Why I Deleted the Substack App

Writing for the Sake of Writing

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

*Update (5/30/24): Well, I am back to ‘using’ Notes…sort of. As Joe Rogan says, I ‘post-n-ghost,’ meaning I post Notes and do not check up on them. Waste of good creative time and energy. I am still off the app and plan to stay that way.

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I started writing on Substack on August 21^st, 2022. For a big chunk of time the Notes function did not exist. Also, I hadn’t yet downloaded the Substack app. It was that beautiful in between moment wherein all I did was simply write the best material I could, and post it a couple times a week. Slowly, and then quickly, my subscriber list started to grow, first with free and then, later, with paid subscriptions as well.

But then Substack rolled out Notes. At first I was slightly skeptical, but then I finally cracked and downloaded the app, posting on Notes. For a while it was okay. Nothing too crazy was going on in the world—other than the usual wars, famines and terrorism which has in some form always been there—and Notes felt more or less like a literary community garden, where each person could find their own “tribe” (in the neutral sense) and be content.

I’ve never been a big social media person. A friend of mine created my first Facebook account in 2011 without asking. I kept it for a while and then deleted it a few times and returned a few more times. Finally, in 2020, I deleted it for good. I’d had a Linked-in account for a long time but I only occasionally used it, and, when I did, it was always work related (book editing). I still have a Linked-in account but I haven’t been on in probably six, eight months. Another friend convinced me to try Instagram and, in 2021, I briefly tried it. I hated it almost immediately and deleted my account. TikTok I have never tried and never will.

For a long time—as I wrote about here—I tried to get my novels out to the publishing world a la literary agents. I’ve written to date 14 novels, most of them autobiographical to varying degrees, and some of them, like my book published here, Two Years in New York, I refer to as “fictional memoir.” None of my novels ever got an agent, but several of them, and one novel in particular, got very close, getting dozens of agent full manuscript reads including one agent who read it three times all the way through and almost took it, praised me widely, and then disappeared into the literary mist never to be heard from again.

Discovering Substack in the late spring of 2020, while listening to a favorite political podcast strolling around The Great Lawn in Central Park, Manhattan, during Covid, changed everything. Yet it wasn’t until late summer, 2022, that I finally started my stack, Sincere American Writing.

What was brilliant about the platform was that the founders truly seemed to believe in free speech, and also in every individual writer’s innate right to owning their own material and subscriber list. If you stayed free, the platform was cost-free. If you got paid, all they asked for was 10% of your earnings. And best of all: It was exclusively for writers and readers, thinkers and debaters. There was no social media aspect to it; no obnoxious distractions. No advertising. No strange, diabolical tweet-like doom threads.

It seemed perfect.

But then the Notes feature started. As any good former addict (sober alcoholic), I gravitated towards it quickly. I enjoyed it, of course, but I also started to feel fatigue a few months in. Instead of waking up in the morning with a book in my hand, excited to explore new worlds, both in fiction, history, biography and memoir, I felt anxiety about what people were posting on Notes, and what I should post on Notes. Somehow, without my knowing it, I’d inadvertently slid through a shadowy side door, glowing with dopamine, into Social Media Land again.

I felt trapped.

Most of it is my “own fault” so to speak. No one forced me to join Notes. The platform didn’t make it impossible to not use Notes. I’m a Millennial addict, like most of us to varying degrees, and I couldn’t help myself. I wanted that dopamine hit. That surging, raging need raced through me day in and day out. I suddenly found myself doom-scrolling like I used to on Facebook, looking for material I knew would anger me. And then I started reacting to political Notes.

I remember when, in 2022, I finally deleted my New York Times app. There was just too much overt Leftist bias, especially when it came to culture war affairs and op-ed pieces. It enraged me. I’d read the biased op-eds and then, foolishly, read dozens of the comments after that. Bad idea. I felt somehow like a victim. Yet it was me who was doing it to myself! So finally one day I woke up, laughed to myself, and simply canceled my NYT subscription and deleted the app. Poof; done.

There’s a silly fallacy amongst Americans that you need to be “educated” about what’s going on in the world at all times. As if you have some sort of power over global events. Of course none of us do. Knowledge is shaped largely by your chosen tribe, and your bias will usually filter through the lens that tribe wants you to see through. Especially now, in our time of monumental polarization.

Anyway. I digress.

First it was the Hamas atrocities against Israel on Oct 7. Immediately I began seeing Leftists claiming that Israel was a fascist right-wing dictatorship that “deserved it.” Like many, I stupidly jumped into the fray on that one, trying to combat every person I saw making, in my opinion, terrible, ahistorical claims. Then it was the Nazi/Free Speech debacle, which was even worse. Here’s my essay on this dilemma.

The point is: It all exhausted me, drained me of all goodwill. I started, slowly, to realize that in our current time of incredible division, polarization, and tribalism, no one is going to convince anyone of anything, and the only thing people will do is mud-sling and fight to the digital death for their side to be “right.” Everything is a binary now: You’re either smart or stupid, good or bad, right or wrong, fascist or democratic, Hitler or Stalin, etc. It’s incredibly boring, not to mention staggeringly anti-intellectual. It’s happening, of course, very much on BOTH political sides.

The constant Note-posting—which I was now doing three, four, even five times a day sometimes—never felt good. Even when I stood up for what I felt were my complex, nuanced values based on hard reading and deep thinking, after posting anything political especially I always felt a sense of fear, shame, guilt and anxiety. I worried how I’d be perceived. I worried what others who disagreed might say. I worried I’d be misunderstood. I worried that somehow I was a “bad person” because I thought independently and didn’t kowtow to either trendy political ideology. Being a sensitive, self-conscious writer—as many of us are—it tore me up inside. It began to feel like a slow spiritual suicide.

So I came up with the simplest and most logical solution. Occam’s Razor, right? I had to delete the Substack app and remove my Notes section on my homepage. In other words: I had to get rid of Notes.

Not much time has passed, but already I feel like a free man, like a bird at last freed from its small cage. I want to get back to that pre-Notes state wherein all we did was create our Art and send it directly to happy readers. We don’t need to constantly see other people’s opinions all day and night and to feel like we should react to their opinions with our own. And let’s face it: Most people aren’t doing deep-dives into left and right sources, and neutral sources, or reading thick biographies or histories about the topics we’re fighting about in the culture wars, honestly trying to hash out what’s true and what’s not. Most people today have their convictions carved out for them by The Tribe, by MSNBC or FOX or Vox or The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or The New York Post, or The Washington Post, etc.

And that is just dumb and boring. It’s a waste of time. A distraction. It distracts from the much more relevant and important thing when it comes to each individual person on the platform: Our writing. Sure, there are exclusively political stacks and that’s great; I try to steer clear of these. But being on Notes feels like living in a collective conspiracy theory; like constantly having everyone’s opinions ravaging your mind every two seconds. Sure, as we Free Speech supporters argued, you can always wall off your digital garden by muting, blocking, banning, deleting, etc. But that in itself becomes a new job.

We need the dopamine hits like an alcoholic needs his booze, like a gambler needs his dice and cards, like a junkie needs his syringes. It’s kind of like online dating but for opinions instead of people. I don’t blame the founders for creating Notes; I get that they wanted an alternative for Twitter/X. I just think that, for me, personally, I want to focus on writing, not on bullshit.

Have fun on Notes. I won’t be there. I’ll be writing.