The Streisand Effect is Alive and Well
A hilarious own-goal by Twitter
By now most of you know about Twitter’s recent throttling of Substack links, effectively killing the reach of any post that dares link to Substack. (Gato and Tessa have already written about this today, so if you need to catch up, that’s where you do it!)
Perhaps (or perhaps not) coincidentally, today I got an e-mail inviting me to the beta test of Notes, which is Substack’s version of Twitter. Well, me being me, of course I decided to dink around on the platform instead of finishing my longform article — so the least I can do is provide an update about my experience with the project.
Most of you know I’ve been banned from Twitter for a long time, but I acknowledge the platform does have some positive aspects. One of the things I struggle with is that all of my Substack posts go out to EVERYBODY via email — and not everything I have to say is WORTH an email to everybody! Sometimes I just want to make a quick comment about an article or bring it to people’s attention.
This is where Notes picks up where Twitter fails. It’s still early in the beta, obviously, so Notes aren’t getting a whole lot of engagement, but it’s obvious this has the ability to do the good things that Twitter could do, without the BS that is millions of bots and advertising spam.
With Notes you have the ability to respond with text AND a picture, which is a function the comments section lacks. (Web links aren’t quite the same) It looks like you can have separate “subscribed” lists for Notes and ‘Stacks, which is a huge deal because some people really love to send out posts. (*cough* Steve Kirsch *cough*) Linking to full posts is simple, and you can easily quote text from an article and it links the article.
This seems to be an extremely good way to find new ‘Stackers, or expand your reach if you’re a current ‘Stacker! Overall I’m excited to have a new platform to advance the conversation in a different way — and hopefully I’ll never have to post another Twitter link again!
(Posting Notes links works just as well, although I’m curious what you see if you don’t have access to Notes yet?)
Edit: What you’re supposed to see there but can’t:
This is the free market in action. When your social media site turns into a pile of poo, people will leave it. Now all we have to do is focus on keeping Substack swamp-free.
From the article introducing Notes: (https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes)
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While Notes may look like familiar social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. This changes everything.
The lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed is attention. In legacy social networks, people get rewarded for creating content that goes viral within the context of the feed, regardless of whether or not people value it, locking readers in a perpetual scroll. Almost all the attendant financial rewards then go to the owner of the platform.
By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing worthy work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content.
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I say this all the time! Ad-based revenue is a sure-fire way to get a terrible media. Subscriber-based revenue is where it's at, because that rewards excellence!
100%.
Lines have been drawn and I love the rallying of substack.
Long form vs. Sound bites. Bring it on.