So I’m going back to Substack, and I’m letting my Ghost website go. Let me explain why, because this is a real reversal and I owe you the reasoning. Helena is keeping her Ghost site, by the way - she has far more time than I do to grow it properly.
The first reason is simple. I’m about to be running three, maybe four publications, and Use More Paper is only one of them. Keeping all of that on a single platform just makes sense. One place to write, one place to manage, one place where readers can find everything.
The second reason is harder to admit. My current site isn’t growing on its own. I expected slow - I didn’t expect this slow. And if I want a real business around this work, sluggish isn’t good enough.
Something has to move.
The Promotion Problem
Here’s the part nobody likes. To grow an independent site today, I’d have to go and promote it on LinkedIn or X.
That’s torture for me.
LinkedIn especially is just cringe. If I have to post somewhere to be seen, I’ll take Substack Notes over either of those, every single time.
Substack also already has a lot of people on it - people who actually like to read. That’s not the main reason I’m moving, but it’s a real bonus.
And then there’s the practical side: video and podcasts. I make both. On Ghost I need separate podcast hosting and YouTube for the video, because Ghost caps uploads under a gigabyte and my vlogs usually run over that. Substack handles writing, audio, and video in one place.
Why I Said No Before, and Yes Now
Here’s the irony I can’t ignore. Substack leans toward social media. That is exactly why I avoided it a few months ago - and it’s exactly why I’m choosing it now. The same trait flipped from a flaw to a feature, because what I need changed.
I’ve said this many times: I want this to be a business - the publication, the podcast, all of it. A business needs an audience. And the honest truth about running an independent website today is that it can sit there, quietly excellent, with almost nobody visiting. Not because the work is bad. Because nobody knows it exists.
Search won’t fix that for me anymore. I even added a robots.txt file to make my site more visible to AI LLM tools. But who is going to ask a chatbot for digital minimalism or paper productivity content?
Almost nobody, today.
Maybe in ten years that changes. Right now, the traffic just isn’t there.
Discovery Moved, So I’m Moving With It
If search won’t bring people, then I need discovery that runs on community instead. And a community engine like Substack is far better at that than a lone website standing on its own. A platform is worth what the crowd on it is worth - and there’s already a crowd there.
If all my back-and-forth bothers you, that’s completely fine - unfollow, unsubscribe, go your own way with no hard feelings. I’m not changing things to provoke anyone. I change course because I’m solving real problems in front of me.
I’d rather adjust in public than stay stuck out of pride.
So that’s the move. The lesson here isn’t “give up on owning your work” - I still believe in that deeply (and Substack is letting me own my newsletter). It’s: meet people where they actually are, and pick the tool that fits the goal in front of you, not the one that flatters your principles.
Work out what you’re really trying to build, choose the platform that gets you there, and then go make the thing. That’s what I’m doing. Come along if you’d like.
Do Your Own Research
Don’t take my word for any of this - here’s where to check it yourself.
On where the web traffic went: the Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 U.S. adults and found that when Google shows an AI-generated summary, people click through to an outside website far less often - around 8% of the time, compared to 15% when no summary appears, and only 1% click a link inside the summary itself (Pew Research Center, 2025). The wider trend points the same way: independent clickstream analysis suggests most Google searches now end without a single click to the open web (SparkToro, 2026). For a small, independent site, that’s the whole story - the front door most readers used to walk through is mostly shut.
On why being where the audience already is matters so much: economists have studied this for decades under the name network effects. The short version is that a platform becomes more valuable to each person as more people join it, which is exactly why an existing crowd is so hard to compete with from the outside (Katz & Shapiro, 1985). Later work on “two-sided markets” shows that platforms win by getting both sides - here, writers and readers - onto the same place at the same time (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). A community-driven platform is simply built for that in a way a solo website never can be.
