A BOOKISH GUY IN A BLOGGISH WORLD

SYNCING THE SUBSTACK INFO NETWORK

I appreciate that one of the virtues of Substack – aside from their commitment to open discussion – is the informational network they help generate. A big part of the latter is the mutual recommendation function. Substackers can recommend other substacks to their readers. And I gather the standard practice is for the recommended substacker to reciprocate. I don’t know how others deal with this situation, but I was in a bit of a quandary, because while I felt a tug of reciprocation, I also felt an ethical obligation to my readers and subscribers to not recommend anything blindly. I feel if you subscribe to my substack, there’s an unstated agreement that you’re trusting me not to abuse your commitment. And I felt that blindly recommending other substacks or blogs might be a violation of that trust.

And the real problem is this: are you sitting down? I don’t read blogs. I mean, basically never. But, what, how? I write a blog. Am I a hypocritical anti-blogger? A bigoted bloggist? What can I tell you? I read books. I’m a very slow reader, and any time I have for recreational or educational reading goes into books. And, as regular readers here will know, often older books. I’m not saying books are better than blogs. As with everything in life, there are tradeoffs. My assessment of those tradeoffs leads me to invest my limited time resources into books.

I created this substack as a place and motivation. It provided occasion to write out my thoughts along my own intellectual journey. Always, the idea was that I was working toward a next book. The substack, if anyone was reading it, was expected to motivate me to produce written expressions of what I was learning and thinking; it provided a place to organize and store those expressions; and with a little luck it might generate dialogue with and feedback from those with similar interests. The changing arc of themes here over the last year and a half are testament, I think, to all of that. I certainly concede that it’s taken a bit more of a blog-like feel along the way. And I’ve come to appreciate more the unique benefits of a blog. But at heart I remain a bookish fellow.

The up-shot is, as the kind recommendations of others kept coming in, I just wasn’t going to read all those other blogs closely enough to justify risking the trust of my readers by reciprocating those recommendations. So, my quandary: ethically I don’t feel right recommending substacks I haven’t and probably won’t read¹; but in the process I’m inadvertently subverting the valuable information network that Substack provides the opportunity to generate.

So, the resolution I’ve come to is as follows. This post/email is my disclaimer: when I recommend other substacks, it is not because I’ve been a reader of them and on the strength of that experience want to recommend them to my readers. However, I recognize that if any other substackers do recommend my blog to their readers, it seems reasonable to presume that their substacks could be of interest to those who are interested in the topics and approaches in mine. So, my new policy, going forward, will be to reciprocally recommend, with this caveat established.

(Since there are ten in the queue already, and I don’t want to overwhelm my subscribers or shortchange the substackers, I won’t recommend them all at once, but rather space them out over the next week or so.)

So, that’s today’s little bit of housekeeping. And for any of you out there wondering when the discussion of federalism was finally going to get going: I repeat, I’m a slow reader. But some material is almost ready to go. Maybe even tomorrow!

Though, I’ll add, as usual, my reflections on federalism have been sidetracked by a fascinating (old book) discovery, which I also look forward to sharing with you. So, stay tuned.

ADDENDUM: I’ve concluded that the best approach is to use how many readers cross subscribed as a metric for estimating the likelihood of my readers being interested in the account that recommended me. If at least, let’s say, eight, preferrable more like 10 readers from the other account subscribe to my account I’ll take that as an indication that there maybe be sufficient common interest to justify recommending the other account to my own readers, even though I probably won’t have read that other account. That’s the best solution I’ve hit upon for now.

1. The one exception to this was Harrison Koehli’s substack, which I felt perfectly comfortable recommending right away, since I knew his work already from other sources — including of course a book which he edited and annotated.