SO I’VE FELT SLIGHTLY BAD NOWADAYS ABOUT HAVING SHUT DOWN MY OLD TWITTER ACCOUNT. When I deleted it, it had something like 180,000 followers. (After I deleted it, someone encouraged me to start one back up under the same handle so no one could do it and pretend to be me, so there’s a basically dormant account now with a few hundred followers.) But it would be handy to publicize my Substack posts.

Or it would have been. Matt Taibbi reports that Twitter is now blocking Substack links in response to Substack Notes, a somewhat Twitter-like function that Substack is supposed to roll out next week. That seems cheesy on Twitter’s part, but does make me feel better about not having an active account there.

I guess I’ll try out Substack Notes, but to be honest, the more it’s like Twitter the less I’ll like it. I hated the partisan censorship on Twitter, but even leaving that aside it was the worst of the social media platforms in pretty much every way. Yeah, it’s good for a pithy zinger, but because of that the quality of discussion is pretty bad. And it’s designed to be addictive and serves as a huge time waster. Maybe Notes will be better, but what I like about Substack now is that it’s basically the polar opposite of Twitter.

UPDATE: Background:

1. Substack links were never blocked. Matt’s statement is false.

2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.

3. Turns out Matt is/was an employee of Substack.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 8, 2023

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments: “As of right now I was able to like, retweet and follow a substack link without any warnings or hindrance. So whatever restrictions there were there appear to have been resolved, at least for me.”