If you love reading, don’t have much time, but do have some time, and only want to read things you already agree with, get excited, because one platform just launched a new feature that’s right up your alley: Substack will now include the estimated time it’ll take for you to skim through an essay and find the bit that confirms your miserable excuse for a worldview.

Awesome! This will definitely help users decide which posts to half-heartedly skim so they can have every one of their own stupid opinions repeated back to them!

As of this week, a counter will now appear in the top corner of every Substack post that reads “X TIME UNTIL YOU HEAR EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR.” This new feature will show that in a shorter piece quite obviously written by AI, it will take a reader just 10 seconds to get to the part that tells them it’s self care to ignore all their friends, whereas in a longer piece written entirely in lowercase with no paragraph breaks, it will take closer to two minutes to reach the lines where capitalism is defined as the root cause of why people are still single. 

Thanks to this feature, readers will be able to decide for themselves if it’s worth scrolling for a full minute to reinforce their opinion that their depression is entirely symptomatic of, once again, capitalism, or if they’d prefer to just scroll for 15 seconds through a listicle titled “What Millennials Were Promised” before reading the line about how they’ll never own a home. Already thinking ahead, Substack has also announced plans to blur out everything in the article except for the two-sentence part that they want to go viral via re-stackings.

So cool! This is how writing and reading in 2025 is done! Cheers to Substack for constantly pushing the boundaries. We can’t wait to skim an essay for 25 seconds that explains why this new feature is super problematic due to capitalism!