Want to support my writing, share it. Put a link on your blog or share it on social media. Write it on a postcard and leave it at your local coffee shop.
Note: Not 3 threads today but one longer piece. Regular programming should resume.
Prompted by this very reasonable sounding podcast with the CEO of Substack I wondered if I had judged Substack too harshly when I said that Substack barely did the work to keep Nazi’s off their platform or highlighted the open letter supporting Substack that a Substack founder started. After a few hours of reading about Substack, I still don’t think you should use Substack for a whole host of reasons.
To be fair, yes I know some writers have been able to support themselves on their writing via the Substack model in a way they were never able to before via their own newsletters or writing on their site’s. I’m sure it’s been life-changing amounts of money provided by Substack to some writers, but I also think that this idea falls into the trap many tech companies use to say they’re different than exploitative industries of the past.
Platform Lockin
The first reason is that it’s incredibly easy to get started on Substack and also very easy to get going but most non-tech savvy people don’t realise that by not owning their domain name they don’t really own anything. If you run your publication on Substack using a subdomain, Substack owns those URLs, not you. – On blogging, substacking and owning digital real estate
Substack is dead simple to get started with. Sign up for an account and then start writing. Advertise your writing on any social platform you use. Compare this to what I do with WordPress and MailPoet. I had to get a server setup, then know how to mess with WordPress, WooCommerce and MailPoet to get my lists working as I wanted. Heck I even wrote my own membership integration because all the others seemed far to busy for my needs. I’ve had to fight spam signups that increased my cost with MailPoet and then I got a $1000 bill from my host because they say they saw traffic that I never saw in any fashion in my analytics. To say what I do is harder is an epic understatement.
Compare the hours of effort I spent working on my site to Substack’s sign up process and it’s not even a contest for those that don’t enjoy coding and simply want to write. Substack is the clear winner in terms of ease of getting started.
They also seemingly do a great job of growing your subscriber base as they could possibly maybe recommend your newsletter during the sign up process. When you look a bit deeper though and know how users operate online, most of the people signing up for a Substack are not engaging much with all the intermediate screens being thrown in their face. The tyranny of the default has users simply clicking through these screens accepting whatever is put in the boxes, thus signing up for many Substack writers they aren’t interested in and will come to view as noise in their feed.
In many ways this type of fake growth reminds me of the fake traffic you used to be able to get from Stumbelupon. For those that don’t remember, it was a site and browser extension that let you hit “Stumble” and then would take you to a random website they had listed. During the era when it was a going concern I would regularly have customers ask for me to help them get traffic from the service and I’d have to tell them that Stumbleupon traffic was nothing but cost in terms of server traffic as the users were only ever vaguely interested in the topic they had tagged in Stumbleupon and had no interest in your site specifically. They were simply bored and trolling the internet for something to do before we had time sucks like Instagram or TikTok which do a far better job at stealing your attention than Stumbleupon and random websites ever could manage.
All those readers that Substack shows you as a positive thing on your dashboard are worth very little. Upon leaving Substack authors have found that users acquired via the Substack recommendation engine have higher churn than organic growth and are less likely to open your missive or upgrade to a paid plan to support your work. They showed up on the site to see some other writing they were interested in and you got shoved in their face and they said yes while trying to support someone else. Later on they wonder why they’re hearing from you and opt-out but enough people are coming in via the recommendation engine that you don’t notice this until you leave the mess that is Substack. When you realize you’ve been duped by Substacks numbers you are also confronted with the reality that for every 10k readers you had you have a month of churn degrading the readership you thought was interested in you.
If Substack showed you this number most people that start writing on their platform would stop because it’s so demoralizing to realize that most people don’t care what you have to say and you’re not going to be the next success story they’ll highlight. So Substack keeps recommending you to random readers and keeps you excited that maybe one day you’ll be able to write for a living. This seems plausible because the number keeps going up according to Substack.
Substack doesn’t care if you can write for a living, they want the masses there to pump their brand so that people start saying “read my Substack”. Your writing is merely food for their churn engine building the Substack brand.
