I just think this situation is so completely bonkers. The policy/legality of it seems sort of irrelevant when it is just so obviously terrible. For instance, the Twitter API (which I’ve actually used, and yes it is trivial to get a token and start collecting data)--I am sure the terms of use disallow building anything that competes with Twitter, and I bet Substack was actually in violation of those terms if they were using the Twitter API to develop Notes, or even during/prior to the development of Notes. But then you ban them from the API! You revoke the token! You don’t go on this weird power trip! I mean what the hell.
And I agree with your general feelings about Notes. Substack said that it will be better than Twitter because it will be funded by subscriptions, not ads, and I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure it will be better than Twitter for a lot of reasons, because Twitter is pretty bad. But that doesn’t mean I want Substack working on it. I would really prefer if Substack was a platform absolutely 100% dedicated to long-form content and small networks. Notes doesn’t help me as a writer, it only helps Substack bring in more users + revenue, and at the cost of focus being placed on the things that actually do help writers.
The Gossip Trap is the best single piece of writing I have encountered on Substack, so I have to say that I largely agree with your take here.
I want to share one point related to Notes . I was invited to test Notes in beta as a reader. I was initially skeptical, even slightly hostile, to the idea. I told the team as much in the product test that I did. I value Substack because it has connected me with writing that manages to deliver me into a state of reading flow--where I am immersed in the mind of another human. I even used your ideas from the Gossip Trap to write an analogy of how Substack delivers the best experiences of the middle school cafeteria--being together with your friends and exploring the world together--as opposed to the worst aspects, basically everything you're talking about in this post.
I'm not sure if Notes will stay this way, but thus far it has mostly recreated the aspects that I value about Substack but on a more interactive scale. For example, the other night I was having simultaneous discussions about basketball (with a writer I've read for 20 years) and free will (with someone I'd never seen before encountering them on Notes). It made me feel like a piece of technology was bridging a gap to enable meaningful human connection in a way that I haven't felt since the early 00s when I was a regular on a few random message boards.
I love this, and hope it's true! My worry is that Notes feels so great now just due to scale. It's sort of like crypto: everything is faster than Bitcoin at first, and feels great to use. But then more and more people start to use the currency because it's so good and it all slows down to a crawl, and then eventually everyone realizes that Bitcoin isn't that bad. Of course, maybe that dynamic won't apply, I'd love for it not to, but that's the reason for my initial skepticism.
I'm sure the experience of Notes will change rapidly as more users come on board. I suppose the slowing down to a crawl here would be recreating the ridiculous Gossip Trap dynamics of Twitter.
Here's what I really hope Notes doesn't break: the positive relationship I feel with writers, even though our relationship is transactional. I normally find transactional relationships to be either unfulfilling or grubby, yet I pay for your Substack (and bought your book) and I feel very good about both of those things. I have a similar dynamic with about 15 writers currently on Substack. I'm only beginning to formulate this idea but the best way I can explain it is that the writer-reader relationship feels finite and visible. I can decide at any time how much to contribute financially and it is always transparent. In contrast, I follow lots of folks on Twitter but even people who I agree with like 100% of the time I don't feel positively connected to. We have a transactional relationship of a type where it is infinite and invisible. I don't actually give them any money (though I could) and what exactly they want from me is not defined. I need to think about a better way to convey this idea, but my main point is: I really hope Substack can maintain whatever combination of factors that are at play that link writers-readers in a positive sum game.
It seems like everyone acknowledges that social media--twitter included--is poison, but no one is willing to quit it. That doesn’t seem especially mature, either.
The attention economy has got many of us hooked on attention, so withdrawing our attention from the whole system means that we have to sacrifice receiving attention in turn.
In our heart we know the solution is to ignore all of this stuff but we don’t want to be ignored, especially when the real world features increasing amounts of people glued to their phones in public, ignoring everything outside their screen.
In a world of narcissistic, petulant, attention-grabbing antics and tantrums the calm, sober, even boring poise of the dignified adult becomes an ever more worthy thing to witness, emulate and strive for.
Worth mentioning that Elon receives an enormous amount of positive feedback for all of his Twitter antics. To a certain audience, this looks like a rebel maverick sticking it to the elitist media, in much the same way that Trump's base loved Trump breaking all the norms of politics. Elon seems to thrive on this kind of praise, so we can expect the antics to be ongoing until Twitter collapses and he sells it for $1.
