Substack Doesn't Love You Back

You Own the Words. The Platform Owns Everything That Matters.

Dear Republic,

As pro-Substack as ROL tends to be, it’s important to keep the platform honest. Joshua Doležal has some harsh but fair words.

-ROL

SUBSTACK DOESN’T LOVE YOU BACK

I began writing on Substack in March 2022, during what most veterans now see as a halcyon time. There was a lot of hype then about how you could earn a primary living just from your writing. Most of the in-house marketing featured writers like Rob Henderson who could import an email list of 10K or more and grow from there. The language was both humble and ambitious: the side hustle could become your main gig.

Most of us starting from scratch knew that wouldn’t be true for us. Jeannine Ouellette claimed she went from zero to $40K in just one year. Boosters like Sarah Fay preached that everyone could do this with enough grit and hard work (and a little paid consulting). Even then, conversion rates remained stubbornly low, more like 3% of free subscribers, not even close to the 10% rate that Substack initially predicted.

Even if you were humming along at 1,000 new subscribers every year, a 3% conversion rate meant it would take 33 years to reach $40K in earnings. Assuming that everyone who upgraded stayed a paying member for life.

Then, last June, the algorithm changed or something else happened behind the curtain, and growth went flat. Sam Kahn called it the “Great Substack Growth Crisis.” A year later it’s still perplexing to be seeing daily notifications about free subscribers while the overall number doesn’t budge.

But Substack claims that even if you’re not turning your side hustle into an actual living, their real value proposition to you is ownership. It’s one of the platform’s core myths: that it allows writers to retain full ownership of their content and email lists. It’s supposed to be the primary differentiating principle between Substack and everyone else.

Here’s Hamish McKenzie in a 2025 post, “Why We Built a Social Network”:

The problem is, those other social apps don’t really care about writers and creators. Their interests lie in creating a big, closed garden where you’re not in control—where you don’t own your audience, your relationships, or even your content.

So we wanted to create another option. Not necessarily a replacement, but a place to have your work discovered and talked about while still being in control. A place where you own your audience relationships, you own your content, and you have the freedom to leave whenever you want.

But compare these clauses in Substack’s Terms of Use with similar language in LinkedIn’s agreement.

Here’s Substack:

• Operating Substack: You hereby grant Substack a license to translate, modify, reproduce, and otherwise act with respect to your Posts to enable us to provide, improve, and notify you about new features within Substack. You understand and agree that we may need to make changes to your Posts to conform and adapt those Posts to the technical requirements of networks, devices, services, or media, and this license includes the rights to do so. For example, we may need to modify your publication to make sure it is viewable on an iPhone as well as a computer.

• Public Posts: If you share a Post with other users on Substack, then you grant us the license above, as well as a license to display, perform, and distribute your Post. Also, you grant all other users of Substack a license to access the Post, and to use and exercise all rights in it, as permitted by the functionality of Substack.

• Term of License: You agree that the licenses you grant are royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and worldwide. This is a license only – your ownership in Posts is not affected.

Here’s LinkedIn:

• You grant LinkedIn and our Affiliates the following non-exclusive license to the content and other information you provide (e.g., share, post, upload, and/or otherwise submit) to our Services: A worldwide, transferable and sublicensable right to use, copy, modify, distribute, publicly perform and display, host, and process your content and other information without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or others.

In fact, what happened on Substack last June is exactly what you’d expect from any other platform. LinkedIn keeps changing its algorithm, too. You can follow hundreds of gurus who promise to help you optimize your reach. Last year, emojis were good, now the algo hates them. Last year you could post on a variety of topics, this year you have to stay in your lane or the AI system can’t categorize you and thereby will suppress your posts.

The user agreements show that there’s already a big asterisk next to ownership. In exchange for giving you free access, every platform insists that it be allowed to change, copy, and distribute your content. But I’ve begun to wonder how much ownership matters if the real value lies in reach. If platforms control the means of distribution, then how much of your audience relationship do you really own? If the algorithm keeps changing, and you have to keep genuflecting to the algo to be seen, then your content is a tool for the platform, not for you. Dan Stone’s goodbye post made it quite clear that the original Substack vision was meant for “individual culture stars,” not for you.

Kahn concludes his essay with a plaintive appeal to the founders to return to a vision that never was true: “Substack developed for writers, and, really, for a remarkable period, it was (and in some ways still is) a writer’s paradise — and there’s a community that is and always will be grateful to management for that.” It remains surpassingly strange that we’d feel gratitude to founders who have demonstrated consistently that their sui generis principles are dubious.

In “An Open Letter to Chris Best, CEO of Substack,” Robert M. Hamburger calls for a return to the dream that many of us had when we joined, not just to find community beyond our isolated writing carrels, but to be discoverable, to have an entry point into the literary conversation. It’s a weird letter, full of fragments and the kind of punchy syntax that may well have been written by AI and not at all the kind of literate appeal that I’d expect a true advocate of the essay to write. Best chose to slap it down as slop, rather than engage with the message, which then fed another outrage cycle, including some conspiracy theories about the whole thing having been staged.

At this point I’m supposed to say something about how there’s nowhere else to go, how the writing life before Substack was dying, how much I’d miss my writing community if I left. Some of that is true, but I would at least like to dispense with the ownership myth.

According to my dashboard, I’ve written 325 posts (including podcast episodes) since launching in March 2022. Nearly 500K words, I’d estimate, the equivalent of 4-5 books. I’d like to say that I own all that, but I can’t deny that the platform has changed my approach. It doesn’t reward the kind of essay I like to write, which typically tops 3,000 words and privileges lyricism over controversy. To be relevant, to be engaged with and seen, requires a different voice and style than the more authentic literary me. So how much of my archive is usable beyond its ephemeral purpose, really?

My friend Mark Slouka, one of the finest stylists I know, launched “Thought Salad” two years ago. Mark is a former Harper’s editor who has taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia University, won a pile of awards including a Guggenheim, and published eight books with Knopf, HarperCollins, Norton, and other major presses. But he’s not writing longform essays here, or short stories, or a serialized novel. The form just doesn’t fit. “Not my forte,” he writes, “but do nothing I can’t, so I spit into the hurricane.”

I guess Slouka “owns” everything he’s published on Substack since October 2024, but you can’t publish weekly without being changed by the medium. It’s well and good to say we can do what we want, write whatever moves us, however sublime or mundane. But good writers are attentive to their audience, to the conventions of their discourse communities, and can’t help being shaped by that environment. I’m one of the ones who pitched Slouka on Substack to begin with, after studying with him in Prague, but the more I think about ownership and how much my own writing has been shaped by four years on this platform, the more I wonder why serious writers spend hours each week crafting essays for this particular medium. The fact that there’s nothing better seems an increasingly poor rationale. Thoreau might ask whether we ride upon this railroad or whether it rides upon us.

Substack was never doing it for us. Why are we doing it for them?

Joshua Doležal is a book coach and editor. He is the author of a memoir, “Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging,” and a poetry collection, “Someday Johnson Creek.” He also writes “The Recovering Academic.”