Why am I moving to Substack despite being disappointed with the platform
A switch away from Medium was in the making for months.
Hi there! I’m Vritant, and you are receiving this newsletter because you signed up for White Space, a weekly must-have newsletter for digital writers. I share key developments in the space, commentary, and more useful resources here.
In this White Space edition we discuss:
The main reason behind my switch from Medium to Substack
Pros and cons of this platform for me
My plans going forward and key takeaways
Read time: 7 minutes
Hello dear readers,
I am transitioning from writing on Medium to writing on Substack. That’s no big deal as I have transitioned from Quora to Medium, and from Twitter to Quora in the past.
I have always been an impatient writer. I switch platforms, but I always think I have good reasons to do so. As I sip morning tea with elaichi, I can’t stop but think about the good time I have had on Medium. I made lifelong friends and learnt a thing or two about writing, editing, and formatting. But it’s time to move on.
With the start of this new chapter, I want to reflect and anticipate how things might go from here. And why I am worried things might not be all sunshine and rainbows.
The main reason behind my switch from Medium to Substack
Let me put this straight: Medium is a great platform. *The writer takes another sip of tea*
It is a brilliant community of readers and writers supported by a subscription model. They hit the 1 million paid subscriber mark recently. It’s a huge thing in this era of the Internet, where almost everything is funded by advertisements. Then some publications publish content in their respective niche. Editors at these publications contribute their time, effort, and energy rather voluntarily as they don’t receive any compensation for doing so.
Then they have this thing called the Medium Partner Program to paywall your stories and earn money from it whenever a paid Medium member reads it. I am not eligible to earn money through the same because I am from India. The irony is that I can subscribe to Medium, nevertheless. And yes, I am one of their 1m+ paid members.
But not getting paid is not the main reason why I am moving away from Medium. A bigger reason than that could be the wait time of days and weeks to get my story published. I can not put any blame on the editors, too, as they work tirelessly and voluntarily to publish the story at their earliest. But again, it is what it is. You won’t get reach without the publications and the publications will take days, if not weeks, to publish your story.
The main reason, however, is that I want to reserve Medium as my place for editorial works and occasional writing, plus re-posting my original Substack pieces.
I run a publication by the name of theMUSINGS and I want to craft it as a place for publishing personal essays. As the sole editor of the publication, I want to dedicate my profile and some space that I have to set the editorial roadmap and submission guidelines.
Apart from that, I will occasionally write original pieces there and submit them to the publications (~2x a month) and re-purpose my Substack content. My aim in doing this is that I don’t want to scatter my attention, nor do I wish to mix all of my work and readership. I want to segregate and optimise all the content I put out there so that it stays relevant, less confusing, easily discoverable and helps me navigate my way forward.
Medium is a great place to start writing, but it feels a little less personal to me compared to Substack. The reach of a story is still dependent on algorithms and there is no direct way for me to communicate to my readers.
Pros and cons of this platform for me
Substack is great, too, like Medium. But that doesn’t discount the fact that there are still some downsides. One of them is native to me, as many of you won’t be encountering it, ever.
One of the biggest cons of the platform lies with the payouts via Stripe. Abhinav Upadhyay, who writes Confessions of a Code Addict puts it the best:
“If you are an India based writer on Substack and decide to monetize, you cannot accept payment in any other currency apart from Indian Rupees (INR). Stripe has a currency loclaization feature, which means that if enabled then your international customers will see the amount in their local currency and be charged in their local currency.
“However, if you are based in India, then to enable this you have to be a registered business or sole proprietor. But that’s the regulatory requirement. Even if you follow it, Substack will not enable this feature for you because it requires specific integration work for Indian authors.
“Charging in INR means that many subscribers will not decide to pay because they are not familiar with the conversion rate. And if the few people who do decide to figure out the conversion rate and decide to pay you will have their cards blocked or the transaction declined because the banks consider payment in INR as a possible fraudulent activity.
“Substack refuses to fix this issue.”
As this is a regulatory and platform optimization hurdle, you and I, sitting in front of our PCs and laptops, can’t do much about it other than pointing it out.
This is also the reason why I put the “tip directly via PayPal” link in my posts instead of enabling paid subscriptions. What’s the point of turning on paid subscriptions if there’s this much uncertainty and regulatory issues?
Coming to the pros, I think we all are familiar with the most popular ones.
Having a direct relationship with the readers, freedom to take readers with yourself wherever you go, relying on subscriptions instead of ads, a peaceful writing and reading environment and a growing community tops the chart.
Though that all is true, now that I have seen many platforms change over a period of time, I do not have a utopian POV about the future of Substack. I won’t be shocked to see this platform change in future; it has always been the case. That said, I still regard highly of this platform. The teams at Substack have built a truly timeless space in this era of Noise and Fallacy Economy. I hope this lasts.
My plans going forward and key takeaways
I hope this lasts.
I don’t have a perfectly carved-out-in-stone roadmap going forward. I want to experiment and see what sticks. At the same time, I am interested in writing commentary about the digital writing landscape and human interaction with technology at large.
I just turned 18. I’m currently a college freshman and a student at National Law University, Delhi. That means going forward, you can expect articles and letters at the intersection of technology, human behaviour, legal and digital writing landscapes and commentary and breakdown of the above and more topics.
I am excited. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I do.
Presently, I write about digital writing, its trends, the platforms and how we should navigate it.
I also like to write commentary posts every Wednesday. Read one here:
I would like to get paid for writing someday. That’s the dream of every writer. In addition to bringing in financial support, it brings a token of validation that their words matter. But at the moment, that’s not a compulsion for me. I also freelance sometimes.
See you soon,
Vritant
You're doing great man
Keep up the great work 👍
That's a unique take!