Yeah, it's a good point he does get positive feedback. However, Trump's base are the voters who vote for him, which is why he has like a 40% approval rating floor. I just don't think Elon has the same sort of floor, and there's also a mismatch for Elon that doesn't exist for Trump. The people most excited about him naming Twitter "titter" are like, anime anons. Not the people who buy Teslas, or the people who sign up for Starlink.
I even wonder about the people who cheer him on Twitter, to be honest.
There's an interesting thing about the whole Titter idiocy, which is that it's almost a beat-for-beat reenactment of a sketch from a 90s show called Big Train, in which an idiot billionaire wants to buy The Ritz and rename it The Titz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjG5JVWgyWw
Thing is, that sketch was written by Graham Linehan, who was booted from Twitter in 2020 for anti-trans posts, and recently restored by Musk. Linehan is normally desperate to claim credit for things and draw attention to his old work. He's also publicly grateful to Elon for restoring his Twitter account.
But Linehan has not mentioned this similarity, or shared any opinion on the Titter situation. This might not mean anything, but I think it's a sign that support for Musk as an anti-establishment figure is very, very weak.
Substack is a place for writers. What percentage of READERS come to the platform off email? Few. This is about substack soul and feeling like the founders don't have a plan for me, the writer. It's just gong to be a swamp of writers pitching writers with a few rockstars which feels like high school. I care more about substacks soul than twitters so I feel more upset about substack branching out to try to be bigger at my expense without making sure it's writers are taken care of, even us little guys, than I do Twitter, an entrenched actor acting perfectly normally as they do with a competitor trying to scrape its database.
You hit the nail on the head with this - and honestly when I see people who hold positions of extraordinary power and influence acting like immature, petulant children in public, it fills me with a lot of strong emotions - mainly deep anxiety and despair, but also an even more fundamental disorientation of suspecting that I can't trust anything I see or hear - almost like a character realizing that he is mentally ill and cannot tell the difference between reality and delusion. I've taken to a habit of just tallying up the number of lies and various attempts at deception I encounter through normal media consumption, from whatever topic is roiling the political discourse, to the most banal tiktok videos. The vast majority of content out there is fake, false, staged, or designed to deceive, mislead and bullshit - what most things present themselves to be are not what they actually are; What most people say has virtually no basis to be claimed with confidence, but is anyway.
I know there are trustworthy and competent people in the world - i've met some, but they don't seem to be in charge of anything. Moreover the public writ large doesn't reward people who model integrity and virtue with attention and clout. We reward vice, melodrama and egotism. We seem to want virtuous superheroes in our pop-culture and fantasy entertainment, but nowhere else in actual life, when given a choice. Maybe the public is being rational on this - in the real world, Winners are often terrible people (and often one cannot compete and win without being terrible) and a lot of folks would rather be an immoral winner than a saintly loser.
I'm not enough of a historian to really have a grasp on this, but it does feel like we've entered a kind of collective epistemic state thats very ripe for huge surges of utopianism, religious fervor and various flavors of idealistic and irrational ideologies like fascism and its corollaries that depend on group shibboleths, identity-based value systems and bespoke epistemologies.
I know all this is largely an algorithmically driven memetic selection process, governed by the incentive structures of for-profit social media and our dopaminergic reward functions. I feel trapped in a surreality because that's actually the case - I'm looking at the "world" through a warped filter. But when that warped version of reality becomes intersubjective because so many people are trapped in the same dynamic - and operate a model of the world on that basis, is there any meaningful sense in which a true-er reality still exists? "Real Life", "touching grass" does still exist, but it's no longer a given that it's more important or consequential to our lives and future plans. A person can unplug from Twitter, but the Twitterification of our institutions, communities and relationships proceed apace.
"many of the people who were adults prior to social media now act a lot more like children."
100%. There's a generational divide here, too. Some of us are old enough to remember life pre-phone and pre-internet. But there's a lot of people out there that have had this situation set to normal for their entire lives.
The transparency and visibility of social media brings out the mimetic instincts and then doses them with crystal meth. It's an escalating ratchet for the Id. The lower the bar gets, the lower it can move.
