Advice for bloggers

Follow these simple steps and you might very slightly increase your chances of becoming a moderately successful Substacker.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Good advice is scarce. That’s not because there’s no market for it. It’s because of the evolutionary, game-theoretic roots of human communication.

Communication involves senders (i.e., communicators) and receivers (i.e., audiences). Receivers want useful information, but communication is governed by the wants of senders, who have very different incentives.

First, why bother to communicate at all? Sharing helpful information looks like altruism, which is puzzling from an evolutionary point of view. Second, communicators wield power over audiences. So, why not use that power to deceive, propagandise, or simply show off? Third, even if communicators are motivated to be honest, why be diligent? Sharing helpful information is hard work. Well-meaning communicators can still be slackers.

In many cases, the simple answer to these questions is, “No reason.” Hence, many remain silent even when they have helpful information to share. Or they deceive and grandstand. Or they share lazy content that audiences find boring or useless.

Nevertheless, obviously not all communication has this character. Why?

One reason is interdependence. People’s interests are sometimes aligned so that senders benefit themselves by benefiting receivers. The most obvious example is family members. In evolutionary theory, “kin selection” makes such altruism unsurprising. When parents teach their children, they pass on information that helps them pass on their genes.

(Obviously, none of these calculations are conscious. They’re baked into the emotions, intuitions, and instincts that drive human behaviour.)

However, much communication occurs between people who don’t have overlapping interests, including strangers. What sustains honest and helpful communication under such conditions? As with almost all human cooperation, it’s social incentives.

Communicators who reliably share honest and helpful information are liked, approved of, and respected. Communicators who share dishonest or simply boring information are disliked and punished, even if just by a worse reputation. Many societies design formal institutions that codify and enforce such standards in specific ways. (For example, lying under oath is a criminal offence in modern legal systems.) But they also emerge spontaneously as part of our evolved psychological toolkit.

The marketplace for bad advice

This lens helps to illuminate why good advice is scarce. For good advice to be abundant, audiences must be able and willing to identify and reward those who share it. They’re typically neither.

First, identifying beneficial interventions involves complex causal inference. This makes it difficult for communicators to discover good advice in the first place. However, it also means audiences are rarely well-positioned to reward good advice and punish bad advice when they encounter it. So, they default to rewarding advice that’s subjectively compelling or aligns with what they want to hear, qualities that don’t correlate well with whether the advice is any good.

(Throughout history and across diverse cultures, many professional healers have advised bloodletting, not because it works—it typically makes things a lot worse and has killed many people, including George Washington—but because it feels like it should work).

Of course, we’re not always in the dark about which interventions have good effects. Some things are obvious. (Eat healthily. Get good sleep. Exercise. etc.) However, precisely because they’re obvious, audiences typically know them already, so you don’t get any credit for sharing them.

If audiences don’t know something obvious, it’s normally because of self-deception. They don’t want to know it. For example, one of the kindest things you can do for some people is to advise them not to follow their dreams. But most people really don’t want to hear that.

Worse, it’s the kind of advice that’s extremely challenging to evaluate. If someone abandons their dreams, how will they discover what would have happened if they hadn’t? So, even if someone takes such advice, they won’t feel grateful. They’ll feel resentful as they fantasise about the success they could have achieved if only they had believed in themselves.

Even worse, the small minority who reject that advice and then achieve success will be driven to broadcast the advice’s outrageous badness. (“This album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothing.”). The result? A chronic overproduction of irresponsible feel-good advice telling people to follow their passions.

Finally, these problems are exacerbated by another factor. Sometimes, we know good, non-obvious advice, but we don’t follow it ourselves due to weakness of will and other factors. Such advice would be valuable for others. But there’s something unattractive about advising people to do things one doesn’t do oneself. It invites accusations of hypocrisy and dishonesty. So, people keep some of the best advice to themselves.

For these reasons and more, the incentives underlying advice-giving are dysfunctional. Because audiences have little ability or motivation to seek good advice and advice givers have little incentive to supply it, most popular advice is bad.

Advice for bloggers

Anyway, in this post, I’m going to offer some advice.

