Substack, the email newsletter company, is now joining the fight against Twitter with Substack Notes.
Could Substack Notes Be a Better Twitter? | Robert Wright & Nikita Petrov
Twitter was never a social network, although it can certainly be used for socializing. It was, and remains, a micro-publishing network, a place to share your thoughts for everyone to read and comment on. Twitter’s problem, which has gotten worse in recent months, is that the level of signal (the replies you want to read) relative to the noise (the trolls and misanthropes) is low. Perhaps Substack Notes can replace it without all the baggage.
“The thing you have to understand about Twitter is that the app was never really the product,” Andrew Graham, founder of PR and communications firm Bread & Law, told Lifewire via email. “The product of Twitter was always [that] moderation — the rules, standards, and enforcement that dictated how people could behave on the platform — defined the experience for both users and advertisers. Musk came along and killed moderation, which means he killed the product, and Twitter has been operating without a real product ever since.”
Notes works much like Twitter. You make posts and you can subscribe to (aka follow) other people’s posts. But unlike Twitter, the discourse has been fairly civil so far, and that’s because it seems designed for a very different purpose.
