We Should All Move to Substack
After months of indecision, going back and forth, I've finally dipped my toe into Subtack's waters and launched my first newsletter/post. Here's my little town: ollieredfern.substack.com
I've changed my mind and now think it's a fairly good site, for now. So many of my favourite authors are there, a lot of interesting ideas are being exchanged, and the site itself is beginning to morph into something resembling a hybrid of Wordpress + Mailchimp + Twitter instead of just a newsletter platform. It feels like the next stage for bloggers and writers.
I'd previously written about how Substack had decided not to do anything about Nazis monetising via their site and how this had made me pause for thought. But then Substack went and banned the Nazis (though they didn't change their terms and conditions - they just applied the clause that prohibitied content that incites violence.) It also turned out that there were only 6 Nazi newsletters, in a sea of 100K newsletters, and that the investigative reporters for The Atlantic, who broke the story, had to do a lot of digging and searching to find them.
This particular Substack post made a convincing argument that the site shouldn't decide what we read. Their point was that hateful content can be found in all social platforms now and moderation hasn't been able to get rid of it, but what's set up in Substack greatly cuts hate out because you simply don't sign up to it as a reader or writer, nor does it ever get shown to you (via trending hashtags or posts.) When I reflect on other sites that I use, including Livejournal, can I honestly say I won't find transphobia, Nazis, and other forms of hate if I go looking?
I guess the clincher was the monetising aspect, but that's now been dealt with and, in any case, an argument can be made that other forms of monetisation can take place (e.g. a Nazi could have a Livejournal account where they post links to some third party site where they sell merchandise.) And let's not even get started with Facebook and what can be done with our data.
The most important point for me is that Substack has aggregated a wide, interesting and strong amount of writers. Because of newsletter monetisation, there aren't any targeted ads so far (knock on wood), meaning the experience is clean from start to finish.
Which leads me to my next conclusion: we should all leave Livejournal and use Substack.
Hear me out! All the functionality that we have here is now present over there, but with added bonuses. Substack, like Livejournal, allows you to follow users, filter or lock posts, design the template of your journal/substack, add videos, photos or more. Posts can be tagged and organised via sections, and writing is shown chronologically in the Substack's dashboard. People posting great writing here (I'm thinking of those of you who wrote such great stuff for LJ Idol) could get some financial return for it over there. Some Substacks are also about photography or illustration, breaking away from the idea that it only needs to be about words. A lot of Patti Smith's posts are videos of her chatting or rehearsing a song.
There's also the Notes functionality, Substack's version of Twitter, where open content can be "restacked" (retweeted) with comments added. The pressure is off to have to post long form content all the time; you can just post a note with a photo or whatever.
Livejournal has been a wondeful place for us all; we've made great friends here, become better writers and found a space to post some intimate thoughts and experiences. In a way, maybe that's Livejournal's single strength now: a site where you can just write about your daily life. But I argue that that's now possible on Substack too, with the added bonus of being able to read some great people, interact with them, and make new friends.
I'll remain here for as long as you are also posting because I enjoy your writing. But I think I'm finally comfortable with the idea of bringing my Livejournal story to an end.