'you can't use Substack'

reflections on writing online in 2025 - and why the grass isn't always greener on the other side.

Look — I didn’t want to do this.

I didn’t want to allocate any budget from my word economy to discussing — gag — platforms. But the repeated discourse around Substack, the people who use it, and what using it says about them has — frankly — worn on long enough. I’ve almost left this platform three times now, and as a good little witch, I put a lot of stock in the Rule of Three.

Why haven’t I left? I thought I’d weigh in.

Substack is a useful tool. It’s especially useful if you’re a writer and a podcaster. The platform unifies blogging and casting in an intuitive, easy-to-navigate way. It gives writers the option to solicit subscriptions, offers a comprehensible statistics backend, and — most vitally — handles RSS feeds in-platform. If you host a podcast, it’s painless to transfer it over to the platform, and you can host your audio on Substack itself.

This is a give-and-take, as is any platform. Substack gets untold amounts of free material to add to their portfolio — hours of podcasts, thousands of images, millions of words. In exchange, users are given an easy centralized hub to share their work and solicit financial support. This is the same Faustian bargain most of us make when signing up for a platform to host our own work. They get our life’s work, we get to promote it. They get revenue, we get clicks with optional revenue.

Laid out nakedly, that doesn’t sound like a great deal. But it is somehow a more egalitarian solution than the majority of alternatives. I’ve been writing online since 2010, and in that time, I’ve observed a lot of changes in this house of flies. As it stands, platform holder being given free domain over your creative output is the lay of the land. While it is possible to, say, host all your content on a domain and network you have direct control over, most people aren’t in those circumstances.

This system of platform holders and creatives has become the default state of being for online media. As writers, we are often either putting our words onto these platforms ourselves or pitching for the chance to be on somebody else’s. Yet ultimately, most answer to the ultimate master: Wordpress. Substack offers a more intuitive UI, less price gauging, and more features directly pitched at the individual. Plus, it’s painless to export and archive your work if you want to move. That’s been my pitch to prospectives for a while now.

But let’s talk about the Bari Weiss in the room.

Bari Weiss is a writer and podcaster who came to prominence in the 2010s. Much of her public image is built upon parroting right wing talking points, then putting a moderate left spin on them. I’ve no real opinion of her work, having even read much of it, other than I find it all very surface and banal — contarianism for the sake of itself. I mean, I don’t like the woman, and don’t agree with many of her points. But I’ve never met her, y’know? Maybe she’s great to smoke a joint with. That would explain why she’s Bill Maher’s fuck buddy, at any rate. Is that misogynistic? Am I proving the gender criticals right? You be the judge.

Substack has partnered with Weiss to bring her new journalistic endeavor to the platform, and is — presumably — investing some sort of capital to get it off the ground. The platform holders have come under fire for being more open with what opinions can be expressed on here without scrutiny, so to many, this was yet another red flag. I can’t deny that — for a few days — I toyed with leaving the platform again as well. Truly, I don’t care for Weiss, her work, or the “intellectual dark web” she helped to mainstream.

I don’t, however, think she’s the anti-Christ. She’s not even the worst journalist working, and we all know it. Her proud Zionist views are unforgivable to anyone sympathetic to the ongoing Gaza slaughter, but they’re not particularly unique either. She’s an establishment neo-con in liberal’s clothing or neo-lib in conservative’s clothing, dependent on your mood. In other words — she is very American, and toes the line that most people outside of left-leaning circles are comfortable with, statistically speaking.

Now, this might not sit well with us morally. It also might not sit well that Substack is facilitating whatever it is she wants to do. Most things about our culture don’t sit well with me, personally, and I find them ugly, vile, what have you. But I can’t duck out at everything that makes me uncomfortable. Curating a social media for your personal enjoyment is one thing — there are many, many voices I don’t want on my own feed. That’s my personal choice.

