Substack writers say that the newsletter ban is bad for business

Why do writers spend their livelihoods on Substack, or how to stop reading their tweets? A no-follow story in the 2021 red flag

We don’t have 2022 numbers. After the abysmal numbers of 2021, the children call it a red flag. Substack took out loans in the early 2000s, but they didn’t raise enough money and the interest rates went up. The amount of debt wasn’t disclosed, either. Also not great.

Substack writers used social media to build their audience, something the Verge’s contributing editor wrote about in 2021. As of, uh, today, you can’t interact with tweets that have Substack links in them, which limits their spread. Promoting Substacks is very difficult because of that. Substack has a social networky feature called Notes and is trying to make its app stickier, but I refuse to subscribe to newsletters to read them in an app!

At the business here and at the audacity of asking to raise money on Crowdfunder, I am goofily aghast. It is, in its way, darkly funny. When the platform suffers in a media startup, writers suffer. But in this case, because it is so easy to leave Substack with your list and go to another platform — Buttondown, Ghost, Mailchimp — this is a rare case where the writers who made their businesses on Substack will probably be fine. It depends on whether or not they invest in Substack.

Musk isn’t happy about Twitter: Why he should not cut off Twitter at the knees? A Comment on Legum and Swider

“It appears that Musk is making decisions based on his own financial interests and petty grievances — even if it makes Twitter objectively worse for users,” Judd Legum, author of Popular Information, a politics-focused newsletter with more than 240,000 subscribers, says in an email to The Verge. It is hard to justify continuing to invest in creating content on the micro-blogging site.

“Given my massive Twitter following, I heavily rely on tweets to convert new subscribers,” says Matt Swider, author of The Shortcut. I want to reach people on my platform of choice so when platforms are at war like this it only hurts the creators.

Twitter’s choice to restrict the sharing of Substack links shortly after that Notes announcement makes the decision seem like a direct response — and Taibbi claims that’s indeed the case.

He thinks he will be safe due to the fact that he has more followers on Substack than on TWITTER. Even though that’s the case, he’s still unhappy with how things are going. Every platform matters when you are an independent creator, says Newcomer. “So it’s extremely disappointing that Elon Musk has talked such a big game about supporting independent voices and then seems to be cutting them off at the knees.”