There is an art to sharing on the internet.

A delicate, precise, frankly impossible art — and approximately nobody has mastered it.

Too little and you're on LinkedIn, posting motivational quotes into a void of people who are also posting motivational quotes into a void, all of them convinced they're building a personal brand. They are not building a personal brand. They are essentially sending letters to themselves and wondering why the postman looks confused.

Too much and you've gone full Twitter or TikTok — a relentless, magnificent torrent of opinions, hot takes, and videos of people reacting to other people reacting to things that didn't need reacting to in the first place. It's exhausting. It's brilliant. It has the cultural nutritional value of a supermarket own-brand biscuit, and yet here we all are, utterly addicted.

And then there's Facebook, which deserves its own category entirely — a place where nobody quite knows what they're sharing, why they're sharing it, or whether their Auntie Patricia from Wolverhampton should really have access to any of it. She does, though. She always does.

Substack, however, is a different beast. It simply asks that you share when you have something worth saying — not as part of an elaborate scheme to game an algorithm, but because you've actually got something to say. Revolutionary. Almost suspiciously sensible.

Now — and brace yourself — Substack is a business. It wants writers to find subscribers willing to pay actual money for the privilege of reading them. I appreciate this information has landed like a mildly damp flannel for some people, but there it is.

Many arrived expecting something considerably more wholesome. A creative sanctuary, perhaps. Warm lighting, mutual encouragement, possibly a Newsletter Wellbeing Officer. What they found instead was a marketplace, and they are taking it extremely personally, in the very particular way that people who feel the universe owes them a response genuinely can.

Which does rather suggest they've turned up to entirely the wrong sort of gathering.

Happens to the best of us.

Though usually only once.