Disrupting Social Media: Substack Is In The *House*
Substack's Launch of "Notes" Today Is Super Promising
Hi! You are getting this email or seeing this post through a platform called Substack.
Substack made a big move today to disrupt social media with the launch of a thingamajig called “Notes.” Our Shift the Country notes show up here, and the main feed is here. It works either on the Substack app or on a computer.
Substack has already been disruptive, because it gives writers a way to bring in paid subscriptions to support their work. It’s pretty awesome. For us here at this nascent nonprofit, we have 29 paid subscribers out of 526 total. It doesn’t keep us afloat as a nonprofit (yet), but it has been super critical to getting this work off the ground the past several months.
The Notes platform launched today could become a very disruptive new social media platform. Specifically for short-form posts — not unlike Twitter.
“Disruptive” meaning that Substack’s Notes has real potential to pull big audiences/users from existing social media platforms that have turned into cesspools run by authoritarian-friendly billionaires (looking at you, Twitter), or that have over-engineered their spaces so much that people can’t write about anything meaningful and have any of their connections actually see that content (Facebook), and so on.
This isn’t the first social media startup since Elon Musk opted to disrupt Twitter all by himself by doing absolutely everything wrong all the time… every few hours. Post, Mastodon, and other new platforms have all made big leaps to grab Twitter refugees and other frustrated social media users. Lots of folks have tried out several options, but none have totally taken off yet with huge migrations of people.
Notes is different.
It’s smoooooooooth, for one thing.
While it’s not perfect, for real it is actually smooth. I’ve worked with cutting-edge tech since 2000. I’ve seen buggy tech. This isn’t it. It’s clean, it’s got clean lines, the crowd is nice, the functionality we might all expect from doing social media elsewhere is there, and it doesn’t hang up (with delays) for long.
It doesn’t have junk.
It doesn’t have ads. It’s a subscriber-supported platform without ads. That’s kind of enormous all on its own, and it’s gotten overlooked in most of the analyses I’ve seen on Notes so far today.
It keeps your place in the main feed when you go to look at or to share a post and come back.
It apparently allows threads. No video yet, but room for it.
Today, on launch day, it’s extra fun because you can connect with famous people who might not otherwise re-share your posts.
On Notes shares are called “re-stacking” — even though the posts are called “notes.” Insert laughing emoji and shrugging emoji. It’s a work in progress.
Still, it’s actually pleasant. Charlotte Clymer is not wrong. It has actually been fun. And it’s weird because, you know, that’s not how social media has felt for a long time.
Since we’re finally ramping shift up around here after a very long journey to get here, it’s also kind of fun to get in on opening day. Here’s the post/note/stack (whatever the proper term is!) from the founders. We responded on this thread, too.
So far for discoverability, it’s been fun. We’ve gotten new subscribers ourselves, and are now subscribers-to to a whole bunch of new stuff.
On top of all that, I think what can help push Notes into enough “stickiness” or resonance to go big is that it’s built on and anchored to an existing user base. That seems like a big key here to a new platform getting traction.
In this case, lots of folks using Substack have wanted more community capability. More ability to connect. Substack writers’ posts have comment sections but that’s not quite the same as an open forum where groups on the same tech can connect. Now that’s there.
Notes is still buggy — don’t get me wrong. One hinky bit is that you can’t (currently) just “follow” a writer on Notes. Rather, you have to “subscribe,” which means that everyone will get the Substack emails from whatever they subscribe to; depending on how much content may or may not be behind a paywall. For us here at Shift the Country, all of our content is free. That’s part of what paid subscriptions help with.
But for the social media aspect of Notes to really work, it would be better if you could just follow people for their Notes content rather than subscribe and get every email newsletter they every send.
There’s more! As a platform, Substack itself does video — live or sent via the newsletter platform. If you use the Substack app, there’s a text-reader so you can listen to regular newsletter posts rather than reading them. Substack does podcasts… which is where we’ll be launching our podcast from this summer once we have a larger audience and more funding.
Substack — the company — is not playing.
All of that is fantastic for an organization like ours. Its baseline capability is a reliable way for us to connect with our fast-growing audience… because everybody who signs up gets the email. Then they get to choose if they open it up or not. No one has to hope they see our stuff via a fickle algorithm. And our stuff doesn’t get buried because it uses words like “homeland security” or “terrorism” or “domestic violent extremism” or “immigration” or “politics” or “Democrats” or “elections” or “covid-19” or “climate” and so on.
You get the idea. It’s become nearly impossible for us to write anything with meaning on Facebook and have it seen. We gave up on Twitter when Musk took it over. We’re on Post but it’s sort of random how that works. We’re on LinkedIn but that’s slow and random, too… and it doesn’t seem to like politics much, either.
Anyway. Long post to say we’re excited!! Substack rocks! Enabling technology! Go team!
It’s really, really refreshing to have a platform that wants to grow, that wants its users to grow their audiences, and that wants audiences to be able to actually find content that is actually interesting to them.
Like wasn’t that what social media was supposed to do in the first place?
So, as the wise one would say, “We’ll see.”
But: Notes is promising.
Also! We’re ramping up our Shift the Country events for real finally! Join us Thursday to talk about how we can raise holy heck this summer what with all the threats to democracy and to humans and to our collective health going on.
Keep the faith — in humans, and in this democracy. Interesting humans with good brains were behind today’s fun day in disruptive technology here with this Notes thing. It bodes well for other things we can do with our very big brains when we create the space for amazingness.
Join us.
Um...I was never on Twitter. I checked out Notes...and I'm actually not 100% certain of what I'm seeing! I came across some of your previous posts, but the comments didn't appear? There were some "likes," but I can't tell whether that's from when they were posted originally, or from someone encountering them directly through Notes. I guess I need a little tutorial! Would love to post my comments wherever they are mostly likely to have impact. But I'm not certain whether that means continuing when I get the Substack notification, or if I should go directly to Notes.
Thanks for explaining! I’ll keep at it…