Searching For The Great Valley

What cartoon dinosaurs can teach us about connection in collapsing online communities

Seeing Twitter, Reddit, and countless other online communities become shells of what they once were has me waxing nostalgic about the carefree early internet days. It has me feeling like I’m part of a tribe of millennial nomads, constantly being forced to migrate elsewhere, perpetually searching for somewhere safe to call home. And with this wistful yearning for a promised land, a movie from my childhood popped up in my subconscious.

The Land Before Time

The film The Land Before Time follows a group of “leaf eater” dinosaurs in their search of a mystical oasis called The Great Valley.¹ Their pursuit of this sanctuary comes in response to their landscape changing — drought, famine, volcanos, earthquakes, as well as increased predation.

On my journey to find community online, I faced similar obstacles to those of Littlefoot and his friends. Despite encouraging early experiences during the dawn of the social web, I’ve seen these platforms morph from utilities to pacifiers. In the hands of massive capitalist corporations, social media has become technocratic, polarizing, and profit-oriented, and it's causing us sincere humans—looking to connect and share our ideas—to scatter in search of that elusive promised land.

The plights that I kept facing in search for an online home had an uncanny parallel to those dinosaurs from my childhood:

• Earthquakes: constant upheaval of places (Reddit, Twitter) where we used to gather

• Predators: big businesses preying on us, surveilling us, productizing us

• Severe weather: changes in the kind of content that algorithms surfaced and incentivized

• Floods: of clickbait and AI generated information, drowning out the authentic voices on the platform

Looking at the downward trajectory of these platforms it seemed like the cash-grab-commercialization of a social network had thus far been incompatible with fostering creative expression and genuine connection within it. When a technology became too much a means to a selfish end, then it ultimately came at the expense of real connection.

Many hopeful social platforms turned out to be connection mirages. Even Twitter²—particularly during the pandemic—showed promise of being our Great Valley.³ But towards the end of 2022 someone with a bit of a savior syndrome reminded us that none of these places are truly safe from turmoil. But little did I know that its subsequent downfall into a wasteland overrun by idealogues and narcissists would allow a relative newcomer—Substack—to step out from the shadow and be given its time to shine.

Murmurs of “The Great Valley”

Just like the dinosaurs hearing murmurs of “The Great Valley” and doubting if a refuge like that could actually exist, I—in my dejected and cynical state—was quick to write off Substack as another short-lived platform that was some hybrid between Medium and Mailchimp.

But as more writers I respected moved there, I began to realize that Substack⁴ was positioning itself as the go-to platform for writers to connect, develop, and distribute their ideas. It felt like Substack was bringing back the spirit of the old web, which had an ethos that the internet is something to be created, not just consumed.⁵

I began to wonder if Substack might be that refuge where us wandering internet travelers could finally find our tribe and settle down. A place that taps into our deeply human desire to connect through the stories we tell — a lasting tradition going back thousands of years. 

Dare I call it the promised land?

The Substack Oasis

Substack did a few key things differently that allowed it to emerge as a potential place for us to find our people and provide for ourselves on the same platform. Offering direct distribution through email was a breath of fresh air in a stifling era of algorithmically-ranked, centralized feeds. And its underlying network allowed publications to operate like a group of federated islands;⁶ creating a unified experience that meant less friction for interacting⁷ with anyone who uses the platform. Most importantly, unlike its predecessors, patronage was built into the core offering of the product; so neither the writers nor the platform were dependent on advertising to sustain business.⁸

While Substack seemed to be doing all the right things to be the promised land, it wasn’t operating outside of the same conditions that have led to the downfall of these other platforms. Just as a combination of factors made The Great Valley the ideal refuge for those vagabond dinosaurs, it wasn’t immune from outside danger.

Trouble In Paradise?

There are a number of places where supercharged growth-tactics are diverting Substack away from its original value proposition; creating small whirlpools that could turn into vortexes and gobble up the potential of the platform. Substack is a venture-backed platform existing in a highly competitive market, beholden to the same expectations for growth and return on investment as its competitors. And while I hope that it can emerge as a gleaming example of creativity, community, and commerce commingling, its recent enshittification⁹ has me concerned.

Substack ‘Notes’ is Tainted Water

Despite its initial utility as a distribution platform, Substack has more recently started to look more like a growth-focused, centralized social network. Attempts to increase engagement by funneling users into an opaquely-ranked Notes feed is a fundamental shift away from direct interaction through email and into something more akin to standing on a grandstand and competing for people’s attention at a carnival. In a very insidious way, these feeds turn posting into a popularity contest; instead of striving to make something special that lights you up, you end up worrying about “how can I make my work stand out against others?”

