My most viral Mastodon post to date made some waves across the Fediverse recently. In it, I made a seemingly reasonable request:

Please, for the love of anything holy, stop launching your new blog on Substack!

I posted this sub-toot in reaction to seeing yet another writer announcing their new Substack blog. I see these all the time. It seems like every submission to The Writing Cooperative is something cross-posted from Substack.

Look, I get it. Finding an audience isn’t easy, and writers should take advantage of any platform that promises some form of payment. But, here’s the thing, Substack is a ‌bad platform. And it’s been a bad platform for years.

Substack is making waves right now because it somehow convinced someone to invest $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. This finally came after multiple attempts and investment rejections, which eventually caused Substack to beg for money from its users a few years back.

(Are any of those investors getting a dividend on this new valuation?)

I moved my newsletter and blog from Substack to Ghost in 2023 for three reasons:

1. Substack condones hate speech.
2. Substack’s financial model is not profitable.
3. Substack is a bad investment for writers.

In the years since, none of these issues have improved. Let’s take a quick look at where everything with Substack currently stands:

Substack Condones Hate Speech

Despite the Terms of Service professing the opposite, Substack allows hate speech to exist on its platform. Not only that, it actively profits from those who sell subscriptions. To that end, Substack promoted a Nazi blog via push notification. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my writing to be associated with any of that.

(And, yes, I get the irony of the story being broken by Write Now interviewee Taylor Lorenz, who hosts her publication on Substack.)

Substack’s Financial Model Is Not Profitable