What Successful Substackers Should Do

How to have a positive impact through blogging

Most of my articles are about stuff that is, in the grand scheme of things, utterly irrelevant. My blog posts about anthropics, while obviously awesome on levels hitherto unforeseen in human history, aren’t that important. It pains me to say this, but if people get anthropic reasoning wrong, the world won’t end (though perhaps they’ll think it will).

However, I try, at least occasionally, to write about topics that are really important to get right.

I don’t think that politics is this way. If you’re wrong about a political issue, it’s not a huge deal. But there are some topics on which influencing people has a massive impact. Most of my positive impact through blogging has been through encouraging people to donate to some very effective charities. Writing about GiveWell top charities got quite a few people to donate to very effective charities, potentially saving multiple lives! And by writing about shrimp welfare, somehow a bunch of other people got on board, thus making about 600 million shrimp deaths painless—wow! Over the years, my writing about factory farming has convinced various people to go vegan, saving huge numbers of animals from horrific factory farms, as well as to donate to effective charities helping animals.

I mention these to note: if you’re a big substacker, writing about these topics can have a huge impact! My substack has only a few thousand readers—imagine the impact that you can have if you had a much larger substack, with tens of thousands of readers! It’s pretty plausible that if you write an article once a year talking about the importance of giving to Givewell top charities, you could save multiple lives. If you write an article talking about the horrors of factory farming, and mentioning organizations helping combat the excesses of factory farming, you could probably save truly huge numbers of animals from a lifetime in a cage. When Matt Yglesias and a few other substackers set up a fundraiser for Givedirectly, in total they raised over $200,000—that’s enough that if given to the against malaria foundation, it would save ~40 lives!

Now, I’m not suggesting that you become a full-time blogger about charity, if you have a big substack. People rarely read full time charity bloggers, unfortunately. But at the very least, if your articles are read by many tens of thousands of people, you should write occasionally about things you think are important for them to do: give to effective charities, for instance. If you’ve built up lots of credibility in the eyes of many people, it’s worth using that credibility to try to save lives. You can probably have a bigger impact by blogging about charity than giving yourself—though you should, of course, do both.

And blog posts advocating that people give to charity don’t have to be snoozefests. You can spend most of the post talking about some serious problem—say, children dying of malaria, or factory farming—before briefly mentioning at the end what people can do about it. In fact, it happens to be that some of my most widely-read articles also involved talking about important things people can do.

If you’re feeling really bold, you can write about the problem of our time—shrimp welfare—and the fact that for just a dollar you can prevent tens of thousands of shrimp from painfully dying! You might be more persuasive than you’d expect—I somehow managed to get a bunch of people to give their money to shrimp. You build up credibility by writing articles about things people want to learn about: you should spend your credibility on the shrimp!