Why I Am Moving From Substack
It’s not as simple as you might think.
One of the attractions to Substack is that it is free. Another is a ready-made audience and community. But the rise of extremism and the investment by Marc Andreessen and Company has led me to rethink being there.
Why I Moved to Substack In the First Place
The original reason I moved to Substack to save money. Doing the self-hosting thing with WordPress had just gotten too expensive: hosting, email newsletter service, plugins for everything—it all added up. Substack was free.
I’m not looking to make any money from my writing, or sell anything, so this seemed like a good fit. I’m still in the process of dropping my hosting account with Bluehost, and getting my domains moved from them to Namecheap. That is taking longer than I expected, but I’m making progress.
I moved two blogs to Substack, and two over to Ghost. I didn’t want to pay for that, but Ghost had the features I needed for those blogs.
The Current Environment
But I have encountered two things that I did not expect. They both come from politics. One was the constant outrage in the feed you see when you log in or open the Substack app. The second was investment by the tech bro Marc Andreessen.
Warning, some politics: Throughout my life I considered myself a moderate Republican. Liberal on things like personal freedoms and conservative on defense and government spending. No big deal. Nothing extreme.
But I changed from Republican to Independent the day after Trump got the presidential nomination in 2016. He just did not represent anything that I thought I believed in. Ever since then, he and the people around him have just solidified that decision. I do not recognize anything about the Republican Party that I knew at this point. Maybe I just didn’t want to see it. I don’t know.
OK, back to my point. As I started using Substack, I would like various things, make a few comments—and their algorithm would feed me more politics. More outrage. I just got tired of it. Yes, as a good citizen, I should fight for whatever I believe in, but there comes a point where you just get exhausted. Maybe that’s what they want.
And then Andreessen & Horowitz and their investment group provided a massive cash influx to Substack. I get the need for Substack to have investors and be a successful business, but when you look at the way these tech giants are controlling the information space all across the board, you have to have a serious concern.
Substack has already had a track record of amplifying far right voices, and that in itself was making me rethink about my future on the platform. But I know that this investment will come with a cost. It may very well be a very real fee, as they try to keep Substack on a profitable basis, but it will definitely come with control. These people are very open about their disdain for democracy and their belief that they are the ones who should control the country and its citizens.
I don’t need that shit.
What I’m Leaving Behind
So I’m moving off Substack. I have set up an account on write.as, and am pretty happy with it there. Aside from the platform itself being really what I wanted, technically, it also does not have this feed shoved in my face every time I login. I really like that. I can read what others have written and published, but when I want—it is not the first thing I see.
But… I will be leaving some things behind that I will miss. There are a few creators that I follow that I really like. I hate to lose their content (even if it is paid). I’m looking for alternate ways to continue to follow them that do not use Substack.
I’ll also be honest: other platforms will probably cost money, too. Yes, I will miss the free part. Finding another platform has been pretty complex as well. I’m just not finding a free (or even cheap) platform that meets all of the needs that my other blogs have. (That search will be in a different article).
I’m still looking for a home for my other blog that I have on Substack. I haven’t found one that meets all of the needs for that one, so we’ll see. That is turning into a more complex task than I originally thought.
But more to come on this. I am staying on Medium for my main blog, and it will be a mirror of my write.as one. We’ll see where else I take my other blogs.