Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
So “Polymarket is Doubling Down on Substack,” the CEO of Substack is “hyped,” a gaggle of Substack writers are up in arms over a for-profit company doing for-profit things, while onlookers are aghast, voicing their “I told you Substack is bad” quips on the very fine and respectable Twitter platform. Burn it all down.
The holdiday downtime has given me some breathing room to get this project done, moving 500 or so posts from Substack to my WordPress blog at Social Media Escape Club.
I did this 100% manually, too. I think I tried exporting awhile back and it crapped out somewhere along the line, and I just said fuck it, I’ll do it one at a time, which really wasn’t so bad because some stuff I wanted to reformat, re-do, or remove 100% anyways.
Why move all my posts from Substack to WordPress? Because someday the Substack platform will cease to exist, and I’ll have no record of my work otherwise.
Because Substack makes it too easy to accidentally delete your entire publication, just like how I deleted multiple posts when I thought I was deleting a podcast feed.
I don’t trust the Substack platform anymore.
My first music blog from 2001 is gone because we were young and dumb and moved onto other things, and we didn’t pay the hosting bill, and oops the domain name lapsed.
The 2000+ metal trivia questions I posted on Twitter as @skulltoaster from 2011-2018 are all gone, along with the 1000+ email newsletters via Mailchimp.
If I get locked out of my account, or Substack goes away, five years of writing goes away with it, and I don’t want that to happen.
Each Substack post is getting moved, and in its place I write “this post has moved…” along with a link to its new home on WordPress. This removes any duplicate work which might affect my SEO or domain health… but that’s secondary to me owning my work, my writing, my ideas.
I will keep sending my newsletter via Substack (for now), but it will not be my base of operations. Everything gets written on my blog first, then it goes from there.
Each newsletter post will include just enough meat and bones to make it a worthy open and read, and they’ll be links throughout for anyone who wants to go deeper.
As I wrote earlier this year, “my newsletter isn’t my permanent address, it’s a delivery truck.”
It all comes back to the web:
“The web platform … offers the grain of a medium — book, movie, album — rather than the seduction of a casino. The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.”
In this piece Robin Sloan also speaks of choosing to pay to send his newsletter, rather than doing it for free via Substack. Ahem.
That last part, though… how the web “offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.”
That’s where we hear the biggest whining. Oh, how it’s so difficult to be found, to be discovered. To do so, you must play the game. You must be a part of the casino, and the house always wins. And even if they lose, so do you (unless you built an email list in the process).
Now, if you just want to send a tiny newsletter, blog a bit, sure… have at it. Just know that there are forces at play consolidating and monetizing every pixel and every button. You won’t get bit today, but there’s no promise you won’t get bit tomorrow.
I’m on Substack long enough to move my original posts to my own WordPress site. I export my email list near daily at this point. My paid membership is now handled by Memberful. Someday my email list will be moved to Buttondown.
Yes, my website could go down. So could Buttondown. The power could go out. The sun will someday expand to engulf planet earth, too. This isn’t about perfect systems, it’s about creating a system I can live with, and feel okay about. Capitalism is rotten, and I wish I didn’t need to make all these moves and pay all this money, but this is reality, and groceries ain’t getting any cheaper.
Link via Brad Barrish
When I saw how fragile social media was, I knew I needed to exit. It was terrifying to see people lose access to their accounts. I can’t imagine how isolating it would feel to wake up and be unable to reach your fans or readers.
When I saw Lucy Werner’s Substack experience, how an inadvertent click destroyed most of her work, including her paid subscriber base, and being told there’s no way to fix it? No way.
I used to believe in having everything under one roof. One website for everything. Now I’m not so sure.
I signed up for Transistor to host my interviews. You can’t embed Substack podcasts on your site. That makes sense to drive people to Substack to increase subscriptions, but what about my own site?
I moved all my paid subscribers to Memberful, which I’ve used before. They’re owned by a solid company (Patreon) and do memberships. I pay them monthly, so if anything goes wrong, I have one company with a dedicated support team to contact.
Next is my email list. Linking to Memberful violates Substack’s terms of service.
