very few weeks, I open Instagram to a story promoting a new Substack post. Sometimes, it’s from someone I’ve met once, other times, someone I’ve known since preschool. Such posts are usually accompanied by a Pinterest-inflected photo seemingly meant to signal a sort of glamorous intellectualism — barren tree branches, a cup of black coffee, an obscure 20th century painting.

Once I’ve followed the link to the app, I head to the home page, where it seems that everyone who could possibly wish to be perceived as a writer has gathered to contribute. A micro-celebrity gives fashion advice, a senator opines on politics, an actual celebrity rambles about fame, and a childhood friend shares her poetry.

What brings all of these people to this platform for writing? Are we witnessing the emergence of a new public forum? A newly accessible location for language? What does the popularity of Substack as a less established, institutional space for writing, even at so established an institution as Harvard, mean?

Kaitlyn Tsai ’25, a former Magazine Chair, began posting on her Substack, “words by kait,” in the summer of 2023, after her sophomore year, after having posted her writing on Instagram for some time. Since then, she’s only seen Substack grow more popular.

What drew Tsai herself to Substack was that, as she says, “the barrier to entry is basically non-existent.” At Harvard, Tsai regularly published in the more formal publication environment of The Crimson. She describes the pieces she would publish in Fifteen Minutes as more polished, created “with the help and the feedback of other writers around me and really made into something that I’m proud of. It’s cleaned up. It has my voice in it, but it’s not just me rambling.”

On the other hand, she describes her work on Substack as “like public diaries,” less polished and more personal. Publishing online was “a way for me to kind of get over my fear of putting just my thoughts out there, even when they weren’t in a polished, edited form,” Tsai says.

“I don’t need to be polished and perfect for my writing to reach people and for it to touch people,” she tells me, “and in fact, sometimes some of the messiness is what makes it, I guess, more attractive to other people.”

Tsai’s perception of readers’ attraction to authenticity — to the “messiness” in writing which affirms that by reading we can achieve direct access to an author’s voice and ideas — is a relatively new development in the history of reading and writing. Much of our contemporary conception of writing, according to English professor Deirdre Lynch, who studies the history of reading and the novel, emerged in Romanticism, with “a new premium put on originality and the notion that writers created out of their own genius.” In our post-Romantic world, we think of authors as artists and creators of new ideas, wholly their own, instead of as scholars or copyists.

In the 21st century, the internet seems to offer an opportunity to actualize the ideals introduced and developed in Romanticism. Primed by our firm belief in the importance of an author’s voice, as unmediated by editors and publishers, we are excited to find such intimate voices on the internet.

If, in the 19th century, Romanticism changed how people conceptualized the act of writing, in the 20th and early 21st centuries, the internet has been changing the material conditions of publishing that writing. “Previously, to get into print, there were structures of gatekeeping involved,” especially economically, Lynch notes. “You had to convince somebody to invest the resources of the printing house in disseminating your writing,” while, with the internet, “now you can sit by your laptop and press ‘send’ or hit ‘return,’ and you’re publishing.”

This removal of gatekeepers underlies the great promise of democratization that the internet itself presents, that some perfect form of access to the “genius” of the author is now possible, and from any author. But, when the individual creative act of the writer plays such a dominant role, what is left for readers to contribute?

In some ways, it seems the internet should make it easier for readers to express themselves, just as it does for writers. After all, comments on blogs are easier to write than a letter to an editor. “But,” Lynch asks, “is that true about the internet now?”

Adam G. Walker, who taught in Harvard’s English Department through last year, initially came to the internet and to Substack believing in that vision of accessibility of a readerly community outside of the exclusive environment of academia. To pursue this vision, he has, in his own words, “gone rogue” from academia for the moment.

Since leaving Harvard, Walker has sought to create accessible communities for readers online by harnessing internet platforms including Substack for“expanding the scope of knowledge-sharing beyond the walls of the academy.”

Walker calls Substack “a place where written essays are exchanged between writers,” where readers and academics can assemble reading lists, share notes, give book recommendations, and co-organize studies “to devote themselves to humanistic study.” But, as he notes, those ideals of community-oriented learning and commitment to intellectual excellence are not necessarily what rises to the top of the platform, or what is picked up by its algorithm. “Some of what I consider my best writing has gone largely unnoticed,” Walker writes, “and what I would consider my worst has received the most attention.”

Tsai agrees that Substack and its algorithm don’t necessarily select for the best work the platform contains, and that the app places the responsibility on readers to be “judicious about what you’re consuming.” Disadvantages of the platform, for her, “would fall more on the reader than the person writing.” Especially as writing generated by artificial intelligence grows increasingly ubiquitous, the accessibility of the app also makes it vulnerable to a proliferation of non-human writing.