For the reasons just mentioned, it’s probably worthless. None of it is supported by serious evidence. Nevertheless, it’s the advice I give to those who personally ask for tips about succeeding on Substack, so I’ll share it here for anyone interested.

(People ask me for advice because I’ve created a moderately successful Substack. Since starting last year, I’ve acquired over 14,000 subscribers and get roughly 90,000 monthly visits. This is tiny compared to the most successful writers on Substack, but it’s more successful than most bloggers on the platform achieve.)

The advice:

1. Stop reading this article and read advice from far more successful writers (e.g., here, here, here, and here).

2. Start now.

   The earlier you start blogging, the sooner you can start building an audience. Moreover, the best way to learn how to blog is to blog. This learning by doing is far more useful than reading posts like this.

   Some people who really want to start a Substack put off starting because it feels important that their first blog post makes a splash. This is misguided. Play the long game. You should put as much effort into your first post as you would into your ninth or thirty-fifth.

3. Persevere.

   Relatedly, I’ve seen smart and interesting people join Substack, publish a few articles, and then stop when they don’t receive the attention or affirmation they wanted. To figure out whether blogging is for you and whether people are interested in your thoughts, you need to blog for much longer than this.

4. Don’t be a coward.

   Recently, blogging legend Scott Alexander gave some blogging advice. Part of it focused on the importance of courage. This seems a bit grandiose. It takes courage to go to war or to criticise a brutal authoritarian regime. Setting aside rare cases where people incur severe professional or reputational penalties for publishing heretical ideas, most blogging isn’t anything like this. Nevertheless, I think it’s probably true that cowardice, or being excessively risk-averse, either prevents some people from blogging or stops them from publishing interesting blog posts (in which case why bother?).

   One fear people have is that nobody will read their blog. Well, you’ll only find out if that’s true by blogging consistently over an extended period. And if it turns out that nobody’s interested in your ideas, that might be painful to learn but it’s also useful information about the world.

   Another fear some writers have is that people will read their blog and hate it and so hate them, and then maybe try to cancel them. People are typically far too paranoid about this. Nevertheless, if you’re terrified of getting negative reactions from what you write (i.e., you’re a coward), blogging is probably not for you, at least when it comes to non-fiction, opinion blogging.

5. This connects to another bit of advice: Grow a thick skin.

   The main thing people are worried about when it comes to blogging is getting hostile reactions from those in their real-life social and professional networks. However, it’s also worth noting that anyone with a moderately successful blog who publishes controversial takes will get many hostile comments from strangers online. The likelihood of hearing from someone with a personality disorder or inexplicable anger who hates your work increases rapidly as the size of your audience grows.

   In my experience, being a blogger requires being emotionally unaffected by such harsh criticisms. My partner tells me she would cry for days if she received some of the angry and hostile comments I’ve received throughout my blogging career. I’m only bothered if the criticisms are well-founded (which, annoyingly, they sometimes are), and even then, the negative experience is pretty mild. I suspect the most successful bloggers have a similarly weak emotional response to harsh criticisms from strangers online.

6. Take risks.

   Experiment with different writing styles. Explore topics and ideas you’re fascinated by, even if you’re worried they might appear weird or not interest anyone else. Argue for the most interesting-if-true claims you think are true.

   I don’t mean you should be an edge lord or attention-seeking contrarian churning out hot takes. Any contribution to public debates should be intellectually responsible, reasonable, and evidence-based. However, subject to those constraints, the most interesting writers are interesting in part because they take risks. If you’re satisfied with everything you write, you’re probably not taking enough of them.

7. Promote your work.

   I once witnessed a prominent philosopher argue that it’s okay to promote your own work because a norm that encourages self-promotion somehow benefits marginalised scholars. I think the idea was that without self-promotion, people would be much less likely to hear about the work of lower-status individuals, so self-promotion is good.

   A simpler and more persuasive argument for why it’s ok to promote your work is that you wrote it, and so presumably think others should read it.

