No More “Substack-ing”

Substack has exploded in recent months in the trail running world with many athletes and creatives jumping on the platform as a way of expressing themselves and growing their audience. Probably a response to many finding out that the obligatory video play is well.. played out, and actually really time consuming and hard to pull off – not even mentioning that monetizing on Youtube has become harder and harder. Instagram’s algorithm is fucking with people’s timelines so engagement is way down as well. Where to turn? Bluesky? Threads? And start all over hoping to rebuild that social graph? This is all hard work.
In comes Substack, a somewhat proven but definitely simple to setup tool to send newsletters and hopefully monetize them along the way. Especially for folks not technically inclined I don’t begrudge them jumping on this rather simple solution to have a website and newsletter tool. I’ve mentioned before the nazi problem that Substack has and if you want to catch up here’s Anil Dash, one of the social web’s most important voices:

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down… four of the Nazis. Four. There are countless more now, and they want to use your email newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the cover they need.

John Gruber responds to Anil’s post focusing on Substack’s strategy rather than their awful politics:

Substack, very deliberately, has from the get-go tried to have it both ways. They say that publications on their platform are independent voices and brands. But they present them all as parts of Substack. They all look alike, and they all look like “Substack”. I really don’t get why any writer trying to establish themselves independently would farm out their own brand this way. It’s the illusion of independence.

Yes, this is the stuff I read and care deeply about when I’m not staying up to date on the constant changes at the UTMB World Series and what new shoes are dropping next. But to get back to the matter at hand: Substack is a shit platform and I agree with Gruber’s points completely:

My advice to any writer looking to start a new site based on the newsletter model would be to consider Substack last, not first. Not because Substack is a Nazi bar, which I don’t think it is at all, but simply because there are clearly better options, and the company’s long term goal is clearly platform lock-in.

But, I say it again: you do you. I understand that others have different reason for doing their thing and I will not judge, well maybe just a little. But here’s what I will do: I won’t call it a “Substack” anymore. It’s not “Check out Adam’s Substack” – it’s “check out Adam’s newsletter”.

There, that’s what I will do. And if you are on Substack and are looking for alternatives, Wired has an article offering some solutions like Ghost and Beehiiv. And if you need help migrating your content and audience, give me ring, I can help.