Substack Is Turning Into a Pyramid Scheme

The biggest danger in the creator economy is forgetting who you are.

Substack used to feel like a library.

You could spend an hour in the feed and come away with three ideas you hadn’t considered before. Writers writing about things they actually cared about. Readers who actually read. A quiet corner of the internet that hadn’t been colonized yet.

Now it feels increasingly like LinkedIn. Substack is becoming a place where creators sell “how to be a creator” to other creators who want to be creators. It’s an endless loop of productivity hacks, growth tactics, and audience building.

At some point, we moved from creating things to teaching people how to create things. Most of the wealth comes from recruiting other people and teaching them how to sell the dream to even more people.

Some would call this a pyramid scheme. In the creator economy, we call it personal branding.

Don’t get me wrong. Substack is still the best platform I have found. But the air is getting thinner. The noise is drowning out the signal. And if you’re a creator actually trying to build something meaningful, this shift isn’t just annoying. It changes how you think.

How I Became a Substack Bestseller

Maybe you have experienced it yourself. You are about to write a new article. There are hundreds of great ideas in your head. You know what you want to say.

But before you start, you take a quick look at what’s getting attention. You see that your favorite creator posted something a couple of days ago that went viral. The topic is great and there is validation that people like it.

Maybe you could write about that? You pause. This could be your breakthrough. So instead of writing what you actually wanted to write, you write something you think people will read.

You came here to write. But somewhere along the way, that stopped being enough.

After spending some time on Substack you start to notice other creators. People who arrived on the platform five minutes ago are suddenly growing faster than you and showing up everywhere. It’s frustrating, even if you tell yourself it shouldn’t matter.

So you take a look at their profile. Research purposes, obviously. Lucky for you, they have a post pinned at the top titled “How I Became a Substack Bestseller.“

You read it. And just like every other growth article you “accidentally“ read, they all seem to point to the same obvious best practices. You must post one to two long-form pieces per week and supplement this by posting on Notes four times a day. Your titles have to be “click-worthy.“

None of it is particularly surprising. In fact, it makes perfect sense once you see it. And that’s exactly why it’s dangerous.

Because you don’t make a dramatic decision to change what you’re doing. You don’t abandon your work or suddenly decide to chase attention. You just adjust. Slightly.

But over time those small adjustments start to compound. And bit by bit your art turns into content.

The $100 Million Sanctuary

Let’s not forget that Substack is a business after all. Last year they raised $100 million in funding. It may have started as a sanctuary for writing, but once you raise that kind of money, you don’t get to stay a sanctuary forever.

The obvious move is to copy what already works. The more time people spend on the platform, the more valuable it becomes. So it starts behaving like every other social platform: Keep people on the platform and give them reasons to come back.

This has an impact on the creators as well. Once attention becomes the currency, the whole game changes. It increases the pressure to create more content.

Since Substack hasn’t introduced ads yet, the quality of content is critically important to them. More creators competing for reader attention is good for their business because it means higher quality content.

Except that’s not what’s happening.

The Placebo Dashboard

By introducing new metrics, Substack supposedly helps you make better decisions. You are told to analyze the numbers to write a piece that’s more likely to capture attention. Because these numbers are plastered across your dashboard and dominate your feed, you’re actively encouraged to analyze data before you even think about your next idea.

The problem is that the numbers you see are misleading.

Let’s take A/B testing your title as an example. Unless you are in the top 1% of creators, your audience size is simply too small to yield statistically significant data.

Substack has essentially given you a placebo button. It’s like the “close door“ button in many elevators. It is there simply to make impatient people feel better by giving them something to do. The only function is to soothe the mammalian brain’s preference for control and certainty. And this function keeps you engaged on their platform.

This data gives us false confidence, functioning as a feedback loop of confirmation bias. You end up changing your writing style or your headlines based on what is effectively the same as flipping a coin.

The biggest problem I see with metrics is that they destroy diversity because they force everybody to pursue the same narrow goal, often in the same narrow way, or to make choices using the exact same criteria.

By gamifying writing with leaderboards, “rising” tags, and subscriber counts, Substack shifts the creator’s focus from a “wide context” problem (how do I write something meaningful and interesting?) to a “narrow context” problem (how do I get this number to go up?). When every creator optimizes for the same narrow metrics, we end up in a sea of sameness.

The funny thing is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors. If you study the trending tabs and optimize your work based purely on Substack’s dashboard, you will inevitably end up sounding exactly like everyone else who is trying to game the algorithm.

The real magic of independent writing comes from instinct, imagination, and sometimes just daring to be different or weird.

