Why Substack and Reddit’s viewership are increasing in the age of AI

This is a reaction post to Elena Verna’s post on the declining viewership of some of the Internet’s most visible sites. For example StackOverflow is affected by Github copilot, and Quora, the question and answer site, is losing attention to ChatGPT and other AI tools.

Why is Substack and Reddit bucking the trend? Elena summarized with: “User-generated content FTW.” Hmm, StackOverflow and Quora also rely on user-generated content and their viewrship is trend downwards, so that’s not all.

I have some ideas why.

Substack

Image from Elena Verna’s post

Substack is where I go to read unique takes on topics such as AI and writing. The longer-form personal content shines here. It feels like a higher quality and more focused LinkedIn, without the social media posts, rolodex, and job boards.

Some authors are peddling new tools/software, but they’re so good at soft-selling that I want to read their writing, whereas ChatGPT has no such charm (yet). For example there’s a professional speaker who supposedly pulled in $1 million last year. His how-to article makes his success sound attainable, whereas ChatGPT does not sell aspiration (yet).

Reddit

Image from Elena Verna’s post

Reddit is where people gather for online communities. It's also a public venting board, which is fundamentally different from ChatGPT’s minimal chat.

Some examples of communities there include:

1. Funny people post in r/comics subreddit. This community has over 3 million subscribers. Funny is subjective and hard to replicate with AI
2. Fiction writers post in r/shortscarystories. The top-rated stories are well-written AND at most 500 words long. ChatGPT can hardly compete, and it’s better for non-fiction anyway
3. There are plenty of NSFW content in certain subreddits, which ChatGPT won't provide out of professionalism
4. People vent and commiserate there: for example the subreddit r/writing is full of morose posts. Crafting stories has always been hard, and the threat of AI eliminating jobs spreads fear. Decreasing attention spans also hurt long-form writers, in addition to the pains of publishing

It’s clear why Reddit does well in the age of AI: people gather to commiserate and make sense of the changing landscape.

Notice the writing subreddit is mostly composed of hobbyists; Reddit has many hobbyist communities, and since hobbyists care about the process as much as the outcome, they gather for camaderie.

AI can’t replace the human touch in communities, hence Reddit’s traffic is increasing.