Substack has some great writers, for sure. But unfortunately something about the marketing and business model seems to induce a large portion of Substack users

Substack has some great writers, for sure. But unfortunately something about the marketing and business model seems to induce a large portion of Substack users to treat it as a kind of pyramid scheme. People cannibalize each other's subscribers, subscribe to each other as a favor or for strategic reasons, and of course there's the barrage of self-interested comments on every new celebrity Substack post. Further, Substack themselves pepper everything with sales pitches, and even remove comments that might appear to question their claims. There's a bad smell there, and I ended up leaving.