That's an important question - why will Substack's twitterish Notes be any healthier than Twitter itself? Maybe an advantage is that its goal will be to connect writers with readers around the content they write, not just to reflect our most impulsive selves. In other words, it might support expertise (of writers who know enough for people to subscribe to their content) instead of destroying it. I wonder.
Brilliant piece, Erik. I've also long thought about how social media affects adults, not just children. It's strange how rarely we think about what any phenomenon might do to adults, especially given what we know about neuroplasticity.
Twitter's awful. Did you come in for much abuse from trolls? Seems to me that the kind of stuff you write would not pull for much of that. I'm on medical Twitter and regularly deal with anti-vax, anti-mask people who are absolutely strutting and butt-wiggling with joy. "Tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belong, tomorrow belongs to me," and they may be right. And that puts me in touch with awful parts of myself, as I hate on those fuckers and look for ways to humiliate them via sarcasm and parody, and sometimes succeed. And compared to others I encounter relatively little abuse, because I'm a minnow. Zynep Tufekci's had a waterfall of venom and turds thundering down on her head for months. I admire her for hanging in.
Anyway, I wonder whether there's a way to organize something where Twitter users with large followings support people like you by publishing your links in their tweets. They could do it by publishing them as images rather than as texts so as not to trigger filters. Might Zeynep Tufekci do it? Kara Swisher? Scott Galloway?
1) I've never used any social media. I don't feel like I miss out on anything. Highly recommended.
2) Musk is an authoritarian egomaniac, and always has been. Everything he has done at Twitter was completely predictable based on his past record (the whole record, not just the sanitized part).
Before social media this behavior was limited to squabbling condo associations, dysfunctional academic departments, and middle schools.
But the miracle of the web has brought this abundance to us all! :) Even to Elon, poor little, rich, smart Elon, even he gets to be a middle school mean girl!
But he's the mean girl who bought the whole damn school.
I just think this situation is so completely bonkers. The policy/legality of it seems sort of irrelevant when it is just so obviously terrible. For instance, the Twitter API (which I’ve actually used, and yes it is trivial to get a token and start collecting data)--I am sure the terms of use disallow building anything that competes with Twitter, and I bet Substack was actually in violation of those terms if they were using the Twitter API to develop Notes, or even during/prior to the development of Notes. But then you ban them from the API! You revoke the token! You don’t go on this weird power trip! I mean what the hell.
And I agree with your general feelings about Notes. Substack said that it will be better than Twitter because it will be funded by subscriptions, not ads, and I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure it will be better than Twitter for a lot of reasons, because Twitter is pretty bad. But that doesn’t mean I want Substack working on it. I would really prefer if Substack was a platform absolutely 100% dedicated to long-form content and small networks. Notes doesn’t help me as a writer, it only helps Substack bring in more users + revenue, and at the cost of focus being placed on the things that actually do help writers.
The Gossip Trap is the best single piece of writing I have encountered on Substack, so I have to say that I largely agree with your take here.
I want to share one point related to Notes . I was invited to test Notes in beta as a reader. I was initially skeptical, even slightly hostile, to the idea. I told the team as much in the product test that I did. I value Substack because it has connected me with writing that manages to deliver me into a state of reading flow--where I am immersed in the mind of another human. I even used your ideas from the Gossip Trap to write an analogy of how Substack delivers the best experiences of the middle school cafeteria--being together with your friends and exploring the world together--as opposed to the worst aspects, basically everything you're talking about in this post.
I'm not sure if Notes will stay this way, but thus far it has mostly recreated the aspects that I value about Substack but on a more interactive scale. For example, the other night I was having simultaneous discussions about basketball (with a writer I've read for 20 years) and free will (with someone I'd never seen before encountering them on Notes). It made me feel like a piece of technology was bridging a gap to enable meaningful human connection in a way that I haven't felt since the early 00s when I was a regular on a few random message boards.
I love this, and hope it's true! My worry is that Notes feels so great now just due to scale. It's sort of like crypto: everything is faster than Bitcoin at first, and feels great to use. But then more and more people start to use the currency because it's so good and it all slows down to a crawl, and then eventually everyone realizes that Bitcoin isn't that bad. Of course, maybe that dynamic won't apply, I'd love for it not to, but that's the reason for my initial skepticism.
