Unlike Medium, however, it's attracted some quality writing. (e.g. Medium seems to attract writers who are (a) blown away by much easier it is to get usage numbers compared to a real blog, and (b) are blown away by getting 70 "views" on an article.)
IIRC Medium was like this too in the beginning. There was a time where I wanted to read articles on Medium because they were higher quality than average. I agree that it's hard to see Substack turning out differently. Although if the company isn't acquired / doesn't IPO then it's also true that these things can vary based on who is running the company.
I think that's right. And one of the things that made Medium attractive to me to cross-post from my own blog to every now and then was that people who mostly didn't know any better saw the overall quality and assumed that there was some filtering going on. Which in turn made it seems more authoritative than a "blog." I stopped bothering once the quality went down and the paywalls went up.
There could be a market for a service that just does quality filtering as a news aggregation service. So basically the opposite of what YouTube is doing -- don't show anything from OAN or CNN or similar partisan outlets, don't show garbage blogs, show the good ones. Maybe easier said than done, but I bet there's a market there.
Of course the question is always how to properly rank an article's quality. I'd say the best approach is to crowdsource it - develop an algorithm that takes into account how many other highly ranked articles reference a given article, and give a higher rank to articles that have more references.
If you do this, make sure to give the algorithm a clever name. Ideally name it after yourself, unless your name is Smith. You'll never do well with a business built around something called SmithRank.
Now if your last name happened to be something related the things you're ranking, like, say..."Article"...wow, call it ArticleRank!
Just remember you heard it first here on HackerNews.
That feels like a big difference.