Is Substack Becoming Facebook With a Paywall?

I have been observing Substack more carefully lately, particularly Notes, and I keep coming back to a question that is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss:

What exactly is Substack now?

Is it a publishing platform?

An independent-media infrastructure?

A subscription business?

A professional network?

A social network?

A place to find friends?

A creator economy?

Or, increasingly, Facebook for people who prefer serif fonts?

That last description is deliberately provocative. But scroll through Notes for half an hour and the question stops sounding entirely absurd.

You encounter beautifully researched essays on economics, politics, history, science or culture with almost no visible engagement.

Then, two swipes later:

“Drop a 💯 if you agree.”

Hundreds or thousands of likes.

A photograph of coffee.

Hundreds of likes.

A beach.

Hundreds of likes.

“Keep showing up.”

Hundreds of likes.

“Write from the heart.”

Hundreds of likes.

“Who wants to connect?”

And, inevitably:

“Follow me and I’ll follow you.”

At which point I start wondering whether I accidentally closed Substack and opened Facebook circa 2012.

Except something more interesting is happening underneath.

Substack itself has changed

This isn’t merely my impression.

Substack describes Notes as a place for creators to publish short-form material — text, links, images, quotations and comments — not merely as a distribution channel for essays. Its Home feed includes material from people you follow, publications you subscribe to and the broader network around them.

Even more revealing is the relatively new distinction between a follower and a subscriber.

A follower doesn’t give a writer an email address and doesn’t receive the publication in an inbox. Following is deliberately a lighter social relationship: followers see Notes and activity in their feeds. Substack explicitly describes following as a way for creators to expand the top of their funnel and potentially convert those people into subscribers later.

Read that carefully.

Because it explains a great deal of what we are seeing.

The follower has become a kind of pre-subscriber.

And suddenly all those requests to follow, connect, restack and engage make economic sense.

Not necessarily intellectual sense.

But economic sense.

So what does someone actually gain from “follow-for-follow”?

Potential distribution.

That’s the currency.

Following increases the network through which Notes, likes, replies and other activity can circulate. Substack itself says following is intended to help people discover creators and ultimately maximize subscriptions.

So when somebody accumulates followers, the immediate prize isn’t necessarily money.

It is optionality.

More potential readers.

More social proof.

More possible engagement.

More people who might eventually subscribe.

And, for writers who charge, more people who might eventually pay.

This creates an obvious incentive to maximize the top of the funnel.

But it also creates a problem.

A large funnel containing people who don’t particularly care about your work is still a bad funnel.

If I follow you because you promised to follow me, neither of us has acquired a reader.

We have exchanged statistics.

That is not audience building.

It is numerical barter.

And here comes the creator economy

There is another dimension that deserves considerably more sympathy.

Many people on Substack are genuinely trying to earn a living.

Journalism has been through years of brutal economic restructuring. Newsrooms have contracted. Careers that once depended on institutions increasingly depend on individual brands and audiences.

Poynter recently examined precisely this question: can journalists actually make a living on Substack? Its conclusion is much less glamorous than the success stories suggest: some prominent writers are doing extremely well, while for many others independent publishing remains a grind.

That matters.

Behind some of the apparently obsessive subscriber hunting is not narcissism.

It is rent.

It is a mortgage.

It is someone who once received a newsroom salary now attempting to transform words into monthly recurring revenue.

I don’t ridicule that.

Quite the opposite.

Independent journalism needs viable economic models.

But there is an uncomfortable consequence when the necessity of earning from writing begins influencing what gets written.

The temptation of the scoop

A serious investigation might require days.

A thoughtful economic analysis might require hours of research, checking numbers, challenging assumptions and rewriting conclusions.

A provocative Note requires perhaps thirty seconds.

Which one receives immediate feedback?

You already know.

And journalism faces an additional temptation: the scoop.

The explosive allegation.

The personality conflict.

The political scandal.

The sensational revelation capable of circulating far beyond the writer’s normal audience.

But virality and sustainable economics aren’t synonymous.

A revealing 2026 example came from veteran political journalist Ryan Lizza. His highly discussed Substack series attracted attention and new subscriptions, yet he subsequently told Semafor that the financial outcome wasn’t nearly as spectacular as the visibility suggested, while questioning how many of those readers would remain long-term subscribers.

That distinction is fundamental:

attention is not loyalty.

And followers are not necessarily customers.

There is now evidence of precisely that tension

Recent criticism from within the Substack ecosystem has become especially interesting.

Some established writers have reported a strange divergence: follower numbers increasing while paid subscriptions weaken. A recent critique of Substack highlighted Taylor Lorenz reporting roughly 200,000 followers while saying paid subscriptions had fallen sharply.

That should make everyone interested in the platform stop for a moment.

Because it suggests the possibility that Substack is reproducing one of the central pathologies of conventional social media:

large visible numbers that don’t necessarily correspond to economically meaningful relationships.

Followers feel good.

Likes feel good.

Restacks feel good.

Views feel good.

But none of those automatically means somebody values your work enough to read 3,000 words — much less pay for them.

The great paradox of Notes

Substack originally presented Notes as something fundamentally different from advertising-driven social media.

The argument was elegant.

Traditional social networks monetize attention through advertising, so their incentive is to maximize scrolling and engagement.

Substack monetizes subscriptions.

