Chris Best

And if they were compelled by it, they would come.

Yeah.

And then, you know, the conversation would live on Twitter, but you could still, you know, you could still have a long form piece of writing that would do the rounds.

It would be like, oh yeah, everybody's reading this thing.

There'd be a conversation about it.

And yeah, that was like a major driver in the early days.

Over time, and actually even before Elon bought Twitter, that became less and less true.

I think as they optimized the algorithm, it ended up penalizing any kind of links out.

at least at the start, not out of any malice, I don't think, but more just it makes sense given what you're optimizing for.

But if you're optimizing for time spent scrolling such that you might see an ad, if somebody clicks out to read a thoughtful long form thing,

you're losing money.

Given the objective function that you might naturally create for that algorithm, those things will penalize.

So it became a smaller and smaller share of the top of funnel traffic that was helping people on Substack grow.

And then Elon bought Twitter.

I talked to him.

At some point, we were sort of comparing notes.

I think he was at least a fan of, we at that point had, I think, been the platform that had taken a pretty strong stance in favor of freedom of the press.

A lot of the things that he at least said he espoused were things that we had been doing.

And so I think he was sort of at least theoretically a fan from that perspective.

Yes.