Fundamentally, however, I think Substack is a very different thing. This is positioning itself as an alternative to long-time industry mainstays. That industry is wide-reaching, and thus, a lot of people are going to be brought under the umbrella that don’t align 1:1. If Substack wants to offer itself as a viable alternative to blogs, podcast hosts, and — hell — even lit mags and outlets, it needs room to breathe. It means breathing the same virtual air as people you wouldn’t want to be in a conversation with, sometimes. I draw the line at hate speech, at baseless conspiracy and at outright misinformation. These are things that do need to be nipped in the bud.

People are gunshy after Twitter, which I understand. It’s hard to get over having your socials of choice — almost overnight — turned into an AI hentai wasteland populated by Reddit rejects. We can’t, however, just up and run at the first sign of smoke. This is how we lose communities and give up precious ground — boycotts and moralistic wrist slaps.

That said — let’s have a brief chat about a few of Substack’s alternatives. Because I’ve given them a shot, and frankly remain unconvinced.

Ghost rubs me the wrong way from the bottom-up. It’s not designed for independent creators — the paywalls, the untenable UI, and the bare-bones CMS alone put me off when I tried to write a year-end movie piece in there. But there are other things. For example, the way I was personally contacted within 24 hours of making a site that — until I posted — my new URL wouldn’t be viewable until I either wrote a post or verified myself. While this might feel like a security step — which it’s advertised as — it feels like a tech bro approach to platform holding. “Make something right now, or we won’t think you’re a real person.”

Maybe I’m just getting old. I digress.

I also dislike Ghost’s podcast implementation, which essentially strong arms the user into finding a third-party option. At first, I welcomed the opportunity. Then I got a taste of the podcasting landscape circa 2024. Anchor has been subsumed by Spotify; Soundcloud remains cumbersome; Libsyn is a terrible service not worth the marked-up cost. I flirted with using Archive as the main host, but their lack of integration with podcasting apps would make it harder on my listenership. I don’t want to use YouTube to host for the same reason I’m committed to not making videos on there.

Then there’s PodCastle, which offers itself up as a friendly alternative with paid options past a certain use limit. I’m sure PodCastle is a great service for the people who use it, but honestly, I have apprehensions about podcast hosting platforms in general in this day and age. I’m also just not interested in shifting where I upload this show again unless the need feels really, really pressing.

Now, as far as newsletters go, I will not use Buttondown. Full stop. Their BlueSky profile is insufferable. Turning your newsletter start-up into a perpetual reply guy is not charming. There’s also not much there for me beyond maintaining and keeping a newsletter. It offers none of the ubiquity or functionality I want as a blogger.

But seriously — would things change if I jumped ship? Like, in the world at large? Would larger injustices be affected in any meaningful way? Hm.

To me, it’s insistence on ideological purity and parity per platform that has led to our current social schism at large. It’s as responsible for Truth Social as it is Blue Sky — i.e. leftie Truth Social. Why a billionaire trust fund brat was able to remake Twitter in his own myopias, and why Facebook is a retirement home littered with AI memes and Marketplace scams. Are we going to let ideologue-based outrage dictate what platforms we can and can’t use? If we do, then we can’t really expect the internet to get any better.

Substack is a useful tool, host to a great deal of writers, artists, and journalists I respect. Erin Reed’s newsletter is easier to stay on top of than her posts; Cintra Wilson remains the unkillable firebrand she always has been; folks like Maddie Gaw and Kristen Lopez have kept my interest in media blogging alive; Robert Evans is among several journalists I trust who still use the platform, as well. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Like, only the immediate people who came to mind. There are several more!

This is what gets ignored when we make a list called “Hanging At The Substack Nazi Bar” and let no-names publicly shame writers — unilaterally — who prefer a certain platform to another. We ignore the trans activists, alternative journalists, essayists, authors, and other respected figures who find it easier to use than platforms that require a bit more technical knowhow. We ignore that the alternatives are can be annoying, less feature-rich, and often involve some kind of capital exchange — you know, for supporting the “good ones.”

