SUBSTACK V2
The Day They Changed The Algorithm
The email arrived on a Tuesday morning with the subject line: “The Great Decoupling.”
The manifesto was seductive in its austerity. Substack announced it was stripping the paint off the walls.
No more profile pictures. Every user would display as a gray silhouette.
No names. Writers would be assigned numbers upon registration.
No follower counts. No images in posts. No bios listing your MFA credentials or your appearance in The New Yorker.
Just the text. Black words on a white screen.
“If you are here to be famous,” the announcement read, “leave. If you are here to write, stay.”
The literary internet erupted.
The first 48 hours were a celebration.
The think-pieces poured in like champagne at a wedding.
“Substack’s Radical Return to Pure Writing” – The Atlantic
“Why Removing Identity Will Save Literature” – The New Yorker
“The Death of the Influencer-Author” – Literary Hub
Writers who’d spent years complaining about “algorithm culture” and “the commodification of art” hailed Substack V2 as a revolution. Finally. Finally. A platform where craft mattered. Where the best voices would rise purely on merit.
The MFA graduates rejoiced.
The literary fiction authors who’d been languishing in obscurity nodded with grim satisfaction.
Author 891 (formerly a bestselling memoirist) posted:
“This is what we’ve been waiting for. No more shortcuts. No more tricks. Just the purity of language. Let the cream rise.”
14,000 likes.
Week two: The Exodus.
The exodus was immediate and violent.
The influencers fled first. Not because the ship was sinking, but because the mirrors had been removed. Without the ability to post the carefully curated photo of the coffee mug next to the Moleskine notebook, they realized they had nothing to say. They migrated back to Instagram, where the lighting was better and the reading level was lower.
Then the “Thought Leaders” left. The “Ex-Google / 8-Figure Founder / Stoic” bros realized that without the bio signaling their authority, their advice on productivity sounded exactly like what it was: the hallucinations of unemployed men with too much Adderall. They retreated to LinkedIn, where the circle-jerk still had avatars.
The poetry accounts were next. It turns out, if you can’t screenshot your poem in a typewriter font on cream-colored paper, it isn’t poetry. It’s just a sentence with bad line breaks. They scattered back to Instagram, where they could still overlay text on photos of their thighs in bathtubs.
Within two weeks, 64% of Substack’s top creators had left.
Substack V2 didn’t mourn them.
“Let them go,” the internal Slack channel read. “We’re building for writers, not performers.”
The ones who stayed were the True Believers.
The ones who’d spent years insisting that craft was all that mattered. The ones who sneered at “influencer culture” and mocked “Instagram poets.” The ones who claimed they wrote for the art, not the audience.
We looked around the empty room and congratulated ourselves on our purity.
Finally, we said. Finally, the tourists are gone.
Now we can have a conversation.
Author 442 had been on Substack for four years.
He wrote essays about solitude, silence, and the dying art of contemplation. His prose was careful. Considered. He revised every sentence seven times before publishing.
On Substack V2, he was just Author 442.
His first essay under the new system was titled “The Covenant of Attention.”
It was 2,800 words. It referenced Heidegger, Sontag, and a passage from Marcus Aurelius.
He hit publish.
Within an hour: 14 likes.
He exhaled. Smiled.
Fourteen people had read it. Fourteen people had connected with it.
That was better than 14,000 people scrolling past, wasn’t it?
He clicked on the profiles of the people who’d liked it.
Author 1829. Author 6904. Author 291.
He read their recent posts. Left thoughtful comments.
“A powerful meditation on impermanence. The image of the moth at the window will stay with me.”
They replied:
“Thank you, Author 442. Your latest piece was deeply moving.”
It felt good.
It felt like a salon. A secret society of the intellectually engaged. A monastery of letters.
No clout-chasing. No performative outrage. No selfies with book covers.
Just writers, writing for those who cared.
Author 442 posted twice a week.
Every post got between 12 and 16 likes.
The same usernames appeared: Author 291. Author 6904. Author 8192. Author 58.
He read them all. Commented thoughtfully. They returned the favor.
It felt sustainable. Intimate. Pure.
100% engagement.
Months passed.
They told themselves that 14 true readers were worth more than a million blind scrollers.
They believed they had saved literature.
