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They are very pro free speech, so you tend to get more interesting (and potentially more heretical) writers compared to other platforms.
Could you provide a link or two of content that might be censored elsewhere? I am curious to read “banned literature”.
Substack crunched the numbers, figured out how much people were willing to pay for certain bloggers' materials. Then they found some very prominent bloggers and paid them huge advances to join the platform. It was very risky but it clearly worked.
And now we are seeing the downstream market adapting in kind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I figured that the NYT would go for the identity politics angle when building a takedown for one of their budding competitors. What I found most amusing about that article was the lack of mention of Bari Weiss, the extremely popular Jewish journalist who wrote for the NYT for years before joining Substack and quickly becoming one of their most popular paid newsletters. It seems like a pretty relevant detail in the Su…
The article is pretty embarrassing for the NYT and also a good example of why people are abandoning the old media. The top talks and talks about it being dominated by white men. Then further down the article, they list the top sellers: "The most successful is the history professor Heather Cox Richardson, who has more than a million paid and unpaid subscribers. Other notable writers include the knighted novelist Salma…
> The platform portrayed itself as a haven for independent writers with fewer resources while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men.
Is just describing how it was formed and indeed the list of 'recruits' was largely male and white (Greenwald, Yglesias, Singal, Deboer, Sullivan, etc). This is perhaps an unfair framing because there were indeed Women and PoC in their list of Substack Pros as well, but they had smaller audiences and their advances were substantially smaller.
> "The most successful is the history professor Heather Cox Richardson, who has more than a million paid and unpaid subscribers. Other notable writers include the knighted novelist Salman Rushdie, the punk poet laureate Patti Smith and the Eisner-winning comic book writer James Tynion IV."
Is describing who's popular on it today.
Those two paragraphs don't have to be consistent for the story to be accurate..
Here's a more skeptical article about Substack's (future) popularity in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/media/substack-g... The article also touches upon factors of Substack's success: > [...] the platform portrayed itself as a haven for independent writers with fewer resources while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men. The hands-off content moderation policy [...]
I don't get why they needed to put this in unless they they are trying to say the platform is racist and sexist. Maybe the NYT is afraid of competition?
Many writers like them because they seem to have made both costly and cheap signals to show that they are on the side of writers: (1) they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform" (2) they let the writer own their audience / mailing list (so they can leave with their audience, if they want to) (3) they advanced money to popular writers These things with the addition of a si…
> they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform" "Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days. It's close to being a dog whistle for the alt-right. I'm surprised this is a stance that would attract more "excellent writers".
[1] - https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
Substack feels like Medium except instead of blogspam from overexcited junior React developers, you get blogspam from wannabe pseudo-philosophers. As other have mentioned the lack of Paywall is nice tho. Medium had one of the most frustrating iirc.
Substack has a more journalistic feel to it. It also seems to have a broader audience than Medium, which I mostly associate with tech content.
Many writers like them because they seem to have made both costly and cheap signals to show that they are on the side of writers: (1) they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform" (2) they let the writer own their audience / mailing list (so they can leave with their audience, if they want to) (3) they advanced money to popular writers These things with the addition of a si…
> they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform" "Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days. It's close to being a dog whistle for the alt-right. I'm surprised this is a stance that would attract more "excellent writers".
I'd disagree. It's unpopular with left-leaning mainstream audiences, but among intellectuals who write for a living, I imagine that extra assurances of not getting kicked off the platform are rather attractive.
Many writers like them because they seem to have made both costly and cheap signals to show that they are on the side of writers: (1) they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform" (2) they let the writer own their audience / mailing list (so they can leave with their audience, if they want to) (3) they advanced money to popular writers These things with the addition of a si…
> they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform" "Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days. It's close to being a dog whistle for the alt-right. I'm surprised this is a stance that would attract more "excellent writers".
There are two questions here, really. The first is why does Substack appeal to readers? To me, it doesn't. What appeals to me are the writers. If I care to read what they write, I'd read it on any platform. They happen to be on Substack, so I read them on Substack. The other question is why does it appeal to writers, in particular the more popular high-quality, high-prestige writers that are attracting readers? I don…
I work at Substack. We are building https://reader.substack.com/ for people who prefer pull. Supports both Substack and RSS. Still early days for that product but we are investing in it.
In such a subtle way it covers much of what substack is doing well and twitter isn't doing well.
>Does it have some kind of a hidden feature that makes it very appealing?
Really just a lack of certain hidden features. Ones that twitter excels at.