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Comment by abhayhegde | Hacker News Reader

Is that basically like Twitter then? A micro-blogging feature?

Maybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links containing to Substack.

> Maybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links containing to Substack.

That seems to have accelerated the shift for some to Substack [1] (imagine if Google blocked searches for Bing or Brave!). Suppressing Substack makes the Twitter brand look weak and nervous.

1. https://reason.com/2023/04/10/elon-musk-matt-taibbi-twitter-...

Substack also removed the "Also publish to Twitter" checkbox from the settings screen before publishing each post.

Is that Substack being evil, or the result of Twitter locking almost everyone out of its API recently?

I just shared an interesting fact that I learned while posting on Substack this morning. I don't know the reason, and generally I don't think of product changes in terms of good and evil.

I think that was because Twitter revoked their API access including breaking their Sign in with Twitter feature (at least that’s what I read a few days back).

prediction - substack goes nowhere, like they currently are.

Suppressing substack when substack is trying to advertise for a twitter competitor is just common sense. There's no need for twitter to advertise for a competitor. That isn't censorship, thats just normal business. If substack was depending on twitter for free data and free advertising they were the ones who were weak and nervous.

Twitter was supposed to be the "public square", even Elon said as much. Restricting which goods and services are sold or marketed in said square is a shift away from that mentality.

When you're even losing the other billionaires: https://mastodon.social/@malwaretech@infosec.exchange/110172...

Twitter's another monopolist media company with a bunch of debt that needs to drown a potential competitor. I don't see Substack being able to become a direct competitor because the newsletter business is too good, and having closed twitter-like spaces that don't allow organized harassment is a good way for newsletters to build community and conversations. Twitter will remain the public version, where constant harassment from the ill and the covert has to be filtered out like spam.

That being said, maybe the important things will start being said in private spaces and only end up in "public squares" via screenshot ten or fifteen minutes later.

Of course. It's never been about free speech, but promoting Musk's personal interests and brand of politics.

As I see it if you have a significantly superior product then a competitor advertising on your platform is a positive since it just make you look even better in comparison. And a social media platform with 200 million daily users should be significantly superior to an identical clone with probably 1 million on a good day. Of course if you think you don't have a better product or that people hate your product that much then it's time to build moats and prevent people from jumping ship.

none of this has anything to do with substack making a business plan off of sucking down twitter data and advertising on twitter. There's no reason twitter has to put up with that.

Twitter's freedom to do something doesn't prevent other people's freedom to react to those actions.

They can block whomever they want and I can say it highlights how fragile they view their own business position as.

if you want to believe not directly contributing to competition that tried to take your data and advertise on your platform is fragile, thats of course your choice. To everyone else its just common sense. the fragility is the business plan that needs to steal its competitors data and space for advertising to have a hope in succeeding.

They blocked any retweet or like of a tweet containing a substack link.

E.g. an author writes content, people who are not affiliated with substack try to like/share.

That is not advertising, and this from the apparent free speech absolutist Elon.

Many had already forgotten that before the so-called villain of the year called Elon Musk took over the blue bird site, there was a social network called Meerkat that Twitter actively suppressed and introduced their own alternative called periscope.

Twitter is within their right to cut off access to their competitors, future or present.

It's admitting that managing infrastructure for email newsletters is not a viable business. After all, you can't serve people targeted third party ads with just email.

Why not? Could insert an ad into the email. Personalized for each recipient even.

It depends what you mean by viable. Substack newsletters have a paid option, substack can take a cut of that and the infra costs of sending emails is tiny.

If you want to bethe next massive aquistion/IPO, then maybe not.

I think it was a bad move by Elon to ban (and good move to reverse, though some damage already done), but I see why he was pissed: it's a straight-up Twitter clone.

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