Faraway hills look green
I started my Substack account two years ago. It was great medium, full of sensible people wanting to do literature and journalism. I had a few subscribers, but I was happy with what I was writing and reading on the platform. But...
Just when everything was looking great, some know-it-all on Substack decided to stir things up. Significant changes have been made, including modernisation, naturally for our benefit, in line with the trendy slogan ‘we’re changing for you’.
Unfortunately, it’s not for me. These so-called notes, taken straight from Facebook’s news feed, and reels, simply reproduce on Substack everything that can be found on social media (apart from adverts). And this is attracting more and more fans of short posts, people sharing links to their TikTok friends, and, last but not least, very young people with an inflated sense of their own importance and their writing. And, of course, all sorts of advisors, coaches, self-styled psychologists and… people whose main occupation is criticising all of this right there on Substack.
It’s getting a bit tiresome. I was hoping that a strong group of Polish writers and journalists would emerge there, and although there are indeed plenty of interesting articles in Polish, the whole surrounding context – the posts and short notes, sometimes just a single sentence – is, in my humble opinion, unnecessary information noise.
That’s why, six months ago, I started looking for a more peaceful haven – something like the blogs of yesteryear, by which I mean those from before the invasion of adverts and aggressive algorithms.
That’s exactly why I ended up here. I started writing in Polish, but there isn’t an active Polish community here. I get the impression that this trend of fleeing social media, which I’m seeing increasingly on sites like this one, hasn’t really caught on in my country yet. And it won’t catch on quickly because a blog is a completely different medium. It requires more effort than clicking ‘like’ or adding an emoji.
I do miss the old Substack a bit. I don’t plan on abandoning it completely – I’ve got plenty of subscribers there. I do wonder, though, how many of them actually read my posts, given the ever-growing number of Polish users. I don’t write about popular topics, and I’m not very good at playing the game called marketing. Some of the new users gain more followers in a month than I have in two years. It’s precisely this marketing that simply bores me.
So I’m stopping here for a moment to rest and unburden myself of what’s been weighing on my mind. I haven’t found a quiet corner on Substack where I can work and share my writing experiences and advice. For most people, it’s a platform for self-promotion and a trampoline for jumping up the career ladder.
I’ve got nothing against trampolines and trampoline jumpers, but I get the impression there are more of them than ladders these days. Everyone keeps saying, ‘You deserve it’ or ‘I deserve it’, but unfortunately that’s not true. It’s just a trend – yet another one in my life – that was supposed to protect people from stress but has ended up turning them into rats in a race.
I’m too old for racing, and I certainly can’t compete with the youngsters. And at my age, ‘young’ means at least up to fifty.
So I’ve switched to ‘escape mode’ and I’m hoping to lie low here, at least until a ‘brand new’ server ‘just for writers’ is set up. I look forward…
Faraway hills look green, or at least greener.