Why I Deleted the Substack App (again)

Social Media for Writers

The most amazing tag I’ve ever seen. Madrid.

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~Click HERE to read my older post about getting off the Substack app from two years ago

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~

Yesterday, I finally had enough and decided to delete the Substack app. I felt instant and glorious relief.

On August 21^st it’ll be three years that I’ve been writing on Substack. At that time (2022) my father was dying of cancer, I was living unhappily in Santa Barbara having left NYC prematurely to care for my father, and I was three days away from my first date with Britney, who would become my wife.

My old posts make me laugh a little now. They were overtly political, angry at the “far left” and “wokeism.” In summer 2022 we were still in the strange No Man’s Land of overtly biased media, rage politics, and endless culture war battles. I was still paying to read the New York Times which angered me more and more with every article I read; even worse (always a bad idea) I was reading hundreds of the comments under such articles which pissed me off even more.

Needless to say: I canceled my NYT subscription. I canceled all news subscriptions. (Including The New Yorker, which I still love for the literary breadth and style but am repelled by politically.) I didn’t want to wake up and feel angry, lied to, manipulated, condescended to. (For reference, I was not listening to anything on the political right, either; I’d shifted from being a left-of-center classical liberal to being more centrist and “politically homeless.”) Instead I started my Substack which, back then, was called something asinine like Michael Mohr’s Non-Woke Writing Newsletter, or something close to that. (Again: I now find this humorous.)

Within a couple months, though, I realized I didn’t want to do the typical, trendy thing and “niche down,” meaning only write about rage politics and culture war issues. My drives as a writer were much broader than that. Politics has always been something I’ve been interested in…but there was a lot more.

So I started writing about other things, essays on my personal life, essays about my dad being sick and being a caretaker, essays about my NYC experience, as well as short stories, segments from my (then unpublished) novels, and much more. And I changed the name of my stack (thank god) to Sincere American Writing, which is much better. (And which makes more sense given that I am genuinely sincere, I’m an American [currently living in Spain], and I love writing.)

In the summer of 2022, Substack Notes did not yet exist. We might call this period a “golden era” of the platform. Celebrities hadn’t entered into the scene yet. Most writers were not paywalling their content. It was the small guys, rejected from traditional publishing, having fun and putting themselves out there. It didn’t feel like their were writer “cliques” yet. There was even “Office Hours,” where you could peruse other writers’ thoughts on the platform and dialogue with Substack employees who clarified how the platform worked. It was a naive, fun, innocent time.

The main idea was (shocking) The Art. Writers wrote, without gatekeepers, and posted their essays and stories. It was that simple. The founders were strong believers in free speech and it was growing as a legitimate alternative to other platforms like Facebook, Medium and others which felt more myopic, more restricted, less open. When the “Nazi” controversy started, the founders looked into it, got the data, and said, Yeah, there aren’t thousands of neo-Nazis with huge followings all over Substack; that doesn’t exist; it’s not a thing. They stayed true to free speech, even as an onslaught of angry progressives on the platform wanted to suppress speech over a few cherry-picked racist assholes who had maybe 100 followers all combined. (I wrote about this HERE.)

But then the app and Notes came in and everything started to change.

At first—just like the iPhone, which I resisted until finally giving in circa 2013—I ignored the app. But, eventually, I found myself curious. So I got the app. And then Notes came. This meant that every single time I opened the app I saw other writers’ thoughts, opinions, grievances, faux-expert claims, etc. And of course I’d then feel the need to engage with these people, agreeing, disagreeing, rejecting, decrying, challenging, in short: Going down the rabbit hole.

Over time I realized that Notes was bad for me. In my opinion I think it’s generally bad for most writers. It does a few things which I don’t like. First, it takes time away from the thing that should matter the most: Your writing; publishing posts. Notes are for quick, short bursts, not long, well-thought-through, nuanced ideas. It created, for the first time, a social media feeling on the platform, which was one of the reasons I’d joined it to begin with: The fact that it hadn’t felt like social media but more like an online literary “community” (in its broadest, most general sense, open, not closed) where anyone could say their piece.

As time went by I started noticing my primal urge to begin taking photos of almost anything, or to write down almost any thought or idea, and post it onto Notes. Because, of course, I wanted the dreaded “likes.” Oh, if we could go back in time and annihilate Facebook and Zuckerburg’s horror-show of dopamine-addict “likes.”

I found myself constantly thinking—during every walk, every run, every morning coffee, every drive—Oh, I should post that. It was distracting as hell. And then of course I was constantly thinking of what to post next, how smart to sound, how wise to pretend to be, whether to come off as angry or cool or relaxed or empathetic or fed up, etc. It started to feel more and more like Facebook, just wild fizzy white noise which accomplished nothing and wasted a whole lot of time and creative energy.

The other bad thing was that, every time I opened the app I also felt myself sliding, often for hours, into Endless Scroll Mode (ESM) wherein time basically just disappeared. Doomscrolling, one might call it. The endless sea of opinions. The endless writers telling you “how to make $100K in two weeks on Substack by doing these 5 things,” the so-called “experts.” Without fully realizing I began to become psychologically captured, which is the idea with social media platforms.

Then the celebrities came in, and I also began noticing the little cliques of smaller writers who seemed to follow each other, support one another, but rejected others. This reminded me of high school. And there were more and more traditionally published writers coming onto the platform and acting as if Substack and the smaller guys were “beneath them,” yet wanting the likes, paid subs and attention. (Most of these guys wouldn't respond if you tagged them, messaged them, etc.)

