Goodbye Substack

Yesterday, aftering thinking about this for quite some time, I deleted my Substack account. I started to feel horrible about using the platform a while ago and I didn’t pay for any subscriptions because I didn’t want to put money into that company, but I was still subscribed to a handful of newsletters that I enjoyed.

If you’re not aware, Substack is doing absolutely no content moderation, which means there are folks using that platform to promote pretty horrible things. It’s been written about by quite a few large news organizations and yesterday I came across a helpful site that puts it all together (thanks Kottke), if you want to read about it yourself.

I think what’s been most disheartening for me is seeing people move on to Substack who previously hadn’t been. I’ve had one email newsletter do this in the past few months and one person who used to be a great follow via RSS is now hardly posting on their site at all and when they do it’s to steer you to Substack. It’s really disappointing to see so many folks congregating around this one platform as if it too won’t, in the end, do what’s best for the platform rather than users. We’ve seen this all before, and yet….

As an alternative to Substack, RSS is great and I’m finding more and more people who are writing on their sites and it’s been awesome. If you want some help to get going in that area, I just saw this article this morning, a handy how-to guide. I already linked to this before, but if you want to see some really good thinking about how Substack isn’t going to make it in the end, I think “Substack Did Not See That Coming” is worth the read. While I may miss a few newsletters for a week or so, I’ll get over it and in the end, I want to support and read folks who value the small web.