My first impressions of Substack Notes, and a preview of the platform.

Can we create a land where adults communicate?

The Red Pill Diaries are my unvarnished, sometimes offensive, slightly narcissistic observations on my red pill journey.

If you’re looking for my unwoke content, head over to the Actively Unwoke Substack.

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I hate Twitter.

I’ve hated Twitter for a really long time.

I’m openly and publicly harassed by a mob of unhinged lunatics on Twitter every day of my life, and the only reason I put up with it is that it is the best place for breaking news, and I have friends and a community on there that value what I do.

But I genuinely hate it. Twitter is a platform that drives people to insanity through the algorithm. It makes people disconnect from reality.

This personal hatred for the hellscape of Twitter was confirmed the other day when I got access to Substack Notes as part of their private beta and I saw how wonderful the world could be.

Substack announced its upcoming Notes feature last week, which led to Twitter declaring war on the platform by disabling all Substack links. In response, Substack opened up its Notes platform to more of its writers, who quickly moved over.

In this piece, I’ll give you a sneak preview of the features of Notes so you can see what they are building.

But overall, the biggest difference so far is in how people are behaving. Maybe it’s because most people are using their real name, but there is significantly less toxic behavior. It feels like the adults in the room.

I find this especially ironic because the users on Notes are NOT a monolithic group in terms of political ideology. This is the first “new” social media platform that’s popped up in a while that does not have a specifically left-wing or specifically right-wing leaning audience. I think all of the verified writers got access to it, and there are prominent figures from both the left and the right.

And, so far, there is very little conflict.

I don’t know if it’s because most people aren’t really looking at it or reading it, but even those I see disagreeing seem to be doing it on their best behavior. It almost seems like a brand new start for many.

And there are so many people on the platform who are not writing about politics. On Twitter, all the algorithm serves me is news and politics, even though I’ve really tried to trick the algorithm into serving me different things.

But on Notes, I’m seeing people post about their passions, their fascinations, and their creations. These are things I never would have seen otherwise, and is making me believe in humanity on social media again.

Hopefully, Substack will open up the Notes feature to everyone soon. For now, you can visit someone’s profile page to see what they are posting.

Let me show you some of the features of the platform.

This is what it looks like when you’re on the platform, pretty similar to Twitter. You can also access it from the Substack App.

Currently, there are only a few ways to look at people, including a list for everyone in the Beta test. I hope that, in the future, you will be able to sort by the category of their writing to find people publishing what you’re interested in.

Right now, everything is kind of jumbled together, so you have finance guys, physics guys, political commentators, culture warriors, poets, artists, etc… all posting in the same place. And there’s not really much of an algorithm sorting through it, so far as I can tell.

The Subtack team is actively using the platform and welcoming users on. Chris Best is one of the co-founders of the company. Bailey works in marketing.

There doesn’t really seem to be a character limit, but Substack will truncate longer posts and allow you to click on them to read more:

One of the drawbacks of the current platform is that when you “subscribe” to someone on Notes, you automatically subscribe to their publications. That means you will subscribe to their email updates.

I write multiple publications under one Substack username specifically because I want people to be able to sign up for what they are interested in, and ignore the stuff they don’t want. I don’t want people automatically signed up to everything and can see how that can be annoying. However, if you are subscribed to one of my publications, that should be enough to see my posts in Notes.

This is a challenge that Substack is aware of and considering.

You can block and mute people, although it seems as though many people are refraining from that for the moment because pretty much everyone is behaving nicely.

The only person I’ve blocked so far is Taylor Lorenz, because fuck that bitch.

Notes has some really cool features that differ from Twitter.

For example, it gives you the ability to quote a section of one of your articles in Notes by highlighting it in the article and then selecting “Restack quote”

It automatically creates a nice quote that you can post with a link to the article, and write whatever you want to introduce the work:

You can also easily embed your Notes in your Substack posts by copying and pasting the link. Here’s what that looks like, compared to the screenshots of posts that I’ve used throughout the rest of article:

You can also link to a Substack chat in a note and that will work too:

When you post both an image and a link in a Note, it will show you both instead of the image replacing the link embed. I believe you can also remove the embed if you only want the image to show up:

Substack also allows you to use basic markdown to format your posts:

This also works if you just copy and paste from your articles - it will port the formatting over.

For example, in this post, I copied and pasted the headline and the subhead from a published post, and the formatting carried over so I didn’t have to manually use markdown.

I also copied the main image I used in the post and created a quote just to see how many things I could do in a single post…and it all worked!

Replies to articles show up as replies to the post for that article. When you post an article on your Substack, it automatically creates a post on your profile page.

When people reply to that article by leaving a comment, it automatically shows up as a reply in Notes.

You can also restack the replies you get to share them. This is the reply on the article in the publication:

When you click restack, it shares it in a post like this:

Everything just works, and the energy is so much better

One of the reasons I love Substack so much is they are very thoughtful about how they develop, and all of their features just work. They have obviously been very thoughtful about Notes and have considered how they want it to work within the larger eco-system. So far, so good.

I hope that as Notes opens up to more people, the vibe will remain the same. If it does, I will be spending a lot more time over there than I do on Twitter.

The future is Substack. I believe in this company, so much so that I invested in them: