Substack Thinks it's a Twitter Killer with Notes

Can Notes grow a struggling app?

Hey Guys,

While some creators increased paid subs revenue by 19% or more with Substack Chat, that’s more internal to your private audience, Substack Notes is coming. Upvote them on Product Hunt here.

Subsack says it’s building a system that fosters deep connections and quality over shallow engagement and dopamine hacks. We turned away from advertising and the attention economy and toward subscriptions and direct relationships.

But is a Note in Substack’s app really a direct relationship or a top-of-the-funnel impressions juicer for shorter attention spans? It certainly has nothing in reality to do with Twitter.

Though Twitter Notes were supposed to offer long-form content on Twitter, I’m not sure where we stand with that. I’m in the camp that Twitter will go bankrupt in three to eight months in 2023 from now April, 2023. That is, there’s a 75% probability it won’t last the year. Twitter could be gone from the internet well before TikTok gets banned, if it ever will.

GenZ is reinventing what the Creator Economy means to them. So how do legacy networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook even survive the onslaught of mobile video and others more immersive forms of communications and entertainment? Substack is neither here nor there.

Substack can raise $7.2 million on WeFunder (legally it can only take $5 million a year), but can it build an app? Substack Chat did not make Substack’s app more useable or sticky. So what now? Trying to kill Twitter seems like low hanging fruit. Twitter has lost the majority of its advertisers and its paid subs hasn’t worked at all.

So is the Substack Notes to Tweet analogy even true? Well, Substack announced a new Notes feature on April 5th, 2023. It apparently closely resembles Twitter in its design, and, much like “tweeting,” allows users to share posts, images, and ideas. It also has a “restack” feature that allows for easily resharing of posts, the same as a retweet. It keeps count of “likes” and comments too.

Silicon Valley media coverage of Notes basically goes like this:

Substack’s new short-form ‘Notes’ feed looks a lot like Twitter

I was hesitant myself to use Substack chat, based on what I was seeing. But if I’m forced to do chat and notes, it’s just “more work” for me as a Creator. Not all of us will be podcasters, entertainers and jugglers of digital dopamine, some of us just want to make it on our own terms, as a writer.

In the mid 2020s that may no longer be possible.

Substack introduced Chat in November, 2022. Perhaps not one of their better product features.

Introducing Substack Chat

I was concerned seeing some of the comments about Notes yesterday and today:

Introducing Substack Notes

Mobile is hard guys, especially when you lack of a real marketing budget like Subsack has.

They mostly promote on Twitter, not even LinkedIn. They mostly focus on community, not marketing. They mostly rely on their 17k paid creators to “refer traffic” to their platform, then spread this traffic via their recommendation engine.

Somehow they haven’t implemented referral systems where Creators can incentivise their readers to refer others in a very effective way.

I love Substack, but this isn’t the best of both worlds.

They attribute Ads to what is toxic about social media, but in this they are both right and wrong. They seem to be making a dig at Medium when they wrote:

“We were dismayed with the clickbait and content farms, the listicles and liars, the cheap outrage and culture wars.”

When Substack is mostly known for political clickbait, misinformation and cheap culture war propaganda, it really makes me pause. I need Substack to welcome all writers, not just culture writers. I write in the Technology category, and my folk are only starting to build on Substack. (The way Substack is going with news and tech, it’s basically gifting these categories to the competing beehiiv). Culture eh?

I want Substack to be an economic engine for writers, not culture or entertainment. To call it an economic engine for culture, is a very subjective arbitrary statement. Does Substack enrich my cultural understand and reading IQ? Can I find great news on the platform? I would pay for great news. So do Millennials and GenZ.

However Substack is not known for factual news. It’s known for dramatic political writing and exaggerated op-eds that are highly speculative. Hey, if that’s your thing! In the U.S., they hold politics close to their bosom, in most other places in the world we couldn’t’ care less.

Without caring about breaking news and trending world events, how can Substack even be compared to Twitter? It makes no sense.

