Why I Write on Substack
I’ve written about why I use Telegram - a space where I can honestly share thoughts, check my ideas with friends and community, and hear my own voice more clearly.
Telegram and Substack stand side by side for me: two places where deeper content is available directly and doesn’t depend on advertising or search algorithms.
Yes, Substack has recommendations and curated collections, but the main thing is that each post arrives in the inbox or app to everyone who chose to subscribe. No algorithm deciding whether your audience sees your work. No games with reach and engagement metrics.
The Real Media Collapse
Big media outlets are losing audiences at a pace that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. CNN down 34%, Forbes down 52%. These aren’t small corrections - this is a fundamental shift in how people consume information.
And here’s the thing: it’s not just about people leaving traditional news sites. The entire model of how the web works is breaking down.
Google increasingly answers questions directly in search results through AI Overviews - those brief summaries that pop up at the top of your search. You ask a question, Google’s AI compiles an answer from multiple sources, and you get what you need without ever clicking through to the actual websites.
For publishers, this is devastating. They create the content, Google trains its AI on that content, then uses that AI to keep users on Google’s own pages. The original creators get nothing - no traffic, no ad revenue, no relationship with readers.
Rolling Stone’s parent company just filed the first major lawsuit against Google over this practice. They’re arguing that Google is essentially stealing their journalism to power AI that makes their journalism obsolete. It’s a brutal irony.
And out of the top 50 English-language news sites globally, 46 saw traffic decrease in July 2024 compared to the previous year. Sites like CNN, The New York Times, and BBC - which together average 775 million visits per month - are all seeing significant drops.
Even Google itself recently admitted in a court filing that “the open web is in rapid decline.”
The Algorithmic Takeover
Social networks have pushed news aside in favor of whatever keeps people scrolling. YouTube and TikTok have perfected the art of algorithmic control - showing you exactly what their systems think will keep you engaged longest, not what you chose to see.
The CEO of The Atlantic put it well: “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine.”
This is the world we’re living in now. The algorithmic model is changing before our eyes and rapidly eating into media revenues. Content that took years of expertise to develop, teams of editors to refine, real reporting costs to produce - all of it gets compressed into a three-paragraph AI summary that keeps you from ever visiting the source.
Why Substack Is Different
Against this backdrop, Substack is showing 49% growth. It’s one of only three platforms in the top 50 that actually gained traffic.
Why? Because it operates on fundamentally different principles.
Substack is essentially your own website with a convenient newsletter subscription form. When you publish, your post goes directly to everyone who chose to subscribe to you. Not to people the algorithm thinks might engage with it. Not to a percentage of your followers based on some engagement score. To everyone who said “yes, I want to read this person’s work.”
There’s no intermediary deciding whether your audience deserves to see what you made.
Users still have more trust in this model. And the people who benefit are those who understand their topics deeply, who speak honestly, and who build long-term relationships with subscribers without resorting to blatant clickbait.
The platform also rewards non-professional authors with the opportunity to earn a share of content revenues. You don’t need to be a legacy publication with a hundred-year-old masthead. If people value what you write enough to pay for it, you can make that work.
Values Over Volume
Successful businesses and personal brands are built less and less on impression volume and audience reach, and more and more on the values they broadcast to the world.
People stay where they feel authenticity and alignment of views.
This matters more than ever in a world where AI can generate infinite content, where algorithms can optimize for engagement with inhuman precision, where the entire machinery of the internet seems designed to come between creators and the people who care about their work.
Direct connection becomes the most valuable thing you can build.
That’s why I write in Russian on Telegram, and in more expanded form in English on Substack. Both platforms let me speak directly to people who chose to listen. Both let me build something that doesn’t depend on whether Google’s AI decides my work is worth summarizing, or whether Meta’s algorithm thinks my post deserves distribution.
The open web might be in rapid decline. But the direct web - the one where people consciously choose what they want to read and who they want to hear from - that’s just getting started.