Substack’s social media vibe shift

Plus: Best links of the week.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Some news! Today we’re launching a special new feature for paid subscribers that will come after every Wednesday interview. In this week’s roundup I share a podcast episode that made me gasp when I saw it in my feed, a book app whose new AI feature immediately went racist, and all my favorite tweets and TikToks recently shared in the group chat. —Kate

---

On October 8, Substack’s official account posted a video on Instagram. In it, comedian Jamie Linn Watson cries into the camera as she describes seeing a man “who doesn’t realize” his life lacks meaning and wonder because he’s not engaged with the world around him—the world, it’s implied, that writers on Substack chronicle every day. Substack, for some reason, was shitposting.

substack

A post shared by @substack

“Has Substack been hacked? What is this?” was one of the nicer of the comments on the video. Nevertheless, Substack has persisted, posting more videos in a similar vein as well as meme roundups and other unhinged promo for specific newsletters. It’s all part of a strategy devised by

randa

, who works in partnerships at Substack after running her own successful newsletters,

hotsingles.nyc 🥵👤🗽

and

Good Hang

.

“To me it felt like our existing social presence wasn't really reflecting the same level of editorial rigor and greatness that we try to project,” she recently told me over Zoom. Here we talk about how this new strategy came together and the results of Substack’s social media vibe shift.

How did starting as a Substack user inform your approach to socials?

So I'll actually tell you about this from both my role as a user of Substack and then also [having] joined Substack on the partnerships team working directly with writers and creators. So I was and still am recruiting people from social media and recruiting people who have these large audiences and who really understand social. And to me it felt like our existing social presence wasn't really reflecting the same level of editorial rigor and greatness that we try to project. So I was thinking, basically, how do we make our social profiles actually interesting as editorial products and reflective of everything that's on Substack and all the cool people?

I follow Substack on Instagram. Is that where Substack is most active on social?

Yeah, it's mostly Instagram and we recently launched a TikTok as well.

I think a lot of people see Substack as an alternative to traditional social media. When Substack is posting on social media, who are you speaking to? Is it existing users who are also on other platforms? Or is the hope to reach people who are not on Substack?

I've been thinking about it largely to reach people who aren't yet on Substack, both from the subscriber and the creator point of view. To go into my experience as a user, as soon as Substack built an app, I downloaded it 'cause I was subscribing to dozens or maybe even hundreds of newsletters at this point. So I'm like, I don't wanna get this in my email. I'm so excited to have an app to actually look at this. So we're thinking these people who are on social media who are interested in finding cool stuff to read and to watch and to listen to will also be more interested in a Substack app.

Do you post on Notes or is that a different team?

I'm glad you asked about that. We also are doing Notes. So maybe you've seen this, but we've been crossposting the memes to Notes as well. Before we started posting memes, we started to see memes pick up steam on Notes, which gave us a good signal that it would be good to try that too.

This is sort of a vibe shift towards more chaotic, niche content. But how would you describe it? And what has it been like rolling it out?

As far as the implementation, we have partnered with Loop, this agency. And in thinking about the vibe shift, we're throwing stuff out there and experimenting. And that doesn't mean that there's no strategy behind it. Some of the things that we've been thinking about, like Substack is this place where there's substantive content, high quality stuff. There's such a wide range. So we talked about this from the perspective of like, we're dumbing up, not dumbing down. We're trying to make content that feels native to social, but that draws you in and makes you feel like you're smart and in on the joke. Another thing I've thought about is we're kind of trying to make brain rot for intellectuals, using formats that are fun and funny on social media and trying to capture people's attention that way to bring them in. Like, for example, some of the videos with Jamie, she's adding commentary or making jokes about these Substack pieces that are serious.

Jamie's one of the faces of these videos. How do you all work together?

So we work with Loop on different ideas for videos every week, and then Loop goes and films them with Jamie and we might have different ways we might want the video to look or different iterations of the script and things like that, and like Jamie might put her own spin on it. When we cast her, I was excited to see her because she actually was on Hot Singles as well. I just think she's really funny and creative and her vibe is really interesting for Substack.

26W Coquettish Comedienne Seeks Humor-Loving Hunk

I know it's early, but have you started to figure out what resonates best, or is it still an experiment?

We're definitely seeing some early signals. The memes have been crushing it, particularly memes that gesture towards this intellectual, online persona. So we've been doing more in that direction. And we did a meme dump around the election that did great. There's so much politics stuff on Substack and politics obviously is a super serious topic, but we were able to translate that to social in a way that worked for us.

Substack is hard on social in the sense that it publishes all kinds of content and people follow for different reasons. And I know some of the comments were like, “Are you hacked?” But are people adjusting more? Are they getting it?

I mean, for every comment that's like, “What's going on?” We have creators that are texting us like, “Who's running your social? It's amazing.” People who get Substack seem to really be getting what we're doing with social, which is exciting and encouraging to see.

---

Welcome to the new weekly scroll, a roundup of articles, links, and other thoughts from being on the internet this week!

What I’m consuming…