I'm sure the experience of Notes will change rapidly as more users come on board. I suppose the slowing down to a crawl here would be recreating the ridiculous Gossip Trap dynamics of Twitter.
Here's what I really hope Notes doesn't break: the positive relationship I feel with writers, even though our relationship is transactional. I normally find transactional relationships to be either unfulfilling or grubby, yet I pay for your Substack (and bought your book) and I feel very good about both of those things. I have a similar dynamic with about 15 writers currently on Substack. I'm only beginning to formulate this idea but the best way I can explain it is that the writer-reader relationship feels finite and visible. I can decide at any time how much to contribute financially and it is always transparent. In contrast, I follow lots of folks on Twitter but even people who I agree with like 100% of the time I don't feel positively connected to. We have a transactional relationship of a type where it is infinite and invisible. I don't actually give them any money (though I could) and what exactly they want from me is not defined. I need to think about a better way to convey this idea, but my main point is: I really hope Substack can maintain whatever combination of factors that are at play that link writers-readers in a positive sum game.
I feel like deleting Twitter I only use it to pull through Substack links 😆
me2! though when I tested various platforms, LinkedIn was the best quality. Twitter gets you numbers but mostly rubbish.
It seems like everyone acknowledges that social media--twitter included--is poison, but no one is willing to quit it. That doesn’t seem especially mature, either.
The attention economy has got many of us hooked on attention, so withdrawing our attention from the whole system means that we have to sacrifice receiving attention in turn.
In our heart we know the solution is to ignore all of this stuff but we don’t want to be ignored, especially when the real world features increasing amounts of people glued to their phones in public, ignoring everything outside their screen.
In a world of narcissistic, petulant, attention-grabbing antics and tantrums the calm, sober, even boring poise of the dignified adult becomes an ever more worthy thing to witness, emulate and strive for.
Great piece, Erik.
Love the Little League coach test
Worth mentioning that Elon receives an enormous amount of positive feedback for all of his Twitter antics. To a certain audience, this looks like a rebel maverick sticking it to the elitist media, in much the same way that Trump's base loved Trump breaking all the norms of politics. Elon seems to thrive on this kind of praise, so we can expect the antics to be ongoing until Twitter collapses and he sells it for $1.
Yeah, it's a good point he does get positive feedback. However, Trump's base are the voters who vote for him, which is why he has like a 40% approval rating floor. I just don't think Elon has the same sort of floor, and there's also a mismatch for Elon that doesn't exist for Trump. The people most excited about him naming Twitter "titter" are like, anime anons. Not the people who buy Teslas, or the people who sign up for Starlink.
I even wonder about the people who cheer him on Twitter, to be honest.
There's an interesting thing about the whole Titter idiocy, which is that it's almost a beat-for-beat reenactment of a sketch from a 90s show called Big Train, in which an idiot billionaire wants to buy The Ritz and rename it The Titz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjG5JVWgyWw
Thing is, that sketch was written by Graham Linehan, who was booted from Twitter in 2020 for anti-trans posts, and recently restored by Musk. Linehan is normally desperate to claim credit for things and draw attention to his old work. He's also publicly grateful to Elon for restoring his Twitter account.
But Linehan has not mentioned this similarity, or shared any opinion on the Titter situation. This might not mean anything, but I think it's a sign that support for Musk as an anti-establishment figure is very, very weak.
That's true.
Substack is a place for writers. What percentage of READERS come to the platform off email? Few. This is about substack soul and feeling like the founders don't have a plan for me, the writer. It's just gong to be a swamp of writers pitching writers with a few rockstars which feels like high school. I care more about substacks soul than twitters so I feel more upset about substack branching out to try to be bigger at my expense without making sure it's writers are taken care of, even us little guys, than I do Twitter, an entrenched actor acting perfectly normally as they do with a competitor trying to scrape its database.
