And with changes coming to my Substack experiments
Back in August, I announced to my vast audience of all things stevendkrause that I was going to shift my blogging practices to a Substack site. Now I’m shifting back— sort of.
There are two reasons for this.
First, while I have begun to find an audience on Substack, I still get more readers on the old blog– or at least I get a lot of hits, according to the Jetpack stats. I am assuming that the reason for this is people stumble across 20+ years of content via Google searches and the like. The most popular post I’ve had on the site for the last couple of years, “AI Can Save Writing by Killing ‘The College Essay,'” had 68 hits since August, and after I said I was done here. Most of my Substack posts have had fewer views. Altogether, stevendkrause.com had around 1700 hits since August; that’s not a lot, but it is more than I received since August on Substack.
Second, and this is probably a more important reason for returning to the old blog, Substack isn’t a blogging platform. Rather, it is a newsletter platform with some interesting social media features (a place for updates ala Facebook or X or Bluesky, chat features, podcast features, etc.). My friend and colleague Collin Brooke commented on my post announcing my shift to Substack that one of the reasons why he likes Substack emailed newsletters is he has them all going to a particular folder or something so he’s able to follow them “like an old school RSS reader.” That makes some sense from a reader’s perspective– and note to self, now that I’m nearly done with the semester, that’s something I ought to set up for my Substack subscriptions instead of just letting them clog up my inbox.
But I’m also interested in Substack as a way of growing my audience, and as far as I can tell, the most successful Substack newsletters are published regularly– some daily, some weekly, some less than that– and they are about a specific topic. My blogging habits have always been much more random than that both in terms of how often I post and what I post about.
So here’s my plan– for now:
I’m going to post stuff here more or less whenever I can get to it/when I feel like it. For the last couple of years, I usually post a couple of times a month. Then I’ll repost/republish those posts on Substack as an “all things Krause” newsletter available in subscribers’ email and at stevendkrause.substack.com, probably around once a month.
Eventually, maybe when I have some time over the break, maybe next summer (but honestly maybe never too), I’d like to get a little more systematic, specific, and newsletter-like on Substack. For example, I am thinking about starting a Substack newsletter about why it is a terrible idea for educators to resist/refuse/ignore AI, and about how “paying attention” to AI is not the same thing as embracing it. I’m also thinking I might create another Substack newsletter to post regularly about food things, which would be about my interests in cooking and I guess I’d say the “food biz.” That might also include more about Zepbound, which is kind of the opposite of being interested in food.
Like I said, we’ll see.