I've learned to respect my comments section

When I first started on Substack, I tended to avoid my comments. I found them to be highly oppressive. I did not want other peoples’ voices in my head. In this, I was influenced by years of Twitter, where a lot of comments come from drive-by randos, who are arguing in bad faith. When my blog first started getting popular and being seen by lots of new people, I’d often spend days hiding from my comments, and I even considered turning them off entirely.

At the same time, I knew that a blog is basically social media. It’s not just about your writing: it’s about forming a connection to the reader. And an accessible comment section signals an openness that is very attractive to potential readers. So I kept at it, and I made some effort to engage with my comment-section.

I struggled with this for several months until I subscribed to

Petya K. Grady

and saw how active her Friday Subscriber chat was. I asked her for advice on how to run a similar chat, and I started connecting every Friday with my readers. These chats were so low-stakes and genuine that I realized there’s nothing to be afraid of. My readers are good people. They read me for fun. The danger here is much more minimal than I think it is.

---

Substack is not like Twitter, because Substack comments tend to come from your own subscribers—people who have some relationship with you. Oftentimes, they’re not trying to hurt you or dominate you, they just want to connect with you. Even when they disagree, it’s a sincere disagreement—they think they can convince you. Or sometimes they just have a comment that they think can add to your understanding of the topic.

One way that I’m different from most writers on Substack is that I don’t see my writing here as being separate from my serious writing that I do elsewhere. In this, I’m more like the archetypical blogger, someone like Matt Yglesias, or Noah Smith, or Scott Alexander, who really sees their blog as their main mechanism for getting their ideas into the world.

And one thing I enjoy about this platform is that the nature of feedback on this platform is conducive to improving my writing. I have these skills that I’ve developed in isolation over twenty years, but my process until now has been very slow. I write a novel, send it to my agent, and he usually either likes it or nixes it. I write a story, and send it out, and it either gets accepted or rejected. Even when there is feedback, it’s just one person’s opinion.

---

What I’ve learned from the comments

With Substack, there is a massiveness to the data. First, you get likes, shares, and open-rates, which are hard data that show you, in an inarguable way, how much your work is resonating. Of course, these three things mean different things, but they’re all related, in some way, to how your piece strikes the reader.

Moreover, the comment section also gives you direct access to the reader’s brain right after they read your piece. Of course, comment sections aren’t representative of most readers, since most readers don’t become commenters. But my commenters tend to be my most engaged and frequent readers. Oftentimes I recognize their names from previous posts. I’m able to get a sense of their tastes and interests.

I am not scientific about analyzing any of this data. I don’t log it anywhere or create coherent theories about what it means. But being immersed in other peoples’ reactions to my writing allows me to get a feel for the impact I’m having on the world. Are people taking away what I want? Are they giving me the reactions that I’d like? Am I happy with how I’m being read?

This also allows me to develop hypotheses that I test, in an unscientific way.