Why I Won't Write on Substack

There is something perverse about every voice of record, every journalist with a profile, every writer with an audience abandoning ship for Substack. It's been a growing trend for the past few years, and it's getting worse. Substack has done an excellent job convincing intelligent people from legacy media backgrounds that their platform is the answer to their employment and editorial woes. If you've spent the greater part of your career in traditional organizations, setting up a "publication" on Substack is functionally no different than being given a column by any other publisher, just with less oversight.

Most recently, we've seen the Great Orange Bookmark wooing Joy Reid, ousted by MSNBC in their purge of non-white voices. The Substack pitch for established media figures makes sense - it's a hybrid model. Substack even pays established creators directly, easing their transition from traditional to "independent" (wink, wink) media. Alongside that financial support, there's the standard Substack dream of owning your audience, building a media empire you control, and captaining your destiny.

There are reasons why that offer isn't as attractive as it might seem. And I'll get to that. But there's a bigger problem with the capitulation to Substack, and I can't believe it needs to be said. It's the same problem writers like me have been screaming about from the top of our lungs for over a decade.

Namely, it doesn't end well for anyone when a single company consolidates a monopoly power over a media industry. History has lessons here. Lessons that are being entirely ignored, but lessons all the same.

We're in our present cultural and political shithole in large part because we allowed companies like Meta and Google to capture a monopoly and control a vertical, shaping discourse, culture and - ultimately - decline according to their whims. We're in a global backslide because social media companies captured users, harvested our attention, siloed us from each other, elevated outrage and misinformation, and farmed every fucking one of us for profit. We're in an economic quagmire because companies like Amazon have used that same monopolistic power to wipe out small businesses, drive down wages, and union bust their way to billion-dollar valuations at the expense of workers and taxpayers. You can count your way through every industry on this planet right now, and you'll find monopolistic, selfish, eat-the-world mentality tech companies trying to own and control everything.

Substack are no different. They aren't a non-profit entity creating space for writers out of the good of their hearts. They're a tech company funded by venture capital, whose end goal is to provide a return for their investors. And so far, those investors have pumped over $90m into the platform, valuing it at well over $600m. Those numbers should give pause to any journalist or thinker who is considering a long-term relationship with Substack. Because sooner or later, those numbers need to translate into something that benefits the backers. Whether that looks like an IPO, an acquisition, or entering the Uber cycle of endless fundraising, the people who matter the most to Substack will be their current and future investors.

And let’s talk about those current investors for a moment. Substack enjoys pointing to its community funders - it raised from some of its own writers through a WeFunder campaign - but its Series A and Series B rounds were led by Andreessen Horowitz. Yes, that Andreessen Horowitz. The ones whose founders are backing Trump and embracing a tech-driven vision of autocratic fascism, who write manifestos against government influence and responsibility, who recently made headlines by hiring an entirely unqualified man to become an investor with their firm, purely on the basis of his having killed a Black man on the Subway. For any journalist worth their salt, for anyone paying attention to the shape of the world, that should be a red flag on its own. Getting in bed with Substack means getting in bed with a cadre of assholes who are already in bed with some of the worst that humanity has to offer.

Substack cannot succeed by the standards of VC-backed tech while remaining compatible with providing a quality service for its writers. Those two goals are entirely at odds. Substack’s goal must be scale, scale at all costs, and growth against any other benchmark. You can argue with that all you like; you can point to flowery statements and ideals, but we’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. The forced decay of every tech platform occurs because mass growth requires product and community choices that are fundamentally opposed to quality. In the venture capital game, sooner or later, someone has to get fucked. And it is very rarely the venture capitalists.

We’re already seeing Substack’s choices drifting further and further away from their original goal of providing a home for writers. One of the core elements of their pitch to Joy Reid was, reportedly, a live video show hosted on Substack. Videos, podcasts, etc, have increasingly become a large part of their offering. These are forms of media that are antithetical to the act of producing and consuming the written word. Substack’s Twitter-lite clone, Notes, is another example of their current decision-making. It’s an attempt to capture their users - and their users’ audiences - further in a bespoke app, sucking them into Substack as an attention hole.

