WTF is substack?

Thanks for joining Creative Lost Souls. But what is Substack and the new notes thing?

OK so substack is doing weird things. To be honest it’s hard to wrap your head around substack.

I’ve been on the internet since way back when and have been on many of the self-publishing platforms.

I started with WordPress, which I still use and is the king of the blog-website and will/should be forever

I used medium for a while. Medium was very closely related to Twitter, I think the same people were involved in it’s inception. But Medium irrevocably fucked themselves when in how they monetised. Readers pay a monthly fee to access a selection of articles, and authors choose whether their articles will be free or subscriber only. It was just a really dumb concept that will be the eventual death of them, especially since Substack is now a fully fledged competitor, solving all the same problems in infinitely better ways. I don’t know how medium became a home for culture wars, but it very much rewards writers for click baity writing and provocation, so I guess I do know after all. I’ve even read authors on Medium write about how they love stirring up ‘the other side’ because it makes them more money.

Substack’s monetisation I believe will ultimately be more profitable for writers ($5 monthly to a single author, rather than an entire planet of them). But it means the writer provides value to a specific community. Whose going to pay money to troll? I believe the writing on substack will be more constructive and positive.

Medium is web articles first and email list second though. So of I go to my old medium page i just get a blog like list of my writing. But when I go to my substack homepage, I see this:

WEIRDLY after pressing “No thanks” (not subscribing) I can then access my entire archive of emails to subscribers.

I can’t see how to turn this off, so is it a website or a newsletter? I mean I started it because I wanted to start a newsletter and I thought it looked like a promising platform, and I don’t think I’m wrong, I’m just… confused. I’m happy to have the articles online, but I have a blog on my website which is meant to be more of the public face of my brand (*laughs internally at this notion*), and the substack was meant to be for something else more specific (struggling creatives, whoever they are) and is meant to be a lot more raw and personal

And now we have “Notes” - which SEEMS to be a kind of twitter just for us, that is, me and those who subscribe to C[L]S. Here’s an example of a note I published to see what the helll would happen:

Looks a lot like a tweet. Apparently they are also visible to my/our extended network. It’s not clear at all. Will I be using notes? Not a lot unless they prove useful to us in some way. I think the ‘chat’ feature seems more promising, being kind of like an old school forum for this community only (I think) but haven’t used that yet either. The rest of this email, from this paragraph forward, is literally what substack told me to tell you about notes….

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Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.

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How to join

Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to creative [lost] souls, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!

You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of creative [lost] souls can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.

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If you encounter any issues, you can always refer to the Notes FAQ for assistance. Looking forward to seeing you there!