Introducing—and caveating—the Episodic Medium Chat Experience

Trade the social platform controlled by an egomaniac billionaire for the comforts of *checks notes* neoliberal capitalism...ah, yes.

There’s lots of reasons to be ambivalent about or even downright resistant to Substack as a platform, but I can’t claim that it hasn’t served as a valuable foundation for building Episodic Medium into what it is today: a community of people invested in episodic television criticism, supporting the work of myself and a team of contributors.

But there are also clear limits within a newsletter format to fostering real community among subscribers: while comment sections are fine, they don’t capture the sense of connection and belonging that comes from other online communities, which in the realm of television criticism has long been epitomized by “TV Twitter.” And so since the beginning, as immortalized on our About page, I’ve thought about ways of building more interaction between contributors and subscribers.

My reasons for not doing this before now were twofold. The first was that I worried about cannibalizing the comment sections: I think there’s a particular value in bringing reader perspectives into direct conversation with criticism, and that dialogue is for me a huge part of the value of episodic criticism both as a writer (getting direct feedback and response to my work) and as a reader (to see how the resulting dialogue informs my own experience of the work, and invites me into the conversation). I worried that if I created a Discord, then it would siphon off some of that conversation, making it so it was severed from the reviews themselves.

The second was that starting this newsletter was already asking you to engage with one platform, and adding a second to the mix would further segment the community for those who didn’t want to deal with an additional step. It also would have created some additional administrative challenges in terms of moderation and tech support—do people lose access when they stop paying to subscribe, for instance? As a result, I’ve simply stuck to using the “Threads” feature, which basically just creates posts on the Substack that are focused on discussion, but are basically just normal posts in terms of how they appear in people’s feeds/inboxes.

This week, Substack has invited select writers to be part of the early adoption of their new “Chat” feature, which is basically their effort to acknowledge the importance of community within newsletters like this one, conveniently at a time when many are seeking alternatives to Twitter for Obvious Reasons. Basically, now myself and other contributors to Episodic Medium will be able to post threads for discussion, and paid subscribers will be able to join in, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with others within the community. These posts could be prompts like the Q&A posts I’ve been doing, Twitter-length responses to TV industry news, or brief observations about anything in particular.

Now, right off the bat, this has its own limitations compared to something like Discord. There’s no DMs, and thus no way to directly contact another subscriber, and there’s no way for subscribers to start their own threads. Additionally, Substack has decided to move forward with this initial implementation only on mobile devices, and currently only on Substack’s iOS app. Android will follow shortly, and they will be developing a web version of the chat function “soon” but gave no firm date.

Needless to say, this does not resolve all of my concerns. There’s still a good chance this cannibalizes comment sections, for example, and as it stands it’s still segmenting the audience by only being available to those who have Apple devices and are willing to download a specific app. However, it’s still an integrated way to start connecting more directly with the community we’re building here, and so I’m going to embrace it as part of the value to paid subscribers moving forward.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, and you have the iOS app, there’s a thread there waiting for you. If you’re not, but feel like having a space where you’ll be able to tweet thoughts about what you’re watching and feel you’ll find someone else who’s interested in talking about it is valuable to you, your $5 a month will help me keep expanding the shows we’re covering and my ability to compensate our contributors fairly for their work.

Either way, I look forward to hearing from you in the comments, in the chat, and on whatever Twitter remains in the months ahead. Below you’ll find some instructions on accessing the chat function on your devices.

---

How to get started

1. Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Chat is only on iOS for now, but chat is coming to the Android app soon (and no, they didn’t give a timeline on what soon meant).

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for Episodic Medium inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my first thread to share what you watched last and chat with others about their shows, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.