The Bait and Switch (TFG Pt 3)

The first two posts in this series were about the ideological rot and the content moderation failures. This one is about the quieter, less dramatic, and frankly more personal betrayal: what Substack did to small, free newsletters when the investors came calling and the bill came due. I joined Substack in early 2022 to partake in the infrastructure. Little did I know how it would turn out.

Here's the original deal as I understood it. You write. You build an audience. If you want to charge for it, great, Substack takes its 10% and everyone wins. If you don't charge, you're still part of the community, you still benefit from the network effects, you still get to grow. Substack got something out of the deal too – your free newsletter brought readers onto the platform, readers who might subscribe to something paid while they were there. You were seeding the ecosystem.

That was the promise. The implicit contract.

Now here's what happened around 2022 to 2024 when Substack's planned funding round collapsed in the market downturn and they had to cut costs to extend their runway.

The free newsletters started noticing something. Your subscriber count would grow, hit a threshold, and then... stop. You'd add five this week, and somehow the total would stay the same. Add more, same thing. The list was being trimmed. Not by you. By them.

I noticed this. Others noticed this. It wasn't random. The pattern was consistent enough and the mechanics clear enough that the conclusion was not subtle: if you weren't connected to Stripe, if you weren't monetizing, Substack was algorithmically throttling your reach and quietly culling your subscriber list to keep the infrastructure costs of your free newsletter from eating into the margins they needed to show their investors.

You were no longer a community asset. You were overhead. That hurts.

The Notes push, which accelerated with the 2025 Series C that pushed Substack's valuation to $1.1 billion, made it explicit. If you weren't connected to Stripe -- if you weren't paying the cover charge to the monetization ecosystem -- the Notes algorithm was not going to help you reach new readers. The discovery feed, the mechanism that drove Casey Newton 70,000 new subscribers in a single year, was effectively paywalled behind willingness to monetize.

They didn't say any of this out loud. That would have required honesty. And we know how honest these fuckers are...

What they said, repeatedly and with great moral seriousness, was that they were building a platform for independent writers. For the free press. For the kind of thoughtful long-form writing that the attention economy had crowded out. Chris Best, the CEO, gave multiple interviews about how the attention economy "rewards things that provoke, divide, and drive outrage" and how Substack was building the alternative.

He said that. While building Notes. While moving the algorithm to surface Andrew Tate. While making it structurally harder for small free newsletters to grow unless they plugged into Stripe.

These fucking guys built the thing they said they were saving us from, charged us rent to live in it, and then told us it was for our own good.

Look: I moved to Ghost. The Nazi content started it -- I wasn't about to let my writing share algorithmic oxygen with that shit. But the subscriber trimming is what confirmed it. Ghost doesn't do that. Ghost is a nonprofit, open-source platform. They explicitly don't build the kind of recommendation infrastructure that Substack has. If a Nazi shows up on Ghost, they get their newsletter and nothing else. No discovery boost. No Substack taking 10% while the algorithm does the marketing.

It's slower. It's less glamorous. The growth levers are smaller. But the deal is what it says it is, which is more than you can say for the three guys who told you the media can't be saved by algorithm and then built one, got a billion-dollar valuation off it, and are now platforming a guy who got kicked off every other website on the internet.

The original sin was the gap between what they said and what they built. The Nazi chapter was when they told you the gap didn't matter. The Tate chapter is them telling you to go fuck yourself.

These fucking guys, man. All three of them join the ranks of TFG infamy.

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