Wednesday, October 21, 2026

Substack and the Price of Independence

Substack's pitch has always been subtraction. No editor's red pen, no ad sales department, no executive deciding your beat doesn't fit the budget this quarter. You write, you publish, and the platform handles payments, hosting, and delivery straight to a reader's inbox. That's a real thing to offer, and it's why several hundred thousand writers took the offer.

But publishing, payments, discovery, and community don't disappear when you remove the editor. They move somewhere. On Substack, they move into a single privately controlled system that performs all four functions itself and takes a cut of the proceeds regardless of what it's cutting off from. The question worth asking isn't whether Substack removed intermediaries. It's what "independent" means once one company has quietly become all of them at once.

Why Writers Join

The product genuinely works, and it's worth saying so before getting to anything else. AJ Feuerman, a publicist, calls herself "an unrepentant early adopter" — she joined at the end of 2017, right after the platform launched (back when Substack was still just a newsletter tool and not yet a referendum on the rest of the internet), purely to read new perspectives and hot takes from people she already followed. She didn't start her own newsletter, Spin Cycle, until a little over a year ago, and forty issues in she still isn't chasing subscribers or income. She told me it exists because, as a publicist, "I love what I do for a living and I find oftentimes it affects how I view things," and writing about her own field in public doubles as a way of examining verticals she doesn't usually get to look at directly — an excuse, in her words, that might lead somewhere professionally or might lead nowhere at all, and either way she enjoys doing it. Her audience is small and mostly known to her: around 300 subscribers on Substack, a third of them people she was already acquainted with, plus a few hundred more who follow the same content repurposed on LinkedIn. Her advice to other writers considering the platform is practical rather than evangelical — manage your expectations, be your own publicist, and actually use the social feed most people forget is there. "It's giving early Twitter vibes over there," she told me, "and it's great."

Steven Huff, a classic-film critic who writes The Moveable Marquee, gives the same verdict from three years further down the road. He joined because critics he knew were using the platform and seemed happy, and because it was easier to set up than the blog he'd struggled with before. It hasn't made him real money — free subscribers far outnumber paid ones — but it's built him an audience and produced comments that have sharpened his own writing in ways he can point to specifically. He publishes twice a month and told me that commitment alone has kept him energized; he's also been watching, with some curiosity, since fellow critic Jonathan Rosenbaum turned on monetization for his own Substack, wondering how that's working out for him. Asked about the moderation controversy that runs through the rest of this piece, Huff gave the answer that complicates it most: he hadn't heard about it. "I've only lately heard that something is up," he told me, "but I'm not sure what it's about." His own threshold for leaving has nothing to do with Nazis — it's content restrictions or length limits beyond what already exists. "I'm an old man, not a digital native," he told me. Ease of use wins.

R.J. Marx joined for a different reason entirely: he needed somewhere to keep writing after retiring from a long newspaper career. Print journalism, in his own assessment, is "functionally extinct — on life support at best," and Substack offered a way to keep his name "out there" without answering to a publisher or editor again. He's used it to workshop a local-history project — a book on the 1962-64 Labor Day riots in Seaside, Oregon, that started as posts — and to support a jazz class he teaches at his local community college, alongside straightforward political advocacy on issues he cares about. He never expected money from it, having been in the business long enough to know writing rarely pays, but he considers Substack's model more generous to writers than Medium's or any paywalled platform he's tried. Two years in, it's delivered exactly what he was after: a passionate, loyal readership, contact with other writers navigating the same uncertain media landscape, and no real stress, since he doesn't depend on it for income — "the only stress is when a post drops like a pin. Then I feel like nobody likes me." Asked about the moderation controversy, he went a step further than Huff: he wasn't just unaware of it, he wanted to know if he should be. "I don't know what the moderation controversy is," he told me. "I haven't been reading about Substack's internal politics. Should I be worried?" His own conditions for leaving are concrete rather than ideological — Substack claiming rights to his pieces, a mandatory paywall, or "if Elon Musk bought it." Asked whether he owns his audience or rents it, he pointed out that the question undersells how long he's actually had one: readers who've followed his byline since the 1970s aren't Substack's to take from him.

Feuerman, Huff, and Marx establish that the tool is real and that plenty of people use it exactly as advertised, for reasons that have nothing to do with each other, with no awareness of anything darker underneath. What they can't tell you is what the tool is attached to.