My Substack vs email
Substack has become the Amazon of publishing. It offers the consensual hallucination of independence and ownership while deceivingly consolidating control and dictating the terms of success for sellers (i.e. you, the writers) – Death by a Thousand Substacks
Much like other social networks of the past, Substack is involved in a pump and dump scheme wanting you to use their social network because it brings with it network effects that make the Substack network more valuable to everyone, while you the writer become incrementally less valuable to Substack and more locked into their platform. Facebook did it and now organic reach is dead so you have to pay to reach people with your business page that Facebook convinced you was the key to your business success not that long ago.
Like Facebook, Substack will hide behind their “algorithm” and tell you how to do better engagement, while your reach continues to diminish and they post quarterly increases in readership and profit. Like Facebook, Substack has platitudes that you own the relationship with your readers because you can export your email list. But if you haven’t paid Substack at least something Substack is the true owner your content because you’re on a subdomain. Even if you move the content to your own site later, you’re not in control of the subdomain so you can’t point all the locations to the new location and keep any links intact for others. Cool URIs don’t change but if you’re not in control of that with Substack, they are and you better pray they don’t alter the terms of the agreement later.
Email’s been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about that today, but you will when you see what they want to do with it. – Don’t call it a Substack
Yes it’s more work to own your domain and setup something yourself, but at least then you do own the content and the locations of the content. You no longer say “read my Substack” and pump a brand that doesn’t know you exist, you tell people to sign up for your newsletter and control the whole experience from end to end without some tech company that’s watching the enshittification play books of the bigger tech companies while they bide their time waiting for their network effects to take such a strong hold that they too can do whatever they want while writers income is at their mercy so people will stay.
Free Speech and Nazi’s
So I have a choice to make, a choice that neither I nor any gender-marginalized person should ever have to make: Either I walk away from a necessary income stream and creative outlet, or I stay and allow my work to fund abuse, harassment, misogyny, and a movement that wants trans people silenced, impoverished, invisible and dead. – In Queers We Trust, All Others Pay Cash
My dislike of Substack started when it was brought to light that Substack likes Nazi’s, but in my research recently I’ve been far more affirmed in my dislike of the “reasonable free speech platform” that is Substack.
Substack isn’t just okay with Nazi’s, Substack pays people that write about hate for the Trans community to write on their platform. From Glenn Greewald attacking trans rights to harassment Substack hides behind the “free speech” mantra to allow prominent writers, mainly white people, to spew hate which results in real world consequences for the communities that these people marginalize.
Substack says they just give the writers money and then step back, but those they choose to give money to are at the very least indirectly endorse by Substack as voices we should value. Few of these writers choose to disclose the money Substack gave them to use their platform and it’s not quite a sponsorship, but by using the platform the writers are shilling for Substack as something good. Those that aspire to be writers will assume the platform used matters and also use Substack.
That’s exactly what Substack is doing. They may make good noises about how they’re simply enabling writers, but they’re doing it for their own profit just like any business would. They want more of the masses of aspiring writers to use their platform and they want eyes on their platform so anyone that attracts the eyes is fair game and in the highly polarized political world we live in the more crazy you spew the more eyes you get, which is only good for Substack.
Alternatives?
Yes, Beehiiv and Buttondown exist as alternatives to Substack and their founders do sound more like they’re writer first, but the Benevolent Dictator for Life of WordPress once sounded the same way and now is just a Dictator dividing the community and throwing tantrums when people don’t agree with him. Ghost is another option which feels better as it’s governance structure is done via a non-profit foundation which insulates it from the problems a BDFL can have by spreading out the power among a number of people.
I said earlier that I use WordPress but I also feel locked down by a platform that has changed drastically under my feet. The tech was forced in a direction that many in the community didn’t agree with, but with Matt controlling so many contributors we are along for the ride to wherever Matt wants to take us. Then add on the crazy shit that the BDFL is doing and I don’t want to be associated with the platform anymore. I’ll be working to move all my sites off WordPress which will be a long process with this site likely being the last holdout due to it’s complexity. To be clear, any platform you start with will have some type of lock in with your content.
You’ll be used to how your platform does stuff, and understand the things it sucks at. Almost any other platform will have some stuff that’s better and some stuff that sucks in different ways.
When I’m asked now about starting a site and newsletter by non-technical people that want to write I point them towards Ghost. At this point it feels like the safest and easiest option to own your writing and your audience.