It’s the end of my first day on Substack’s Notes and I still haven’t posted. To be honest, I crumbled under the pressure.
The MO for this neonate Twitter rival is to fix online discourse – a lofty aim.
In its initial unveiling of the platform on April 5, Substack wrote: ‘Imagine Kareem Abdul-Jabbar leaving a comment on Margaret Atwood’s note about trends in science fiction, or [American food journalist] Alison Roman sharing a quote from an amazing recipe developed by a little-known food writer who then gets a flood of subscriptions.
‘Think of your favorite Substack economists nerding out in a deep thread about the latest jobs report, or [Substack sports writers] Joe Posnanski and Molly Knight going back and forth about Major League Baseball’s opening day.’
It seems Substack is to social media what The West Wing was to TV. Smug.
And I love it.
But am I worthy of getting involved? I can barely cook, and have only ever been to one baseball game (Chicago Cubs v Atlanta Braves, a great day).
Must everyone who posts (they haven’t gone with ‘stacks’) be an adored author, world-renowned expert in their field or of equally grand standing? Back in the day that was the exact criteria needed for people to be published or broadcast in any way, but times have changed. Notes has set the bar high – will it be able to keep it that way?
The announcement continued: ‘The goal here is not to create a perfectly sanitised information environment, but to set the conditions for constructive discussion where there is enough common ground to seek understanding while holding onto the worthwhile tension needed for great art and new ideas. It won’t feel like the social media we know today.’
That will be a relief for some, not for others. As Elon Musk reported in his impromptu yet well-timed interview with the BBC earlier today, Twitter has reached 8billion user minutes per day. Notes has a long way to go – and must succeed where others have so far failed.
However, it doesn’t seem entirely immune to what makes social media users tick.
‘We set about building a system that fosters deep connections and quality over shallow engagement and dopamine hacks,’ trumpeted the announcement.
And yet, as on other platforms, it offers a like button and ‘restack’ function – the very source of that dopamine.
That’s not unreasonable of course. Notes, while free, is an extension of Substack’s paid-for platform. It’s a commercial entity, and for the writers making their living from it, endorsements and sharing are key.
And speaking of, while Margaret Atwood may not have yet switched on her Notes, there are names aplenty.
David Aaronovitch, esteemed columnist at The Times for 18 years, recently left the paper to launch his own Substack, and wrote a welcome ‘Hello, Notes! What’s going on?’ post seemingly within minutes of the platform’s launch.
His former publication doesn’t yet appear to have set up its own account, and newspaper and magazine accounts seem few and far between on day one. But it is only day one.
Political news magazine The New Statesman is an early adopter however, posting an opening gambit of ‘Is anybody here?’. The staffer behind their account was clearly impressed with who or what they saw, posting shortly after: ‘Twitter, 21 March 2006-11 April 2023’.
Is Notes the George to Twitter’s dragon? It’s a battle of far greater proportions, and despite ongoing turmoil at the Silicon Valley stalwart, Musk’s platform doesn’t appear to be going anywhere yet.
Content will be the key.
Users will find a familiar journey in Notes – the Home and Subscribed feeds mirroring For You and Following, an inbox for DMs and the key posts feed – although hashtags don’t seem to work. Is one a better user journey than the other? Substack would argue its lack of advertising gives it the win, but materially they’re from the same family.
What you read in your feed, what you choose to see or are shown, is where the difference – Substack hopes – will lie.
‘We at Substack intend to do a lot of exploring,’ it writes. ‘And we hope you’ll come with us.’
Well, every journey starts with the first step – or in this case, post. I’ll get writing.
Metro’s deputy head of social Cameron Clark shares his take
Since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, a number of start-ups have attempted to capitalise on what they perceive to be the platform’s slow but terminal decline into irrelevance. These range from pre-existing apps such as Mastodon to new products like Hive and Post.
Yet, despite offering spaces that near-mirror Twitter’s offering, none have yet taken off. And there’s good reason for this.
If a Twitter replacement is to succeed, it likely needs to offer users two things.
One is a steady stream of real-time news and information. Twitter’s influence stems, in part, from its value as a real-time news aggregation platform – from the Arab Spring in 2010, which affirmed Twitter’s place as a vital news comms tool, to the collapse of Liz Truss’s government last year, Twitter offered a vital space for users to track major events second-by-second – an experience not yet replicated by another social platform.
The other is a hub for what social platforms term ‘power users’. These individuals are the heaviest and most influential users of the platform, and, on Twitter, encompass celebrities, public figures and journalists.
Twitter succeeded because it flattened social hierarchies, allowing random members of the public to both follow and easily engage with everyone, ranging from Huw Edwards to Ariana Grande. A Twitter replacement would need to draw in a similar calibre of users in sufficient volume to achieve the same appeal Twitter once had.
Can Substack achieve this? It’s probably got the best chance of any platform so far – many of Twitter’s ‘power users’ already use the platform to produce newsletters, offering a key pull factor to draw users in.
Now Notes gives the platform the infrastructure needed to offer real-time coverage, a component it previously lacked. So far, most Twitter clones have offered the latter, but failed on the former.
This by no means guarantees success, but if Musk’s response to Notes (the banning of all Substack links on Twitter) is anything to go by, it’s at least one to watch.
