Substack in 2024; Controversy can Rejuvenate an Independent Voices Platform
Substack is rejuvenated after a paid media purge and exodus of critics in a mainstream media funded campaign.
Hey Everyone,
Substack’s ability to rejuvenate itself is going to be more significant than a mainstream media in decline due to the declining quality of social media, poorer performance of Google search and a number of other factors in how citizens are seeking alternative Op-eds, news and coverage of the world in which we live.
Substack is a bold experiment in freedom of expression, community and supporting writers from all around the world to build their own publications and experiences for global citizens.
Writers who aren’t invested in Substack’s community of writers also won’t see Substack the same way as those that do try to grow the success of others and actually care about their peers. Substack isn’t just the relationship between a writer and their readers any longer with Notes, where more collaboration is fostered and more of a sense of communal identity separate from the rest of the internet exists. After six years Substack’s brand identity is forming in its core group of writers, and not just among its scattered readers.
The latest attack on Substack by the Atlantic, itself a competitor of Substack with 22 Newsletters, many of which are quite political (very similar to Substack itself), and the mainstream media as a whole supported by actual ‘journalists’ on Substack - endears me to Subsack even more.
Funny how that works! On the spectrum of censorship, content moderation to free speech and people forming groups, and as a platform for the little guys, Substack’s survival is now in an election year, more important than ever.
I tried to ascertain the damage to Substack’s Newsletters leaving and audience, because the mainstream media conveniently leaves out those details out who has left in their pretty poor blanket coverage. I do not think it’s very significant on the Newsletter/publications leaving, however maybe more on the audience churn on the political left in terms of paid support.
Casey Newton was perhaps the most goofy actor in all of this drama. Given that Substack has treated him like a VIP with benefits (extreme favoritism), supposed to be one of the poster-boys of actual journalists making it on Substack, it was pretty brutal to watch his conduct. It also shows how Substack hasn’t been very aligned with who to boost. A platform like Substack should boost for the record, people more likely to be loyal to the platform, the little guys. The home grown peasants with pitchforks, not some privileged NYT expert in hyperlinks with dozens of cozy buddies on the inside of America’s rapidly declining institutions of journalism.
Boosting an ambitious journalist from Silicon Valley who already had gigs with The Verge and the NYT, maybe wasn’t the smartest idea Substack ever had! Someone who clearly couldn’t care less about damaging the reputation of Substack in the process of his own “investigative” crusade (even contacting Stripe) on content moderation after having profiteered immensely from Substack’s recommendation engine (which is now a shadow of its former self btw).
Thank you for your Service
Still with every funded campaign by the mainstream media to damage Substack as they grind losses in their own paid subscriptions media, some good people have left. Email and Newsletters have always been a revolving door. Talent in, churn out. This isn’t particularly unusual. A majority have moved to Ghost, beehiiv or ConvertKit.
RIP:
1. Platformer
190,000
https://www.platformer.news/why-platformer-is-leaving-substack/
2. The Food Section
3. Citation Needed
by Molly White
https://citationneeded.news/citation-needed-has-a-new-home/
4. The Disconnect
https://parismarx.substack.com/welcome
5. Garbage Day
69,000
6. Search Engine
with PJ Vogt
7. The Handbasket
Marisa Kabas (organizer of the “petition”)
8. The Racket
Jon M. Katz (instigator)
Now on beehiiv, read: https://theracket.news/p/off-stack
Subscriber Estimate Lost
To be generous I’d say 500,000 subscribers left with the exodus of around two dozen publications. Considering Substack has in the area of 35,000 publications, it’s not a very large exodus. In fact, it’s more bark than bite. It’s impossible to know how many paid subscribers unsubscribed when the mainstream American press did their copy-pasta campaign.
Also considering that many of these subscribers will stay on Substack since they follow other publications here, most of them are not actually lost at all. Consumers have been dialing down on paid subscriptions as discretionary income slows. I think the point is paid subscriptions are in decline everywhere in 2023/2024 for written media. Even TikTok is stuffing its feed with TikTok Store Ads and slowing its own (paid) growth tremendously by doing so.
Still quietly a lot of churn of some of the bigger Substack influencers (like Grit Capital) have been occurring since the pandemic, and this may be a sign that the Newsletter economy has slowed along with the advertising slowdown, a Creator Economy startup winter and other macro factors for the most part outside of our control. Crypto people leaving Substack is nothing new given that crypto media is pretty well lost. Those crypto bros are now AI bros. Media is a tough business, and now you have to compete against AI spam that’s basically breaking the Google SEO model.
