I love blogging. I lose track of time when I blog. This love for blogging is what brought me to Automattic, the company where I work. After a beautiful sabbatical of blogging for pure pleasure, I return to work and all of my colleagues today ♥️. Over the weekend, while reflecting on my months off, I began switching my brain from blogging as my avocation to blogging as my vocation, and particularly, to thinking about where blogging stands in the wider world.

Something I noticed as a consumer of content during my time off is that Substack is All The Rage. I knew it before, but squirreled away the knowledge and didn’t think about it a ton. Over these past three months of following communities and podcasts and creators on the web, everyone has a Substack in the way that everyone used to have a blog. Some of the people I follow, which I usually found via podcasts, even talk about how they used to have a blog and now they have a Substack instead. During my sabbatical, I subscribed to a dozen or so Substacks, of writers who inspire other writers, of artists who inspire other artists, of others that I don’t even remember what they did because each time I received the newsletter in my inbox, I deleted it without reading it.

I barely even noticed I was deleting these newsletters without reading them until I read the post I Love You But I’ll Never Read Your Substack by Rebecca Morrison on the Brevity Blog. I got the notification for the post in my email, as I do for most blogs I subscribe to, and I clicked over to the Brevity blog to read it.

I’ve been thinking about her post a lot. I’ve observed my own behavior, noticing how I click through to people’s blogs when I get notifications in my email box, but for the most part, I delete Substacks without reading them. I don’t read them in my email, and I don’t click into the Substack platform to read them. I’ve been trying to puzzle through what the difference is, in why I’ll read blog posts but not newsletters. Is it just because I’m old and set in my ways, because blogging is what I know and have done for lo these many years? Is it my bias towards blogging because of what I do for a living? Is it because blogs are open on the web and are easy to find and share? Or is there something more there?

I was in the shower this morning thinking about it, and I think I realized what it is for me. I noticed how the Substacks I do read are the personal ones from people I care about or am interested in. I’ll suffer through reading them in my email because I really truly care about what the person has to say.

And then it hit me, especially when I noticed my “suffer through” phrasing — I don’t want to spend time in my email. That’s not a place I want to be. Email is a place to get into and out of as quickly as possible, like a restaurant that has food I want but I don’t want to sit in there to eat it — the lighting is harsh, the colors of the walls are garish, the floors are sticky, the sound is loud and echoey. Similarly, Substack or Bluesky or other platforms are not places I want to be; they’re not necessarily unpleasant, but they’re generic and feel like chain restaurants that are safe and the same no matter where in the world you visit them.

I want to be somewhere with atmosphere. I like going to people’s blogs, where they’ve created a space that’s personal to them. I think this might be the main difference for me. Blogs are like living rooms that invite you in to someone’s designed space. They’re like restaurants that take care with creating an ambiance that says something about who they are and what kind of mood they hope for for their guests. Blogs are places I want to sit and eat because they have personality.

All of that being said, I am a sample size of one. Clearly Substack has something going on or it wouldn’t be so popular. What is it about Substack that’s so appealing, especially to readers? Am I doing it wrong?