The many delusions of Jason Arday

Plus: Is Substack dying?; The death of a CancerTok star; and... narco-influencers?

It’s a grim time to be online.

Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re diving into the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal, the death of a CancerTok star, the state of Substack, and narco-influencers.

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Get in loser, we’re bundling

Last week, investigative journalist Scott Carney wrote a viral Substack column titled “The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing,” which pointed the finger at subscription fatigue and the increased prioritization of free content on the platform. Substack began as a site that functioned like a neutral service provider, merely sending emails and hosting pages. But it has recently added features that make it more like a social media network, including Notes, livestreams, followers and short form video.

Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz has had similar concerns.

The top comments on Carney’s post are complaining about how expensive it is to follow multiple writers (which inspired a secondary round of discourse with writers defending the concept that writers deserve to be paid). If you want to follow more than just a couple of bloggers, it’s easy to find yourself paying far more than you would expect. When you add lots of Substack subscriptions to all the streaming services, it’s understandable that people feel stretched thin.

Substack, as a company, represents the peak of what Ben Thompson called the Great Unbundling: Cable packages used to bundle together hundreds of channels into one expensive package, but now you pay separately for a wide variety of streaming services. Newspapers used to bundle sports, news, lifestyle content, comics, classifieds, and weather, but now there’s a separate app or publication for each of those. And while magazines used to contain articles from a wide range of writers on a variety of topics, today you can directly subscribe to single blogs.

Everyone likes unbundling in theory. Why pay for the things you don’t care about in the bundle? Why not only pay for the thing you care about? But the end state isn’t always what you want — some folks find themselves paying more for all the streaming services than they ever did for cable, and paid subscriptions to 10 different blogs might cost more than their previous magazines and papers did.

If you’ll permit me a moment of navel-gazing, I think we’re due for a moment of re-bundling. That’s part of why I joined up with The Argument. There’s so much more value for readers if I’m bundled with all the other fantastic stuff being produced here than there would be if it was just me alone.

Sure, we’re basically reinventing the wheel with this new “bundle a bunch of good writers together” idea. But I think — and hopefully you, dear readers, agree — that publications like The Argument are the future.