Chris Best

Although I would say given what's happened since, maybe questionably so.

But at least on that core idea of like, hey, there just has to be freedom for people to say the things they believe and want to say.

He at one point floated the idea of Twitter buying Substack and me coming to run Twitter just as like a thought experiment style thing.

and when we were about to launch notes which is like a you know our feed i kind of gave him a courtesy heads up we'd been having this conversation i was like hey we're launching this thing you know we think it's important it's something we've been planning for a while you know we're not trying to like mess with what you're doing but we launched it and he was very upset he actually asked me not to launch it he was like don't watch this thing basically

because he saw it as a twitter competitor and i think there was there was a moment there where there was sort of this meme of like is twitter actually going to fail is this going to like tip over people going to switch over to blue sky switch over to threads or switch over to somewhere else

And so he saw us launching this feed as kind of, I think, a declaration of war.

And he banned all mention of Substack on Twitter.

There was a week where not only could you not share a Substack link, if you just said the word Substack, nobody would see your thing.

And if you searched for, literally you'd search for Substack on Twitter, it would say, no results.

Like doesn't exist.

We were like Voldemort.

You can't say the name.

And that, I think after some backlash, they canceled that policy pretty quickly, but left in place a bunch of kind of like underhanded things that would hurt traffic.

I think Substack and the New York Times were the two sites for a while that got the treatment where you would click on a link and it would go there, but it would delay for five seconds.

Like you just click and it would just be like spin.

And five seconds sounds like a short amount of time, but in software, it's an eternity.

And there was like various de-boosting and all these things.

And I haven't talked to him since.

I think in the original, like when he literally, like he couldn't say the word, I think there was like a general uproar that's like, this is actually ridiculous.

Like you can't be a free speech platform and then ban discussion of a commercial rival that you don't like.