Aug 10, 2026 · 19 min · 7 segments
It feels like Substack is everywhere right now, and honestly it's giving 2015 blogging renaissance vibes! But should you start one INSTEAD of a blog or an email list? In this episode I'm getting into…
where you would basically subscribe to blogs.
This was people having their own websites, either on WordPress, even blogger.com or whatever it was, Wix, Squarespace, and having their own blogs on their websites.
You could use a tool like Feedly or Bloglovin to subscribe to to what we call an rss feed or that blog feed on someone's website and then you would like get a little notification in the app and you would see their blog post pop up in the feedly or blog loving app um when they post something so it's very sub stack is very similar to that actually but that whole vibe was just very very different to how we ended up approaching blogs in the past sort of five years or so because what you would do is you would specifically go and find a website or a blog that you liked the writer of you like their approach you like the type of content that they were sharing or even if it wasn't like an individual person let's say it was just a company website but you really liked their blog content that they were publishing you would go and specifically follow that person or that website or that company and to hear about their blog posts and see what they were writing in the same way that you would follow like a person on Instagram.
And I'm kind of talking about the era just slightly before Instagram became big as well.
So this was people's alternative to that, essentially following blogs, following to hear from a specific brand, basically.
And as I say, it's because you wanted to hear from that specific approach or that specific topic, But then a sort of shift happened and I'm not exactly sure when it was or why it was.
But blogging then ended up becoming more of an SEO exercise rather than something that you would do to share your thoughts and opinions on something, share from a personal perspective or share from a specific approach and have people following you to hear from that.
it more became a tool that you could use to help people find your website through Google, because you would be writing a specific post about a specific search term or something like that.
And I think maybe because of the rise of Instagram and people moved over there to follow and subscribe to people that they wanted to hear more from, and that shorter form content was easier to digest.
So people stopped kind of reading blogs and needing to follow people on bloglovin feedly and stuff i think even bloglovin then went out of business or just shut down a few years after instagram became really popular so people stopped using it because of instagram and blogging was also moving over to this shift of like really seo focused But now I feel like we are back wanting those personal perspectives in a longer form piece of content that isn't just Instagram.
very boring and the same and everything.
I feel, I just feel like people have got bored of seeing that and they just want some personality to be injected into things again, just like they were in the blog love in feedly days where you would follow a specific person or a company because they had their own perspectives and things that were going into the content.
Whereas somewhere along the line, everyone got lost and just posting very bland posts.
content just for the focuses of search algorithms and this really goes back to what i was saying in episode 120 about the way that things have changed in the online business space and people wanting to see more humanness and personal stuff it's all part of the same shift And blogging is the exact same.
where you would basically subscribe to blogs.
This was people having their own websites, either on WordPress, even blogger.com or whatever it was, Wix, Squarespace, and having their own blogs on their websites.
You could use a tool like Feedly or Bloglovin to subscribe to to what we call an rss feed or that blog feed on someone's website and then you would like get a little notification in the app and you would see their blog post pop up in the feedly or blog loving app um when they post something so it's very sub stack is very similar to that actually but that whole vibe was just very very different to how we ended up approaching blogs in the past sort of five years or so because what you would do is you would specifically go and find a website or a blog that you liked the writer of you like their approach you like the type of content that they were sharing or even if it wasn't like an individual person let's say it was just a company website but you really liked their blog content that they were publishing you would go and specifically follow that person or that website or that company and to hear about their blog posts and see what they were writing in the same way that you would follow like a person on Instagram.
And I'm kind of talking about the era just slightly before Instagram became big as well.
So this was people's alternative to that, essentially following blogs, following to hear from a specific brand, basically.
And as I say, it's because you wanted to hear from that specific approach or that specific topic, But then a sort of shift happened and I'm not exactly sure when it was or why it was.
But blogging then ended up becoming more of an SEO exercise rather than something that you would do to share your thoughts and opinions on something, share from a personal perspective or share from a specific approach and have people following you to hear from that.
it more became a tool that you could use to help people find your website through Google, because you would be writing a specific post about a specific search term or something like that.
And I think maybe because of the rise of Instagram and people moved over there to follow and subscribe to people that they wanted to hear more from, and that shorter form content was easier to digest.
So people stopped kind of reading blogs and needing to follow people on bloglovin feedly and stuff i think even bloglovin then went out of business or just shut down a few years after instagram became really popular so people stopped using it because of instagram and blogging was also moving over to this shift of like really seo focused But now I feel like we are back wanting those personal perspectives in a longer form piece of content that isn't just Instagram.
very boring and the same and everything.
I feel, I just feel like people have got bored of seeing that and they just want some personality to be injected into things again, just like they were in the blog love in feedly days where you would follow a specific person or a company because they had their own perspectives and things that were going into the content.
Whereas somewhere along the line, everyone got lost and just posting very bland posts.
content just for the focuses of search algorithms and this really goes back to what i was saying in episode 120 about the way that things have changed in the online business space and people wanting to see more humanness and personal stuff it's all part of the same shift And blogging is the exact same.
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