“You may not circumvent your payment obligations to us by soliciting payment from a Reader outside of Substack or by using any alternative method to collect subscription payments. This includes receiving payments for your publication through links to PayPal or a separate Patreon page.”
True, I don’t “charge a subscription fee for your publication,” but I could wake up one morning to find my account suspended for linking to an “alternative method to collect subscription payments.”
This means I can’t promote my weekly Zoom calls to the 6,500 people on my email list.
In early 2024, I wrote “maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.” Putting all our marketing eggs into the social media basket wasn’t a great idea, and I’m beginning to think the same of Substack.
It is UNREAL that any setting other than DELETE MY ENTIRE SUBSTACK would delete your whole entire substack.
Please help.
My Substack publication. All my subscribers. All my posts. Everything gone.
How? I deleted my podcast and a glitch in the substack system meant it wiped everything.
A similar thing happened to
Chelsey Pippin Mizzi (although she still had her publication and data it wiped all her posts).
My stripe account is still working. I don’t know if my publication will come back. I don’t know if I create a new publication if it will attach to old stripe data. Or if I have to effectively bankrupt myself to refund everyone and then re-ask them to subscribe to a new publication.
Has this happened to anyone else? Can anyone help?
This happened to me, but it only wiped out about 10 video posts. Thankfully I had full back up copies of those videos, and was able to piece together the posts again. But the permalinks, the comments, the views, etc. – all gone.
So I had a handful of video interviews on Substack. They were sent out as newsletters, but they were also posts that I wrote. Not just show notes, but like… full posts.
Well, I didn’t like the way Substack handles podcasts… I mean, no individual episode art? The organization was a wreck, too. I just didn’t like how it felt.
I signed up a free trial of Transistor – for $19/mo you get unlimited podcasts. And they’re all just, like, in their own sandbox. Like, if I just delete one, nothing else is touched.
I learned the hard way that this is not the case with Substack. I uploaded all the audio from these videos to Transistor, and it worked great. Seriously. What a solid system. Everything just laid out in a way that makes sense, unlike how Substack sort of blurs together a post and a podcast episode.
Continue reading “SUBSTACK PODCASTS ARE MORE PLATFORM LOCK IN”From One Thing’s ‘The new rules of media‘ from December:
“Rely on nothing you can’t take with you. For now, Substack email lists and Stripe charges are still portable. If they weren’t, I would move to Ghost, because Substack’s incentive is to get you as locked in as possible. (Patreon still keeps your Stripe info, therefore fuck Patreon.) The same goes for audiences: Direct traffic, through homepages or email inboxes, is the most reliable because no one can take it from you, but it’s the hardest to cultivate.”
Discoverability is a myth propped up on social media’s legion of bots and active users. Yes, some people won, but that had to happen, so other people could see the lottery winners and believe they could win, too.
So Substack has partnered with The Free Press. Check out the comments on that post to see how that’s going. Oh, and Substack has a N*gger Problem.
Jesus christ and merry christmas, huh?
This has me thinking about leaving Substack, where I set up my Social Media Escape Club newsletter back in 2021. This was long before they rolled out their Twitter clone called Substack Notes, which has ushered in some major social-media-like vibes.
So yeah, Substack has sort of become social media.
I mean, I love that it’s been the driver of subscribers for me, to the tune of 4,500 people on my email list. But holy moly, being associated with this company is a mental drag.
Thinking of moving my operation to Buttondown, which will cost me $79/mo, but at least it will be without the drama and the 10% cut.
We talk a lot about not letting algorithms and AI take creative jobs – yet somehow we let robots curate “best of” lists and become tastemakers of music and media and art.
We subscribe to cool / smart / interesting people, right?
Then go to their Substack profile and dig through their subscriptions.
Dig around and find some blogs, click on the links in their posts – discover something new, fresh, and interesting from an actual human instead of a computer.
“I mentioned my ambivalence about my amateur podcasting and graphic-designing. He assured me that the problem was a lot bigger than me, or Substack. ‘This de-professionalization is a huge part of the transformation of work over the past several decades. It has happened to all kinds of professions, academia being one.'”
Sara Eckel from The Amateurization of Everything