It’s a tricky place for both parties because Twitter has the distribution and the network effect; and writers have a premium (but gated) content. And Substack

It’s a tricky place for both parties because Twitter has the distribution and the network effect; and writers have a premium (but gated) content. And Substack is in a bad place to because does not have the social graph and platform power of the first and needs the pay the latter. On top of that Twitter needs to generate some revenue in the worst moment of the company history that was the end of ZIRP. Being purely speculative here, I think in Elon’s head Twitter would be the “public square for free speech” but in reality every writer is using the platform only to get the network effect and the vitality aspect to generate leads to their gated communities and/or brand awareness/social status. One aspect that cannot be forgot is that Elon is the man with the bomb vest, because he’s willing to break the company and has so much less to lose than writers and Substack; and they know that they depends of Twitter. I do not think that Matt Taibbi or Michael Shellenberg had other platform options to get millions of impressions [1][2]; or Substack can pay and play the game of “let’s build our own network via social graph” due to their financial situation [3]. [1] - https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1644428913651642387?s=46&t=-mDU6GHJw23TlnLlNdNm-w https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1644428913651642387?s=46&... [2] - https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/1644380198312480768?s=46&t=-mDU6GHJw23TlnLlNdNm-w https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/16443801983124807... [3] - https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/26/report-substack-the-highly-hyped-newsletter-platform-has-ditched-plans-for-a-series-c https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/26/report-substack-the-highly...