And here is where it gets sneaky. Through these metric-driven nudges, your behavior starts to change. Do this long enough and you’re slowly becoming someone you didn’t intend to be.

When metrics define who you are, you get stuck. Because metrics are inconsistent. And so your identity becomes inconsistent too.

That’s the part most people miss. They think they’re optimizing their strategy. But what they’re actually doing is destabilizing their identity.

Identity Drift

I call this identity drift. Here is how it works:

1. You start writing what matters

2. You notice what performs

3. You adjust slightly

4. You repeat

5. You drift

None of these are big decisions. They are just small compromises. But over time you go from expressing something to producing something.

The real problem is that you’re trying to build something without knowing who you are as a creator. Before you ask how to grow, you need to decide who you are.

If you don’t define your identity, the platform will define it for you. And as we have seen that’s not necessarily in your best interest.

Most people never really define who they are as a creator. Not clearly, at least. So when the environment changes, they don’t have anything stable to anchor to. They try to be a writer, but also a teacher. They want to express something real, but they also want to grow. They experiment with different formats, different tones, different strategies, hoping something will click.

In isolation, none of that is wrong. But taken together, it creates a kind of internal fragmentation. You’re no longer operating from a clear center. You’re reacting, adjusting, adapting, trying to reconcile different roles that don’t fully align.

The specific loss here is not just voice or quality. It’s the relationship with the work itself. The artist makes something because it demands to exist. The content creator makes something because the calendar demands it. Those are completely different orientations, and the distance between them is measured in identity not just output.

The Horror of Success

Identity drift doesn’t just change what you create. It changes how creating feels.

Sitting down and writing feels heavier. I mean, not that it ever was easy, but now you feel exhausted even before sitting down to write. You second-guess ideas and start to procrastinate by reading another how to grow article.

The writing is not really the problem. The problem is hitting publish. For all the changes Substack made, the editor makes it really easy to hit publish. So why does it feel so hard?

It’s the pain of shouting into the void. You pour your heart into an article and nobody reads it. You start to take it personally and think it’s the content. So you think you can escape the pain by writing about something that’s supposed to get attention.

I know it sucks. But you know what sucks even more? Actually getting a lot of likes on an article you didn’t create because you wanted it to exist but because you thought people will read it.

One day you wake up to 30,000 subscribers. It seems like you made it. But then you have to write about stuff you are not passionate about for an audience you don’t care about. The audience came for a performance, not for who you really are.

This is where things get slightly masochistic. You spent so much time building your audience that you can’t just walk away. Maybe even your mortgage payment depends on it.

This is no longer identity drift. It’s an identity prison.

You Are the Work

If this feels uncomfortable, it should. Because at some point, you handed over authorship.

We are so obsessed with the work that we forgot the most important piece of work: you.

Before you can create art, you have to appoint yourself an artist. You don’t wait for the feedback of the creator economy. You decide (internally) that you are one. Your first step is simply giving yourself permission to occupy that identity. It seems trivial but it means you take the responsibility to shape your own life.

You cannot create compelling content if you spend your entire life locked in a room staring at analytics and editing software. You must have the courage to go out, experience the world, suffer, love, fail, and live vigorously. That messy life experience is the raw fuel for your creative engine.

Don’t overthink your content strategy. Focus on pursuing your own curiosities, developing your own skills, and figuring out your own life.

The writing, videos, podcast or whatever you create are really just a byproduct of becoming who you really are.

If you just follow the metrics, you are handing the chisel over to the algorithm. You are letting a piece of code determine who you get to be. And let me tell you, the algorithm has terrible taste.

The Quiet Rebellion

Awareness is the first step. The second step is harder. It requires courage. Because it means you will have to go against the default path of the creator economy.

Some people accuse me of being a contrarian just for the sake of being a contrarian. I get where it is coming from, but I disagree. Obviously. Being a contrarian is part of my DNA (I was born C-section, btw).

I’m throwing rocks at the creator economy because the machine is broken, and we have to smash some windows to let the fresh air in. We have to make some beautiful vandalism called art.

It takes a lot of bravery to ignore the dashboard and accept that the numbers don’t define your value. That is a quiet rebellion for creative freedom.

You must have the courage to declare yourself a creator, to stand out, to disappoint your audience when it’s time to evolve, and the courage to live a life worth writing about.

Substack is changing. You can’t control that.

But you can control how you react to it.

The shift toward the attention economy is also an opportunity to find out who you really are and to take responsibility for shaping Substack in what it was intended to be.

The identity drift is already happening. The question is who will you be?

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P.S. Everything in this article points to the same problem. You are trying to build something that looks like you without knowing what you actually look like.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of building for the wrong audience.