Therefore its incentive should be to connect readers with writers whose work they value enough to pay for.

That remains an important distinction.

And it is one reason I still find Substack considerably more interesting than conventional social networks.

But human behaviour introduces another variable.

Once people discover that visibility can produce subscribers, they begin optimizing for visibility.

And once visibility becomes a scarce resource, people learn which formats generate it cheaply.

Welcome back to social media.

Why does a banal photograph sometimes outperform an excellent essay?

Because the two objects are asking completely different things from the reader.

A photograph requires perhaps one second.

Beautiful.

Like.

Next.

A sentence saying “Never stop believing in yourself” requires approximately the same intellectual investment.

Agree.

Heart.

Next.

A serious essay about monetary policy, geopolitics, artificial intelligence, philosophy or history asks something considerably more expensive:

attention.

Perhaps five minutes.

Perhaps fifteen.

Perhaps forty.

It may challenge what you believe.

It may require concentration.

It may even require you to admit that you were wrong.

The heart button therefore measures frictionless reaction much better than intellectual value.

This is hardly unique to Substack.

It is practically the defining problem of social media.

But that is precisely why seeing it emerge here matters.

One Substack writer recently documented almost the perfect miniature experiment: a frustrated Note generated dramatically more interaction than nine carefully researched newsletters that had received only a handful of likes.

There is nothing mysterious about it.

The metric is measuring engagement, not quality.

Those are not synonyms.

Then there is the strangest Substack genre of all

Content about creating content.

I find this ecosystem fascinating.

Articles explaining how to gain subscribers.

Notes explaining how to make Notes successful.

Newsletters explaining how to grow newsletters.

Writers teaching writers how to find writers who will follow other writers.

People selling subscriptions explaining how to sell subscriptions to people who would like to sell subscriptions.

It begins to resemble a perfectly circular economy.

Substack about Substack.

There is even commentary from successful Notes strategists acknowledging that “writing about writing” is unusually easy to grow because an enormous proportion of Substack’s active creator population is naturally interested in precisely that subject.

Which raises my favourite question:

After everyone has learned how to build an audience, what are we going to tell the audience?

Because somewhere along the way, content needs an underlying asset.

An idea.

Expertise.

Reporting.

Experience.

Knowledge.

Analysis.

Something.

I may simply have a different conception of publishing

I don’t need everyone who encounters my work to follow me.

I certainly don’t intend to follow someone merely because they followed me.

And my objective isn’t to turn every reader into a paying customer.

I write because I have opinions and analysis I want to put into public circulation — particularly about economics, finance, markets and geopolitics.

Some readers will agree.

Some will disagree.

Some will think I’m completely wrong.

Excellent.

That is considerably more interesting than exchanging follows.

My ideal reader isn’t someone who clicked a button because I clicked theirs.

It is someone who stops and thinks:

I hadn’t considered it that way.

Or even:

This guy is completely wrong, and here is why.

At least something happened intellectually.

Perhaps we need to separate three things

There is publishing: creating something worth reading.

There is distribution: helping people discover it.

And there is monetization: converting some of that readership into income.

All three are legitimate.

The mistake is assuming they are the same activity.

You can be brilliant at distribution and have remarkably little to say.

You can produce exceptional journalism and be terrible at marketing it.

You can have 100,000 followers and a weak business.

You can have 2,000 intensely committed readers and an excellent one.

And you can publish entirely for free because your objective isn’t monetization at all.

None of those models is inherently superior.

But we should at least know which game we’re playing.

So, is Substack becoming Facebook?

Not quite.

And that distinction matters.

Substack still has something Facebook largely never had: a direct economic relationship between writer and reader, ownership of the subscriber email relationship, long-form publishing infrastructure and an ecosystem where genuinely exceptional independent work can survive.

Following itself is explicitly secondary to subscribing in Substack’s own description of the system.

That gives me some optimism.

But Notes is undeniably importing the social grammar of mainstream platforms:

followers,

likes,

short posts,

images,

restacks,

public engagement,

network effects,

and the constant psychological measurement of whether anybody noticed you today.

The danger isn’t that Substack literally becomes Facebook.

The danger is subtler:

that writers begin behaving as though it were.

And once the incentive becomes “What can I publish that will generate the most visible reaction?” rather than “What do I actually have worth saying?”, the technological architecture almost becomes irrelevant.

We already know where that road leads.

My metric remains unfashionably simple

Did I publish something worth reading?

Did I substantiate it?

Did I add something rather than repeat something?

Did someone learn something?

Did someone reconsider something?

Did I provoke an intelligent disagreement?

If yes, I consider the publication successful.

Ten likes or ten thousand.

Because a serious article with five thoughtful readers can contain more value than a motivational slogan with 5,000 hearts.

Visibility is distribution.

Followers are potential audience.

Subscribers are relationships.

Revenue is a business model.

None of them, individually or collectively, proves intellectual value.

And perhaps that is the distinction Substack needs to protect more aggressively if it wants to remain something more interesting than another social network.

Otherwise, we may eventually build the world’s most sophisticated independent publishing platform only to discover that its most successful piece of content is:

“Good morning, writers. Who’s writing today? Drop a ❤️ below.”

At which point Facebook will be entitled to demand royalties.

Roberto Balbino — CEO, Fintech SCB
Independent analyst of finance, economics, geopolitics and global markets.