Why Substack is an ideal platform for writers.

Until they go woke and ruin everything.

Photo taken by Julie R. Neidlinger

Hey, writer.

Looking to make a change in your writing platform? Maybe bring in a little extra income doing something other than stuffing envelopes or falling for those tricky comments that swear you could make $10K a month doing this One Crazy Thing?

Consider Substack as your new writing platform.

My reasons are as follows:

1. They make it easy to create a for-pay platform, with some freebies, as needed.

2. They have created not just a blogging platform, but a podcast, social, and chat platform.

3. All of those platforms have access (pay or free) controls so that you can better control your content and increase income from the same place.

4. You can avoid trolls and ugliness by using pay-to-play controls. For example, you can decide who can comment on posts and the social notes based on if they are paying or not. Trolls like free, unfettered access. It’s useful.

5. You can block accounts that pay to play only to troll.

6. Sharing and responding to content within the growing platform is very easy.

7. There are many ways to manage your content, be it in special sections with the same or different subscription lists, or through tags.

8. Collaboration with a team or guest writers is easy.

Nearly every week, there is something else. There are quite a few content formats you can create.

The payment/subscription option is the best part, however, as it’s integrated in and you don’t have to fuss with PayPal or other platforms to manually managed access to paid content. It’s as easy as writing a post and clicking on settings.

My main annoyance is when Substack features writers or content, either for you to read or to use as an example, they are nearly always left-leaning. That tells me that the people behind Substack are unable to allow conservative or right-leaning people to share the stage. Despite the number of conservative or alternate writing that flocked to the platform and made it what it is, they can’t seem to bring themselves to recognize it.

This is worrisome.

Despite promising not to censor or restrict content as we experienced in recent years, their leanings make it plain to see that what they see as “normal” content is left-of-center, making right-of-center content easier to someday justify as being worthy of removing. It could be the pattern of begrudgingly letting the yucky kids into the playground until they are big enough, and then showing them the door. Like all the other social networks.

But for now, it is quite nice.