Dear Boy Act 3 Read Online
Leana Eckes
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Reading Room is a new mini series with writers like Anne Helen Petersen sharing their favorite publications to read on Substack. Kate is a thoughtful reader and researcher, both of her peers and of the online spaces that she covers. We asked Kate to share what she is reading.
As we kick off the Substack category tour, we asked Kate Lindsay, co-author of Embedded, to share some writer-to-writer advice about creating trust with your readers. Co-founded with Nick Catucci, Embedded is a twice-weekly guide to new internet creators including trends and weekly interviews with \u201Cvery online\u201D people. Read on for her advice, or listen to her read it aloud above.\u200B
I\u2019ll admit, there was a period of time when I was too jaded from working in the digital media industry to read any online content. At my first writing job, I wrote seven stories a day, sometimes waking up as early as 6 a.m. to fit it all in. By the time I\u2019d worked at a few different publications, I could tell when an article was actually an SEO grab masquerading as a legitimate piece of writing, or a piece of clickbait meant to make people mad, and I wasn\u2019t interested in feeding the machine with my own reading habits.
While I\u2019d like to think this particular era of digital media is on its way out, you still see shades of it when the latest viral moment prompts every outlet to scramble for its own unique take. So many websites are writing the same thing. This can be helpful: When Yellowjackets was airing, I was so deep in the show and its fan theories that I read every perspective I could find in hopes of getting all the crumbs. But this strategy doesn\u2019t work universally. For instance, I similarly consumed Covid-19 content in the first year of the pandemic, but I realized that this wasn\u2019t actually reading\u2014it was anxiety-spiraling.
All this is to say, I\u2019m somewhat precious with what I consume, and definitely read a lot less than perhaps you\u2019d think for someone who calls themselves \u201Cchronically online.\u201D I like pieces that work to clarify a moment with reason rather than drum up anxiety for clicks, and I have a natural aversion to reading whatever piece has my Twitter timeline in an uproar\u2014because it was probably designed to do just that.
This was one of the first things I noticed about writing Embedded: I no longer have to cater to SEO, or try to get someone\u2019s attention on a timeline. We\u2019re writing for readers who, by nature of signing up, already want to read us. So our coverage can be more thoughtfully catered to them in a way that feels helpful, not exploitative.
Our best-performing pieces for Embedded are often the ones that seek to make the reader feel understood. Our newsletter is about the internet, but rather than highlight what\u2019s dystopian about this time, I always try to focus on the things about it that are uniquely human, or voice something we all experience that hasn\u2019t been formally put to paper. Similarly, the pieces I love and share with others aren\u2019t ones that are particularly spicy or that make me want to get up and go do something, but that reflect back to me a thought or experience that makes me feel seen.
This isn\u2019t to say you need to try to broadly appeal to your readers. Curating our My Internet series has taught me that the internet may be getting bigger, but people still find and occupy their own particular corners of it. The 2020 National Book Award nominee Rumaan Alam follows Mary-Kate and Ashley fan accounts. Former New York Times columnist Ben Smith is on Geocaching reddit. Writer Taylor Lorenz loves bird TikTok. Investing in a niche may not reach the most readers, but the people you are writing for will be real and engaged and appreciative, which is, ostensibly, why we all started doing this.
I\u2019ve also learned that people will pay for writing, and we should continue to normalize that. For My Internet, we always ask people what they pay for online, and some have named publications from the New York Times to Insider to Study Hall to, of course, their favorite Substacks. But when you step back and look at social media as a whole, everyday people in the replies and comments are routinely astonished when something is paywalled. Sure, running into a paywall is annoying, but the fact that you\u2019re annoyed you can\u2019t read something is the reason to pay for it! If you want to read good stuff, then you have to free writers from the advertising model that forces quantity over quality, and that means people with the means to give their money, doing so.
If all else fails, I\u2019ll leave you with these two pieces of advice: Trust recommendations from humans, not algorithms, and treat your clicks like currency\u2014give them to the kind of content you want to see more of, not less.
This is the third in a recurring series of longform writer-to-writer advice, following Mason Currey\u2019s advice column on creative growth and Anna Codrea-Rado of Lance on learning to celebrate just how far you\u2019ve come.
Substack I\u2019m most excited to open ASAP: Today in Tabs\u2014it breaks down the exact discourse I recommend against reading, but now I can still know what people are talking about.
First Substack I subscribed to: That\u2019s gotta be Garbage Day, and I still open every single one! I recently cited this one, about how social media is digesting the crisis in Ukraine, in my own writing.
Substack I subscribed to most recently: After School\u2014one of the only places to report on Gen Z that isn\u2019t patronizing. I think this Gen Z gift guide is a perfect example of how hard its author, Casey Lewis, works to be accurate and comprehensive.
Substack I recommend to friends most often: Rachel Karten\u2019s Link in Bio is essential for understanding the professional social media space. I love this one about the personal social media accounts of people who run brand accounts.
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I'll admit at the beginning: I've sold online courses in the past and now that I've been on the "student" side of the fence, I have many regrets to what I've sold people. While the information was really good, the delivery? Oh poor you. I'm sorry. No refunds. It was years ago. But still. I'll be the first to admit that I now have new opinions on what needs to exist to make an online course better/useful/worth it.
I'm taking a course right now and I'm on the second little video module. THANKFULLY, I can speed up the playback. BUT. I can't fast forward. Here's the problem there: I'm watching a screen very slowly fill with ten rules. I know there will be ten because the graphic has room for ten. I'm on three. If I speed this guy up to the max, he sounds like a bee, but it's still way slower than I can read. I tried fast forwarding to the tenth rule so I could just pause and read them at my pace.
That's problem number one: if your course delivery mechanisms challenges my learning method, how well do you think I'm going to learn the lesson? (Hint: I paused my course to write this letter to you.)
I'm watching this terrifying bastard slowly wave his hand around while a bunch of bullets populate the screen to his left. Boring bullets. Fine, we learn with those, I guess. But I don't have to watch this animation build. Just dump the information in front of me.
I had to take a mandatory security training the other day, and I had to do things like click on the briefcase or the printer or the monitor to get more information. I wanted to choke out Carmen San Diego or whoever it was trying to get me to be more security-minded. Did I mention "mandatory" course?
I understand how this particular course I'm taking right now was made. Someone who was really smart probably spent a little time explaining all the core principles that they intended to teach me, and then, a "writer" got involved and wrote sentences. Real concise sentences. Like, very learnable sentences. The white rice with no salt or butter of sentences.
Get it. Expenses are reduced. Someone...someone designed this. Just think about that. They wanted to tell me that if I followed this method, it would lead to reduced expenses. And this is the graphic. It's not whimsical. It's truly horrific. I'm not learning better. (Okay, I'll stop about the graphics.)
In the mandatory security training, there was a whole lot of required clicking: "Click on which parts of this email give away that it's a phishing attempt." That wasn't so bad, because it emulated an email. Then, there were "Click on potential physical security issues." I get it. Fine. Worst, though, Click on this thing that is a graphic made to look like something specific and then we'll just continue the narration. THAT stinks.
My own sin is that my courses were mostly talking head. I'd present information. You'd have to watch it (or at least listen) to absorb it. I'd give you my notes, but those would be useless without the talk track. See? I forced one learning style on you.
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