Destacked: Why I Avoid Substack As Much as Possible

Substack is a company that started in 2017 and in less than a decade, has become ubiquitous with the notion of newsletters. Beyond helping one maintain such a system; it provides a set of features and an interface that largely gets out of the way. This has made it an attractive places for folks who don't care or know about DKIM, escrow and handling a website to do what they want to focus on. This makes it understandable as to why so many people find it to be a useful place to begin a newsletter. However, there's a limit - ideally, in this landscape of platforms optimizing in favor of fascism - that one has to take as someone who creates things online. This goes almost double if the things you're challenging are being exalted by those same makers of the platform you're on.

Longtime readers of my site's blog will know that I'm a fan of Justin's company, Buttondown. I've been using the service since 2018, when I wrote my first entry on it in January — in that fashion of New Year resolutions to "get to writing". That newsletter is older than the now-broken links to my site that it references. However, my use of it is casual: I use it to send out semi-periodic updates. This use-case, while different from someone like Ed's blog on tech or the like, isn't enough for folks to justify moving out of the encroaching nature of right-wing voices growing on Substack. Why is that?

The company provides the following:

• At its core, a means of blogging that's restricted to a domain equivalent to less of that of things like Wordpress or Squarespace.
• Said blog entries get sent over e-mail to a fixed amount of people.
• Gating access to content by way of a pay-wall with multiple tiers.

After this point, the "uniqueness" of Substack comes also to be one of its means of value capture:

• Folks can publish short notes: they serve as a way of invoking conversation that can lead to a form of organic discovery within their platform. It's important to note that there's no explicit API to extract these notes or reply to them. This traps users the same way Instagram and TikTok have managed to enclose their communities.
• Folks can find "rankings" of those who speak on particular topics. By seeing folks be associated to a concept like history, fashion or technology, it works to add a level of prestige (if not credence or authority of knowledge) to that topic. This can encourage a snowball-like effect of subscriptions for a publication. For those who aim to use this as their primary source of income, this is something that they'll use to their advantage, and something Substack can game for more engagement.

The Literal Nazis

Substack's CEO had no issue — and continues to not — with the prelevant rise of Nazism on his company's platform. Ars Technica writes:

Joshua Fisher-Birch, a terrorism analyst at a nonprofit non-government organization called the Counter Extremism Project, has been closely monitoring Substack's increasingly significant role in helping far-right movements spread propaganda online for years. He's calling for more transparency and changes on the platform following the latest scandal.

In January, Fisher-Birch warned that neo-Nazi groups saw Donald Trump's election "as a mix of positives and negatives but overall as an opportunity to enlarge their movement." Since then, he's documented at least one Telegram channel—which currently has over 12,500 subscribers and is affiliated with the white supremacist Active Club movement—launch an effort to expand their audience by creating accounts on Substack, TikTok, and X.

Of those accounts created in February, only the Substack account is still online, which Fisher-Birch suggested likely sends a message to Nazi groups that their Substack content is "less likely to be removed than other platforms." At least one Terrorgram-adjacent white supremacist account that Fisher-Birch found in March 2024 confirmed that Substack was viewed as a back-up to Telegram because it was that much more reliable to post content there.

A journalist on Substack noted recently how the platform prompted many users of the such:

The Substack app apparently push alert promoted a Nazi newsletter to several users. Users have complained about it on Substack Notes but the company hasn’t responded. Generally push alert promos are for content a user is likely to interact with

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— Taylor Lorenz (@taylorlorenz.bsky.social) July 29, 2025 at 1:07 AM

I'll note that push notifications a bit more varied: that can be for what's optimized to a particular user. But it can be for any reason; which is what troubles me more: that the platform might have pushed it because it was popular with a set of users and those users have been made the sample of what the entire platform is interested in: an approach commonly taken in content discovery platforms. Even if you're not interested in that particular topic, you might see it (something Facebook and its sibling apps are very prone to do).

What's also not highlighted is Substack's disregard for plagraism. A Black write on the platform has noted an example that ends up being an experience that platforms that can be weaponized by content farms:

This is something that's endemic of any platform that allows you to post content; it's not the easiest thing to combat either.

The article goes on to highlight that the problem is not new to Substack. The silent problem is that publications on there who are now "stuck" — be it for fiscal reasons or for reach — are passively becoming okay with this. Molly White, at one point in time, was on Substack herself. She invested some time, with her technical know-how, to move from it to a self-hosted Ghost setup two years later. She also noted the difficulty of doing something like this: companies can insulate you from the headache of being an independent publisher on the Web. This demonstrates that it's not difficult for us to escape places that aren't aligned with. But it does take effort; as it tends to be with anything worth doing.

The Middle Ground

My values and ethics lead my actions. This results in me in avoiding Substack as much as possible. Since folks still choose to keep their work there, I have some subscriptions that I support like J. P. Hill in a paid capacity. In fact - as of this writing, it's the only subscription you'll find on my placeholder account. Once they move from that platform, I'll delete my account, as I'll no longer have a reason to stay. The other publications that I do subscribe to from Substack live in a folder called "Substack Publications" in my RSS reader of choice; something I found to be the best way to build my own means of subscribing to folks in this capacity.

This doesn't explicitly solve the issue with funding. Folks like Molly White and Kelly Hayes have found homes with Ghost, a self-hostable blogging platform that does most of what Substack provides. Others, like Paris Marx, despite their critical journalism around Big Tech, still chooses to remain there, forcing me to place them in my reader. As a reader, the impact and interface is minimal but for writers, the difficulty of funding oneself remains.