If I could earn a free dollar every time someone whined about their terrible attention span (myself included), I’d probably be able to solve my country’s dollar value crisis by now. 

A big chunk of our day-to-day lives nowadays is spent mindlessly scrolling for miles on social media platforms. But the brainrot memes are all fun and games only until we ask ourselves, why exactly do we scroll? What are we trying to achieve by switching from one app to another – even though they are all essentially formatted the same way – just to do the same thing all over again? No matter how many answers we come up with, the real reason we keep scrolling is simply because we can’t stop.

Almost every popular mainstream social media platform now operates heavily on short-content-based algorithms. Amidst the sheer volume of reels that makes you feel like you’re missing out on something important every second you don’t scroll, there is a slow death of long-form content like blog posts and articles from genuine writers and thinkers who aren’t scampering for easy views on mindless creations. 

This is why platforms like Substack are intriguing because they seem to steer away from the overwhelming engagement-validation-views trinity of our everyday social media apps. Although Substack was mainly designed to provide writers with a scope for monetising their work through paid subscriptions to personal newsletters, its current interface operates much like a social media platform. There is a social feed, a discovery tab, and community engagement tools like option to DM or comment on posts, as well as the option for uploading photos and videos.

There is no question that to a reader, Substack feels like a breath of fresh air as a space where people actually write blog posts and articles about topics that interest them. But as utopian and different as Substack might seem in contrast to other platforms at first glance, it’s gradually starting to adopt some of the very features many are trying to escape in mainstream social media platforms. 

For instance, although Substack’s multimedia integration can help authors expand their territory by publishing videos or podcasts, it also puts the platform at risk of turning into the same grindmill of short-form content. Given our long-term habituation with using short-form audiovisual content-heavy algorithms, not everyone will be using this feature the way it’s intended to because not everyone on this platform is a writer actively seeking monetisation. 

Furthermore, despite initially claiming to be an ad-free platform, Substack is now about to introduce native ads within the platform.  Native ads, in this case, are basically blog posts that seem organic and catered towards a reader’s preferences but are in actuality paid for by an advertiser seeking to promote their product. Although designed in a way that makes them hard to spot, they will be labelled clearly to maintain transparency. 

This may be a positive change for big-scale creators on the platform who will be able to pull good ad sponsorships for additional revenue. On the flip side, whether smaller creators will benefit similarly from this feature or not is yet to be speculated. As a reader, however, it seems like the same jargon from mainstream social media platforms repackaged into a palatable system of delivery. 

An unskippable ad may not be jumping out at me every other minute like it does on Instagram or TikTok, or I may be able to scroll past easily, having spotted the labelling, but here’s a nagging question behind all that. 

Can Substack offer a fair blueprint for monitoring and regulating exactly how much corporate interests can meddle within this advertisement system of theirs? Even if they can, there is no guarantee that it won’t be an internally biased regulation system. Most importantly, how can they ensure that after a certain amount of time, this won’t turn into a familiar trainwreck of product promotion that outmanoeuvres genuine content from writers and creators?

Beyond all these, however, in the context of the Bangladeshi blogging scene, Substack has important potential. Currently, platforms like Somewhere In and Sachalayatan are some of the longest-standing blogging platforms in our country. The quality of the blogs published here has been consistently good for years. But despite being used actively by many veteran writers and thinkers, there is a significant absence of the younger crowd using these blogsites. 

This may be attributed to the absence of what we now consider an attractive or flashy algorithm. But maybe a break from our constant shitposting culture on an increasingly hostile and desensitised social media sphere and a shift towards a more mindful way of using our words to voice our thoughts will do us some good, whether we choose to do it on our traditional blogging sites or ones that match our generational demands regarding an online presence. 

Similarly, veteran writers can also benefit from the multimedia features that are often missing from our local blogging sites to reach a wider audience and, more importantly, experiment with diverse tools for creating.

Platforms like Substack may not completely change how we use social media and what we expect out of this usage. No matter from which angle we try to change these patterns, at the end of the day no platform is neutral, and social media will always be a business first. And when it’s a business that needs to earn revenue, there will be an inevitable surrender to popular demands, just like Substack gradually adopting mainstream social media features beyond its initial goals. 

But even a small step towards tweaking our widespread brainrot epidemic should be looked into with enthusiasm, and Substack is not a bad place to start given how disconnected we currently are from everything that cannot be consumed, commented on, and scrolled past within 30 seconds. We must remember that when it comes to social media, it’s not the apps and their shiny features; rather, it’s ourselves and our attention that are the commodities.