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Betting Against Substack
I once turned down Substack because of their design limitations. As they emerge yet again in the news cycle, I thought I’d make my point with some of that design stuff they don’t do.
So, this is not a normal issue of Tedium. I have been messing around with some email design stuff recently, and I decided to try out an experimental new layout. This was built using MJML, an email scripting tool, and converted after the fact to CSS grid. And it’s about my favorite topic: How much I dislike Substack. You may find this over the top, or annoying, or weird. But it got my brain going, and that to me is the important part. Anyway, let’s get to it.
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This is a highly experimental issue meant for modern email clients. It may break. (If you're still reading your email in Outlook 2016, what are you doing?)
Hi, Ernie here. I decided to build a weird thing today and make it the next Tedium issue. (Hover or tap to read more!)
Yeah, your average Substack can't do this. Might as well rub it in their faces.
What's on my mind? Well, recently, Substack decided to partner with Polymarket.
It added a bunch of attractive design elements to its newsletters, things it could have added at any other time in its history. Chose not to.
This partnership has received scrutiny from writers.
“Unsurprisingly, I hate it. This is noxious for society and particularly toxic for writers,” writes Dave Karpf, who's leaving.
“Substack's partnership with Polymarket is the last straw for me.”
Ana Marie Cox, explaining her decision to unsubscribe from her paid Substack newsletters.
Despite this, the company appears all-in.
It’s not the first time Substack has been in hot water, by the way. It punted on Nazis.
You know who’s really excited about the partnership? Polymarket.
“Journalism is better when it's backed by live markets,” the company recently wrote on X. Journalists loved that.
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Polymarket recently let people bet on when the U.S. government was going to attack Iran. Some people won big.
$1.1B in funding
Substack’s current valuation, after a fresh round last summer led by Andreessen Horowitz, a major existing investor.
In a sense, I get it. Substack needs to make money and keep its funders happy.
Honestly, though, there are so many other options. Just an endless number. You don’t need to put yourself through this!
But given who it’s serving—journalists, many of whom have been laid off—it feels greasy.
I mean, think about it—in a time when people are getting laid off and using this as the backup, it sucks when the so-called savior is selling you out.
The result is that people who invested in the platform have to answer for it—even if they don't use it.
This was also true of the whole situation in 2023, which gained momentum from an open letter. Are we gonna do open letters every time they screw up?
For readers, my advice: Press Substackers to offer alternatives.
Substack may feel like the only game in town sometimes, but it does not have to be. You can push publishers to add things to Patreon and Ko-Fi, or move elsewhere. Many of these people don't move because they're afraid they might lose subscribers. Give them a second market. It might convince them to support more platforms.
So hey, weird email, right? I want to explain why I did it this way. See, back in 2017 I turned Substack down largely because they were asking me to take this highly visual thing I built to their platform. In the years since, they've done very little to expand the platform's visual design capabilities.
As I was thinking about the Polymarket thing, where the company went out of its way to add visual widgets for a company most of their readers don't even use, I thought it might be good to explain this point in a design-heavy format, just to be snarky. (Plus, I'll be honest, I just like shaking things up sometimes.)
It may break in some email clients, but email is a format that deserves more love than it gets. Might as well try something, I say. Anyway, see ya in a couple of days—with a normal email.
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