The Dependency Stack

Substack has always described its 10 percent cut of subscription revenue as aligned incentive: the company only profits when the writer does — a sentence that reads better in a pitch deck than in a subscriber ledger. It's a good sentence, and it holds up less well once you notice who's actually taking the cut first, and that "the writer" in that sentence doesn't distinguish a film critic from a newsletter promoting Holocaust denial. The fee can't discriminate. That's the design, and it's also the design flaw.

It shapes behavior in smaller ways too. Luke Y. Thompson, a film critic who writes Mortal Cinema, opened his account years ago when Substack first rolled out its Twitter-style feed, looking, like a lot of people at the time, for somewhere to land if Twitter finally broke. It sat dormant until he lost two paying gigs at once and decided that if he was going to maintain a critic's outlet either way, he might as well build his own audience instead of someone else's. What it's delivered since is modest and specific: some money, a circle of friends inside what he calls the FilmStack community, and an audience small enough to actually know he's the one writing his own reviews — a dig, he told me, at his years reviewing for Nerdist, where readers sometimes assumed the bylines belonged to Chris Hardwick. His biggest complaint about the platform has nothing to do with ideology — it's Stripe's chargeback mechanism. If a subscriber forgets they renewed and disputes the charge, the writer eats the full disputed amount, plus a flat $15 cost just to dispute it — one Thompson says he usually loses anyway — even though Substack already took its 10 percent before the dispute happened. It's a small mechanical detail that doesn't show up in anyone's moral accounting of the platform, and it's real money leaving a freelancer's pocket for a transaction that already cost him once. Real money, gone twice.

At scale the math gets worse. Sean Highkin, who runs the NBA newsletter The Rose Garden Report, switched from Substack to Ghost last year and now pays $2,052 annually in platform costs, against the $4,968 he was paying Substack for the same subscriber base. Matt Brown, who writes the college-sports newsletter Extra Points, estimates he'd be paying around $1,800 a month in fees had he stayed on Substack, versus roughly $3,000 a year on Beehiiv now — a savings, he says, of "bare minimum $15,000" annually, and probably more.

The professional network cuts the other direction too, for writers who never joined. In early 2025, Katharine Coldiron needed to consolidate several scattered obligations onto one platform: irregular posts stranded on Blogger, film essays she'd been publishing on Medium, and a yearlong short-story project that needed somewhere to collect money from readers. She narrowed the field to Substack or Patreon and picked the latter, for reasons that were mostly about texture rather than ideology — the writers she followed had mostly gone to Substack, the visual artists and other media-makers she followed had mostly gone to Patreon, and Substack's own promotional emails had started reading like Mailchimp's, "more corporate and self-promoting," right around the time Patreon's path to actually getting paid looked clearer. She isn't sentimental about the platform she chose either: gatekeeping cuts both ways, she told me, and self-publishing has always let both overlooked voices and "utter crap (and harmful crap)" through the same open door, no different in kind from self-published ebooks or zines. What she watched happen to Substack afterward was less charitable — it went, in her words, from ubiquitous to mocked, "mentioned with rolling eyes and memeification," while its digest features came to resemble something "used to be known as 'newspapers' or 'magazines,'" minus an editor to keep the noise down. Knowing what she does about the white-supremacist and anti-trans content Substack allows on its platform unquestioningly, she said plainly that she's glad she didn't choose it. And yet she is, by her own count, the only writer she knows without a Substack — a correct call on her own terms that still costs her standing in a professional community that mostly decided the argument was already over.

Alistair Pitts never really joined in the first place, though not for lack of opportunity. He signed up in May 2024 to follow one specific newsletter, then was gifted a free annual subscription to another by a fellow film obsessive he'd "met" on Letterboxd — a platform he was, by his own account, growing jaded with, since nothing he wrote there got traction unless he stooped to one-line "zinger" reviews of whatever big release had just come out. Substack, in theory, should have been the better fit for a "longform content chap" — though the thing he actually makes is A Russian & Soviet Movie Podcast, which he's been producing since 2017, and what he'd lost wasn't a writing outlet but a discovery tool: he'd used Twitter mainly to get listeners to the show, back when a pithy line or two of text and a compelling still image were enough to gain some traction with the algorithm. Substack never quite filled that gap, and it's a platform less oriented toward the kind of curated visual content that dominates Instagram besides. In practice it's delivered "not much of anything beyond a vague, occasional sense of, 'oh yeah, I should probably carve out some time to do that.'" What's kept him at arm's length is a specific memory, not inertia — he described the moderation record as making him "uneasy," citing a direct fear of "Twitter all over again," and added, of Musk specifically, that he wished the man "would do us all a favour and move to Mars and take his white supremacist buddies with him." His plan going forward is to invest elsewhere entirely — Patreon, YouTube, direct relationships with labels and publications.

