Jeff Russell

Hey Jeff, on

(b) I have similar reasons as SDI re: signal/noise, though I am very much interested in sociology and society. Besides that, I see all of your posts in my feed here without any difficulty, so subscribing by email would be quite redundant and unnecessary.

On being reluctant to blog on substack, I feel you. One of the big dangers of participating on a big platform with a big user base (youtube and twitter being the most notorious) is having your content succumb to what I (and I think some others have) would term "audience capture." If your blog were to be successful to the point of having at least a few paying subscribers, you might find yourself writing what they want to hear rather than what you really want to talk about.

Even on this tiny little platform I've found myself refraining from making public posts on topics I don't think my subs would have any interest in; the last thing I want to do is clog up their feeds with the written equivalent of white noise.

Having said all of that, a substack might be a good idea if you were to write about a single theme or topic you might think would have broader appeal than what you normally post about there. I'm thinking of going that route if I were to build myself a content brand around a topic I'm intensely interested in (like history) that might be able to attract an audience larger than the very niche stuff we tend to talk about here on DW.