Substack’s Coverage of Substack Controversy
Substack definately isn’t an alternative media ecosystem but it is a complementary media of independent voices. This ecosystem of voices across topics is better even than failing news aggregation apps in terms of developing sustainable revenue. With Notes and more community products, it’s also less mob than tribe. Substack has managed to develop a writer identity. All of this is lost in the Creator Economy media coverage it seems as well.
These independent voices do deserve Native sponsorships and whatever other help to monetize they can to survive as independent voices, as extraordinary a job as Substack has done with paid subscriptions. In 2024, we’re reaching paid subscription saturation in media and blogging. Typically media needs to pivot when you hit a wall, but most Media outlets are doubling down on Newsletters (Substack’s own business). The reality is there won’t be room for everyone as Boomers and GenX age (the main readers and main paid subscription supporters). It’s demographics baby!
Our independent voices have also made some interesting reflections on this episode (Substack vs. Nazi sounds so weird) that in itself was a very “entertaining chapter” in Substack’s history.
If the campaign was actually true, you would think it would have had a far bigger impact. When you had idealistic journalists and researchers on Substack actually believing a “hit campaign” by The Atlantic and its funders, you see how permeated with misinformation the internet has come. Even a censored and content moderated internet is failing to even give you the truth.
Substack is its own beast in terms of the amount of misinformation people want to consume as we naturally gravitate towards topics and political orientations that affirm our own thinking, values, beliefs and cravings for belonging no matter how ephemeral. The internet is today full of synthetic media that is not going to be terribly truthful, it’s not as if content moderation has worked particularly well.
Google in 2023 and 2024 seems partially bad at telling the difference between fake sites generated by A.I. and real high quality sources. Social media and Search is breaking down as a whole, which is actually a much bigger story! I warned about synthetic media spamming the entire internet a long time ago. In 2024, we are starting to see some semblance of how this is taking shape.
There has been so much written about this, it might even be a case of bad publicity (“all publicity is good publicity”) is good publicity when it helps people discover Substack.
Substack as a collection of independent voices doesn’t replace a media in a stark decline, but it does complement how we read online and provide outlets for various groups of people, beliefs and specialized interests. There’s a high chance that Twitter, known as X, will go bankrupt and will strain the finances of Elon Musk. It cannot keep up as a broken model indefinitely with so many lawsuits pending. Buying Twitter was clearly Elon Musk’s worst decision ever. Also because it damages how legacy media used to work before the AI synthetic media onslaught.
Substack’s Coverage of its own Controversy
There has been so much written about this, it might even be a case of bad publicity (“all publicity is good publicity”) is good publicity when it helps people discover Substack. In an election year if Substack gets more right than left, is that such a bad thing at all? I mean wasn’t that inevitable after all given where Substack has found momentum.
The reality is, people are craving complementary media of independent voices. Whether in America, Europe or even places like India. Whether to sound politically correct or neutral, writers take all kinds of sides on this issue. Some defend Substack, others vilify it, but they are also doing this for attention and to reduce churn at a confusing juncture. Still I find it makes for some great reading.
And isn’t that the point after all! We aren’t here to be lectured to, we are also here to be entertained.
On the great Orange Fence…
Factual Issues…
Censorship and Media…
Hatchets for Pitchforks?
How to…
Is Misleading…
Some thoughts…
People like Eric Newcomer or Lenny would never have been able to make $1 Million without Substack for instance. It’s not just political wackos that are thriving on Substack. There are investor types and some Op-ed essayists as well outside the confines of easy definition.
A Great Death of Media is Coming
That is the beauty of Substack, it’s a tapestry of independent voices that no mainstream media publication like The Atlantic or the LA Times could ever replicate. In fact, those publications are unlikely to survive very much longer. Time Magazine is owned by the CEO of Salesforce, the Washington Post is owned by Amazon’s original founder, there’s a disturbing pattern in how media is controlled by Billionaires and Silicon Valley itself. We aren’t actually getting free media coverage in America.
Nobody actually wants to deplatform in 2024, since the internet is pretty broken. Why would you want to go to Ghost given that Google search has been hijacked by AI generated spam, bots and fraudsters stealing SEO traffic from legit sources? It’s not going to turn out well for you! The current decline of Google search means a Wordpress or a Ghost may as well be on the dark web. The rules of SEO no longer make sense on an internet permeated by more and more AI generated content which 99% of us consider SPAM>.