Stampedes of Commoditized Writing

Looking at Substack’s mission statement of “building a new economic engine for culture” or reading early interviews¹⁰ with the co-founders of Substack expressing their desire to increase the size of the market for writing, it becomes clear that the intention for the platform was always growth. And with these incentives for expansion top-of-mind, the very tools that increased opportunity for independent publishers are now contributing to a commoditization of writing on the platform; and we are seeing a suffocating stampede of low-effort diary entries, formulaic listicles, and clickbait soundbites—fit for a feed—that trample the delicate space necessary to cultivate connection and creative growth.

Vanity Metrics are Poisonous Berries

The prominence of analytics and metrics on Substack subliminally tell you that your priority on the platform is to grow your audience. Genuine connection becomes secondary when vanity metrics¹¹ incentivize users to focus on breadth (reach) rather than depth (niche). Coupled with the pervasive “Notes” feed, writers are increasingly encouraged and rewarded for posting regularly, commenting, liking, and “restacking”. Have no doubt that these game-like tactics will grow the platform further, but these transactional interactions will come at the expense of community-building cornerstones like authenticity and sincerity.

Is the Substack Landscape Different?

While it still remains to be seen how much the Substack landscape deteriorates due to its aggressive commercialization—as it currently stands—it's the best platform we have to put down our roots; to create, connect, and support each other. The soil is fertile enough to sustain any number of different intentions for using the platform.¹² Substack took lessons from the platforms that preceded it and developed a self-supporting ecosystem with all of the tools we need to grow our own online gardens.

Although it may seem like Substack is inviting invasive species into the environment with the “Notes” feed or its introduction of audio and video, it's important to remember that these and any slew of new features are optional.  The platform ultimately gives us control, flexibility, community, patronage, and direct connection built-in. Our self-contained Substack habitats can be whatever we need them to be: polished perches for seasoned writers to share their articles; low-pressure notebooks for emergent writers to develop their ideas and find their format;  communities of writers to network and interact with; or simply platforms to distribute writing directly to our readers through email.

Substack can remain a haven for us as long as it doesn’t sever the direct connection we have with our subscribers. Email is an entrenched Lindy¹³ technology and the closest thing we have to a permanent address on the web. And even if we eventually decide to leave, access to our subscriber lists means the connections we’ve developed aren’t trapped in the platform’s proprietary pool.

Cultivating Our Online Gardens

What has made the Substack valley special—despite its dangers—is the environment fostered by the people who use it. Ensuring the platform continues to work for us means being more purposeful and intentional with how we use it. This starts with treating our sites as places to think in, not just publish from; gardens for our ideas to exist at all different stages of development.

From seedlings of prose planted in my Logs¹⁴ section, to sprouting stories in my notes¹⁵ section, to full-grown long-form essays;¹⁶ I plan to use my Substack as an evolving entity that encourages me to improve my craft consistently through process-oriented experimentation, iteration, and idea cross-pollination.¹⁷ My true north has always been intrinsic curiosity—writing to better understand the world and make sense of my experience in it—and I want my Substack to be a shared garden that reflects my progression of thinking over time.

What Seeds Do You Want to Plant?

The key to maintaining a creative practice is finding a cadence and format that works for you given your current circumstances. Resist the pressure to grow your garden beyond what you can sustain, it will deplete your soil and burn you out. Chase the long tail¹⁸ by purposefully leaning into the weird¹⁹ and doubling down on depth of connection. Have faith that a sustained effort and deliberate practice will lay the groundwork for skills development, and your resulting body of work will tap into the networked nature of the internet and connect you to a dedicated group of true friends and fans that is much more valuable than a swath of shallow followers.²⁰

Don’t feel pressure to confine yourself to a certain format, experiment until you find something that works for you: serialize a book like

Michael Dean

’s Essay Architecture; coordinate clubs and workshops like

Justin Lind

’s Men’s Journaling Club or

Erin Nolan

’s Expressive Journaling Workshop; give people behind-the-scenes and direct access to the artifacts of your creative process like

Sublime

does. We can use the flexibility of the platform to make anything that expands our surface areas of serendipity, and eventually we’ll develop an expansive and interconnected collective of community gardens that nourish ourselves and each other.

