(2022-03-10) Why Substacks New App Is Bad News For Newsletters

Ernie Smith: Why Substack’s New App is Bad News for Newsletters. Now, more than four years since Substack launched, the firm decided to do something small that, symbolically, represents something big: It released an app.

But when you load the app, it does something that makes you immediately questions its motives—it discourages readers from continuing to get messages in their email, instead relying on the app to read those messages. (Edit: They appear to have changed this opt-in to an opt-out. Perhaps because of backlash exemplified by pieces like this one?)

the problem here is that Substack is finally starting to put up gates on the walled garden it created around the open platform, and for any publishers that rely on Substack, that is not the place that they want to be.

CEO Chris Best attempted to take steps to clarify the company’s stance on email, which sort of feels like a way of justifying why an app like this needs to exist. “Email is great for all of the reasons it has always been great,” Best told Newton. “It’s low friction. It’s this direct connection where you can reach out, unmediated by the algorithm. But it’s obviously not the best version of that reading experience.”

But here’s the thing: When you reach a certain size or scale, as Substack arguably has, any attempt to push away from the original medium needs to be seen as an attempt to harm competitors, which in this case would be anyone else that distributes a newsletter on a platform that is not Substack.

Sure, it’s about improving the reading experience, but let’s be straight here: It’s really about closing off anyone else that didn’t buy into Substack’s specific vision of email newsletters.

And this doesn’t even get into the problems this potentially creates for newsletter authors. Leaving Substack is something that should be seamless. (Often, it’s not.) But by building an app that actively encourages people to stop receiving your messages over email, they’ve added seams, and as soon as they leave the platform, it adds friction that wasn’t there before.

the “alternative media ecosystem” I want to see is one where the platform doesn’t matter at all to the reader, where it’s just there to help the creator, not shape the final result. We have email and RSS already; we don’t need an intermediary.

Email should stay open. Building an app play halfway through isn’t in that spirit—no matter the justification.