Hate to say this, but while I really like the product design here (great job substack team), I’m not personally loving the vibes so far. Clearly many of you are though, so take this as an n=1 datapoint. As I feared, a public stream dominated by writers has a vaguely unhealthy feel to it. Like take the English department depicted in Lucky Hank and scale it by 1000x. It’s not something that can be solved with product design unfortunately.

Also looking at the activity, realization hitting really hard: *this is not my tribe.* I write a lot, and hopefully reasonably well, and people seem to enjoy reading me, but I clearly don’t identify as a writer. I wish there was a way to systematically take the spotlight off writers and put it on the ideas somehow.

I’ll continue reflecting and looking for an angle of engagement that works for me here. I hope this succeeds, but I suspect my n=1 reaction might point to more basic problems.