The Social Web is Not a Place, It's the Thread Between Us

In retrospect, I realized that the cracks caused by Substack’s changing landscape shined light on the most important lesson to be gleaned from The Land Before Time: the real story wasn’t really about finding some Great Valley; it was about how a quest for connection brought a hodgepodge group of young dinosaurs together, the deep bonds they forged on their journey, and the feats they accomplished by supporting each other.

Instead of lamenting the inevitable changes of these online platforms, we should direct our energy towards using these networks to find our tribes and build a deep connection with them through the things that we share with each other.

The answer isn’t the tool itself [...] The solution lies in facilitating human connection. You must understand that it is our nature to long for relationships. People will always go to lengths to find each other. -

bobbyhundreds

, This Is Not a T-Shirt

When we treat these platforms as tools to facilitate authentic human expression it allows every word we write and every essay we share to become a signal to others about what is meaningful to us, and about how we want to connect. And ultimately the destination we end up at won’t matter nearly as much as the friends we make along the way.

---

Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who took the time to give feedback on this essay:

Michael Dean

,

Charlie D. Becker

,

Erin Nolan

,

Chris Wong

,

Randall Bennington

,

Becky Isjwara

,

jules

,

Barbara Nickless

1. According to legend, this promised land has an unlimited supply of food and is said to be free of “sharp tooth” predators. A safe place for them, and their herds to flourish.

2. No, I won’t call it X.

3. I wrote at length about this experience in my previous essay ​​

How to Make Friends on the Internet

4. For the uninitiated, Substack is a distribution platform with an underlying social network. Beyond its network effects, its value proposition is handling the technical and growth-related aspects of a site. I.e. Distribution, hosting, analytics, and patronage are all built into one.

5

I think that when the web first started, everybody who was putting up a website, understood that we were creating it. Nowadays, people who were born into an age where Facebook [and other centralized platforms] dominate, I don't think they understand that they have that capability that anybody can innovate and create something new. - Howard Rheingold

6. Federated implies a cooperative model where multiple independent entities work together to collaborate or share resources while maintaining their autonomy.

7. Subscribing, commenting, and recommending each other’s work

8. If you look for the inflection point when most legacy “social networks” stopped being utilities, it's when they introduced advertising and the primary goal of the platform shifted from connection to engagement.

9. Enshittification happens when platforms pivot their attention away from providing a reliable service for their users and towards ensuring a strong return on investment for their shareholders. This usually takes place through the introduction of a stream of new features which rather than serving to improve the offering which initially drew users to a site, instead exists solely to increase revenue or growth.

10. In a 2020 interview, Chris Best (co-founder and CEO of Substack), told The Verge, “We want to help massively grow the size of the market for great writing, so much more of it can be created.”

In a 2021 interview, Hamish McKenzie (co-founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack), told The Bit, “What we’re setting out to do is restore the value of online writing and to trigger a renaissance with lots more writing than any time in history.” (H/T

Emily Sundberg

)

11. Prominent signifiers of audience size on landing pages, special badges and colorful checkmarks for subscriber counts

12. Whether it be finding a community, growing your audience, setting forth on a career as an independent publisher, or simply as a tool for distribution of work on other mediums.

13. The Lindy Effect theorizes that the longer a technology has been around, the longer it’s likely to survive in the future.

14. Atomic, bite-sized, stream of consciousness snippets captured throughout the day.

15. Molecular, short-form pieces, developing out of themes that arise within the logs.

16. Long-form literary organisms; cohesive, opinionated and well-research.

17. A majority of this writing will exist on my site but won’t be shared via email —  only the writing I’m really proud of, that I deem worthy of my readers’ time/attention will be send to subscribers, the rest of the work will exist on my site for those who are curious enough to explore the garden. This provides a huge psychological unlock for me in terms of helping me get over my perfectionist tendencies and press publish. Embracing that not all seeds will grow into plants that bear fruit, and not all plants need to be shared or sold.

18. The long tail is a term coined by Chris Anderson that in this context means sustaining a long, successful career through organic growth by offering scarcer but higher quality work (seeking specialization not commoditization)

19. H/T to

Alex Dobrenko`

for this concept on leaning into the human weird (i.e. making and sharing art that only us perfectly imperfect humans could make)

20. Kevin Kelly’s concept of 1000 True Fans suggests that creators, such as artists, musicians, and writers, don't need millions of fans to make a living. Instead, they only need 1000 true (dedicated) fans that care deeply enough about the creator and their work that they will support anything the creator produces. It suggests that by cultivating a strong, supportive community, creators can achieve financial sustainability and artistic independence.