I’ve always inherently distrusted groups, small and large, closed “communities,” and cliques. They’ve always smacked to me of “coolness,” conformity, homogeneity, sameness, group-think and psychological capture. All my life I’ve seen myself as a strong, stand-alone individual. An independent thinker. A follower of no binary politics, no major philosophy, no rank or community but rather someone who thinks for themselves and does their own thing. This penetrates all my life and all my writing.

I thought about getting off Substack altogether. There are other platforms. Or maybe I could go back to submitting work to magazines and waiting six months to hear back and (95% of the time) being rejected. Or, god forbid, submitting manuscripts of novels to literary agents, which sounded equally dull, boring and pointless.

But I realized: I DO love Substack. It IS, truly, a cool, interesting “community” (or perhaps “broad constellation of writers” is a superior metaphor?) of writers who are trying to be heard. Smaller writers, often, who have been gatekept out of the traditional system. But also, more and more famous people have now joined. People like Glennon Doyle got on for 5 minutes, gained 200,000 subscribers, and then tried to call “victim” when people on Substack basically revolted. (We were told we were still “punching down” because she was A Woman, despite the fact that she had way more cache, power and connections than 99% of us on the platform.)

And now, in mid-2025, Substack is still my favorite platform to write on. But if I’m fully honest, for me, it’s lost some of its regal shine. Look, I get it: It was probably inevitable, wasn’t it? It’s not the fault of Substack but of “capitalism,” which is really just another way of saying: Human Nature. A platform starts out small and cool and fun and then it grows and consolidates power and expands and bigger and more famous people join and new features are constantly added and we get more and more addicted and the inevitable cliques form…and we’re back to social media, to the terrible, tactless tyranny of too many fucking tech features and too many people and too many thoughts, ideas, etc.

Was there any other way for it to happen? Maybe. But wouldn’t we have ultimately arrived more or less at the same place? It’s like the first wave of punk, in the mid-late 1970s: It was fun while it lasted; there will always be the punk spirit after that, but it’ll never be what it started out as.

And look: I’m not a total Debbie Downer, nor am I naïve. And I also have to take ownership and full responsibility for myself. Not everyone has reacted the same way as me. Not everyone has become addicted in the way I have. It’s true that I AM an addict. There’s a reason I’m 15 years sober (on September 24^th). I still have active addictions even now: Ask my wife. I drink tea addictively. I eat addictively. (Maybe a post on that at some point: I’m working on this one currently and have some insights.) I write addictively. I read addictively. I give advice addictively. I’ve always been addicted when it comes to social media, online dating (pre-Britney), you name it. So that’s on ME. I own that. I can’t be with social media and not engage. It’s always been one of my weaknesses.

Yet, obviously, I also know I am very much not alone here. I’ve seen the Notes complaining about Notes. Many of them. I’ve discussed it with fellow writers. I’ve both felt and witnessed the tension herein. (Hell, I even wanted to screenshot my deletion of the Substack App and put THAT on fucking Notes!!!)

But Substack is making a lot of money. Notes has helped in that regard. It has drawn newer, bigger writers to the platform.

*(Without the app I can still post Notes, but I now have to go looking for it, whereas, with the app, you open it and there are everybody’s cognitive farts, waiting for you to engage with. Without the app it’s much less likely you’ll engage on Notes, especially, say, on a walk or something like that. And since without the app I don’t particularly love scrolling on my phone using the internet, more than likely I’ll be doing Notes, to whatever extent I do them, on my laptop, which means far less often.)

So, in the end, I realized that getting off Notes was the best move for me. I don’t want to feel chained down to social media, shackled by the constant need for likes and attention and collective community and worry about why I’m not being included in this or that group. Human beings are not meant to inhabit that much information on a daily basis, to see that many diverse views and opinions, to spend that much time endlessly, pointlessly scrolling. At the end of the day you’re obsessing, staring at a tiny iPhone SCREEN trying to “connect” with the world. But are you really connecting?

In my case, I love the freedom of being able to walk or think of something or have an idea and not need to get into the app to post a Note about it. I can use Substack online, where I encounter not Notes and social media, but only my own personal Substack page. Social media clicks into our dopamine brains and makes us want to be liked, heard, understood, seen, experienced, etc etc etc. But we’re not meant for that on this scale and this constantly as human beings. I want to spend much more time being outside, not on a screen, not on my phone. It’s true that I’m on Instagram, but that platform doesn’t have the same glue-like affect on me. I can browse for ten minutes and get off for several days. Ditto Linked-In, which I check maybe every few weeks. Substack is different.

I respect everyone’s own feeling and view on this, for sure. It’s not about judgment. This is my own personal thing. But I know I’m not alone.

Who knows: Maybe one day I’ll get the app again. Then again: Maybe I’ll get off Substack altogether. I don’t see that happening any time soon. Because I love to write. But I want to go back to a time where writers wrote and readers read, not the futuristic time where writers did incessant social media and spent hours and hours glued to a screen trying to come up with pithy sayings. And with AI now joining the chorus it’s only getting weirder and more complex.

I sometimes ask myself: What would David Foster Wallace say/do if he were on Substack? (Ironically, it is sort of Infinite Jest come to life.) Or H.L. Mencken. Or Dostoevsky. Or Joan Didion? Or James Baldwin? Or Richard Wright? Or Zadie Smith? Etc.

Who knows. But one thing I know for sure: They valued literature, writing, Art, more than short pithy statements and calculated social media bursts of whatever.

And I do too.