Why your substack is not a blog

I love that people are writing on Substack, because it is almost a return to what blogging originally was: openly sharing connected and linked learning and insight with the world. A couple of things frustrate me about Substack though and these are things that really distinguish it from a proper blog: 1. It's really hard to comment. In order to comment on a Substack post, I have to be a subscriber to a person's substack and I have to log in to do it. That is a bit too much work for me. When I read an interesting post and I want to contribute in the discussion, that extra step of subscribing is sometimes a bridge too far. I have dozens of unpublished comments sitting in various authors' comment boxes. Blogs, like this one, may ask you to identify yourself – which helps with spam – but you don't have to do anything else. I moderate comments here with Akismet, a plug in that rejects spam, and personal moderation. But I love the conversation here, when it happens. 2. Substack is its own…