Publish Like the System Was Designed for You — Because Now It Is
5 strategic shifts to help your natural publishing style thrive inside Substack’s new model
When I came to Substack in 2022, I brought with me a kind of cautious optimism — the hope that it might finally be possible to grow something real, meaningful and lasting outside the demands of social media.
For a while, that felt true. Publishing here felt calmer, smarter and more connected to how I actually wanted to create.
If you came in early, you probably felt the seismic shift in your publication this summer — free subscriptions came to a screeching halt and with it came a quiet grief as the platform began shifting. The early magic gave way to features and changes that (while likely necessary for scale) felt closer to the growth-churn of everywhere else.
But based on everything I explored yesterday about Substack’s new sequential recommendation model, I have to say, without an ounce of sarcasm:
I’m still hopeful for the great Substack experiment.
Yes, my enthusiasm is tempered by many things because ** gestures broadly at the world ** — but I’d be lying if I said wasn’t even more confident for people who have storytelling chops and an earnest desire to connect with real humans on the internet.
Because I believe this particular shift — the launch of Substack’s sequential recommendation model — actually re-aligns the platform with what makes good publishing work.
If you’re someone who hates social media, who resents having your creativity compressed into sound bites, who’s tired of your publishing tools and timelines shifting every time another platform decides to kill a feature — I have good news:
If your ideas are strong enough to carry a reader on a journey, they really will have a system designed to support them.
Substack’s model doesn’t reward noise. It rewards curiosity. It doesn’t ask for constant reinvention. It asks for continuity.
It doesn’t want you to write for an algorithm — it wants you to write for a human, and let the algorithm follow their lead.
Today’s post is about how to strategically respond in 2026 after a depressing summer of wilting email lists — and asks you to consider five small but powerful adjustments that I think can help your natural publishing rhythm do the work it was always meant to do.
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So interesting! Thank you for this!
I have now for a long time stuck with one post per week on Fridays. I wonder if you think it might make sense to break some posts up into smaller chunks and publish more often to help build momentum?
Thank you for this. I'm open to changing up my cadence to suit a train of thought, though I think my readers are pretty conditioned to seeing me on Wednesdays. Thinking about keeping Wednesday and adding a weekend post to move a train of thought forward a little faster.