Maitland McDonagh shows what it looks like to be on the inside of the same bargain Coldiron and Pitts declined. A veteran film critic who's watched most of her mainstream outlets dry up, she runs two Substacks — MaitlandOnMovies, active, and Maitland's Vintage Gay Books Newsletter, a dormant side project reviewing vintage gay pulp fiction from a substantial personal collection she'd been sitting on for years, set aside in favor of the movie newsletter simply because its readership was always the smaller of the two. What Substack actually delivers, mechanically, she finds hard to complain about: link a bank account once, and the money shows up on its own schedule, minus a cut she doesn't begrudge "given all the responsibility they take off your plate"; the traffic graphs tell her exactly where her readers come from and what fraction convert from free to paid; and she handles her own copyediting and photo-sourcing — with help from someone she calls Frank — without finding any of it especially hard. MaitlandOnMovies had brought in just under $2,000 year-to-date at the point she and I spoke, which she calls "not life-changing but also not nothing." That income matters now in a way it might not have a decade ago — "pretty much no-one is offering me work anymore," she told me — and being a recognized newsletter voice has an unexpected professional side effect: it keeps her on studio mailing lists for screenings and screener links, sometimes ones she'd otherwise lose access to entirely.

She'd never had a moderation problem herself, even publishing reviews of vintage gay pulp erotica — her own theory is that she stuck to discussing the plots rather than the sex, and that Substack has gotten "a little more conservative these days" regardless. That's precisely what made the Nazi material land harder once she actually saw it. She hadn't heard about the moderation controversy either, and once she looked, she found it harder to forgive than anyone else in this piece did: she pulled up Substack's own hate-speech policy, which bars content that would "incite violence based on protected classes," and called the gap between that language and the platform's actual conduct "way hypocritical." A platform careful enough to keep her decades-old erotica newsletter untouched is the same platform that let Nazi newsletters run for years. Asked directly whether she owns her audience or rents it, she didn't hedge: "I feel I'm renting my audience and don't know whether I could carry over the bulk of them to a different platform." Her verdict on the platform overall is a shrug rather than an endorsement — worth it, she says, "if you're willing to put in the work and are willing to give your newsletter some time to develop a following," which is a description of a job, not a dream.

Coldiron and Pitts are opting out of the same recommendation network, professional visibility, and discovery infrastructure that Maitland depends on and knows she can't take with her. Staying costs money, and increasingly, for writers like Maitland, staying is what keeps the money coming at all. Not joining costs relevance. Substack built the only system currently offering both dependencies at once, and charging admission to get out of either one.

The editor who used to decide what got published is now a recommendation algorithm that doesn't distinguish a Nazi newsletter from a film newsletter. The publisher's overhead is now a 10 percent fee collected from every writer regardless of content. The circulation department is now subscriber infrastructure Substack owns and controls. The advertiser pressure that used to shape what a magazine could print is now Stripe's chargeback rules. The professional network a critic used to build over a career is now a platform-specific community that doesn't travel intact to Ghost or Beehiiv. Editorial standards are now a company moderation policy, set by people who've said, on the record, that they'd rather not enforce one. Nothing here disappeared. It changed shape, and the fee sits at the center of every substitution, collecting regardless of which side of the moderation argument it happens to be funding that month.

The Governance Test

In April 2023, the Anti-Defamation League published the first documented case against the platform, cataloguing antisemitic, conspiratorial, and white-supremacist accounts thriving on Substack and flagging the company's cut of their paid subscriptions as a financial stake in content it wasn't removing. Jonathan Katz gave the problem a name in The Atlantic that November, reporting Substack was hosting, and in some cases profiting from, Nazi and white-nationalist newsletters with subscriber counts in the tens of thousands. Roughly two hundred Substack writers organized as Substackers Against Nazis that December, demanding answers; co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded on the 21st that censorship doesn't make extremism disappear and, in his view, makes it worse. Casey Newton wasn't satisfied. He and two Platformer colleagues independently verified seven newsletters explicitly supporting Nazi ideology; Substack removed one before Newton's list arrived and five more after. On January 12, 2024, Newton left for Ghost with more than 170,000 subscribers. Writer Max Read later reported Substack had leaked word to a friendly outlet ahead of Newton's story, framing the finding as six marginal accounts to shrink it before it landed.

