Substack: The Platform Where Everyone Agrees With Me, Which Is Precisely the Problem
How Substack Became the Left's Answer to X (And Nobody Told the Right)
These days, I probably spend more time than is healthy trawling the Notes feed on Substack, you know, the way other men my age spend their days watching golf or worrying about their prostates.
For me, it’s a bit of a research exercise: reading what's trending and gauging how much vitriol is being spewed. Unfortunately, it has now become something closer to a ritual, something akin to counting sheep, except my sheep all look suspiciously alike, and every single one seems furious with Donald Trump.
For my sins, I did an actual count the other morning, out of nothing better to do and a mild sense of professional duty. I found that ninety per cent, and I'm being conservative here, no pun intended, was anti-Trump commentary. Wit, rage, despair, gallows humour, five-thousand-word essays comparing the man to hideous dictators and to Satan.
There was not a single voice that piped up to say, “Actually, chaps, I rather like President Trump.”
Naturally, as a man of leisure with a gardener who doubles as my editorial conscience, I mentioned this to Wayan, who was at the time doing rather violent things to a hedge.
"Wayan, have you noticed, everyone on Substack hates Trump?"
He didn't look up. "Maybe only people who hate Trump write for Substack."
He’s a wise man, is our Wayan.
Wise he may be, which is, infuriatingly, the most Occam's-razor thing anyone has said to me all month, and entirely beside the point, because it isn't quite true, or at least it didn't used to be.
You see, somebody, bless him, has actually done the maths.
A researcher named Kyle Tharp went and counted properly, the way I couldn't be bothered to, and found that eighty-one of the top hundred political newsletters on Substack are left-leaning or progressive.
Eighty-one out of a hundred. That's not a lean; that's a full prostration. If a pub quiz team scored eighty-one out of a hundred on "questions about how much everyone dislikes the current American president," you'd assume they'd nobbled the quizmaster.
And there's a reason for it, which is where this stops being merely funny and becomes almost elegant. When Elon Musk took over Twitter and rebranded it X, a great many of the liberal commentariat, your Heather Cox Richardsons and the like, your resistance-Twitter veterans; those people who used to argue with strangers for sport, packed their bags and went in search of a new home.
Many of them found a new home on Substack.
Meanwhile, on X, the MAGA crowd never left. Why would they? The décor suits them, and the views are delightful. That left you with this strange, tidy segregation.
In other words, the coastal elites moved into one apartment block, the populists stayed in the other, and nobody even exchanged a cup of sugar or welcomed a new arrival with a cake.
Which raises an amusing question about my own comment sections, doesn't it?
Substack links every one of my essays to X on the assumption that it will widen my audience. What it may actually be doing is beaming my satire into a building full of people already primed to see me as the enemy, while my actual readership, the people who like, comment, subscribe, and tell their friends, increasingly lives in the one building where everybody already nods along.
I am, in other words, potentially performing stand-up comedy in two rooms at once, one heckling me on principle and the other applauding before I've finished the joke.
The really galling part for me is that Substack didn't set out to build a clubhouse. Quite the opposite. The company's own pitch has always been that “political debate is good for you.” It's a lovely piece of copywriting, even though, on current evidence, it’s becoming a debate club with one very popular book and no one left to argue against it.
I want to be careful here, because I genuinely don't know how to prove any of this about my own readers.
Substack doesn't provide a breakdown of who's subscribing and why; I can see the numbers, not my subscribers’ politics. It's possible I've got a quiet contingent of Trump supporters reading me every week! For all I know, there's a MAGA hat somewhere in Ohio bobbing gently to my nonsense about Wayan and the hedge.
I can't see them. I can only see who's loudest, and on this platform, the loudest people are all reading from the same hymn sheet. I appear to be one of the choir, whether I signed up for it or not.
So here's my modest proposal, offered with the appropriate degree of self-mockery: if you're out there, whoever you are, reading this in good faith from the other side of the aisle, say something.
Not to convert me, God knows I'm past converting, and not to start a fight, because I've had quite enough of those on other platforms for one lifetime. Just so I know you exist. Just so this doesn't turn out to be one man in Bali, talking to himself in front of an audience that agrees with every word before he's even typed it.
Wayan, for what it's worth, remains unconvinced that the exercise is worth the effort.
"Maybe," he said, finally looking up from the hedge, "you just write for people who maybe think you're funny, I don’t know why!"
It's either the wisest thing anyone's said to me about my career or the most damning. I genuinely can't tell. Probably both.
Either way, Wayan is currently on probation.
Paul v Walters is the author of several novels and an anthology of short stories and is fortunate enough to live on the island of Bali. His latest work, RITUAL, was recently launched at the Ubud International Readers and Writers Festival.
