Twitter, Substack, and Algorithmic Discovery

Substack is not the Twitter alternative it claims to be. That's both a problem and a potential source of innovation.

The situation at Twitter is very chaotic right now.

Half of the company’s workforce has been fired. The new owner of the company, Elon Musk, has instructed the remaining engineers to overhaul the site’s account verification system by Monday, the day before the United States midterm elections. According to Musk himself, advertisers are leaving the site en masse.  

This is not a post about Musk; there are dozens of those written every hour. My references to him will be limited to what is strictly necessary to make my points. Instead of pontificating ad nausea about his questionable political stances on dozens of issues, I will simply mention that they are, well, questionable — enough so that there is an entire Wikipedia page entitled Views of Elon Musk.

These stances, combined with the proposal to require accounts to pay for continued verification, have further pushed a lot of #resist, blue check liberal types to declare they are leaving Twitter.

Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash

After t…