Last week, the newsletter service Substack presented something called Substack Notes, a service where users can share their thoughts, recommendations, links, and more in short form.
Substack writes that Notes should primarily be a way for Substack users to drive traffic to their newsletters on Substack, but the service could of course be used in a way that resembles how Twitter works today. This seems to be what Twitter suspects, at least. Over the weekend, Twitter started removing the ability to retweet and reply to tweets that contained links to Substack’s newsletters without explanation.
Twitter owner Elon Musk later explained that links to Substack were marked as “unsafe” on Twitter because Substack had tried to download large amounts of data from Twitter to fill up its “Twitter clone.” Substack CEO Chris Best has denied trying to take data from Twitter to fill up its own service with users. Musk has also not been able to provide any evidence that this was the case.
Yesterday, Twitter removed its restrictions on tweets containing links to Substack. Substack Notes is currently rolling out in a closed beta version, and it is unclear when the service will be publicly launched. Thanks to Twitter’s actions, the service has received a lot of publicity, so there are likely many people looking forward to its public launch.
Above are images of what the Substack Notes interface looks like today.
