For tech it's twitter, for lifestyle it's instagram, for search it's google, for conspiracies it's facebook, for gen z it's tiktok, for gen x it's media. Whatever way you slice it, Other People's Audience is the fastest way to grow.
This no longer exists. You need Twitter in perpetuity. If for some reason you’re banned from Twitter (often there’s no reason at all) there goes an entire career and audience you’ve built for years.
If Facebook bans you because you think vaccines have microchips you don’t lose your income. If Twitter bans you because you said something mean you’re dead.
Tell it to Josh Rogan.
"- Tell it to Evel Knievel"
As if Josh (Joe?) Rogan is representative.
He's a geopolitics writer that was, ironically, interviewed by Rogan about the lab leak hypothesis, but he's not banned from Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshrogin
Neither is Rogan, btw, but he's not posting any of his controversial takes there.
The good news is that there's this robust, free, and open protocol you may have heard of: email. I can hear Gen Z laughing at me already. "LOL, Gen X grandpa, why are you yelling at clouds? And what's 'email'?"
Yes, email. Build your subscriber list via email. Nobody can cancel you or take that away from you.
Not coincidentally, they're the two only media that are delivered by open protocols.
For a newsletter at least, this definitely isn't true.
For context, I'm the cofounder of SparkLoop — a referral platform specifically for newsletters.
We see thousands of newsletters growing 5-50% monthly with referrals (and more if they do other marketing stuff).
Except this doesn't work for Substack users, because Substack doesn't support tools like ours.
The problem isn't that "you can't grow a newsletter without Twitter" — it's that "you can't grow a Substack without Twitter".
Just choose a better email platform and the problem disappears.
Because thinking of Facebook as a boogeymen that turns people into monsters requires thinking of their users not only as monstrous, but as helpless dupes, unable to resist being influenced by the medium they're using.
The media's overrepresentation on Twitter means that applying the same logic would require a level of introspection and self-awareness that would be difficult for most people, let alone journalists.
It's the same reason everyone overestimated early-2010s Twitter's userbase, when for a long period it had less active users than the Google+ stream alone (ie, not the auto-posting from Google products).
Or perhaps it's that the company has engaged in systematic malfeasance, unethical business practices, and has profoundly amoral leadership, resulting in profoundly amoral behavior, culminating in knee jerk dishonesty, denial, and misdirection, and the systematic betrayal abuse and injury of their users, host societies, and culture at large.
The answer is right here:
> Twitter is the Facebook for the chattering classes [a group which includes those working in media].