Substack's Easter Miracle

Not a chirp. Wednesday, Substack announced the beta release of Notes, a Twitter-like scrolling feed for short-form content, which immediately attracted the unbridled wrath of Twitter’s Lord Commander Elon Musk. By Thursday morning, it was no longer possible to embed tweets on Substack, and by Friday it was total war. Over the course of 48 brutal hours, links to Substack were aggressively suppressed, as was Substack’s Twitter account, tweets that mentioned Substack, and every URL that included the company’s name. For Elon’s final act, with a gesture reminiscent of his infamous poop emoji press strategy, Twitter searches for the word “substack” were re-routed to the word “newsletter” (at the time of my writing, they still do). Naturally, reaction from writers who use both Substack and Twitter has been overwhelmingly negative.