Substack Notes: A Threat to Twitter's Monopoly?

This morning, I shared on Twitter my latest article that I published on Substack (which you can read here). After half an hour, I noticed that I still had no likes or retweets even though thousands of people had seen it, and dozens had opened the link or engaged with the tweet.

It took me some time to work out what was going on. I logged out, logged in again, and looked at anything unfriendly I may have tweeted about Elon Musk (which is not entirely unthinkable), but I couldn't find a reason for being shadow banned or thrown in Twitter jail.

Then Substack popped up as a trending topic on Twitter, which is remarkable since Elon Musk seems to go to any length to avoid losing readers to other platforms, and that turned out to be exactly what was going on. Musk had decided that anyone who dared to add a link to a Substack newsletter in a tweet would have to feel the vengeance of Twitter's owner. It resulted in my tweet not receiving any retweets and likes.

Substack trending topic

Workarounds were quickly found and shared among Twitter users in the following hours. URL shorteners like Hootsuite easily change the address to a name without using the word Substack. Additionally, many changed the letter S to the number 5. They wrote "5sub5tack" until it became clear that Elon's fury was only targeted at the link addresses, which explains why "#Substack" could become the leading trending topic, likely to Elon's regret.

Musk's reaction seems motivated by jealousy and carefully guarding his near monopoly on the microblogging universe. I'm no legal expert, but I doubt his actions are allowed; they also seem at odds with Musk's admiration for free-market mechanisms. Not to mention his self-proclaimed identification as Free Speech Absolutist. 

Substack’s new tool

Twitter reminds me a bit of the oil industry. This old dominating force still has the money and the power to set the rules while fearing new disruptive developments like innovation in renewable energy. Meanwhile, Substack is new, rapidly growing, constantly innovating, and well-managed by visionary leaders. 

Twitter is the opposite of all that. Advertisers ran away, and so did many of the non-fired employees. As a result, the quality of the service and its reliability are rapidly deteriorating while we move into an unpredictable future under unpredictable leadership. 

Why don't we all leave Twitter? There isn't yet a proper alternative. Mastodon is a better, decentralized system that, by its design, can never be owned by one power-hungry individual, but it is still much too small to form a real competition. Substack is another exciting development, with a few more to follow, like Post and Medium. But most of these alternatives move in a different part of the social media universe. And then there is the latest development, a Twitter-like integration within Substack called Notes. 

Notes

Substack wrote today: "Very soon, we'll launch Notes, a large investment in providing writers with an alternative for growth outside of traditional social networks. Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack, giving writers and readers the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links." 

While there isn't yet evident competition for Twitter, it doesn't mean Twitter will forever stay in the lead. The past decades provide many examples of companies and products that were once close to monopolizing within their respective industries but lost market dominance over time. For example, Kodak once held a near-monopoly in the photography market, but its empire collapsed due to the rise of digital photography and competition. Likewise, you may remember Blockbuster as the go-to destination for movie rentals, but it failed to adapt to the rise of streaming services like Netflix and declared bankruptcy in 2010. And MySpace dominated the social media landscape for years until the rise of Facebook, which offered a cleaner interface and a more intuitive user experience. 

Another one that comes to mind is how Blackberry was replaced by iPhone and Android smartphones. From his experience, Elon Musk knows how fast an established market can change; he has seen it while producing electric vehicles and launching rockets. 

Alienating Twitter users

Strangely, when buying Twitter, he seemed to have forgotten all his previous experiences; he broke down a good brand without replacing it with anything better. As a result, he alienates with his Trumpist rhetoric many of the progressive users and potential buyers of his relatively environment-friendly cars. And in that climate of possible failure, he fears that an innovative and adaptable new kid on the block in the form of Substack proves to be better at staying ahead of the curve in today's rapidly changing social media landscape.

I generally find more progressive ideas in Substack newsletters than on Twitter, where increasingly right-wing populism is the dominant voice. This may have aggravated Musk's pain when eying the successful newcomer and triggered him to take measures to stop Substack.

He may succeed this time, but I doubt he can hold the fort this way for many years against new technologies and initiatives. This business landscape develops so quickly that fending off all new developments while not improving your product is hard. Think about chat-GPT; it's only about five months old and has dramatically changed our working experience. Not adapting and innovating but only obstructing the progress and success of others seems like a losing battle.

If you love Twitter like we all enjoyed it, stay there for a while, but extend your presence to some of the potential newcomers in social media and writing, like Substack or Mastodon. Otherwise, you will someday feel like trying to put a Kodak photo film into your iPhone before taking a picture; it's a sign that you missed the boat. 

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I write this newsletter because I believe we can do better on this beautiful but fragile planet if we work together.

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Photo: Alexander Shatov on Unsplash