8 reasons why substack is not (yet) the new tumblr

1. tumblr is the only remaining social platform in which algorithm is opted-in, not assumed. people there are known to reject “for you” pages and will boycott the feature if it’s forced upon them instead of being something they can opt-in to. it means tumblr posts circulate organically through people who choose to reblog it to their site and feed it to other people’s dashboard. friendships and community support are formed through the act of intentional sharing and discovery, not because the algorithm decides to pick it up and shove it on user feeds.

2. if there’s one thing tumblr users fight so hard for it’s stagnancy. hardcore users who have been there since the late 00s will do whatever it takes to make tumblr the last vestige of good social media that is safe and pleasurable to use. this means: no tiktok-esque vertical video format and no giving away user data to advertisers. “monetization” is always being taken with a grant of salt so that community aspect and collaborative culture will always be the backbone of the platform, even if it means the website is not always profitable to the investors.

3. on tumblr you could gift each other crabs for $2.99. for fun.

   

4. there are no “tumblr influencers”. tumblr makes it so that your follower count is kept to private, making it impossible for anyone to brag about their popularity, unless they choose to reveal it for some reason. in general, status there is based on opinion and not numbers; and how popular you think someone is is a vibes-only calculation. this on its own has successfully eliminated the element of competition off the platform. the last thing you’ll see on tumblr is writers and artists being insecure about building their tumblr audience. they will, however, complain about building audience somewhere outside tumblr.

5. consequently, the general rules of tumblr is that you go there to hang out and scream into the void, not to sell people something. otherwise, people could smell your bullshit and will block you for good. again, tumblr also doesn’t track user clicks, making it impractical to do any traffic marketing there. thriving creators on tumblr are thriving because the amount of connection they put for their audience. they make money by giving away more free stuffs as opposed to putting them behind paywalls.

6. on tumblr you don’t use polls for research. you use it to conduct a platform-wide bug race.

   

7. on tumblr, the ability to go anonymous is a two-edged sword: on one hand, it gives you the freedom to express yourself under a pseudonym. you could have the most incredulous user handle ever graced the internet like powerbottombrucespringsteen (all love) and people would still take your opinion and views seriously. you could be pursuing doctoral degrees and running 6 figure businesses IRL and they wouldn’t even matter in the eye of the community if you don’t participate in the collaborative culture. you are seen as what you appear as, how you show up online, what you give to the community, and not for what you are behind the screen. on the other hand: it makes it easier for people to receive hate messages and hide under anonymity.

8. substack doesn’t have neil gaiman, a permanent tumblr resident.

3 ways substack is heading towards becoming a better evolution of tumblr

1. substack is the first and only platform i’ve seen outside tumblr with a really good knack for longevity and archiving. while the typical shelf life of a social media post lasts for 5-10 minutes, a tumblr post from 2012 could still circulate and be celebrated in the year of 2024, and again in the coming years. revisiting and rediscovering are important virtues that go against the way social media works, where the algorithm usually favors newer stuffs. on substack, however, you could always go down the rabbit hole without being interrupted by ads, which i think is the first step towards building a library on top of the social feature.

2. the fact that you can restack any part of a substack post is godsent. not only it gives smaller publications a chance to be discovered, it’s also a tool for interesting discussions to open up and new ideas to grow from. some of my posts here are inspired by other people’s conversations under a restacked post. on the writer’s side, it’s always good to know which part of a post resonates and what people’s takeaways are. if we could leave “serial liking” etiquette behind and encourage more people to restack instead i think we would be undefeated anywhere.

3. i’ve never seen any platform other than substack that could match the intensity of tumblr’s hatred towards generative AI and the “content”ification of writing. like they said: a community full of writers ennui towards generative AI is a warrior’s bond stronger and more meaningful than marriage.

Subscribe now

thinking in (fake) movies

did you know that back in 2022, tumblr invented a fake martin scorsese movie and gaslighted everyone on the internet into thinking that it’s real?

goncharov is a fascinating result of an entire user base bandwagoning on plot points and then mashing them up to create actual coherent story. the success of goncharov highlights tumblr as actual social media based in community effort rather than status, and that being in a community that values entertaining others leads to incredible collaborative works of creativity that don’t even feel like work to make. martin scorsese not only acknowledging the bit but also playing along with it is the most satisfying ending goncharov could have gotten.

to me, this is the ultimate beauty of tumblr: when you treat a platform as a sandbox and not a popularity contest, technically any post can be a cultural phenomenon if your friends and mutuals are dedicated to the bit enough and also just really want to cause problems.

in case you missed it: google is integrating AI into their search engine, and last week everyone was on a run to uncover the funniest, wrongest possible AI-generated google search results.

here are some of my favorites:

• fruits ending with “um”

• straight up answered a search query with the beatles lyrics (if you sing you lose)

• ok to drink antibiotics

the reason behind this catastrophe is because opinionated forums like reddit and quora are, at least as i’m writing this letter, still included in the model in which the AI was trained on. meaning that if we look something up on google and it catches on a reddit or quora thread with the same query or topic as ours, the AI actually thinks it counts as a reliable source and then generates a summarized answer on top of the search results.

it’s harmless in concept if you’re just googling basic facts, or you’re just searching for coffee place recs. it’s harmless until the AI decides to deduct an answer from reddit user fucksmith to add glue to get cheese to stick to our pizza without knowing the context it was written in.