“Well, just make a Wordpress!” That’d be a great idea, had I not already done that — twice. Wordpress is a ubiquitous tool, and I use it in my day job. In fact, I’ve used it in every day job I’ve had since 2016. Furthermore, I was active on Blogspot from 2010 to 2018. I’d like to use Blogspot, really, but Google killed newsletter functionality in the past year — no dice. It’s a shame, but I’m surprised it took that long.

So in order to get the same functionality of a free Wordpress out of a Wordpress in 2024, users are expected to buy in; if you’re bringing an external URL you purchase, sorry! You can’t take advantage of Wordpress’ native newsletter tools. You’ll have to sign up for one of the dozens of terrible services, the best of which — surprise! — all cost money. You also have to navigate the WordPress backend, which still somehow sucks eggs!

But let’s make things even more transparent with hard numbers. I make around $2K a month at my current contract. It’s paid in one lump sum, usually at the end of the month. Up top, rent takes away about $575 of that; then bills, which range from $250-300. Factor in about $100-$150 a month for weed, I then have to budget the rest out for food, essentials, and amusement.

Some may find this situation alarming. Some may find it enviable. Others, poverty line; still others, lap of luxury. It depends on the day for me, personally. But I am very grateful for my current role, because it grants me an enormous degree of creative and personal freedom — and allows me to play homemaker while my partners are out of the house. However, it also has forced me to contend with budget in a way I never have prior.

Being budget-conscious, then — why , exactly, would I choose to pay for a podcast feed, a blog, a newsletter, and a URL separately? While I do plan on reviving the mads.haus URL, I feel like platforms that are as user-unfriendly, tiered, and self-righteous as the ones mentioned aren’t worth investing in. Because ultimately, that’s what participation in these platforms is: investment. Platform holders bank on people’s desire for ideological and social purity to supercede a degree of common sense.

None of this is to say that people who use switch to those platforms are all annoying, bad, or wrong - nothing of the sort. Some of them offer legitimate benefits to Substack. Others seem much more suited to organizations, which is fantastic. Ghost seems much better at group management, for one. Podcastle, too, looks to be the least exploitative host right now. Button Down? It’s a pretty comprehensible newsletter tool if you don’t want to do the whole Substack thing. Alternatives existing is a good thing; browbeating others into using them with performative social politics, however, is so 2017.

Because I, for one, tire of this zero sum game. Netizens play it with platforms, with companies, with respected journalistic outlets. If something does not conform to their experience or outlook, it’s put on a list, muted, and disengaged with. While this is a useful practice for getting less angry at words on your screen, it doesn’t actually address the root cause of terminally online behavior which is, well, being less terminally online. Turning your phone into a portable confirmation bias machine does little to actually make you engage with the world around you, or use the internet to do something useful.

Further, Substack isn’t really traditional social media. It’s a platform to do with what you will. Yes, that platform has given money to Bari Weiss now. So have several papers and websites who have also published writing by smart, insightful people that aren’t red-baiting twats. Does that mean we throw out those institutions — that WaPo, New York Times, BBC are all meaningless poison? I know and know of some fantastic writers who’ve worked with all three — writers whose personal politics align pretty closely with mine. Are their words moot because those platforms offer visibility and have pedigree to them?

Sorry, but I don’t think that’s how it works.

Some insist upstart, user-funded journalism is the answer, but games press veterans can tell you firsthand how poorly that tends to bear out. Po-faced white people standing in front of urban decay proclaiming themselves as the “future of journalism” is a farce, frankly. Capital interest will come knocking for them, too. The house still wins in our economy’s perpetual Tom & Jerry chase, with no final catharsis in sight. I trust good faith actors taking advantage of a more open, less tiered platform more than I trust people who pay a fee to tell me how bad Substack is.

In 2025, I hope to keep using Substack — a flawed but functional platform that offers direct control and ideological freedom for individuals with minimal interference from the folks in charge. Hope to see you here.

be back next week w/ 2024 films in review xoxo happy new year’s bitch!