Chris Best

TikTok creators who maybe didn't even move or were just like, I don't know what's happening with this app.

I newly realized how important it is for me to have some way to contact my audience.

And what didn't work, I don't think for almost anybody, was I'm going to start doing on Substack what I did on TikTok.

But many people who brought their audience then realized, oh, there's more I can do here.

Like, oh, you mean I can write something and people could read it?

Or I could make a longer thing and people might check it out?

That was sort of like a big moment

We've had a lot of interesting controversies.

We've had various times where people have been angry that we, you know, take a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press and allow various points of view or various things that people disagree with.

I expect we'll get like one of those every year or two for the rest of my life if we succeed.

So...

I guess maybe early on in subject history, we were very symbiotic with Twitter in the sense that this was a platform for long-form writing.

OG Twitter was very, as you say, it was sort of like the short-form social network of the literate, of people who wanted to read.

And old Twitter, in my mind, a lot of what people were talking about would be links to long-form things.

And links performed very well.

And, you know, a big part of why Twitter became what it became was it was sort of like the place you would go for the headlines.

And so in the early days, a lot of those moments where people would come and bring their audience, it would be somebody who had a following on Twitter who would say, hey, I'm starting a sub stack.

Maybe I just got fired or maybe I'm just striking out on my own.

You know, come check it out.

You could just post a link and it would all your people would see it.