Can Substack Recover the Blogosphere We Lost?
When I launched Jacobin in 2010, my first step in making the magazine successful wasn’t a glossy cover or a TV hit. He landed on a sidebar of Crooked Timber.
If you grew up in the mid-to-late 2000s, you know the sidebar I mean: that “blogroll” column of outbound links on sites like Crooked Timber, Marginal Revolution, Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality, Arts & Letters Daily, and a hundred smaller publications run by academics, policy wonks, and obsessives who wrote much more than this that their work required. A link wasn’t an algorithmic lottery ticket, it was a handshake.
For a small socialist magazine published in an undergraduate’s dorm room, those handshakes mattered. Jacobin’s early writers and editors were not the product of a newsroom or think tank, we were strangers to mailing lists — particularly LBO-Talk, the scrappy community that coalesced around Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer. LBO-Talk taught many of us how to argue with numbers and footnotes without losing sight of the lesson. It was a noisy but limited space, a space where reputations were accumulated and put at risk, moderated by norms and the threat of being excluded from a list you actually wanted to be on.
This was the secret sauce of the political blogosphere in its heyday: it seemed both democratic and organized. You read about people who have taken the time to understand a topic, and then, in their comments sections or on your own blog, you fight back. “Trackback pings” linked these conversations together. RSS readers made sure you don’t miss the next round. The result was not a canon, but a shared public square with porous borders.
For Jacobin, being drawn into this conversational mesh was a shortcut to legitimacy. The blogging world rewarded the two things a small magazine could really control: argument and perseverance. If you were right early and often, the links came. If you were wrong but interestingly enough, the links sometimes still came through. This environment allowed a fringe socialist project to reach beyond the far-left ecosystem and involve liberals, social democrats, and even a few libertarians who were hanging out for practice. At the same time, we consolidated writers and editors from mailing lists, scattered socialist organizations, and small newspapers into something like a political center with editorial processes and deadlines. Online conversation gave us oxygen, but creating a real magazine gave us lungs.
What killed the old world of blogging that many of us are nostalgic for today? On the side of the anglophone socialist left, a bittersweet response might be the rise of the Jacobin as an institution. But for the infinitely larger realm of non-socialist political publishing, we should look to Silicon Valley. The evolution of Facebook dismantled the link economy and replaced it with the feed. The growth of Twitter has mimicked a comments section or mailing list but, without a fixed community, has bred more nastiness and less grace. Then the journey got rocky: the “pivot to video” and publishers chasing algorithm changes instead of building and owning their audiences and data. Each round discouraged the slow, thready debates that blogs excelled at and rewarded short performances tailored to the whims of the platform. The conversation has migrated, but it has also become clearer.
The messy civic spaces of comments sections withered or were shut down by editors who rightly feared defamation, abuse, and bot swarms. One of the first things I did when I joined The Nation in 2022 was to deactivate Disqus, our commenting system. But these types of discussions have not disappeared; they have fragmented. Some took to private Slacks or Discords where the incentives were geared toward cohesion, while others metastasized into a pile of quotes and tweets, where the incentive is attention through reporting. What we have lost is not just a set of sites, it is also a structure of attention that has transformed heterogeneous publics into overlapping publics.
The current newsletter boom, in which Substack is at the center, looks, at first glance, like a restoration. The direct relationship with readers resembles RSS in spirit; writers own their mailing list; comments exist again; the pressure to feed an algorithm exists but is tempered. In another timeline, a 21-year-old could have avoided the headaches of payroll and print runs and simply created an enduring socialist newsletter with a few dozen contributors and a few hundred supporters. A few well-timed articles in mainstream media, a few podcast appearances and you can occasionally move a debate.
I won’t pretend it’s a bad option. The democratization of tools and the standardization of readers’ income have allowed dissident writers – from both the left and the right – to speak directly to the public and bypass the groupthink of the caste of professional editors. It also made possible what the blogosphere never really achieved: a path to economic viability for small-scale political media without advertising, foundation funding, or book advances. This is a welcome step forward.
And Substack has another feature that reminds me of the blogosphere. The old world of blogging was fundamentally interdependent. Its culture was outward-looking: link to argue, link to approve, link to say: “if you read me, you should read them”. Newsletters are, by default, inward-facing. Their unit of distribution is the inbox, not the open web. The Substack recommendation engine, however, replicates the previous model to some extent. When creating their publication, authors can select other newsletters they admire and promote them. New readers see these recommendations during the signup process, creating the appearance of a positive-sum relationship between contest newsletters and the feeling of a shared community. It’s not algorithmic: everything is chosen and organized by the writers themselves.
Yet despite this feature, and although cross-posting and linking persist on the platform, it rarely produces a sprawling, multi-site conversation that a curious viewer can read in one go. We seem to be building fewer enduring collective institutions and more ephemeral vehicles for individual progress. Additionally, paywalls, as necessary as they are to support writers, turn arguments into closed micro-publics.
While some aspects of Substack may be reminiscent of an older form of political publishing, it doesn’t seem to be rekindling the strong communities that made the best political blogs feel special. While Crooked Timber is a living remnant of that order today, it is like Byzantium of the last century: rich in history and culture, but a city-state that was once an empire.