Andras Jones supplies something close to Substack's own defense, from a writer's chair rather than a corporate one. "The power to censor always favors authoritarians and harms intellectual minorities," he told me, arguing the company's refusal to police pro-Nazi content is fidelity to free expression rather than a lapse in judgment. He's arrived at that position partly through experience: he told me he's been called a "Putinist" for expressing concern about the US arming Ukrainian Nazis, a "toxic white Bernie Bro" for backing Medicare for All, an "anti-vaxxer" for asking questions about the Covid response, and a "right wing Trump supporter" for criticizing Democrats from the left — a run of contested labels he offered as evidence that "Nazi," in his experience, gets applied about as loosely as any of the others. He pushed further: "Do the Nazis on Substack include those in favor of arming Nazis in Ukraine to fight Russia? Who gets to decide which Nazis get censored and which ones get Uzis?" — a framing of the war plenty of readers would contest on its own terms, and one that treats "Nazi" as a live debate rather than the specific, sourced description the ADL and The Atlantic attached to specific newsletters. He allowed one exception, though: "if Substack is actively promoting or prioritizing hateful content that's another matter."

Here's where the distinction between what's documented and what's argued actually matters. That Substack's recommendation algorithm surfaces extremist newsletters to new subscribers is not something I'm inferring — it's a Guardian investigation's own finding, published February 7, 2026, under controlled test conditions: within two hours of a reporter subscribing to a newsletter called NatSocToday (2,800 subscribers, $80 a year, a swastika for its profile image, a recent post calling Hitler "one of the greatest men of all time"), Substack's own system surfaced 21 other profiles with similar material, several of which the paper found regularly share and like each other's posts. A second account, Third Reich Literature Archive, had 2,100 subscribers at the same $80 rate. A third, run by a writer named Ava Wolfe, charged £38 a year and engaged specifically in Holocaust denial. The algorithm also surfaced "great replacement" conspiracy content to the same test account. Substack had already made a version of this same mistake once, sending some users a push notification actively promoting NatSocToday in July 2025 — a "serious system error," the company said, though it's a strange kind of accident that lands on one specific newsletter.

Here's my own reading of that finding, not the Guardian's and not Substack's: a platform whose product actively recommends extremist material to strangers within two hours isn't merely tolerating speech the way a common carrier does. It's functioning as a publisher, making editorial decisions about what deserves amplification, whether or not it wants to be held to a publisher's standard. Jones's free-speech defense answers a real question — should this material be allowed to exist somewhere. It doesn't answer the one the Guardian's evidence actually raises, which is whether a company should build a system that hands it to people who didn't ask for it.

Why People Stay

Community, not conviction, is what actually holds most of the writers I spoke with in place.

John Skipp doesn't argue principle. He does a headcount — of his own feed, not the platform's statistics, and that distinction matters. He joined in 2022 after discovering Sari Botton's Oldster Magazine, and spent the years since building Yer Pal Skipp into a real operation: frequent, near-daily posting, an interview podcast, and a novel, The Change — a Twilight Zone-inflected countercultural thriller — serialized in fifty-two paid installments, the only thing on his Substack he's ever put behind a paywall. Skipp is no apologist for Nazis; he's unambiguous about where he stands. What he denies is that they're anywhere near him, comparing them to the anonymous extremists undoubtedly living somewhere on his own long Portland street — neighbors you don't choose, but don't move over for either. Then he names the people actually in his network: E. Jean Carroll, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, George Saunders, a dozen more. "Name me one fucking Nazi in the batch," he told me. "I double-dare ya." His own feed feeling clean isn't evidence the platform is; it's evidence his threshold for leaving is specific — "when all those excellent people are driven from Substack" — and that the bet only pays off if the people eventually driven out would be the good ones.