Substack’s writers didn’t ask for this. They’re not benefiting from it. So, what are they getting out of the platform?

The first, most obvious, is the Substack network effect. Substack pushes the idea that their signup flow, showing similar newsletters and creators as endorsed suggestions when a user subscribes to an individual writer, creates a network effect, allowing new ways to grow and build an audience. If I recommend you, and you recommend me, we can circle-jerk each other to internet superstardom. Or something like that.

But in practice, that engine just artificially inflates subscriber counts with users who aren’t particularly interested in the additional content they just checked a box for. They aren’t familiar with that creator, and they don’t give a shit about seeing their email in their inbox. In fact, half the time, they question why they’re even on the list, having forgotten the split-second choice they made in the middle of attempting to sign up for the thing they actually wanted.

The result? They won’t become paying subscribers. They’ll either drag down your open rate, report you as spam, or unsubscribe as soon as they get around to it while you sit with the false accomplishment of having “grown.”

Substack's second “killer feature” is that they offer a “free” publishing platform. But this is misleading. While they market themselves as having no upfront costs, their business model extracts 10% of your revenue plus processing fees once you monetize, creating a perpetual tax on your success. Compare this to Ghost, which charges a predictable monthly fee but lets creators keep 100% of their earnings.

As your subscriber base grows, Substack's percentage-based model becomes increasingly punitive—a $10,000/month newsletter loses $1,000+ to Substack versus Ghost's flat $99-299 monthly fee regardless of revenue. This revenue-sharing approach is a potentially massive hidden cost that grows precisely when creators achieve the success they've worked for, making Substack substantially more expensive for serious publishers.

And yes, if you’re a struggling writer, I can understand not wanting to shell out for Ghost or just trying to set something up - quick and dirty - so you can get your thoughts out there and hopefully eke out as much of a living as any of us are allowed to in the age of the super billionaires. But the fees can’t be ignored forever, and if we’re talking about creators who see independent publishing as their job, they make the platform entirely unsustainable. The margins are low enough on the work we do without Substack taking a cut.

For now, Substack lets its users import and export their mailing lists and readership. It’s a core part of their “own your audience” pitch. But it’s hard to believe that will remain a serious promise as user acquisition and churn become problems to be solved in the name of growth and scale. I have no scoop here; I have no revelation about Substack’s intentions. But I can point to every other social media and content company and say very confidently that none of them got where they are today, where Substack has to go, by allowing their users the freedom of movement.

And even if Substack continues to grant their users permission to move away from their platform, they’re adding as many lock-in features as they can to prevent that from happening. Even their podcast hosting, as pleasant an offer as it is (why pay $20 a month for Transistor when Substack will host your 3-hour conversations about Keto for “free”), makes it all the more difficult to leave the platform behind.

Let alone - most users, most writers are simply not tech-savvy enough to move their paying subscribers from Substack to another platform. Stripe isn’t exactly built for the non-developer, and while Ghost and others offer support for creators trying to make the move, it’s not an easy process.

I publish my blog and The Index on Ghost. It’s open-source, it can be self-hosted, and if you’re not interested in dealing with any of that, they can host it for you in exchange for a simple monthly fee. There’s no small print. There are no nasty surprises. You want a blog? You pay for a blog. And when you start getting paying subscribers of your own, Ghost leaves you to it. They don’t take a cut. They don’t monetize your audience. Their business model is transparent and reliable.

I can be a curmudgeon. I get that. But I don’t think any of this is unreasonable. If you’re serious about publishing, if you’re serious about an independent press and speech that isn’t reliant on a single company’s monopoly, you have to be watching Substack’s rise with a sense of dread.

No platform is ever truly free. That applies whether we’re talking about TikTok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook - or Substack. And if you think to yourself, this time, it'll be different, good luck to you. It might not happen today, it might not happen tomorrow, but sooner or later, you're going to get fucked.