THE LEAK
On a Friday in November, a disgruntled engineer—fired during the restructuring—dumped the internal Substack V2 database onto a public GitHub repository.
It wasn’t just usernames and emails.
It was everything.
User behavior. Traffic patterns. Time-on-page metrics. Click-through rates. Referral sources.
A data journalist at The Verge downloaded the file and built a heat map.
Blue Dots: Writers (users who had posted at least once)
Red Dots: Pure Readers (users who had never posted, only read)
The map loaded.
The screen filled with blue.
Zero red dots.
The analysis had shown that Substack V2 had 8,429 active users.
8,429 of them were writers.
0 of them were readers.
Every single person on the platform was a creator.
There was no audience. No passive readership.
It was a closed loop. A Ponzi scheme where everyone was selling a shovel, but there was no gold and no ground to dig.
The data revealed a rhythm.
User A posts an essay.
Within 60 seconds, User A navigates to User B’s latest post. Scrolls. Leaves a comment: “Beautifully observed.”
Moves to User C’s post. Scrolls. Leaves a comment: “This resonates deeply.”
Moves to User D’s post.
Why?
Because the algorithm—even Substack V2’s “pure” algorithm—prioritized reciprocity.
If you wanted your post to be seen, you had to engage with others first.
The users had figured this out within days.
They weren’t reading.
They were networking.
They were commenting on other people’s work solely to guilt them into commenting on theirs.
The Verge journalist published the most damning chart:
Average Time-on-Page for a 2,000-Word Essay: 14 seconds.
Not 14 minutes.
14 seconds.
Just enough time to scroll to the bottom, tap the heart icon, and type: “Great piece!”
The comments weren’t reflections.
They were transactions.
Author 442 read the article on his phone.
His hands were shaking.
He opened his Substack V2 dashboard.
Clicked on his most recent post: “On the Ethics of Silence.”
16 likes. 4 comments.
He clicked the first comment.
Author 6904: “A necessary meditation. Thank you for this.”
He opened a new tab. Checked the timestamp.
Author 6904 had posted that comment 9 seconds after Author 442 published the essay.
The essay was 2,400 words.
It takes at least eight minutes to read.
Author 6904 hadn’t read it.
He looked at the data leak. Found his own post. The one about grief. The one with the 14 perfect readers.
Time on Page:
Author 221: 8 seconds.
Author 775: 6 seconds.
Author 390: 12 seconds.
He stared at the numbers.
They hadn’t read it.
They had scrolled to the bottom; hit “Like.” They had typed a generic compliment about “tone” or “structure.”
He checked the next column: Referral Source.
Every single one of them had posted their own story within five minutes of commenting on his.
The realization hit him like a hammer to the teeth.
They didn’t care about his grief. They didn’t care about his craft.
Author 442 scrolled through his own comment history.
The essays he’d “read.”
The comments he’d left.
“Powerful.”
“This will stay with me.”
“A profound exploration.”
He checked the timestamps.
11 seconds. 8 seconds. 14 seconds.
He hadn’t read them either.
He’d been performing reading.
Just like everyone else.
We weren’t a community of artists.
We were a room full of people screaming “LOOK AT ME” at other people who were screaming “LOOK AT ME.”
We were all wearing noise-canceling headphones.
And the only thing we ever read was our own name in the notification tab.
The article went viral.
Writers across the internet tried to defend Substack V2.
“This is reductive. The quality of engagement matters more than the quantity.”
But the data didn’t lie.
Someone pulled the archives and ran a textual analysis on the comments.
73% of all comments on Substack V2 fell into one of five templates:
“Beautifully written.”
“This resonates.”
“Powerful work.”
“Thank you for sharing this.”
“I needed to read this today.”
The comments weren’t responses.
They were social scripts.
The Platform Didn’t Die
Substack V2 stayed online.
The servers kept running.
But the writing changed.
People stopped writing essays.
They stopped writing fiction.
They started writing:
“I read yours. Please read mine.”
Then:
“Read mine.”
Then just:
“Mine.”
“Me.”
“Me.”
And now, when you log into Substack V2, there are no stories.
The feed is just a million gray avatars, typing the same thing, over and over again, into the dark:
Read mine.
Read mine.
Read mine.
And nobody ever does.
END.
A necessary meditation.
(lol)
Ugh.