(2023-04-12) Owens Substack Notes Could Be The Twitter Killer Weve Been Waiting For

Simon Owens: Substack Notes could be the Twitter killer we've been waiting for. Ever since he acquired Twitter last year, Elon Musk has shown himself to be a capricious owner. (Musk Buys Twitter)

his actions last week were particularly erratic and shocking.

Shortly after Substack announced Substack Notes... Musk rolled out a series of updates that increasingly throttled users’ access to Substack

Luckily, the outcry against his actions was so swift and loud that he quickly reversed course, and now Twitter users are free to engage with Substack content once again.

The reason that so many people found Musk’s moves so galling was that they were such a direct attack on writers’ ability to earn a living. For the entirety of its existence, Twitter had done virtually nothing to directly compensate creators for the content they contribute; instead, those creators justified their addiction with the notion that the platform helped them amass a loyal audience that they could then monetize elsewhere

But this still begs the question: was Musk right to be afraid of Substack Notes?

Is there anything about Substack Notes that’s uniquely threatening? I think there is.

Why other Twitter competitors failed

While Mastodon does have a fervent and loyal user base, its decentralized framework makes the platform difficult to scale to the level that would make it a true Twitter killer. Its UI is clunky and the onboarding process is truly atrocious.

Post, on the other hand, has a really elegant design — in some ways superior to Twitter’s — and in its early days I thought it had a real shot at becoming the de facto landing spot for Twitter defectors. But in the six months or so since I’ve joined, it’s been extremely slow to launch new features and still doesn’t even have a halfway decent notifications functionality.

So why do I think Notes has a chance of cannibalizing a large chunk of Twitter’s user base? Well, for starters, Substack already has a large network of creators who are engaged on the platform.

Twitter’s power users are already endemic to the Substack platform from day one.

Notes is perfectly aligned with creators’ incentives to make money.

Back in October of last year I wrote a widely circulated piece titled “Substack found its unfair advantage.” That advantage was the platform’s Recommendations tool, which introduced network effects to an otherwise decentralized medium

Substack Notes represents a huge leap forward in enhancing those network effects. Before its launch, Substack only served as a platform for longform content — i.e., newsletters — which meant that creators still needed to turn to outside networks for posting their shortform content

In just the two days since Notes launched, several writers have reported that they’ve seen their biggest jump in subscribers since joining Substack

Back in November, I wrote that “Twitter has never understood the Creator Economy.” My core thesis was simple: “The real incentive that keeps creators glued to any particular platform is its ability to help them make money.” Musk’s predecessors didn’t realize this and he doesn’t understand it either.