You hit the nail on the head with this - and honestly when I see people who hold positions of extraordinary power and influence acting like immature, petulant children in public, it fills me with a lot of strong emotions - mainly deep anxiety and despair, but also an even more fundamental disorientation of suspecting that I can't trust anything I see or hear - almost like a character realizing that he is mentally ill and cannot tell the difference between reality and delusion. I've taken to a habit of just tallying up the number of lies and various attempts at deception I encounter through normal media consumption, from whatever topic is roiling the political discourse, to the most banal tiktok videos. The vast majority of content out there is fake, false, staged, or designed to deceive, mislead and bullshit - what most things present themselves to be are not what they actually are; What most people say has virtually no basis to be claimed with confidence, but is anyway.
I know there are trustworthy and competent people in the world - i've met some, but they don't seem to be in charge of anything. Moreover the public writ large doesn't reward people who model integrity and virtue with attention and clout. We reward vice, melodrama and egotism. We seem to want virtuous superheroes in our pop-culture and fantasy entertainment, but nowhere else in actual life, when given a choice. Maybe the public is being rational on this - in the real world, Winners are often terrible people (and often one cannot compete and win without being terrible) and a lot of folks would rather be an immoral winner than a saintly loser.
I'm not enough of a historian to really have a grasp on this, but it does feel like we've entered a kind of collective epistemic state thats very ripe for huge surges of utopianism, religious fervor and various flavors of idealistic and irrational ideologies like fascism and its corollaries that depend on group shibboleths, identity-based value systems and bespoke epistemologies.
I know all this is largely an algorithmically driven memetic selection process, governed by the incentive structures of for-profit social media and our dopaminergic reward functions. I feel trapped in a surreality because that's actually the case - I'm looking at the "world" through a warped filter. But when that warped version of reality becomes intersubjective because so many people are trapped in the same dynamic - and operate a model of the world on that basis, is there any meaningful sense in which a true-er reality still exists? "Real Life", "touching grass" does still exist, but it's no longer a given that it's more important or consequential to our lives and future plans. A person can unplug from Twitter, but the Twitterification of our institutions, communities and relationships proceed apace.
"many of the people who were adults prior to social media now act a lot more like children."
100%. There's a generational divide here, too. Some of us are old enough to remember life pre-phone and pre-internet. But there's a lot of people out there that have had this situation set to normal for their entire lives.
The transparency and visibility of social media brings out the mimetic instincts and then doses them with crystal meth. It's an escalating ratchet for the Id. The lower the bar gets, the lower it can move.
That's an important question - why will Substack's twitterish Notes be any healthier than Twitter itself? Maybe an advantage is that its goal will be to connect writers with readers around the content they write, not just to reflect our most impulsive selves. In other words, it might support expertise (of writers who know enough for people to subscribe to their content) instead of destroying it. I wonder.
Brilliant piece, Erik. I've also long thought about how social media affects adults, not just children. It's strange how rarely we think about what any phenomenon might do to adults, especially given what we know about neuroplasticity.
This is the best article I read in a long time, great analysis. Thank you, Erik!
It's much too nice to Musk, IMO.
Twitter's awful. Did you come in for much abuse from trolls? Seems to me that the kind of stuff you write would not pull for much of that. I'm on medical Twitter and regularly deal with anti-vax, anti-mask people who are absolutely strutting and butt-wiggling with joy. "Tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belong, tomorrow belongs to me," and they may be right. And that puts me in touch with awful parts of myself, as I hate on those fuckers and look for ways to humiliate them via sarcasm and parody, and sometimes succeed. And compared to others I encounter relatively little abuse, because I'm a minnow. Zynep Tufekci's had a waterfall of venom and turds thundering down on her head for months. I admire her for hanging in.
Anyway, I wonder whether there's a way to organize something where Twitter users with large followings support people like you by publishing your links in their tweets. They could do it by publishing them as images rather than as texts so as not to trigger filters. Might Zeynep Tufekci do it? Kara Swisher? Scott Galloway?
1) I've never used any social media. I don't feel like I miss out on anything. Highly recommended.
2) Musk is an authoritarian egomaniac, and always has been. Everything he has done at Twitter was completely predictable based on his past record (the whole record, not just the sanitized part).
Yeah social media exposed these people more than it brought out this behavior.
Before social media this behavior was limited to squabbling condo associations, dysfunctional academic departments, and middle schools.
But the miracle of the web has brought this abundance to us all! :) Even to Elon, poor little, rich, smart Elon, even he gets to be a middle school mean girl!
But he's the mean girl who bought the whole damn school.