Renée Stramel and Will Battersby show what that community actually buys, from opposite sides of the transaction. Stramel isn't building an audience — she's an artist and reader who fled to Substack in the wake of the last presidential election, disgusted, she told me, by the way other news organizations were falling in line and specifically by Jeff Bezos's management of the Washington Post, a paper she'd read for years. What she found instead was a community of artists and gallery curators having longer, slower conversations about work and industry trends than she'd found anywhere else — enough to make her seriously consider starting a blog of her own there, a plan she's since abandoned specifically because it would leave her "dependent on another outside platform and vulnerable to those whims." "I am not happy about it," she told me plainly, asked about the moderation record — and Substack has become what she calls a "refuge" from the rest of social media regardless, more intuitive to her than Bluesky and easier to find her own community within. She recommends it to friends looking for an alternative to Meta but tells them upfront what it is: "a platform built by billionaires."

Battersby runs a small production outfit, Etch, that joined Substack in late 2024 betting that its readers and what he calls "consumers of smart moving images" overlap enough to be worth reaching directly. It's delivered a small but steady income in the company's early years, real information about its own audience — what length of material they want, how often Etch can actually deliver something of quality that isn't just a filmed podcast — and something harder to quantify: the confirmation that someone is actually watching, rather than shouting into what he called a "direct to consumer void." What he'd lose by leaving isn't the money. It's the specific, private relationship with the supporters who get behind-the-scenes material the company doesn't put anywhere else — a relationship he doubts would survive a move to YouTube or elsewhere in anything like its current form, even if some of the audience followed. "Is there a morally perfect platform?" he asked me. "This is capitalism, so every means of communication is going to be compromised in some fashion." He's lived that compromise from both directions — he mentioned, almost in passing, that a small left-leaning streaming service once released a documentary his own father made in the 1970s without properly securing the rights, and he was glad they put it out anyway. Etch did draw one line: it left X after Musk, in Battersby's words, "publicly and openly declared his fascistic politics." Substack hasn't crossed that same threshold for him. Not yet. His advice to other writers considering the platform is characteristically unsentimental: "Join. Find out if you have an audience willing to subscribe to your work. Use it for creative discipline."

Luke Y. Thompson gets to the same place as Skipp and Battersby by a different road entirely: exhaustion, not community. Walmart is where his grocery money stretches furthest, and it's problematic. Facebook is how he keeps up with extended family, and it's problematic. He still needs Twitter/X for sources who won't post anywhere else. "There's only so much ethical consumption I have the time and energy to manage," he told me — an argument that any platform large enough to matter will host people worth blocking, and that the writers actually worth reading are easy enough to find without pretending the whole platform is clean. Skipp bets on the community. Battersby bets on the relationship. Thompson has simply run out of room to keep litigating every platform he touches. Three different roads, one destination: nobody here is leaving.

What Leaving Costs

The alternatives don't eliminate dependence so much as let a writer choose which dependency to keep. Ghost offers greater control without Substack's built-in social network. Beehiiv supplies a different set of growth and recommendation tools under a different financial arrangement. Patreon is built around membership more than publishing. An independent site provides the most autonomy and the least assistance — which means the writer gets to become publisher, circulation department, technical support, and unpaid intern all at once.

That leaves writers with a choice more complicated than stay or leave. They can pay Substack a percentage for convenience, discovery, and community, or rebuild those functions elsewhere at the cost of money, labor, reach, or some combination of the three. A mailing list can be exported. The habits surrounding it cannot. Comments, recommendations, in-app followers, recurring payments, and the ordinary expectation that readers know where to find you belong to the system in ways a spreadsheet of email addresses doesn't capture.

The Loan Comes Due

Sean Highkin's numbers look, on paper, like an unambiguous win: $2,052 a year on Ghost instead of $4,968 on Substack, and a subscriber base that's grown 22 percent since he switched. But something didn't survive the move regardless. "When I first joined up, they gave me a big push and featured me and funneled a lot of traffic to me," Highkin has said. "But once I wasn't one of the 'new recruited talent' they could tout, they stopped featuring me and I saw my growth stagnate." That featured placement — the thing that got him an audience in the first place — never came with him. It couldn't. It wasn't his to take. It belonged to Substack the whole time, on loan, and the loan came due the moment he stopped being useful for recruiting the next round of writers behind him.

Substack promised to remove the middleman. Then it quietly became nearly every middleman function at once. That it works well enough for most people to stay is exactly what makes the dependency worth noticing.

My thanks to everyone who agreed to talk with me about their own experience of the platform, whatever conclusion they came to. Their willingness to speak plainly, on the record, about a bargain most of them are still actively weighing is the reporting this piece is built on.

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