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Today, Substack announced the launch of a new Notes feature that will enable users to exchange articles, quotations, comments, photographs, links, and thoughts. The platform’s notes are shown in a dedicated short-form stream that resembles Twitter. A note that has been shared is similar to writing a Tweet. A like and comment count are shown for each note. Retweeting, or “restacking,” a post is another possibility.
As highlighted in Substack’s press post, the firm appears to concur that the new feature resembles Twitter. Notes “may look like familiar social media feeds.” Substack counters that because Notes is ad-free, it differs from other social media feeds.
The business stated in a blog post that “attention is the lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed.” “In contrast, a subscription network’s lifeblood is the money given to those performing excellent work there. Here, people are rewarded for maintaining their audiences’ respect and interest. This platform’s ultimate purpose is to turn casual readers into paying subscribers. The content producers receive the great bulk of the financial benefits under this approach.
The goal of the new product, according to Substack, is to enable constructive discussion where there is enough common ground to seek understanding while “holding onto the worthwhile tension needed for great art and new ideas,” not to create a “perfectly sanitized information environment.”
This move with its Notes stream could bring the firm even further into the cultural debates over what constitutes free speech, given its penchant to welcome contentious authors and the otherwise deplatformed. Substack may find it harder to draw in the larger (and often more moderate) readers that make up the majority of any network’s user base the more it aligns its brand with the more extreme personal brands of contentious media figures.
The introduction of Notes is not the only way Substack has attempted to profit on the recent Twitter commotion; the company also introduced a Chat feature in November. When it cautioned in a piece last year that “Twitter is changing, and it’s tough to predict what might be next,” it also took a more direct jab at Twitter. The article has urged all types of creators to move their Twitter fan base to Substack. The chances of Substack profiting from the Twitter mess are increased by the new Notes offering, which is essentially a Twitter clone.
It’s important to note that Substack is challenging not only Twitter, where numerous back-and-forth threaded dialogues between authors and readers already occur, but also other online communities where authors have been developing their own networks, such as Discord, Slack, and Telegram.
A week ago, Substack opened up a community fundraising round, allowing writers to invest in and own a portion of the firm. This announcement was made today. Substack currently has $7,138,675 in commitments.
The platform now has more than 35 million active subscribers, including two million paid memberships, according to the business, and users have paid writers more than $300 million through Substack. More than 17,000 writers are making money on Substack, according to Substack, and the top 10 publishers there combined earn more than $25 million a year.
