The Strange Intimacy of Substack

On writing, community, and how fast things can change

When I joined Substack, I really thought people would be waiting to read me.

They were not.

I arrived with very sincere writer optimism and a name that, in hindsight, may not have helped. I think my handle was Ghosts, Dogs & Dead Mothers, which at least one person found off-putting. Fair enough, maybe. But I had just written an 80,000-word book centered around my dead mother, and not long after that my stepmother died too. At that point I had, in the most literal and least poetic sense possible, two dead mothers.

That sounds harsh written out. It also happens to be true.

So I started where most people start on Substack: posting into the void, following a few people, hoping for a little reciprocity, trying to figure out whether I was bad at this or just early. I wrote things I thought were funny. They were not especially well received. Then I wrote a piece called I Chose This Life, and for the first time something shifted. Someone read it. Someone liked it. Someone restacked it. It did not go viral, because almost nothing does, but it got seen. More importantly, it got read.

That was all I wanted.

Not fame. Not internet domination. Not some fantasy of becoming a literary brand. I wanted readers. I wanted to know the words landed somewhere other than inside my own head.

That was also when I met H.

He subscribed quickly, commented generously, and seemed to understand the strange mix of writing and platform mechanics better than most people do. He talked openly about the algorithm, about reach, about how writers could help each other find audiences instead of waiting around to be discovered by magic. He offered editing help. He read some of my work. He encouraged people. He connected writers. He made the place feel less random.

That matters more than people admit.

For all the jokes about Substack being a glorified email list, it can also feel like a little frontier town built by insomniacs, mourners, essayists, novelists, obsessives, and people who do not quite fit anywhere else. When it works, it really works. You find people whose work you admire. They find yours. You restack something because it moved you, or made you laugh, or said the thing you have been trying to say for years. You start recognizing names. Then voices. Then patterns. Then people.

I found writers there I genuinely loved. A few were new enough that I got to be the person saying, “You should read this.” I connected some of them to H because he was good at helping people get traction and because he had built real relationships. That is one of the nicest things about a good online community: it can make generosity feel useful.

Then the same system that creates that closeness can also distort it.

A lot of the writing I care about on Substack does not come from some clean, polished, content-brain place. It comes from grief, shame, memory, family damage, addiction, longing, secrets, all the things people are usually trying to manage in private. That is part of what makes the place feel alive when it is good.

H published one of those pieces. It came from a real wound, one of the hardest experiences of his life. I know what that kind of writing feels like. You do not do it for fun. You do not do it because you have identified some clever market opportunity in suffering. You do it because something in you needs to be said, or named, or dragged into the light. Maybe you want healing. Maybe you want witness. Maybe you want someone else to feel less alone. Usually it is some combination of all three.

And then, while H was suspended, people started talking.

Not carefully. Not kindly. Not even honestly, from what I could tell.

What began as speculation quickly took on that nasty online energy that always seems to appear the minute facts are missing and people are bored, hurt, or eager to be right. Suddenly there were insinuations that the piece had been shared for attention. That people had been pressured into participating in some kind of emotional spectacle. That the network around him was really a “cult,” as if writers restacking one another is proof of mass manipulation instead of a normal way small communities work.

I have actually been in a cult. This was not a cult.

This was a loose group of writers trying to help each other get read.

Was there sometimes pressure to engage, to restack, to support, to reciprocate? Maybe. But pressure is not coercion. No one was forced. No one was punished. Mostly it worked the way relationships usually work: the people who gave the most energy tended to get the most back. That is not sinister. That is just how groups work.

What made the whole thing worse was the cruelty.

There were comments on that personal piece that were so ugly, so disproportionate, and so weirdly gleeful that I found myself wondering how many people keep burner accounts solely to be inhumane with less consequence. It is one thing not to like someone’s style. It is one thing to be skeptical of online dynamics. It is another thing entirely to watch someone write from an obviously painful place and decide that this is your moment to mock them.

That part I will never understand.

And here is the thing I keep coming back to: I do not actually know why H was suspended. Most people talking about it do not know either. That did not stop them from speaking as if they did.

What I do know is this: Substack moderation is opaque, inconsistent, and often absurd. I know that because I have been suspended too, and not for anything remotely dramatic. I have been temporarily blocked from posting for sharing links to my own work in threads where people were literally asking to read other people’s writing. Asking. Inviting it. Still, after a few replies, I hit some invisible limit and got locked out for hours, then longer. I filed an appeal. I got the usual vague language. Maybe it is a bug. Maybe engineering will review it. Maybe someone will respond eventually. Maybe not.

So when people act like a suspension must mean someone did something monstrous, I am not convinced.

Sometimes it means a platform has bad systems.

Sometimes it means automation is stupid.

Sometimes it means the machinery underneath our little literary neighborhoods is not nearly as thoughtful as the people using it.

And maybe that is what unsettles me most. Not just that people can turn on each other so fast, but that a platform built on intimacy can so easily become a place of paranoia. We are encouraged to be personal, vulnerable, confessional, and deeply human. We are also sorted by algorithms, throttled by filters, and left to interpret silence from a support system that barely exists. In that environment, people start making up stories to fill in the gaps. About suspensions. About motives. About each other.

It is a terrible way to treat writers.

I still love parts of Substack. I have met smart, funny, generous people there. I have found real readers there. I have been surprised by kindness there. But this whole episode reminded me how quickly online community can become moral theater, where nobody knows the facts but everybody has a theory, and the most vulnerable work somehow gets recast as performance the minute other people feel uncomfortable with it.

Maybe that is the risk of writing honestly in public.

Not just that people will misunderstand you, but that they will decide misunderstanding you is more interesting than reading carefully.