I spent a year and a half convincing myself Substack was different. It wasn’t.
Digital Doug is moving.
I opened the Substack app last week and got served a wall of content I never subscribed to. AI slop, rage bait, and articles about how to game Substack engagement. That last one was the final straw. When the feed is full of people explaining how to manipulate the feed, you know the platform has lost the plot.
I signed up for a newsletter platform. I got a dopamine trap with a word count.
Digital Doug has a new home at digital.douglangille.ca, where it should have been in the first place.
The For-You Feed Problem
When I started using Substack a year and a half ago, it was simple: write, publish, email subscribers, done. The authoring experience was clean. The promise was straightforward. But somewhere along the way, Substack decided being a newsletter platform wasn’t enough. Now there are Notes. And Chat. And Discovery feeds. And a “Home” tab that shows me everything except the newsletters I actually subscribed to.
The platform stopped doing the one thing it promised: delivering newsletters I actually subscribed to. Consider this: email is a protocol, not a platform.
I wrote about this a couple months ago in Slaying the Algorithm Dragon. RSS exists. Algorithms are a choice, not an inevitability. Every platform eventually decides you can’t be trusted to choose what you read, so they’ll choose for you. LinkedIn is next. Watch the slow creep of the For You tab eating your Following feed.
This isn’t about Substack being evil. This is about the enshittification of everything, the slow decay where platforms get noisier, pushier, and worse on purpose. I’m tired of renting space in someone else’s rotting infrastructure.
What I Actually Want
I want to write things, put them somewhere I control, and know they’ll still be there when the next platform pivots to video or whatever.
I’m not optimizing for engagement. I’m not trying to go viral. I just want to: write, publish, archive, repeat. A professional presence that survives platform trends. Content in formats that won’t be hostage to export features or terms of service updates.
I’m not asking for much. Just the digital equivalent of owning my house instead of renting.
Coming Home
Digital Doug has moved before. Multiple times. I’m either learning or stubborn. Probably both.
There was the WordPress era. Then the Substack experiment, a year and a half of never quite being comfortable. I’ve dabbled and experimented with the next bright shiny thing, moved my blog four times now.
I’m documenting the mistakes so you don’t repeat them. I’ve built this infrastructure multiple times with reflection between each iteration. That experience matters.
I’ve made an active decision that my core presence sits on two owned properties: digital.douglangille.ca for Digital Doug and douglangille.ca for Darkling Whim.
Any future experiments live on another domain. That’s my personal commitment going forward. Stability isn’t in never trying new things. It’s in owning the foundation.
Experiment concluded. Results: still prefer text files.
Back to Jekyll, back to GitHub Pages, back to what works. Digital Doug is home.
Here’s the stack:
- Domain: digital.douglangille.ca (I own it, I point it wherever)
- Content: Text files in markdown (readable by humans, portable, future-proof)
- Storage: GitHub (free, reliable, version controlled)
- Generation: Jekyll (turns markdown into a website)
- Hosting: GitHub Pages (free static hosting)
GitHub is versioned storage you control. Markdown is plain text that looks nice and will survive the platform apocalypse. Jekyll is content management without the management or the database. Your domain is your address. You point it anywhere.
This stack means I can move hosts without rebuilding. The content is portable text files, not database exports.
Is this overcomplicated? Maybe. Do I enjoy text files more than I should? Absolutely. And I’m cheap. GitHub Pages is free.
Where to Find Digital Doug
Owned platform doesn’t mean only one place. It means you control the source.
The Source (new home): digital.douglangille.ca is home now. All content lives here first. RSS feed available (subscribe once, and you get posts without an algorithm in the middle). There’s also an email subscription option (opt-in, opt out, I’m not building a list). You decide. Revolutionary concept.
Internal NSCC (continuing): The SharePoint Digital Doug site is still the primary channel for NSCC folks.
Distribution (continuing): LinkedIn: megaphone only. And some great conversation.
Substack (deprecated): This post is my last Substack post. I’ll be removing the archive after a warranty period.
The key point: everything lives in my GitHub repository as text files I control. I publish to SharePoint, LinkedIn, wherever. But the source is mine.
Side note: Darkling Whim is separate. My creative fiction site, wonder with teeth.
Why This Matters
Your professional voice is infrastructure, not content marketing. Treat it accordingly.
Platforms die. Google Reader. Google+. The good version of Twitter. Your content shouldn’t die with them. Your domain persists, job to job, platform to platform. It’s the archive that builds over years, not optimized for this week’s algorithm.
For IT folks: you already know this about servers. Your writing is no different. You won’t work for the same employer your entire life. A GitHub repository becomes your portfolio: scripts, documentation, artifacts. The website itself demonstrates skill. Social media has no long-tail value. Tweets disappear. Your own platform is something to use going forward.
For career builders: your body of work matters more than any platform’s reach. Your portfolio is both the work and the record of the work. Use an AI assistant to mine your archive instead of starting from scratch. Job-hunting without an archive means rebuilding your portfolio from memory.
For students: start now, own it forever.
I’m not your dad. Use whatever platform you want. Just keep a copy you control. Future you will appreciate it.
The Invitation
You don’t need to do what I did. You need to own what you publish. These are not the same thing.
Start simple:
- Own a domain ($15/year, pick any registrar)
- Point it at something (WordPress, GitHub, Notion, whatever)
- Write in portable formats (markdown, plain text, anything that isn’t locked)
- Keep copies you control
Paths that work:
- WordPress.com + custom domain (low barrier, high control)
- Write.as or similar (minimal, markdown, owned domain)
- GitHub Pages (if technical or learning inclined)
- Even Notion with custom domain (better than nothing)
For technical folks: GitHub Pages teaches you git. Git is the ultimate ‘Undo’ button for your career’s intellectual property. Your repository becomes your portfolio. Double win.
For everyone else: Simple is fine. Imperfect is fine. Starting beats optimizing.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just go build the thing.
