Why Substack Notes is a threat for Twitter | #48

Last Wednesday, Substack announced an upcoming rollout of its Notes feature. The announcement prompted a harsh reaction from Twitter, the company. For a few days, the platform blocked users from liking, commenting, or retweeting tweets that had Substack links. What's this Notes feature and why is it a threat for Twitter?

Substack Notes is a new Substack feature which allows writers to share short-form content like recommendations, photos, ideas, or commentary on other posts. It will be a way for writers to share not only long-form writing, but also quick thoughts and ideas. User can like, comment and reshare posts and it looks a lot similar to Twitter. While similar to traditional social media feeds, there are a few things that make Substack Notes more attractive for users and creators. Those differentiators might drive users away from Twitter to Substack.

First, there are no ads on Substack. Substack is a subscription network and it doesn't rely on any third-party ads to generate revenue. The absence of irrelevant ads results in a better user experience and makes sure that writers are the main beneficiaries of users attention.

That last point is crucial. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are content aggregators and they get the financial rewards associated with user attention. If something goes viral, it's the platform that benefits with more ad revenue, not the individual creator. On Substack - it's all about the creators. Substack writers own their relationship with readers and they benefit from viral posts by getting more subscribers, first free and ultimately paid. On Substack, creators are the main financial beneficiaries of users' attention. This is important because it will push writers to focus on creating great content on the platform and share their best content, both short and long-form, inside Substack.

Third, Substack Notes will have a higher quality of content by real people. Unlike Twitter, Substack is not infiltrated with bots and fake accounts. And from the product announcement, it seems like only writers will be able to share content using the Notes feature. This makes sure that Notes will have high quality content for people to read and engage with. And it might result in users spending more time on the platform because of higher quality of both short-form and long-form content.

And lastly, Substack's beautiful user experience, on both mobile and web, will keep readers coming back to it. Substack’s current product looks clean, unencumbered with ads and noise. As a results, users who interact with the product will have a better user experience and might keep coming back to it to learn from and engage with writers.

While Substack's user base is not nearly the scale of Twitter, it's still sizable. Currently, there are over 35 million active subscriptions to Substack publications, and 2 million them are paid. This significant, but most importantly loyal, audience is more likely to read and engage with writers sharing short-form content. This might mean that in the long-run, more people will switch to using Substack vs Twitter.

Substack Notes is rolling out in the coming days. I'm excited about the roll-out and will actively share helpful content and recommendations in the platform. It's a feature that already promises to be better than Twitter in many ways. Whether it's a significant threat for Twitter remains to be seen, but there is definitely a cause for Twitter to be concerned.