1. The company seems to agree that the new feature looks similar to Twitter, as Substack noted in its announcement post that Notes “may look like familiar social media feeds.” However, Substack argues that Notes differs from traditional social media feeds because it doesn’t run on ads.

2. “The lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed is attention,” the company wrote in a blog post. “By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing great work within it.

No, the competition for attention does corrupt entirely into clickbait, and Substack has not been different just by not incorporation Ads. If Substack wants to play an ideological card, at least be honest. I say this because I grew up on Medium where the ideological playbook was nearly exactly the same. I spent years investing in a false promise, that turned out to be a gimmick.

Substack Notes Has To Work

But Substack may not have the luxury of listening to its customers, writers and readers at this stage in its evolution. The stakes of its survival are too high.

Substack Tweeted its Notes feature yesterday. On the only platform it’s ever done actual marketing, Twitter.

If I’m on a platform that claims to be a pure-play paid subs approach, do I need to be an entertainer just to survive and thrive? Does Substack need to have real app features beyond just great writing to grow? In this day and age of mobile video competition for attention, pretty much.

By growing its audience from politics on Twitter, Substack is basically tied to laws of clickbait that are all-corrupting. As a humble writer attempting to make a living on Substack, I’m tied to these norms too.

I’m forced to do a Sponsored Ads/paid subs approach just to make anything approximating a working wage. Why wouldn’t Substack try to empower me, it’s customer and marketing associate? By making the false claim that Ads are what makes social media toxic, I am being penalized. I have to look out for myself in how I grow an Email list and peddle my value to potential advertisers off-platform. There is a deep dichotomy here in the launch of Substack Notes.

The Philosophy is Idealistic but not Practical

TechCrunch tries to contextualize it as such: Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content.”

Even though Substack Boost has helped me grow my paid subs, I don’t pray at the altar of this kind of idealism, because I’ve seen it fail too often in the past, well before Substack came to my town.

If I can earn a modest living after three years of writing a Newsletter, what is the price of my loyalty to the platform? I’m the sole breadwinner of my family guys. The livelihood of real people is at stake.

There are more than 35 million active subscriptions to writers on Substack, including more than 2 million paid subscriptions. There are just 17k paid writers on Substack after five years. The churn rate for Creators is high, those that stick around may get rewarded by the Substack Network.

I’m in my 40s, do I have the ambition to gamble in this kind of game? I wonder how others feel about it. From LinkedIn, Twitter to Medium the gamification and declining ROI is noticeable as the internet continues to evolve. If Substack is mostly for the top 1%, if I’m not creating ROI for engineers or from a tech journalism background, do I have a chance?

Substack is launching a new feature that actually is a lot like other social media feeds: Notes.

After spending years being critical of social media, Substack is trying to inherit it on its own terms.

Twitter or Reddit aren’t toxic places because they have the occasional Ads, bro.

Notes feature will allow Newsletter Creators to be set free: it will "give them the power to recommend almost anything — including posts, quotes, comments, images, links, and ideas," co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi wrote in the announcement. The feature will be available to all users in the coming days.

You know the things that would set me free? More diversity of revenue streams. NOT relying on just paid subs that scale very slowly. Too slowly for most to even keep up writing Newsletters.

Even misinformation at scale, I can somehow accept. But limiting the revenue of your own customers and creators? That’s just bad leadership. It’s poor business sense. It doesn’t make you different, limiting their revenue is not a unique selling point (USP).

Because what makes social media toxic is complicated and goes well beyond the competition of Ads.

Substack also argues that Notes won’t feel like traditional social media, and that the goal with the new product is not to create a “perfectly sanitized information environment,” but to allow for constructive discussion where there is enough common ground to seek understanding “while holding onto the worthwhile tension needed for great art and new ideas.” In other words, they won’t have any content moderation. They are frankly way too poor to do content moderation at scale. Which you know, doesn’t even bother me.

