Artificial Inconvenience

the shame of sharing

Today Twitter blocked all interaction on posts that contain Substack links, and blocked embedded tweets within Substack posts. The impetus for this was Substack’s launch of its own Twitter-like feature, which it calls “Substack Notes”. 

Since its acquisition Twitter has been trying to compete with Substack. They launched 4000 character longform tweets to compete with Substack essays, but I don’t think that was successful. People use 4000 character tweets to turn Twitter into LinkedIn, but as far as I know, no one uses Twitter like it’s Substack. If I’m writing for Twitter, it’s because I want it to fade away after a few days but potentially briefly hit viral consciousness. If I’m writing for Substack, it’s because I want it to persist and be read by a smaller audience. In the same way that I never use 4000 character tweets, I’m unlikely to use the “Substack Notes” feature in place of Twitter. It doesn’t offend me that either one of them tried, but it’s just not what I’m on either platform to do. 

As a user, I find that separation of content by platform is good. It’s nice to have different audiences on different platforms, it’s nice to talk differently in a different spot. In the eternal social media as public place metaphor, it’s nice to have two different bars that each have different vibes and different activities. Spending all your time in one spot can get exhausting. Platforms can try to implement the features that from a technical perspective make the other spot cooler, and those features may even fit better in their new place. Snapchat stories fit better on Instagram, and Clubhouse fits better as Twitter Spaces. Usually the new features don’t fit perfectly, but it’s fine if they try. As a user, I’m fine going to whatever platform has the current best features and culture for my particular interests.  

The owners look on enviously when you spend your time somewhere else. Unlike bars, which have a constant income stream from people paying for drugs that make them feel good, the dopamine drug of social media is given away for free, because people are embarrassed to pay for it. Because they give their most valuable product away for free, platforms have to be creative with how they make their money. On Substack, money is squeezed out of users by frequent calls to monetize their platform as individuals, with Substack taking a small cut of their profits. Although I love Substack as a platform I’ve tried to turn those off on my page as much as I can because what I’m doing here is not monetizable writing.

On Twitter, money was previously squeezed out of users through ads, which were annoying and clogged access to content. Elon believed the ads were hampering Twitter’s success, so he dramatically lessened them under his ownership. He wants to flip Twitter’s revenue model into an $8/month subscription service, with dubious benefits for subscribing, because he can’t upset the non-paying user base. I personally pay $8 a month for Twitter because I easily get $8 of value from that site so if they’re begging for my money I’ll give it to them. Other people find begging pathetic so “paying for Twitter” has become a phrase to mock people with the blue checkmark as Elon sycophants. Twitter’s subscription gives paying users a blue check mark previously reserved for “important” users, which is a literal sale of Twitter’s own credibility, so I understand why people think it’s pathetic. 

Whatever the method of monetization, the biggest challenge is to keep users on your site, to grind the maximum amount of monetization out of them, hence the jealousy if the users spend time somewhere else. People will pay more if they’re with you more often, so how can you keep them? As Substack’s popularity has grown, and as it attempts its own assault on Twitter’s shortform text dominance by launching a shortform text platform of their own, Twitter chose artificial walls as their way to keep people there.

This is by no means the first time Twitter or other social media platforms have fought against links to other platforms. Elon Musk does the same things other social media executives do in faster and uglier ways, passion over bureaucracy, but getting to the same result. YouTube links and TikTok links embedded in posts have always been actively inconvenient on Twitter, which is a choice by Twitter, not a technical limitation. Embedded videos could be more convenient, but that would push users to the other platforms.

Social media platforms work against a shared ecosystem because they make more money by total dominance of consciousness. It would be very easy to implement smooth hyperlinks to creators’ pages between Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and Youtube, but those have intentionally not been implemented because they are financially disadvantageous for their owners. TikTok actually does have quick links to Instagram and YouTube, but they make so much money as the most culturally central social media platform that they can afford to keep their mixed platform creators happy and sacrifice their own profits a bit. If anything it gets creators with big platforms elsewhere to come to TikTok. TikTok tries to draw people in, but Twitter has to resort to keeping people in. 

In the case of Substack to Twitter embedding, what’s being linked is text, so it loads fast and there isn’t a way to make it more of a hassle. Twitter took the action of “you can’t like or interact with these posts that contain Substack links” to make the Twitter to Substack link artificially inconvenient in a lamer way. This artificial inconvenience may be totally gone tomorrow, that’s what Elon’s all about, but this is sort of solution that’s taken very often.

Mostly it’s just an annoying world to live in. Inconvenient attention labyrinths to the active detriment of the user. It will not last forever, but I worry that what comes next will be worse, a boring flat social media that finally wins and takes the entire internet. I love Twitter, which is why I let them bill me monthly, but I hope we can one day be more dignified about all this and yet for obvious reasons I’m not sure we will be.