RIP Medium. RIP Twitter. Long live Substack?

Some thoughts on going all-in on Substack

RIP Medium

You might remember several years ago when Medium, for a year or two, was the trendy choice for startup company blogs.

This was before the roller coaster back and forth product decisions that eventually made us all realize Medium didn’t know what it wanted to be.

Before the ads and branded partnerships were the future… and then weren’t. Before the paywall. Before creating and then shuttering publications. Before Ev bounced.

At the time there were a couple reasons startups would give for going with Medium. The text editor was one of the best around. The site design was clean and simple and ahead of its time.

But, most importantly, it had built-in distribution.

By giving up control and going with Medium you could start a blog for your company and potentially get an immedate audience. Or at least you could until Medium realized there was no money in that and quickly went yet another way.

And, today, after pivoting into dizziness, their audience has dipped, their articles have become click-baity-listical-style-morning-routine-self-help-schlop, and the startup blogs have long since left.

RIP Twitter

You might also remember several years ago when Twitter, for a decade or so, was the trendy choice for startup social media accounts.

This was of course before, well… Elon.

It really is like Elon looked at Ev’s Medium misteps and walk backs and layoffs and said “hold my Diet Coke”.

And for someone like me who mainly uses blogs and social networks for talking about and promoting what I’m working on, the collapse of places like Medium and Twitter with their built-in networks and easy to use products with clear marketing benefits, has been pretty worrisome.

Long live Substack?

But relying on any online network that lived and died on ads was always going to end this way.

That’s why the experts have told us for years that we needed to own our email lists and host our own newsletters and blogs. And they’re right… but owning your social network is where it starts to break down.

(And sorry everybody, I gave it a real shot, but Mastodon ain’t it)

Enter Substack Notes and the long awaited and now rolling out Substack profile pages and handles (FYI you can now find me at substack.com/@adamhowell)

Juxtapose Substack’s product growth over the last several years with Twitter and Medium and it’s night and day. Substack has seemingly known where they were going this entire time. A clear vision of a network built on a clean reading and writing experience, a direct relationship with the writer, and subscriptions not ads.

Which, for me, is what makes Substack Notes such an interesting new addition. A potential safe harbor built for the longterm in a tumultuous sea of algorithms and blue checks.

Being able to have one simple place for both long form and short form content, personal and business, is really exciting.

So I’m setting up shop and going all-in. Personal newsletter. Newsletters for my businesses . And choosing to become active again on a social network with Substack Notes.

The combination of newsletter + notes + network effects all in one ad free environment is just too good to pass up. And, for now at least, I trust Substack not to fuck it up.