As the rapidly evolving company hits a $1b valuation, a few familiar creators are going elsewhere. Emma Gleason reports.
Lots of Substack newsletters have been published about leaving Substack.
A recent dispatch was sent from the desk of popular New Zealand journalist and Substacker David Farrier. He left the platform on August 15, taking his newsletter Webworm with him, after spending a year mulling the decision. “I didn’t want to leave,” he told The Spinoff from the US, where he’s based. Substack’s admin team was great, there’s a legal support programme, and he knew the platform’s co-founder Hamish McKenzie, a fellow New Zealander, who he said gave him “incredible” support. “So leaving that was hard,” Farrier said. “But I just fundamentally disagree with where Substack has gone.”
Farrier joined in 2020. Back then, it was a tool for sending emails and getting paid for them. Founded in 2017 and geared at writers, Substack was about “taking the power away from the big platforms that are oriented around engagement-based algorithms, and putting that power instead in the hands of writers and readers”, as McKenzie told The Spinoff in 2021.
Since then, the company has evolved rapidly. The Substack app debuted in 2022; the company has added publishing functions like podcasts and live video, community tools like notes function (similar to X and Threads) and a comment section (like a hybrid of Reddit and WhatsApp) that facilitates conversations with and between followers. They are all features shared with social media platforms. Its founders are now considering introducing advertising.
These functions can make writers feel reliant on the app, Farrier says, and he worried about “lock in” – that the longer he stayed, the harder it might be to leave. “I realised I didn’t want to be contending with that anymore.”
“Welcome to Webworm, no longer on Substack,” Farrier told followers on Friday. (Image: Webworm)
In June UserMag reported that Substack had sent a push notification (another newer function) to the newsletter NatSocToday, which uses a Swastika logo. Substack said it happened accidentally. Farrier thinks it was inevitable. “It happened because they host Nazi newsletters,” he said. “The fact that 10% of my income was going back into that system, and that on top of that, Substack, being a social media platform, is pushing people towards content that I think is pretty terrible, I just made a decision that this is one thing I could do to change.”
McKenzie was approached for comment by The Spinoff, but did not respond.
As Substack has evolved from a publishing tool into an online community, with recommendations and algorithms, the amplification of creators’ work has grown, but this increased visibility also applies to other accounts too. The challenges of transparency, promotion and moderation are things social media companies have grappled with for years, and users have (vocally) left those too – unhappy with the user experience or how it’s being run. People deserted X, many going to Bluesky, and Spotify is losing artists and listeners.
For Substack, this criticism of its content moderation is not new. In November 2023 The Atlantic published a story declaring that the platform “has a Nazi problem” and “profits from many of them”, with journalist Jonathan M. Katz identifying 16 newsletters featuring iconography like swastikas and the black sun. A month later, McKenzie published a statement, with co-founders Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, acknowledging the criticism, clarifying that while they “don’t like Nazis either”, they didn’t think “that censorship (including through demonetising publications) makes the problem go away” and instead makes it worse. “We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.” By January 2024, Substack confirmed it had removed five newsletters for “inciting violence”.
Taylor Lorenz reported on the latest – an accidental push notification – in the company’s highly publicised “Nazi problem”. (Image: Usermag)
At the time, New Zealand writer Jennifer K Shields contributed to an open letter to Substack’s leaders, and she quit the platform in December 2023.
Nadine Hura left Substack the same month. While hate speech and disinformation played a part, Hura moved for myriad reasons, including functionality, paywall and growth focus. “When the community you’re writing to doesn’t have a lot of money, constantly pressuring people to cough up feels shitty and embarrassing.”
For writers from minority communities, there’s added complexity. “The system will always amplify and remunerate those who already have a voice and visibility, not just by design but by deliberate intent.” Thinking about the ethics of every platform can be stressful, but it’s a responsibility that comes with publishing, she says. “Editors and platforms normally carry that stress, but if you are publishing yourself, then it’s for writers to carry.”
