Twitter is on the attack against Substack – The Verge

Twitter is rebranding Super Follows to Subscriptions

2023-04-13T14:05:10-04:00

Twitter is rebranding its "Super Follows" feature, which lets you subscribe to individual users to get access to some exclusive content, to just "Subscriptions." Twitter owner Elon Musk promoted the feature on Thursday, noting that you can find it in the "Monetization" section of settings.

Super Follows were first announced in February 2021, and as far as we can tell, the rebranded Subscriptions have many of the same features. With Subscriptions, you can charge users so they can get access to things like exclusive tweets, subscriber-only Spaces, and special subscriber badges. Down the line, Twitter says that it hopes to include "newsletters …

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Substack launches its Twitter-like Notes just days after Twitter throttled Substack links

2023-04-11T11:00:00-04:00

Yep, that looks like Twitter. | Image: Substack

Substack's Twitter-like feature for shorter posts, called Notes, is launching for everyone on Tuesday. Notes could prove to be a worthy Twitter alternative for some, especially for Substack writers who have already built audiences on the platform and are looking for a new place to post after Twitter throttled Substack links and marked them as unsafe.

Substack's Notes will appear in their own separate tab, meaning they'll be separate from the full newsletters you can read in the Inbox tab or the threads you can read in the Chat tab, where you can read newsletters. In a blog post, Substack suggests using Notes to share things like "posts, quo …

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Elon Musk tweets then deletes DMs from Matt Taibbi over his Substack snit

2023-04-10T21:00:44-04:00

Elon Musk and one of his "Twitter Files" writers, Matt Taibbi, don't seem to be on great terms right now, and that situation probably isn't getting any better after Musk posted then deleted a DM conversation between the two of them.

Let me try to recap how we got to this point. I'm warning you now that it's a bit of a mess.

Taibbi, given access to Twitter information from Musk, published the first of many editions of the so-called "Twitter Files" that Musk believed would be a shocking exposé of former leadership.
Taibbi also publishes Racket News, a Substack-based publication with more than 362,000 subscribers.
On Wednesday, Substack announc …

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Substack CEO pushes back at Elon Musk, says Twitter situation is ‘very frustrating’

2023-04-08T20:08:14-04:00

Quick recap: Substack, the popular subscription newsletter platform for writers, launched a new feature in its app called Notes last week, which is fairly similar to Twitter.

Twitter, the world-historical clown car of a company currently operated by Elon Musk, responded by blocking the ability to like or retweet any posts containing the word "Substack," throwing up a warning message if users clicked on Substack links, and finally blocking even the word Substack from being searched. Substack users, the vast majority of whom are independent small business owners who depend on Substack as an enterprise software provider, mostly responded to th …

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Twitter is now marking Substack links as unsafe

2023-04-07T20:09:54-04:00

Twitter has started marking links to Substack as unsafe. If you click on a link on Twitter with substack.com in the URL, Twitter will show a separate notice warning you that "the link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe."

Don't be alarmed - the links we've checked appear to be perfectly safe. This notice seems instead to be Twitter's latest hostile move toward Substack after the email newsletter platform announced its own Twitter-like "Notes" feature on Wednesday.

On Thursday, Twitter blocked people who use Substack from embedding tweets into their stories. Then, lat …

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One of Elon’s handpicked ‘Twitter Files’ writers quits Twitter over its Substack restrictions

2023-04-07T17:15:12-04:00

Matt Taibbi has announced that he's leaving Twitter amid the company's ongoing spat with newsletter platform Substack.

If Taibbi's name doesn't immediately ring a bell, perhaps the phrase "Twitter Files" might. Using access granted by Twitter CEO and self-avowed free speech enthusiast Elon Musk, Taibbi and other journalists have shared internal Twitter information that was intended to reveal how corrupt the company's previous leadership was. (What they actually revealed was Jack Dorsey's personal email address and some sloppy journalism. Oops.)

Twitter seems to be in a drag-out fight with Substack, blocking users from liking, replying to, …

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Substack writers say Twitter’s newsletter ban is bad for business — and worse for Twitter

2023-04-07T16:35:24-04:00

This week, Twitter began restricting the promotion of links to Substack newsletters, a move that seems to fly in the face of owner Elon Musk's vocal support of free speech on the platform. The change is a huge problem for Substack writers, who have found Twitter to be one of the best places to attract new subscribers to their newsletters.

"It appears that Musk is making decisions based on his own financial interests and petty grievances - even if it makes Twitter objectively worse for users," Judd Legum, author of Popular Information, a politics-focused newsletter with more than 240,000 subscribers, says in an email to The Verge. "If this c …

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Substack founders fire back at Twitter over restrictions and rules that ‘change on a whim’

2023-04-07T12:04:18-04:00

Substack's founders have responded to Twitter's new restrictions on promoting tweets with links from the publishing platform, telling The Verge that writers' livelihoods "should not be tied to platforms where they don't own their relationship with their audience, and where the rules can change on a whim."

On Thursday night, Twitter users noticed that they couldn't like, reply to, or retweet some tweets that had Substack links in them. Twitter hasn't said why it made the change - or if the change was even intentional - but the timing is certainly suspect, given that it happened about a day after Substack announced its own Twitter-like "Notes …

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Twitter now disables likes, replies, and retweets if a tweet has Substack links

2023-04-07T11:27:49-04:00

Writers trying to embed tweets in their Substack stories are in for a rude surprise: after pasting a link to the site, a message pops up saying that "Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts" and explaining that the company is working on a fix.

After those reports surfaced, between Thursday night and Friday morning, Twitter apparently began to restrict promotion and visibility for tweets with links to Substack posts. New tweets linking directly to Substack.com can still be tweeted, but trying to retweet or like those tweets via Twitter's website results in an error message saying, "Some actions on thi …

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Canary in the emerald mine

2023-04-07T09:30:00-04:00

I had a corpse on my phone, and I kept checking in on it. Ever since January 12th, my preferred iOS Twitter app had been locked in stasis, frozen on an error modal informing me that "there was a problem authenticating with Twitter," and wow, was there ever. Without any notice, Twitter had revoked the mainline access credentials for Tweetbot and every other third-party client not operated by Twitter itself.

Unlike many decisions made during Twitter's "vox populi" Roman cosplay era, there had never been a poll about this. Elon Musk had never appeared deep in a thread with Kevin Sorbo and a spartan avatar burner account to say, "Yikes, third- …

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