Substack Nation

Citizenship Questions for Substack

Photo by Marek Okon on Unsplash

I am a relatively late adopter of Substack, but I tend to be slow at most things. The thing is, I really liked Medium for a while, and clung onto the forlorn hope that it might redeem itself, but it seems not.

Medium got into a financial hole, until a spelunking saviour found the route out using a route map provided by Gerald Ratner, but forgot its writers, who are still wandering around a cave complex in the dark, with a tea light and a branded tote bag, containing nothing but a bag of Cheetos and a pot of olives.

So I am now trying to get my head around Substack, or “Subsnack” as it might be called, given my propensity to indulge while trying to compose.

As well as trying to get my aged brain around the multiplicity of Substack features, it takes a while to understand the “culture” of a new platform. The nearest I usually get to culture is that yoghurt at the back of the fridge, but I know that culture is important, unless it is poetry, in which case it should be banned.

There are Substack in-jokes about olives and pickles and Emma Horsedick (still haven’t discovered more about this last one and I am loathe to Google this in case Mrs. Pearce checks my search history) and it seems that on Substack it is obligatory to possess a cat, which is why I have adopted my virtual cat Schrödinger, though she has the unfortunate habit of disappearing. I can only apologise if you are a dog person, but it seems as though cats are in the ascendancy here.

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“The past is a foreign country”

is the famous opening line of L.P Harley’s 1953 novel “The Go Between” and Substack does feel a bit like a foreign country. And at the risk of being controversial, as we know, every country now needs a citizenship test to keep out “undesirables”.

Such tests usually involve a list of questions to see if new visitors can assimilate. In the UK such questions might be:

“What is the national catch phrase?” (“Mustn’t grumble”, though we do endlessly), or

“How many types of rain can you name?”,

or being controversial again, “Jam or cream first on a scone?”

In a Note, and we love Notes here since they are a wonderful distraction from doing real writing, I asked what questions should be asked in a “Substack Citizenship Test”. I thought you might be briefly amused to see the responses so far.

For starters, we have the ubiquitous David Perlmutter with:

“Can you write a coherent sentence in the English language?”

That’s me stuffed then.

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Joe T Poet: Resists, Rants suggests:

1) Do you want to grow together?

2) What kind of readers should the algorithm to show you?

3) Does it matter if you have 5 or 500 subscribers?

4) Who is Emma Horsedick (don’t laugh)?

5) Do you have unreasonably strong feelings on the em dash?

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Just A+ Content Guy suggests:

“Question 1: Have you ever accidentally hit “send” instead of “schedule”?

Bonus points for naming three acceptable synonyms for “newsletter.” Extra credit: Suggest a niche so specific it can’t possibly scale.

📌 If you haven’t doubted your niche, you’re still a tourist.”

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DILLIGAF?IDO suggests:

“Tell me a joke…” :o)

On the basis that “You can tell an awful lot about a person from their sense of humour.”

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Phillip Slater gets controversial with that “AI detector” the em dash:

“What’s your opinion on the Em Dash?”

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I hope you enjoyed these introductory questions, and I hope you can suggest some more to keep out other undesirable refugees arriving on small inflatable boats from Medium like me!