Since Thursday, Twitter was reported to be restricting access to tweets containing
Substack links and marking them as “potentially spammy or unsafe.”
Noting that these tweets were clearly safe, it was speculated that Twitter was acting
out of vengeance against Susbtack for a new Twitter-like feature that the
company was going to release. After all, Musk had clarified back in December that
Twitter would not tolerate “relentless free advertising” from competitors on
its platform.
I can't even reply to my own Tweet if it's got a Substack link in it pic.twitter.com/LLaQuFksmM
— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) April 7, 2023
The feature, called ‘Notes’ had been in testing with a limited number of writers for some weeks and has now been announced to roll out in a separate tab on Substack. It is meant to help users share shorter posts like posts, quotes, comments, images, GIFs, and links. Unlike Twitter, it has no character limit. Up to six photos and GIFs can be shared within Notes. Moreover, users can engage with other Notes using the Like, Reply, and Restack buttons. The Restack option is basically Substack’s version of Retweet.
The Notes tab is further divided into two sub feeds: “Home”
and “Subscribed.” Within Home, users can view and interact with Notes from
people they have subscribed to, as well as recommended accounts. The Subscribed
feed consists of Notes specifically from those that users have subscribed to.
While Twitter has now decided to remove restrictions from tweets
containing Substack posts, search results for “Substack” on Twitter still shows
a search for “newsletter” instead. Maybe if more writers turn to Substack to interact
with certain writers, we would see Substack gaining more popularity. For now,
Substack just wishes to peacefully coexist with Twitter, though.
