Is Substack social media?
It certainly wants to be
About a year ago, I moved my newsletter from Substack to Buttondown. I was disturbed by the increasingly unignorable fact that Substack was (and still is) making money from reprehensible content including, but not limited to, Nazi propaganda. I was also annoyed by how I was beginning to feel pushed toward Substack’s goals of engagement and growth, which ran counter to my goals for this newsletter.
Since I moved, Substack’s Nazi problem reached a boiling point, prompted some high-profile writers to leave the platform, and has now settled into the background simmer Substack banked on it eventually becoming. Substack is counting on us saying, oh, no social media platform is perfect, and at least this one lets me charge for my work. This is, in fact, what so many writers who didn’t leave Substack because of the Nazis said. The fact that many people didn’t make a principled stand when money was on the line (or, at least, they feared their money could be on the line) didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was how many writers accepted the argument’s foundational premise: that Substack is, and should be, a social media platform.
So, is it? Yes and no. There is still a way to use Substack, as both a writer and a reader, that doesn’t approach anything resembling social media or engage with the company’s experiments to push it in that direction. Readers can still receive a writer’s work in their inboxes or look it up on their Substack site without encountering anything else within the platform’s ecosystem. Writers can still, for the more part, ignore Substack’s promised growth hacks and algorithmic spaces, namely Notes. I would venture to guess that’s the way most people, and especially most readers, interact with Substack—as a more or less invisible tool that delivers emails from their faves.
But Substack is also intensifying its use of what Casey Newton (who left) called the “dark patterns” of social media. Substack is pushing its app, which is centered on the algorithmic Notes feed that makes context collapse possible in a way it could never be in an email inbox. The platform’s recommendation network—oft cited by both company and writers as Substack’s great advantage in terms of subscriber growth—is propped up by the distasteful subterfuge of aggressively prompting new subscribers to one newsletter to also sign up for other “recommended” newsletters, in a way that makes it unclear how to opt out of those additional subscriptions. Readers end up receiving a bunch of emails they didn’t realize they signed up for, and writers end up with a bunch of uninterested subscribers who rarely, at least according to Newton, convert to paid. Substack, on the other hand, ends up with a bunch of new “subscriber” numbers it can show to its venture capital investors.
This year the “dark pattern” situation got even worse, as new subscribers are now also muscled into “following” a bunch of recommended publications. Substack followers see your Notes and likes in their feed on the app, but they don’t receive your newsletters. Writers can’t make money from followers the way they can from subscribers, undermining Substack’s promise to help you charge for your work, if you want to. But more importantly, you can’t take your followers with you if you leave Substack. You can still export a list of your subscribers’ emails and move them to any other newsletter service you like, as I did. But your followers belong to Substack, the same way our followers belonged to Twitter. And we all know how that turned out.
This post is not intended to make any individual writer feel bad about using Substack. Substack is allowed to become social media, and writers are allowed to be excited about that, or at least believe it offers an acceptable ratio of benefits and drawbacks. But we also don’t have to believe the company’s social media transformation will benefit us, we don’t have to cooperate with it, and we don’t have to stick around. At the very least, we should make sure we understand how Substack’s incentives are changing before it’s too late—before we’re locked in, before we lose control of our audiences, before enshittification ensues. I wish I thought this story had a different ending. But it never does.