According to Paul Graham's essay The Acceleration of Addictiveness, products get more addictive over time. You can't just make a static line dividing technologies into addictive vs safe. Safe technologies tend to get more addictive over time.
Believe-it-or-not Zoomers, when I was a teenager, I didn't watch enough YouTube and I didn't spend enough time on my phone. That was more than a decade ago. Today, in 2026, YouTube can eat up huge amount of my time without much to show for it, and that happens largely because YouTube is available on my phone.
I'm not surprised that YouTube became addictive, but I am surprised that blogs lost much of their value. When I was in college, reading blogs did me more good than reading books. Over the last couple of years that inverted, and blogs flipped from "default educational" to "default time-wasting", at least for me. This happened right around the rise of Substack. I don't think this is a coincidence. Reading a blog on Substack feels qualitatively different from reading a blog on a hand-coded HTML website. It's way more optimized, and that's not (necessarily) a good thing.
The earliest blogs were hand-coded in HTML (like this one). They had no likes or comments, because everything was a static HTML webpage.
After that came Wordpress. Wordpress supported comments and WISYWIG editors. On the surface, Wordpress looks more similar to Substack than to raw HTML websites. But in terms of user control, Wordpress is more similar to raw HTML websites than to Substack. Wordpress bloggers frequently paid for hosting, but the Wordpress engine was (is) open source. Anyone can run it on a private server.
Want to know whether a platform is under the user's control: I give you...the Like Button Test. Can a website implement a meangful like button? If so, then that website is NOT under the user's control.
Let me give you an example. Here is a "like" button.
0This button is meaningless. First of all, since this website is raw HTML with no dynamic server, your like count will not be saved. (Sorry.) But more importantly, there is nothing stopping me from increasing the count to whatever I want it to be.
1465000Why does this matter?
Whenever you go to any Substack page, the first thing you see is a popup trying to get you to subscribe to the website's email list. I hate these because I have am not subscribed to a Substack email list, and I never intend to subscribe to one.
You might think this is a trivial inconvenience. And it is. The time and attention that I put into skipping Substack "subscribe" popups is trivial. Nevertheless, Substack's "subscribe" popups unsettle me. Substack's "subscribe" popups unsettle me out for the same reason that a person being deliberately rude to me creeps me out. It indicates that the person (or the company) is uncompromisingly misaligned with me and that they don't care that I know it.
But isn't the "subscribe" popup acting in the best interest of bloggers on Substack?
I tried using Substack once. The first thing I did was look for the option in the Substack settings where I could disable that annoying email popup for my readers. I couldn't find it. (Note: overcomingbias.com doesn't display the pop-up. I'm not sure how Robin Hanson disabled it.ld) Why does Substack care so much about users subscribing? Because Substack's business model is built around subscriptions. Everything about Substack is optimized to drive paid subscriptions.
Is this a good thing? If you're an author who wants to earn money by selling subscriptions then Substack may be perfect for you. (Though god help you with the platform lock-in.) But if you're like me and your gameplan doesn't involve paid subscriptions, then Substack's platform may work against you.
But what if you're a reader? If you want to pay for subscriptions then Substack is fine. But if you're reader who doesn't want to pay for subscriptions then Substack is working against you. It'll constantly show you enticing snippets of articles that you could read in full if only you subscribed to the authors' Substack.
I. HATE. THIS. SO. MUCH.
I go to websites because I believe they'll make my life better. When I spot an enticing snippet that I don't want to pay for, that makes my life worse than if I had never seen it at all. The more enticing it is, the worse my unpaid experience is.
But isn't this just a business trying to sell me something? Aren't all businesses trying to make their products as enticing as possible?
Yes and no.
I pay people for two things.
If I pay the government to make my life better, then that means the government is not doing its job (of forcibly extracting rents from its subject population). Surprisingly, I live in a competent civilization where this almost never happens.
If I'm interacting with a business, I'm paying[1] them to make my life better. If I'm paying a business to not make my life worse, then I'm not really interacting with a business. I'm interacting with a de facto government.
If I'm paying the government to make my life better, then I'm being tricked[2]. If I'm paying a business to not make my life worse, then I'm being tricked too.
Businesses want to make the difference between "buy" and "not buy" feel as great as possible. They can do this by making "buy" feel better (by making products better), which is good. They can also do this by making "not buy" feel worse, which is bad. I like businesses that make "buy" feel as good as possible. I stay away from business that make "not buy" feel bad. I especially stay away from businesses that cultivate FOMO. Substack's entire business model is built around FOMO.
When I read unpaid Substack, lots of articles (the paywalled ones) are deliberately making my life worse. Substack slipped under my radar because I thought Substack was like Wordpress but easier to use. Actually, it's more like OnlyFans for intellectuals. Which, admittedly, does make it the perfect platform for Aella.
[1] Payment is not always in money. It can take the form of attention, labor, reputation, etc. ↩
[2] You might think that public transportation is a place where I pay the government to provide an economical service. Where I live, the tickets are nominal fee, and the real funding comes from taxes. ↩