This is significant to me because when we started this work, we didn’t know just how dramatically other platforms would clamp down on “off-platform” links; we had an inkling, but our main motivation was a sense that “discovery experiences” all fail to attract significant usage unless they are also “consumption experiences,” which is non-obvious.

If you make a page of “Great Stuff on Our Platform,” or “Top Stuff in X Category,” it’s always disheartening to see how few people visit. Small numbers do, of course, and I desperately await improvements to our category and leaderboard pages, but the volumes are just shocking: for every one visitor to such a list, there are thousands or tens of thousands who will scroll a feed like Notes. The way the math works out, you can get to one million new posts discovered / day (that is: posts from people the user wasn’t subscribed to) via something like Notes, whereas you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to do so with directories, “explore” pages, and so on. And this is how writers and other creatives find subscribers, so it matters a lot.

That was reason enough for us. We wanted to make publications grow, and we knew the experience of discovery had to be seamlessly integrated with something that audiences wanted to do in itself, not as a separate “go out and find good things to read” thing, but as a “I’m reading things right now and finding new things” thing. This isn’t really possible with long posts, so we wound up with Notes.

Then, in the following year, we learned that every major platform was starting to crush posts that led to other sites. In other words, Instagram e.g. does not want you to get traffic from Instagram; they want to keep all that traffic to serve ads against themselves. As it turned out, Notes was pretty vital to keeping Substack viable, to making it possible for people to grow their subscriber lists, which they can always take with them if they want to leave. I’ve seen it said that we did this for “lock in,” which we did not and which wouldn’t work anyway, given the export functionality.

Obviously Notes, like every part of Substack, needs a huge amount of work; and like every part of the Internet, it comes with costs for all. But it’s relieving to see it get to this scale, as it means new readers for writers, new listeners for musicians, new audiences for visual artists, etc., and it also seems likely we can get it to larger scales, to support more livelihoods and make more creative practices sustainable for people. We’ll see, of course, but I’m glad it wasn’t a flop!