   In general, quite a bit of self-promotion is necessary to reach and grow an audience. When I first started my Substack, I would advertise my articles on Twitter. These days, I mostly use Substack’s superior version of Twitter, Substack Notes. For example, I will routinely quote and post passages from articles I’ve written on the platform. Admittedly, this looks (and is) narcissistic. Self-promotion can feel icky. It violates social norms against self-aggrandisement and can easily be taken too far in ways that backfire. Nevertheless, it’s often necessary for building an audience, especially when you’re first starting.

8. Promote other people’s work.

   Stinginess is one of the most unappealing character traits, and social stinginess—a reluctance to praise, help, admire, and celebrate others and their contributions—is even worse than financial stinginess. Given this, be socially generous on Substack. Support the writers and works you think deserve a larger audience. This is important because it’s the right thing to do, but it’s also important because cultivating a socially generous disposition generates goodwill from others. I’m not saying you should be mercenary about this. You should only celebrate and promote writers whose work you think is excellent. However, it’s simply true that cultivating generous and friendly dispositions makes your life go better, including as a blogger.

9. Treat your writings as important.

   When I write blog posts, I typically write as if my contribution really matters. I wrote like this even when I first started blogging and only had a few hundred readers. This can probably come across as self-important and cringeworthy. Nevertheless, it’s really difficult to get people to take your ideas seriously if you don’t take them seriously. By “serious”, I don’t mean humourless. Many successful bloggers are playful and funny. (To be clear, I’m not one of them. I recently had to remove an attempted joke from an article because it was so unfunny). But I think there’s a lot of value in being earnest as a writer, and many bloggers seem to struggle with this. They’re too scared of seeming self-important or pretentious that their writing seems frivolous and uninteresting.

10. Don’t write to impress academics, and for the love of God, don’t write to impress academic philosophers.

    If you’re an academic thinking of starting a blog, it’s a great idea. If you have a PhD and can publish in top, peer-reviewed scholarly journals in your field, you’re almost certainly smart and erudite enough to write a blog that many people will find interesting. However, if you do so, you need to constantly remind yourself that a blog post is a completely different beast from an academic article. I read many blog posts written by academics where it’s clear they haven’t internalised this lesson.

11. Pay a lot of attention to clarity.

    When it comes to blogging, many people will advise you that you should keep articles short. As someone pathologically incapable of writing concise articles, it pains me to say that this is probably good advice in many cases. However, overall, I think the length of an article is much less important than its clarity. I constantly read writers who obviously have interesting ideas but it’s difficult to figure out what they’re trying to say. I think people underrate how much that negatively affects the quality of their work and the potential size of their audience.

    Dwarkesh Patel recently tweeted “unreasonably effective writing advice”: "What are you trying to say here? Okay, just write that."

    That’s great advice.

    Another concrete piece of advice I would give many people is to write shorter sentences and paragraphs.

12. Finally, artificial intelligence is your friend.

    If you’re an academic or a writer and you’re not using state-of-the-art AI, you’re making a massive mistake.

    You shouldn’t ever use such systems to write your posts, partly because it’s unethical and partly because to be a successful blogger, you need to have a distinctive voice that AI can’t (yet) replicate.

    However, there are countless ways that AI can help with the writing process. I pay for access to ChatGPT, Claude, and text-to-speech software, and use them all extensively.

    For example, I recently wrote an article about the causes of right-wing populism. As with most of my articles, it took me about a week to come up with the ideas, plan out the essay, and write it. (It’s nearly 4,000 words long).

    One reason I can write so quickly is because I’m drawing on a body of knowledge (e.g., about political psychology) I’ve built up over many years. However, I also benefit massively from AI.

    For example, in writing this article, I solicited extensive feedback (including criticisms and objections) from ChatGPT and Claude when first planning and brainstorming ideas. I then used ChatGPT’s ‘Deep Research’ to generate multiple review articles surveying the social-scientific literature on the causes of right-wing populism, which I converted into speech and listened to on walks and when cooking. Finally, once I had a complete first draft, I asked ChatGPT and Claude to identify weaknesses in my arguments, check for grammatical errors, and fact-check my claims.

    Overall, this engagement with AI increases the quality and efficiency of my writing in countless ways. If you’re a writer not using these technologies, you’re making a big mistake.