We Should All Move to Substack

[dotinthesky]

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.

Comments

[picosgemeos.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, that's interesting to know... I wasn't aware they were doing that with data, so freely merging info and capturing so much detail. I thought (and I confess that I know little of how this technology works) that it remained exclusively within the relationship of the publisher (the newsletter) and the reader, with Substack just fuctioning as an arbiter, taking "a cut". I guess I trusted their marketing...

It's a good point that you and Olamina make about aliases.

Good luck with it!

Thank you!

[amw.livejournal.com]

I wrote to them the first time it happened (two completely different and unrelated mailing lists i had previously been subscribed to were merged under the same account) and it was early enough that their CEO replied to me personally. It was the usual "we respect your privacy but we think this will bring value to our users" schtick, which is now the standard line i get from CS every time i send another disappointed email.

Here are some ways you can see what is going on:

If you hover over a link in any email you will see a "gateway address" at substack.com which forwards you on to the actual address on the wider internet. This means they are tracking your clicks. Most all companies do this nowadays to analyze engagement with their content and customize future emails to try drive as many clicks as possible. The difference with Substack is that previously your click was private to you and the publisher, but now all the publishers are on the same platform so the metrics are consolidated. Even worse, on Substack these gateway links are obfuscated, so you cannot even see what the original link was by looking at the address, which makes it impossible to even know what a link is linking to without submitting to the tracking.

If you open up any email in "view source", you can see a personalized "tracking pixel", which is a tiny image that is invisible, but if you have images enabled in your mail client then it will automatically be loaded and used by the sender to track open rates. Again, this is common in marketing emails nowadays, but the difference with Substack is because they have inserted themselves as the middle-man between every publisher and reader they can cross-reference the tracking in ways that previously would not have happened when newsletters were not part of a monolithic social media platform.

Third is the push to try get people to install the app, which was really noticeable when some of the new features that they encouraged writers to market on their behalf only worked in the app. Companies love it when users install an app, because then they gain access to all kinds of personal data on your phone, as well as being able to consistently track everything you do and fire notifications to suck you back into their ecosystem. Substack already succeeded in making links useless in email, but at least with tracking pixels users still have the freedom to block images and preserve their privacy that way. Apps, on the other hand, are walled gardens that take the last shreds of freedom away from users, which is why companies try so hard to force people to install them.

Finally, Substack is a Silicon Valley company backed by venture capitalists, notably Andreessen Horowitz. History has shown that VC-backed companies care zero for user privacy because their raison d'être is to make investors rich. When an investor hands you 65 million dollars, they are doing it because they expect that you are going to hand them back 650 million dollars, not because they want you to build a better whatever. When a company has signed that Faustian contract, it dictates how they operate. Everything must be about growth. Increasing engagement is a key metric that boosts company valuation, so they track everything and it becomes a race to the bottom. Facebook and Twitter suck because they are a product of this system and Substack will eventually suck in exactly the same way because that's how the system operates. As Twitter shows, you can't even extricate yourself from the suck by going private again because after you sold out it's already too late.

To be fair, i probably have stronger feelings about this than the average person because i work in the industry, so you can just take this as one data point. For me the real way to fight media consolidation is not to move to yet another American-owned, VC-backed social media platform, but to support decentralized solutions and try to sprinkle your online presence across multiple sites so no one company can build a monopoly. Of course this strategy is fine for people who just want to hang out and socialize online, but it's not a good way to build an audience or make money, so i definitely understand why consolidated social media appeals to creative professionals.

[picosgemeos.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this response! Really appreciate it and you've given me so much food for thought.

I was actually thinking about online presence these days and the decentralized aspect of it - in the sense that in the early days all my friends were on the same chat board, or Livejournal, but now everyone is spread out. I had left Facebook some years ago but decided to return because I have a group of friends (ex-LJs) who only post there. Then I have a few on Mastodon, others on Bluesky, others only on Instagram etc. I think I really want somewhere that can hold everyone together again and maybe that's the Eldorado thinking behind me joining Substack. I secretly wish for just one place instead of having to keep checking different apps/sites.

My page on Substack is free and I have no illusions that I'll make money from it. I've been reading my old diary entries, LJ posts and pieces that I wrote and I think I'd like to use that space for posting them there, for having somewhere to point the few friends who might be curious. But I'm also very aware that Substack can easily disappear like countless other sites before - that something else will eventually replace it! We've all been around long enough to know how it goes...

[amw.livejournal.com]

This is a really interesting topic.

