Where is Substack Headed?

Interesting Tweet Sunday evening from Matt Mullenweg, a co-founder of WordPress.

Per Emma Roth of The Verge,

“Substack, the once buzzy newsletter platform, is losing a new swath of writers to rival platforms most people haven’t heard of. Just last month, The Ankler, one of Substack’s most popular publications, left for a platform that gives it more control over its site. Others who have departed Substack within the past year voiced similar complaints and cite the platform’s increased focus on social features as well as a pricing model that puts a chokehold on their business.”

The Ankler is a popular high profile revenue generating entertainment site, so perhaps not your typical writer on Substack. Though Substack taking a slice of revenue is concerning to writers who make their living by writing.

But Roth highlights other factors causing concern among users, enough so for some to leave.

• Feeling they lack control over their site
• Limits on customization
• Social interaction being more internal than external
• Limitation on integrating third-party apps
• Overly heavy on recommendations
• Limits on having followers come with you should you migrate from Substack

Piqued my interest when I read the above as earlier this month I tried Substack for a few posts on the platform. I wanted to see what it was all about. Some bloggers I have a lot of respect for use Substack and there is a community atmosphere that I am always interested in from back in the AOL and early blogging days.

I didn’t have that enjoyable an experience. I had some quirky problems in writing and sharing images. It could have been totally me with the rest of the world having a great experience. I’ll also acknowledge I am the founder of a managed WordPress platform for the law. I’ll be the first to be accused of being biased, and I’ll be the last to spend a lot of time learning how to use the platform.

My conclusion though was that Substack was headed in a social media direction emphasis versus a publishing platform emphasis.

No doubt you neeed you need a publishing solution to write and generate some sort of a community. But if you get distracted with a heavy investment in your company to grow a social network, you can lose your roots in a publishing solution for newsletters.

WordPress is not the only publishing solution in the world. The Ankler moved to an open source platform called Passport, which is built in partnership with Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. But the mission of Mullenweg and cofounder Mike Little remains strong — to democratize publishing.

I wish Substack, and its writers well. But you have to be careful with investors and possible buyers detracting from publishing first.