Nine out of ten posts I see today on Substack are AI slop. I can tell because the pattern is always the same: perfect paragraphs, sentences that say nothing, em-dashes everywhere, correlative conjunctions, and text that feeling that nobody was actually present when the it was written.

The result is that I started skimming everything. My attention was trained to distrust before giving anything a real chance.

What I want to see are diaries. People actually opening up, writing about what they lived, what they think, what they felt at 11am on a Tuesday. I want to know people through writing, the old way.

If you have a publication made of the above, please comment out and I‘ll subscribe.

On that note: Substack leaves a lot to be desired for creators. You can’t have a post just for free subscribers. It’s either paid or open to everyone. That model is deeply limited. It gives me the impression that the platform is more interested in what we write to train AI, than in offering decent tools to the people creating content. The “benefits” they announce (with so much fanfare), like people celebrating their $1,000 ARR, are just billionaire crumbs.

Writing on the internet is still worth it. But it’s worth it because we insist, not because the platform helps.