The quality concern is real but I think it assumes writers are optimising for reach in a broad sense. I started writing about backend engineering a few weeks ago and what I actually want is to find the right hundred people, not a million random ones. Substack surfaces AI takes. HN surfaces whatever's trending. There's no feed for 'engineer who's been running Postgres in production for a decade and has things to say about it.' The problem isn't that I want to go viral, it's that even targeted discovery doesn't exist.