The careful attention required to use Substack in accordance with the intellectual ideals that bring us to the platform are not encouraged by the way we habitually engage with culture.

Lynch warns of the danger we encounter as writing and reading separate, writing becomes active, and reading passive. It may seem passive readers “aren’t really reading, they’re consuming, they’re gorging.”

The association of consumption with reading is, with the internet, becoming not only an outside perception of readers, as it was in the past, but how people explicitly think of their own actions. When Tsai automatically describes Substack users’ reading as “consuming,” her language reflects the exact conception of reading against which Lynch cautions.

Little wonder, when consumption looms over much of Substack. On Substack’s Notes page–a sort of Twitter/Pinterest hybrid–for example, a carefully arranged image of a meal, or a list of the objects that a writer has purchased recently, frequently appear alongside the essays that make up the core of the platform.

The introduction of short-form video content to Substack in 2025 also brings the app ever closer to the passivity of the very platforms like TikTok or Instagram Reels that many Substackers attempt to escape. Substack is not an escape from the endless scroll through slop that the internet has become in recent years.

My own understanding of Substack is also shaped by its algorithm. My perception of what the platform is used for — writing on culture or pseudo-academic subjects, candid writing about the self — is not necessarily the same as Tsai’s or Walker’s. It certainly doesn’t match the platform’s actually most subscribed to publications.

The platform’s most popular writing tends toward politics, especially American politics, or finance. Many authors of those pages do not write from the outsider perspectives I associate with my experience of Substack. Substacks with the largest number of free subscribers include “Letters from an American,” Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter on “the history behind today’s politics”; and “Robert Reich,” the writings of Robert Reich, a professor and politician who worked in the administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. These writers and their peers have strong roots in halls of power, in the institutions of academia and publishing, and in the government itself.

Substack seems to provide a space for those deterred by the inaccessibility of writing in institutions like publishing or academia, but the space is entangled with those institutions. If anything, what’s on the app may be more related to those institutions than it seems. Can Substack be “the app for independent voices,” as its tagline reads, when it is inundated by voices deeply affiliated with pre-existing groups and institutions?

Even apart from the users of Substack, does the app format even allow for truly “independent voices”? Can “independent voices” exist at all when they are necessarily dependent on one app and its algorithm for reach?

The first step of signing up for a Substack account is to select 3 topics from a set list, so the algorithm can recommend Substacks that fit your interests. Clicking on most of these options expands them into subcategories—if you’re interested in “Literature,” for example, you can choose whether you are more interested in “Book Clubs” or “Literary Criticism.” Your very first interaction with the platform immediately boxes you into groups based on interests for the algorithm’s ease of categorization and understanding .

To get on Substack, you must outsource the first moments of your discovery of the new platform to an algorithm. Of course, you can look outside of your echo chamber, retrain your algorithm to include as much as you want, but that too requires more conscious effort than simply beginning to scroll. The internet may remove human and economic gatekeepers, but the apps and algorithms also resurface old barriers to true accessibility of writing and reading in new ways.

We are always striving towards a more accessible and democratized model of writing – and notably, writing not only for the self, but, with some level of expectation of a reader. There is something empowering about writing in a space of happy medium between authority and accessibility – not so official as printing, but, in some way, formalized.

Before Substack or the internet, the development of “blank books,” bound journals in which people could write, as opposed to loose leaves of paper, was “very emancipatory,” according to Lynch. Blank books “make you feel like your writing will last,” she notes, as “the book form itself says, ‘I'm writing a book,’ even if the book that you're writing will only exist in a single copy and be written by you.” Regardless of the actual existence of an audience, having a place that feels real in which to put our writing feels empowering and important. Yet, blank books, in their physicality, do make their owners’ writing last — we have and study them in museums and libraries. It is not clear that Substack, without a physical domain, can do the same, however much it offers the illusion of a place to house writing.

Every space we create for writing to exist within necessarily entails compromises between accessibility, longevity, authenticity, excellence, and every quality that reading and writing involve. No space will be perfect, and each will have its flaws. Yet, as we constantly strive toward different and better means for reading and writing, it is worth considering exactly what we are striving toward. We must be conscious of what we give up and why — the values to which we give the most weight, and those which we take for granted.

—Staff writer Silvia L. Siegel Yousef can be reached at [email protected]. Her column, “Writing after Writing” asks who is writing what, and where (and why that there) on the internet, as we navigate a time of panic over the perceived end of literacy–or, at least, of literacy as we have understood in the past.