However the demise of Twitter and things like the decline of journalists on X has really hurt free speech, truth and independent voices as well. While advertising revenue has migrated mostly from Twitter to LinkedIn, more LinkedIn posts are also looking suspiciously like ChatGPT spam. I’m not sure Medium can keep on in its current form either. It’s a shadow of what it once was. Ten years ago I could find a rather uplifting brand of techno-optimism on Medium, fast forward today and most of that stuff is AI generated Venture Capital propaganda.
The Decline of Media will Corrupt Democracy
It’s clear the American Media will keep declining as democracy begins to fail. Wealth inequality keeps increasing, trust in Government and institutions keeps declining. The interest on National debt keeps increasing.
Substack in a sea of media failures, might be one of the last men/women standing. If Substack manages to keep it profitable, growing and independently owned. That’s not a sure thing in such a chaotic and political world. Startups are in terrible shape and media one of the hardest industries and Creator Economy startups seem particularly vulnerable.
Publications with a minimum of censorships should continue, because independent voices might be all that we will have left in a few decades. The AI generated media will just be a canvas for the elites. There’s little doubt about that, Davos 2024 showed us how they are using AI to foster their own agendas.
Substack in a sea of media failures, might be one of the last men/women standing. If Substack manages to keep it profitable, growing and independently owned.
Monopoly Capitalism is a system that might replace a lot of our current institutions, sort of like a dystopian nightmare from a novel. The free press is being hijacked and the Casey Newtons of the world won’t exist any longer even a decade from now. That’s why while I don’t read much political content, I’m much more comfortable with peasants with pitchforks writing, because it’s infinitely more human and entertaining.
People should be free to have their own opinions, and their own perspectives on the world in which we are living in, and a Silicon Valley brand of content moderation mostly conducted by AI, isn’t likely the answer. Elites should not be able to dictate the kind of news we are exposed to.
Storytelling is embedded in the roots of our culture and traditions as tribes, ethnic groups and communities, and writers need a place where they can congregate without feeling the all-seeing eye of Surveillance capitalism censorship. Nobody has the time to keep following their favorite writers as they migrate down black holes of traffic (Ghost, wordpress, beehiiv, etc..). beehiiv’s idea of recommendations is literally writers paying for new subscribers. It’s not even remotely building a sense of community among fellow writers. Instead its prioritizing monetization, Ads and scaling at a time when the Newsletter economy isn’t actually thriving (there’s bots). And how am I supposed to keep up with a writer who migrates to Ghost? Am I supposed to bookmark their website? Is this 2009?
I certainly won’t be reading even among my favorites of those who left, in fact, I mostly don’t even realize who is gone. I had to look really hard just to find a few that left in the old guard media contrived exodus. It just goes to show how incredibly gullible we are as writers. This also underscores how desperate the mainstream media has become, and their actual decaying commitment to the truth while they breakup embrace paid subscriptions - and this is important, way too late to save their business models.
Why is Substack Worth Supporting?
How people consume media will change with the decline of Google, mainstream media, and entire generations of readers who will age out of the economy. Zoomers and Millennials growing up on video and screens aren’t necessarily connected to reading in the same way.
The rise of synthetic media and AI generated content is a tidal wave that is very destructive, nor does it lead to media, writing and creative utopia. It’s not entirely clear what will even be left after all of this. There will be a major disconnect as the American model of the internet falters in how consumers and citizens are supposed to access good information, truthful information and human information.
Good information
Truthful information
Human generated information
Our decline in trust of the mainstream media has solid foundations in our own experience. Yet sources on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are even worse. Substack has a surprising amount of good information, ideas and unique perspectives.
The future of media might be unrecognizable in just a decade, and by supporting a writer on Substack, you are literally voting with your wallet for the survival of a small oasis filled with “little guys”, independent voices and something outside the control of elites, Silicon Valley and a very unfree press of the future that’s gone from a rising risk, to an inevitable certainty.
Like you, I really enjoyed the various op eds about the Substack vs Nazi issue. It also gave me hope that there are lots of level headed writers on this platform. And that's why I want Substack to continue. Substack enables writers like these to have a voice. In the media and on an algorithm-run Internet, extreme voices are usually amplified. On Substack there's a fairer and more likely chance to find voices in the centre.