Hura now dispatches her newsletter using the not-for-profit publishing tool Ghost (its managed hosting service has a monthly fee – Farrier also moved his newsletter there) and understands that’s not an option for everyone. “I don’t judge writers who are on Substack and still recommend it to lots of people because for some communities, it will mean the difference between publishing or remaining silent and invisible. But if you have a paid blog, and are actually earning money for Substack, then I think the pressure and responsibility will feel greater.
“A lot of our communities now will see all of this and think ‘I can’t use Substack because of this’ but it’s more nuanced than that. There needs to be structural change, and some have more power than others to force that.”
Nadine Hura’s final dispatch before migrating platforms. (Image: Substack)
On the same day Farrier left Substack last week, fellow New Zealander Emily Writes did too, announcing her exit in a newsletter. Eyeing up the doors is sports writer Alice Soper, who told followers she intends to leave by the end of the year. Other local journalists and writers have been conferring in the corner, weighing up their options.
Chris Schulz explained to followers of his music newsletter Boiler Room that he was considering what to do next. By Tuesday he told The Spinoff he’d made up his mind. “It’s time to leave,” Schulz said, and believes writers should be accountable for the platforms they use. “They absolutely have to be, I’ve always felt that,” he says. “If you’re running content, you’re a publisher and you need to be responsible for it.”
Schulz joined Substack during the pandemic too, when freelance work was evaporating, and loved the place. “Everything they did was pro authors at a time when journalism was getting shredded,” he says, and it gave him hope. “This was supposed to be the safe space, the new way forward.” Does he begrudge anyone who stays? “Good god no.”
One such stayer is Bernard Hickey. His newsletter The Kākā is among the top 10 New Zealand newsletters on Substack (Shit You Should Care About and The Weekly Chartstorm and former doctor Sam Bailey top the list with 372k, 102k and 31k subscribers, respectively). After five years on the platform, Hickey’s threshold for change is high (The Kākā supports five fulltime jobs) and he says it gets higher the longer you use the app, due to that lock-in factor. He’s considering his options, plus what Substack is doing and not doing about keeping its spaces safe. “I certainly take it seriously, and I’m very aware that there is a real issue to address here,” he told The Spinoff.
In July 2025 the company achieved “unicorn” status with a $1.1b valuation, after a Series C funding raise of $100m. It’s unprofitable by choice, instead “investing in and continuing to grow the business”. The place is heaving with creators and their audiences; in March, McKenzie said they had reached five million paid subscribers – up on three million in 2024 – who collectively earn (sources claim) as much as $450m each year. Active subscriptions reportedly hit 35 million in 2024, and estimates put the total number of newsletters at 75,000.
High-profile names have set up shop on Substack. Elizabeth Gilbert, Lena Dunham, Katie Couric, Ava DuVernay are there, so are Salman Rushdie, Ottessa Moshfegh and Roxane Gay. Even Tina Brown. Mehdi Hasan left MSNBC to start a newsletter, Jerusalem Demsas departed The Atlantic to launch a “left-leaning” publication on the platform.
The way users engage with it is varied; many readers use the app, while others simply have newsletters land in their email inbox. Creators can choose what they paywall and how much subscribers are charged, and many have cultivated a highly engaged community of readers.
For some writers, there’s pressure from their audience to make an ethical or ideological stand, contributing to the pressure they feel to leave, or explain themselves. “I think the people lashing out have good intentions, and I agree with them,” Farrier says, “But I don’t like seeing people doing good work on any platform being screamed at because of their method of transmission.”
After deciding to leave, and investigating platforms like Patreon, Beehiive (whose CEO Tyler Denk claims has gained thousands of creators from Substack) and Buttondown, Farrier moved Webworm to Ghost, which is open source. While “not as much of a nightmare” as you might think, he still carved out a week for the admin, and acknowledges “a certain amount of privilege” required to migrate platforms.
“I want to reiterate, to writers who are on Substack, I don’t want them to feel panicked or feel pressure – there is time to think about this stuff. ” Farrier says. “Every medium you post on will be compromised in some way.”