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Not so long ago, if you’d asked me where I networked with other writers, I would’ve said Twitter, Medium, maybe LinkedIn.
Substack wasn’t on my radar for this.
It was just a publishing platform. A tool to send letters into inboxes. That’s it.
But fast-forward to now, and the Substack app is my single biggest growth driver. (Followed by Medium.)
And that’s both incredible and slightly terrifying.
Notes Changed Everything
Substack Notes turned the Substack app and experience into something else entirely.
Something way bigger.
What started as “Twitter but calmer” became the place where many discovered writers, got discovered themselves, and picked up new subscribers. Daily.
Before Notes, app-driven traffic okay but nothing to think about twice.
Now, the app is where the magic happens.
Followers, susbcribers, comments, paid conversions, they all come from people who find me inside Substack, not from emails landing in inboxes.
That’s huge…
It’s also a quiet shift in what it means to “have subscribers.”
And that’s something to worry about.
Hidden Shift Away From Email
For years, we heard: build an email list, because you own it.
Emails were yours. Direct contact. A line no algorithm could cut.
But on some of today’s biggest writing platforms (and social media in some cases too), that’s no longer 100% true.
Medium has already moved to a closed system: subscribers don’t equal emails anymore. If you check your dashboard now, all you’ll see is ****@****.com. You don’t own the list. You own a number on Medium’s servers.
One you can't export and take with you. Just like regular followers on social media.
Substack hasn’t gone that far, yet. But they’re on their way.
You can still export email addresses. But dig into your export, and you’ll see a little column called Email disabled: TRUE/FALSE.
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