I think if you go back to the earlier days of the internet (1990s and early 2000s), it was far more splintered than it is now, but at the same time people didn't really care because being able to chat to even just a handful of people with a common interest on the other side of the planet was so new and exciting that it seemed like magic.

Then there was a brief period when it seemed like absolutely everybody in the world was on Facebook. Not just people with a common interest, but also your real-life friends, family members, loved ones... Being able to share a photo or a story with everyone in your orbit was incredible!

But then the skepticism started. Facebook started needing to make money, so we got ads jammed into our feeds and algorithms designed to promote engagement over quality content. Influencers and other marketing-oriented types optimized their content to extract as much money from the service as possible. People started worrying about their personal data. They started to see the downsides of "crossing the streams" between personal and professional life, or family and friend life. Bad actors swooped in and abused the systems to try affect political change. Kids didn't want to be on the same website as their parents - or their grandparents! And 10 years later here we are.

I don't know if we will ever go back to having a centralized spot where "everyone" convenes. People saw what that was like and - for different and personal reasons - many chose to move away from it.

The thing is, we can still create communities like LJ was back in the day, we just need to let go of the hope that "everyone" will be on there. LJ at its best only ever had a few million users outside of the Cyrillic side, which is like 0.1% of Facebook's current userbase or 1% of Twitter's. A couple years ago Substack already claimed to hit "millions" of active users, so it's likely already bigger than LJ ever was. Even if there are "only" a couple million people on a social network, that's still plenty!

The reason why i like the idea of Mastodon, Lemmy and other fediverse projects is because they hark back to the even earlier days of the internet when all we had was email, usenet, IRC and so on. Those were totally decentralized services - you connected to your local server on your ISP or a nearby university or hobbyist network, and there might only be a few thousand other users on that server so it felt personal. But the protocols were open and so those servers also synced up with other servers around the world, sharing information in a peer-to-peer fashion. By keeping everything decentralized in this way, it was hard for any one company to exert control. It felt so much more democratic than today's online world.

I suppose some would argue that federated systems don't scale when you have billions of users, or that open systems are too prone to abuse by bad actors, but maybe that's a perspective too wedded to the venture capital/growth-at-all-costs world view? Maybe it's fine to have multiple, smaller networks all running in parallel? If you think about it, that is how real-world communities work, so why shouldn't online communities work the same way? Maybe what we really need is all levels of government to provide platforms to their constituents as a public service, the same way they provide transportation systems and parks and playgrounds. But of course the capitalists who run all the global media networks have spent the last few decades convincing half the planet that the government is evil so maybe this is my el dorado thinking...

[picosgemeos.livejournal.com]

I think another aspect of social media which has changed, and is age-related, is the amount of time we have to spend on it. In the early days of LJ I was also a temp and had a lot of free time in my office. It was something to do to kill time! Then it became a way to make friends because I had just moved to London with my boyfriend and didn't know anyone - all my old, close friends now were met on LJ!

Nowadays, I have so many other responsibilites - I really notice how social media takes away from it.

But what you said about needing communities where we can meet like-minded people is true to how I feel about Substack. I see a lot of writers there that I admire and comments from users that are well thought and engaging. They remind me of LJ's glory days when posts sometimes generated hundreds of comments.

Maybe it all really boils down to nostalgia for my youth! :-)

[olamina.livejournal.com]

As a subscriber, every time you post Substack adds this at the end of the email "Picos Gêmeos is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Picos Gêmeos that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments." Just FYI 😉

[picosgemeos.livejournal.com]

So, something interesting just happened that I thought I'd share with you!

I'm currently logged into Substack via Chrome (I know, I know... I should probably stop using it.) I decided to take a look at my page using Microsoft's browser, Edge... and I was also logged in there. I thought that was weird as I hardly ever use that browser - only usually for Livejournal (I have an older LJ account that I'm reading chronologically).

So I logged out of Substack on Edge and this got me also logged out on Chrome. I can't remember this ever happening with another blog-type site.

[amw.livejournal.com]

That's wild! You have to hope that it was just a glitch, or maybe you followed a link in Edge a couple months ago and forgot about it, because if it was easy to hijack a session then you can bet malicious actors have already figured it out and are actively exploiting it. I imagine Substack is a juicy target for state actors and other ideologically-motivated hacking crews because of all the political bloggers on there, so one would hope their security is on point.

[picosgemeos.livejournal.com]

I'm going to run some tests and see what happens - maybe try with Firefox too. Will report back! :)

[olamina.livejournal.com]

I also feel strongly about this because I work in the industry..and I feel guilty about the small role I've played in perpetuating and profiting from this scourge on humanity.