Hello from my new home
I hold two contradictory truths about this newsletter: I love writing it, and I think about changing it constantly. Should it have more a consistent theme? Should I turn on paid subscriptions? Should I be trying to grow my subscriber list? Should I do anything other than sit down approximately once a week (or lately, as often as life/health allows), barf out some thoughts, and send it off?
So far, the answer to all of those questions has been no, and it remains no. But as you can see, I did finally decide to change one big thing about The Lizzie Wade (not so) Weekly: The platform I use to send it out. I’ve moved my newsletter off Substack and to the independent service Buttondown.
Like all my previous decisions to quit platforms, this one happened gradually, and then suddenly. It would be fair to say the tipping point was this article in The Atlantic about how Substack hosts, promotes, and earns money from white supremacists and self-described Nazis, just as they host, promote, and earn money from some of the worst members of the anti-trans brigade and most dangerous peddlers of medical misinformation, all currently poisoning politics and ruining lives in a disturbing number of U.S. states and beyond. I’ve known all those things for a while, and I still felt ok-ish about staying on the platform because I wasn’t making, charging, or giving Substack any of your money. (I do pay to subscribe to several newsletters on Substack, and I don’t plan to cancel those subscriptions.) I knew I wouldn’t feel right turning on paid subscriptions as long as I was using Substack, but I don’t plan to offer paid subscriptions anyway, so whatever.
But recently it’s become undeniable that Substack and I are moving in different directions. Or rather, it’s increasingly obvious that Substack is trying to coax me and its other writers into fulfilling the platform’s needs, which are engagement and growth, instead of our own goals. It’s also using us to provide intellectual and moral cover for the fact that, as one expert told The Atlantic, the reactionary right has “found a safe space” on Substack.
I’ll come back to engagement and growth in a second. On the moral cover piece: If there are all kinds of Substacks, from my tiny, non-monetized missives to professional white nationalist outlets with “bestseller” badges, no one kind of Substack defines what the platform is. I don’t begrudge the company its bet that non-existent content moderation dressed up as free speech is a good business decision. In fact, I’m sure it is. I don’t even think writers whose politics and mission I find reprehensible should definitely not be allowed on Substack. But at a bare minimum, I don’t think they should be invited guests on the company’s official podcast, and I don’t think Substack should earn more and more money the bigger their audiences grow. Since both those things are currently the case, I’m not willing to be part of the bargain anymore.
But if I’m honest, it’s really the engagement and growth imperative that guided me right up to the edge of leaving before the Nazis pushed me over. I have no intel or even gossip about Substack’s internal decision making or their plans for the future. I only know what’s public: Substack has accepted large venture capital investments, launched products (especially Notes, but also the in-network recommendation feature) designed to make it more like social media, and most recently, initiated the dreaded Pivot to Video. I’ve been in media long enough to know what all that means: Run while you still can.
What Substack wants, above all else, is for me to write A Substack. It wants me to charge, expand, chat, note, and heart. It wants all of my new readers to come from inside its ecosystem, via its human and algorithmic recommendations. It wants me to feel like my brand is intertwined with the platform’s brand, which is the same as dependent on it. It wants me to feel like I’m happy to be there, but it will also settle for me feeling like I can’t escape.
The truth is, I don’t want to write A Substack, and I never did. I want to write my newsletter, whatever that looks like over time. While there is obviously money in newsletters and the mini media companies some writers turn them into, there are not an infinite number of newsletters that can or should make money. I count mine among the ones that shouldn't, at least for now. I don’t want to be pushed into doing more (and more and more and more) monetizable work just because Substack once made it easy and free for me to start sending my dinky little emails.
In this, I’m following the lead of Andrea Grimes, who was on the road to much greater Substack success than I was and recently swerved off it and onto her own WordPress site:
Because the thing they say about planting trees — the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now — is roughly translatable to Substack. The best time to get on Substack was never. The best time to leave is now.
As an activist journalist, I knew I couldn’t continue to excuse and ignore Substack’s fundamentally predatory, exploitative publishing model indefinitely, and I wanted to get off the platform before it became even harder to leave — before I had hundreds instead of a few dozen paid subscribers. Before my list swelled to five digits. Before I became truly reliant on network recommendations to build and maintain my audience. Before — and I was already feeling this, somewhat — the pressure to churn out content for the paid subscriber machine killed the fun of it all.
I encourage you to read the whole post, not just for how Grimes convincingly (and entertainingly!) articulates Substack’s ethical issues, but for how she pushes back against the accepted idea that the right thing for a professional writer to do is always whatever generates the most money and biggest audience. No matter the goals of a particular project. No matter if a bigger audience means less room to experiment. No matter if more money comes at the cost of your own enjoyment.
Writing and reading on Substack is starting to feel like being in a walled garden. It seems nice and safe and pretty, as long as you don’t look too closely at who’s around you, or think too hard about what you might be missing outside. But for this project to remain what I want it to be, I can’t stay inside those walls, which are already growing higher and higher. I need to be off in the woods, with the people who want to find me there. Thanks for joining me.