Why Substack becoming the next LinkedIn is an inevitability
(Not a tragedy. Just a pattern.)
The honeymoon phase
When I joined Substack it was all vibes.
“I love the community here.”
“I deleted all social media but I’m keeping Substack.”
…
Then a small shift:
“I deleted all social media and doubled down on Substack.”
...
And then the punchline:
“Now, I work two hours a day and money rolls in while I sleep.”
This arc is familiar. Not because people are lying. But because this is what happens whenever a new platform opens up.
Not manipulation. Not bad intent. Just human behaviour plus incentives.
The race to “win” new platforms
Whenever a new social platform unlocks, the first instinct isn’t curiosity — it’s optimisation.
Who can grow fastest.
Who can monetise earliest.
Who can turn presence into leverage before the rules harden.
Because we all have ambitions. And being able to voice those ambitions to the maximum number of people feels like the answer to a lot of problems.
Feels like being the operative term.
This is where volume increases, tone sharpens, and success stories get louder — not because people are worse, but because attention becomes scarce.
We’ve seen this movie before
We’ve already watched this play out on LinkedIn.
What started as professional connection became performance.
The rise of the LinkedInfluencer wasn’t an accident, nor was it (entirely) deliberate engineering from the company — it was the natural outcome of visibility being tied to opportunity.
Then came:
The posturing.
The AI sludge.
The endless “lessons.”
The success narratives stripped of context.
And importantly: add an opaque algorithm to that mix, and you don’t just get noise — you get uneven amplification.
Despite assurances to the contrary, distribution on large platforms is never neutral. Marginalised voices tend to remain marginalised — even when the mechanism isn’t obvious.
Why Substack isn’t exempt
1. Scale changes behaviour
Substack isn’t small anymore. As of 2025, it supports tens of millions of subscriptions and over five million paying readers. Growth at that scale changes behaviour — not because anyone intends it to, but because systems respond to incentives.
At this size, platforms stop behaving like tools and start behaving like ecosystems.
Not good or bad. Just physics.
2. VC backing changes incentives
Substack is also venture-backed. The company raised $100 million in a Series C round valuing it at over $1 billion.
Venture funding changes growth. It doesn’t mean founders are malicious, chasing their big cash-out, or dishonest about community values.
It simply means growth is now structurally expected. And growth always demands optimisation — whether creators want it or not.
A comment I read recently captured this better than any think-piece I’ve seen. Gianni De Rezende Cara wrote:
“Substack doesn’t allow custom sending domains—and instead forces emails to go out from Substack’s domain. It subtly raises the cost of leaving. If you build, say, a 3,000-subscriber list where no one has ever received an email from your own domain, the moment you leave and send that first email, your domain’s lack of reputation will hurt deliverability, and many messages will land in spam.”
This isn’t sinister. It’s how platforms protect momentum.
3. The fantasy of the newsletter life
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer looks exhausting and vaguely embarrassing.
Becoming a newsletter writer, though? That feels romantic.
Laptop. Coffee. Putting the world to rights through words.
So we idolise the people who’ve “made it.” Growth advice proliferates. The quiet platform gets louder.
There are now tens of thousands of Substack publications offering advice on how to grow on Substack — which tells its own story.
4. Why the world is pushing people here
More people have side hustles. More people want ownership of their thinking. More people want to write without tying it to an employer.
Substack’s advantage: you can write about sex, pastries, confidence—or the intersection of all three—without worrying about your job.
Substack allows people to be plural, not just professional.
Hold on a minute… Substack and LinkedIn are not the same thing.
There’s an important nuance here; one raised brilliantly by Melanie Goodman and Jose Antonio Morales in their recent article.
Substack and LinkedIn were built for fundamentally different purposes. LinkedIn is short-form, fast-moving, optimised for visibility in the moment (and crucially was built for connection first and foremost). Substack was designed for long-form thinking — sustained attention, deliberate readership, ideas that unfold over time rather than compete for the next scroll.
That distinction still matters.
But it’s also where the pattern starts to show.
Substack didn’t begin with short-form. Notes came later. And yet, increasingly, they’ve become central — not just socially, but structurally. Notes are where discovery happens. They’re where conversations form. They’re widely understood (and quietly encouraged, even by Substack itself) as the fastest route to growth.
I’ve felt this shift myself. This year, the majority of my subscriber growth hasn’t come from long-form essays. It’s come from Notes — shorter, quicker, more reactive pieces of writing that travel further because they’re easier to consume.
That doesn’t mean long-form is disappearing. It means attention is being routed differently.
This is the same gravity LinkedIn operates under: optimise for interruption, not immersion. For quick recognition rather than prolonged reading. Not because anyone prefers shallow thinking — but because platforms inevitably respond to how people actually behave at scale.
Substack is still a long-form platform. But the centre of gravity is moving. And we’ve seen this shape before.
So... should we care?
Honestly? Probably not in the way people think.
Every successful platform eventually commercialises. Influence follows attention. Wealth follows influence.
And then a new altruistic baby platform appears. People declare it “different.” While remaining loyal to the old one and reminiscing about the good old days.
The bottom line
The mistake isn’t enjoying Substack as it is now, it is believing it will stay that way.
Platforms change. Incentives harden. Attention gets priced.
The advantage isn’t leaving early or winning fast. It’s knowing why the environment behaves the way it does — so you’re less surprised, less disappointed, and more deliberate about how you show up.
Substack becoming more like LinkedIn isn’t a betrayal. It’s a pattern.
The only real choice is whether you participate with nostalgia—or with clarity.
What do you think? Is this an overly cynical take on a fundamentally different platform? Or do you too see this change as inevitable - and do you care??
I’d love to know!
Interesting read. Thanks for sharing.
Great read, and thanks for the mention, Claire.
I don’t think this is a cynical take at all. If anything, it captures the inevitable changes platforms go through as they scale, while still acknowledging that there’s real value in engaging—provided you calibrate your intentions and expectations.
I hope Substack never turns into LinkedIn. I was part of the early group of creators who grew quickly on Twitter and later moved to LinkedIn, but I stepped away once the migration really took off. Got tired of the growth game.
That said, I don’t think it’ll ever get that bad.
Still, I remember when early Quora was an incredible place for thoughtful stories, and now I don’t even wander near the door.