The Line Between Community & Self-Promotion on Substack
Observations on the intersection of community building and self building
A version of this post has been sitting in my drafts since May for a few reasons, the biggest being that the line between community and self-promotion isn’t talked about in a robust way here. There’s an underlying social code for participation on the fashion side of Substack built around connection and trust that quickly veers into personal branding, and this feels somewhat taboo to call out on a platform generally known for its good vibes. Today’s post shares a throughline with the viral trends we’re seeing on Substack by way of community as the common thread.
The things I’m talking about aren’t meant to shame, but to take a deeper look at the interplay between community and self-promotion. This is becoming more difficult to navigate on social media as personal branding is increasingly interwoven into job prospects for creative industries like fashion. With a rapidly cooling US job market, more people are turning to entrepreneurship as a bridge to new professional opportunities post-layoff or in the hopes of making content creation the main event.
When I joined Substack two years ago, the first thing that stood out to me was the community aspect. Writers would reply to reader comments on their posts, people would promote each other’s work in notes, and chats were places for help with fashion questions, no matter how esoteric. Instagram could never.
I started my newsletter a few months later and quickly became immersed in the inner workings of personal branding on fashion Substack. Self-promotion was a normal and accepted part of having a newsletter, most notably in the form of sharing your work to find an audience. You could also comment on and restack other writers’ posts as a way to join the community, which doubled as a benign form of self-promotion that I’ll dig into more below the paywall.
People started linking to their posts in my comment sections during my first year of writing. This showed up in two extremes: newsletters that weren’t even tangentially fashion-related, like time optimization and medieval history, or someone blasting their fashion content far and wide. My chat started with threads about what people were wearing and making1, but it wasn’t long before promotional links crept in.
Both of these experiences break the social code and neither is unique to me. Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed the larger the newsletter, the greater the volume of outside publication and affiliate links, and the harder it seems for the creator to stem the tide of self-promotion. When Substack released reply rules as a moderating tool last month I saw a wave of publications use a form of ‘no self-promotion’ in theirs, signaling that this is widely felt, although not widely talked about. But why?