Hello Substack, goodbye Medium
I’ve moved all my posts to Substack and will be deleting my Medium account at the end of Jan.
Content Creep
Before COVID, before children (“BC”), I wrote a lot in different places. I replied to hundreds of Quora, posted on different blogging platforms. I spent a lot of my free time writing. My best rhythm was during hour-long train commutes writing Quora answers. Every trip I completed one answer; sometimes two or more. Offline, I maintain a semi regular day journal.
Then life happened. When our first child was born nine years ago, she recalibrated our lives. I’ve often thought of this change as “we had the same amount of time but now needed to divide it by three”. Now, I think of our children as a higher priority concern. Without children, someone can prioritise between their hobbies, work and family/friends. With children, a sizable amount of time is locked out and available attention for the remaining time is depreciated. With a young child, you have less time to spend on your hobbies and whatever remaining time you do spend on them is diluted by a need to constantly consider “what is my child doing?”. Writing this post is a perfect example: I started writing it one week ago while putting my youngest to sleep. I’m working on that draft while my two eldest are doing their own activities (occasionally interrupted by fights) and my youngest is playing in the living room (occasionally standing up and attempting to raid a cabinet or drawer he knows he isn’t allowed, but he also sees the opportunity. At two, my youngest can already open any child lock, so that isn’t a viable solution.
And I’m happy with this trade off. I love to write and explore topics yet I wouldn’t trade time with my children to go back to BC and all that content. Having children forced an important reality that we all face. And COVID helped make that even more clear.
Too Much
We all have an overwhelming number of things that we want to do. Children help with the realisation that we will not live long enough nor have the attention to do it all. Raising children is painful, frustrating, exhausting, expensive and fun, crazy, interesting and full of opportunities for personal growth. Children are our only real chance at immortality. They offer us the chance of sending a piece of ourselves into the future. What kind of piece depends on how we raise them, context, genetics and a whole lot of randomness.
With this creeping realisation, I had conflicting emotions about writing. Some things I wanted to write for myself other times I felt I wanted to write to impact the world. And I even went through times of wanting to write just to get views and upvotes and get that kind of recognition. These conflicting feelings and the reality that my writing just didn’t get much traction. Answers that I invested days in on Quora were never upvoted. Posts that I loved on Medium were ignored (and ones that I wrote randomly seemed to be popular for no clear reason). And the trolling bothered me. Medium and so many other portals became the home of trolling. People who were there just to troll often ended up dominating comments and discourse. Which did drive engagement since people would argue with the trolls. Trying to write, keep track of kids, deal with trolls… It just became exhausting.
Becoming Less
This resulted in my Becoming Less Project where I’ve worked to reduce my digital footprint. I’ve published very little on Medium during the last few years as I worked through this cleanup. I still struggled with this attention focus. It takes me more attention to cleanup old content, consolidate, than it does to just create new content in new places. I’ve continued writing in my online notes and offline journal but I’d pretty much stopped publishing.
About a year ago, I noticed more of the authors I follow were showing up on Substack. The comments were mostly civil. And the platform incentives seemed to be much more around creating content that is interesting or meaningful for a specific group of users or more about just a single person writing about what interests or entertains them. This is a refreshing approach considering that most other platforms focus on encouraging users to make viral content that earns the writer $100. Then that writer will write another article about how they wrote their viral article which then goes viral and allows them to write an ebook and offer a subscription for the low low price of $9.99 per month on how to write viral articles for medium that earn $10…
Questions Remain
Even as I move from Medium to Substack, I’ve not answered all my questions. I’m still figuring out what kind of writer I want to be. I’m still not clear what and where I want to post. For example: After a long hiatus, I’ve recently started writing some Google Maps reviews. I may consolidate those or remove them again.
This is all part of a wider conversation about content generation that we are living through. Do we write content to monetise or share? And how will ChatGPT and other GPT-like content engines change this in the future? Is the internet a place to troll and argue or somewhere to engage and learn?
Increasingly, I find that the answer to many of these questions is simply “yes” or “both”. Just like any other communication medium made available to the complexity of humanity — almost anything imaginable will become a possible use. If almost any use of content is valid or possible, then why I produce content becomes so much more important. What value do I create for myself and others by production of this content? What are my values around content and writing?