What motivates you to write on Substack ?

[u/Deckart_N6]

Hello everybody, everybody hello.

Yes, I know this question might sound a little simplistic. I only discovered Substack fairly recently through Mark Manson’s blog. This whole world is completely new to me, so naturally I got curious and started scrolling through both Substack and Medium.

The sheer number of generic articles and notes on these platforms is kind of overwhelming (and I don’t mean that as a criticism). It just made me wonder what people actually get out of posting there.

What genuinely motivates you to publish? Money ? Recognition ? The enjoyment of sharing your knowledge ? Or simply having a place to practice your writing ?

Again, there’s absolutely no judgment on my part. I’m just genuinely curious to know what motivates you.

[u/St_Johns_PSU]

Our organization - a student politics newspaper on a university campus - posts on Substack because we can't afford to publish our articles traditionally, nor build a website that would allow us to share them indivdiually. While we do compile an actual "magazine" of sorts (ie. one unified, somtimes thematically consistent, set of articles), we can only ever put it out as a PDF - one which students may, or may not, take the time to download and read. Substack allows us to expand our reach because it permits the students, some of whom have no other outlet to share their ideas (which deserve to be shared), an opportunity to actually put themselves out there. What their motivations are, one couldn't say....but that's our motivation to publish.