Anti-vaccine conspiracies just isn’t for everyone. Anti Trans commentary is not for everyone. Hyping what’s trending on Twitter isn’t my cup of tea, but maybe it is yours.

What if Twitter Goes Bankrupt

Along with Post News, Mastodon and so many others, where will Twitter users go if Twitter dies, which appears highly likely in 2024? Substack Notes in this context makes sense.

If Creators are in a battle for attention, platforms are in a battle for users. Substack has room for improvement, it needs to be opportunistic. This isn’t a cultural revolution, this is business.

I’m all in on Substack, and sure I wouldn’t mind if it got some of Twitter’s users but it needs to get better at what I do, covering the actual world and the news. That’s what makes Twitter so special, breaking-news and watching it on a global scale.

"Our goal is to foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, while giving writers a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences," Best, McKenzie, and Sethi wrote

Guys this is more than just entertainment, I want news that is trustworthy and indie journalists who take it seriously, not just dramatizing one part of the story! I’ve been reading subjective op-eds on Medium for years and it never really goes far into the truth. The subjective route is adolescent, at best. I also want reliable information, sources I can trust.

Mechanics of Notes

1. Notes appear in their own dedicated tab, and the feed looks pretty similar to what you might see on Twitter or other social media platforms.

2. On individual posts, for example, you can see familiar icons for likes, replies, and reshares (which Substack will be calling “restacks”).

3. The character limit on Notes is not yet public.

4. The Notes tab also has two feeds separating “Home” and “Subscribed.” The Home feed will show content from sources across your “extended Substack network,” according to Tobin, while Subscribed will show content from “a smaller universe of sources tied to your subscriptions.”

5. With Substack Chat, Subscribed and Home Notes is going to get a bit confusing.

What is the Goal of Notes?

To my understanding, Notes is a way to create more buzz and impressions at the top of the funnel through a teaser post of content.

“Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences,” they write. “The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers.”

All of this being said, Substack may be well positioned to capture some people who are looking for a new place to post, especially if those people want to build a subscription business. Who would not want a side income or a place that connects the dots with their existing:

• Podcast

• YouTube channel

• Books or Ebooks

• Courses

• Other Creator activities (.e.g. IG, TikTok, Snap, etc…)

Substack is a stack that isn’t an all-in-one, you really do need to connect it with other things you are doing online, even if that’s just LinkedIn and Twitter. Not everyone wants to be a YouTube Creator or sell Sponsored Ads in their Newsletters, but those that do, obviously have an advantage to scale their Newsletters and their Creator brand online as a media business.

TechCrunch makes a rather half-hearted argument stating that:

It’s worth noting that with Notes, Substack is not only taking on Twitter, where many back-and-forth threaded discussions between writers and readers already take place, but also other online communities where writers have been building out networks of their own, like Discord, Slack and Telegram.

That’s a pretty laughable argument and simply is not true. Nobody uses Substack as an alternative to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Snap or WhatsApp.

Finally Substack said this about Notes:

Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack (think top of the funnel). But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links. Our goal is to foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, while giving writers a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences. 

If I’m a Creator on Substack who wants to grow faster, this means not doing Notes is non-negotiable for me.

I don’t have high hopes, I just want Substack to be more than a ponzi scheme for the top Creators (the top 5 of each category earn the lion’s share of all revenue).

The company recently revealed that readers have paid writers more than $300 million through Substack, and that the platform now has more than 35 million active subscriptions, including two million paid subscriptions. Substack also revealed that more than 17,000 writers are earning money on Substack, with the top 10 publishers on Substack collectively making more than $25 million annually. Don’t even get me started on whether its community funding round is a great way to raise capital or exploits its uniquely flawed ideology for profit.

I love Substack, but it needs to do better in audience growth, ideological leadership and actually supporting Creators and writers survive and thrive. If only it actually put the Creator first, and not its own rigid and somewhat outdated ideological foundation which is a superficial way of seeing the future of the internet.

Now I have to put on my Twitter hat, and grow some entertainment balls. While creating clickbait on Substack. See you around.