A Writer Gave In and Joined Substack — Here's Why You're Stuck on Big Tech Too

A longtime blogger has finally decided to start writing on Substack, and they're not happy about it. After years of posting on Facebook, their own WordPress sites, and the community forum LessWrong, they realized the intellectual crowd they wanted to reach had quietly migrated to Substack. Writing anywhere else meant their posts got far fewer readers. So they gave in — but the post reads less like a happy launch announcement and more like a reluctant surrender.

The reason is something economists call the "network effect": a platform's value comes from who else is already on it, not from how good the technology is. If everyone you know is on one app, joining a different one is pointless. That gives the company running it enormous leverage. It owns your data, decides what you see, and can slowly make the service worse — more ads, more fees — because you can't easily leave. Over the 20th century, the same dynamic concentrated power in phone companies like Ma Bell and oil giants like Standard Oil. Software was supposed to break that pattern, but it didn't.

There is a proven fix. Email works this way: a Hotmail user can message a Yahoo user because the underlying system is open and shared. Through the 2000s and 2010s, engineers built similar "federated" systems for social media — open protocols where anyone can run their own app and still talk to everyone else. The technology works. But users didn't care, and stayed on the big platforms anyway.

So the writer is joining Substack — grudgingly. The lesson for the rest of us: the apps you use aren't winning because they're best. They're winning because everyone else is already there. And until that changes, switching costs you your friends.