what’s most entertaining to me is seeing how diverse, almost polarized the public reactions are to this update. there are AI supporters who are hopeful still, defensive even, to the fact that this is just the first iteration of this feature, and that fixes and improvement are on their way. though concern seemed to be the main reaction that i get coming from people who are worried about their children using google. some are also enraged seeing that these generative answers could escalate to a level as extreme as recommending people to commit murder.

weirdly enough, for the longest time i’ve had a love and hate relationship with AI, this is the first time i genuinely feel like everything is going to be fine. seeing new stances emerging, people not wasting a second to invent browser plugins that undo what google does, and even new memes born out of this collective experience has truly made me hopeful.

my friend and team member tatiana figueiredo once wrote an essay on why AI won’t take our jobs. in times like this, i find myself always circling back to these questions she asks in it:

though the changes AI is enabling to our work are undeniable, i’ve been considering another angle. what are the non-AI opportunities that AI enables?

in this future where lots of jobs are automated away and we’re all super productive with the help of robots, what will life actually look like? and what will online businesses look like?

there’s a reason why people travel down to bali and bangkok all the time: a change of scenery.

the profound nature of humanity is that we will always invent a way to escape boredom and everyday routines. even in a future where AI does become a driving force in our lives, i don’t see how that’s going to change the escapist nature in us. if anything, the silver lining that an AI-driven culture creates is that there will always be a percentage of people who inevitably turn to seek out something human-crafted for a change.

maybe it’s because i’m always told that AI is coming for us and there’s nothing else we can do except to adapt to the change. but adapting is not the same as conforming. humans will remain humans even if everything around us changes, and something about last week’s event tells me that we’ll always find ourselves a way to rebel out of a situation when it gets dire.

history goes to show that we have been masters in doing that, and we always will be.

Subscribe now

thinking in movies

in singing in the rain (1952), we’re being taken back to the late 1920s where film industry is navigating a massive transition from silent movies to “talkies”. i couldn’t help but notice an uncanny parallel to our situation now with AI.

we grow up watching talking movies so it might not register to us that movies used to be silent. and here’s the thing: different movie output is that it requires different process, and different process also demands for different crews and teams that do the job.

that rings a bell for you?

it’s implied in the movie that people who work in the industry are losing jobs and opportunities due to the transition. silent performers are shown to be struggling to convey their acting through talking and there are now more demands for movies with sound. yet at the same time, a whole new set of opportunities open up: the role of a voice coach. the concept of voiceovers. sound engineers and the technologies needed to support the sound production. boom guys, people who know how to work cables, and generally more people on the set.

so here’s an idea i’m entertaining: a future where the becoming of AI doesn’t mean the death of everything else, but rather an endless opportunity to bring more humanity to the table - whether it’s through our writing, our art, and our line of businesses.

last october i tweeted about wanting to crowdsource a name for my content calendar dashboard in notion that doesn’t include the words “content” and “calendar” in it. as with everything post-elon twitter, it got zero responses. it could be that the “xwitter” algorithm was suppressing my tweet so that nobody saw it.

it doesn’t take a genius to know that i’m the biggest hater of the word “content” on the internet (and if you didn’t then, you do now). the most common argument people sometimes throw back at me is that “content” has only merely become an umbrella term, almost a technical one, to describe something that fills the space of a medium on the internet. but the fact they’re telling me this only further reveals the reason why it never sits right with me: the intentionality of turning our work into something that “fills the space” instead of something we deliberately make space for, something so meaningful that it deserves its own space instead of the other way around.

in the context of the film industry, even big names like martin scorsese and guillermo del toro have stepped up and took this matter into their own hands. it’s diabolical to see the reduction and homogenization that are being done by streaming services to moving images for the sake of keeping people on their platforms. and while others might think, “what does this industry-scale fight have to do with my process?” it’s the innocence of the question that terrifies me, to realize that on a slightly smaller scale, people have been unconsciously practicing the same thing to their own work.

when people call their content planner a “content engine”, “content flywheel”, or even “content operating system”, my first thought is always: why does the practice of “content creation” have to be heavily affiliated with machinery? the use of machines implies productivity, and productivity is almost always being measured by constant output, if not volume. productivity is the near enemy of creativity, and it operates on eliminating everything that slows down the machine - sometimes that includes creativity itself1.

to put it another way: are we not just creating for the sake of creating?

if yes, then i don’t think i’ll be participating in that.

i’m also not saying that i’ll be policing everyone who still calls their publishing system “content calendar”. everyone is allowed to call their content calendar whatever they want. but i profoundly believe that we are the product of the environment we create for ourselves, and that intention is everything.

so when i open up Notion and go to this dashboard, i’m perfectly happy to see my 9358263 drafts lying around waiting to be edited and the calendar empty. it opens up a whole other can of worms on how i plan to build the practice of publishing consistently, but the point is that i don’t feel compelled to fill out this calendar just for the sake of keeping my “audience” “engaged”. it’s only there for when my writings are truly ready to go out and see the world.

ladies and gentlemen, i want you all to meet: my word station :)

the quotes i put there is by annie dillard, which i found through ’s brilliant essay:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

i hope that this reflection unlocks something for you. and if it does, i’d love for you to reach out and tell me about it!

you can grab the template below.

Subscribe now

thinking in movies

a movie that goes with this week’s reflection is billy wilder’s ace in the hole (1951).

as we talk about sacrificing creativity for the sake of productivity, this movie becomes a twisted looking glass on how things are unironically the same now as they were over 70 years ago. newspaper business (runs by kirk douglas’ character) is this movie’s substack publications, and the question that it asks over to us is: how far would you go to keep your audience engaged?

it’s dark and cynical, but brilliant nonetheless. i’d love for you to give this one a try.