“The best way to describe it, I think, would be like switching from Mac to Linux,” he says.
He has hopes it’ll all be worth it in the end but hasn’t found the switch as seamless as he’d imagined. He has found the migration process a bit more challenging, calling it a “mixed bag” so far. Another member of Yanyi’s Substack Fellows class, the college-sports reporter Matt Brown, recently moved his newsletter “Extra Points” from Substack to Ghost, using Ghost Pro. Again: What Substack offers and what Ghost offers just aren’t all that comparable. “I built a self-hosted WordPress site in the glory days of blogging, and it's pretty similar.”īut it’s important to emphasize the need for some know-how. Using Ghost “requires a bit more technical know-how but is totally manageable,” she says. Isabelle Roughol, another recent Substack-to-Ghost migrant, likes how Ghost allows her more control over the finished product for her podcast and website Borderline. For writers who want more control, Ghost’s customizability is key to its appeal. Uri Bram, the publisher of popular newsletter “The Browser,” says Ghost has a “better product for 10 times less money” than Substack. While the Substack moderation controversy ended up raising Ghost’s profile, plenty of writers are now switching to Ghost for other reasons. “I think it very strongly changes the position you can take on neutrality and content moderation when you're funding certain content, and particularly when you’re hosting it on one single website, which of course they are doing.” By paying writers, O’Nolan sees Substack as following Medium’s playbook. Since launching in 2012, the company has served as both a blog host and a home to its own publications and stable of authors.
O’Nolan sees Substack as much closer in spirit to the publishing platform Medium. “The way Ghost works is different from the way that Substack works,” Yanyi says. So new converts don’t necessarily expect it to behave in the same way they wanted Substack to behave. Ghost, which does not pay any of its writers or attempt curation, doesn’t occupy the same gray area between platform and publisher that Substack does. “We have absolutely no ability to control how Ghost is used,” O’Nolan says. Basically, Ghost could be home to the exact same content driving people off Substack.
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While Ghost Pro does have a content-moderation policy (basic stuff-no porn or phishing schemes allowed), the vast majority of Ghost users go the free route, leaving them thoroughly unmoderated.
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Ghost has definitely grown since 2013-its paying customers include Tinder and OkCupid, so there’s a chance you could get ghosted on a dating app that uses Ghost, and its software has been installed more than 2.5 million times-but the nonprofit simply isn’t trying to operate with the same never-stop-scaling! mindset that guides so many digital-media startups flush with Silicon Valley cash.Īlso, Ghost is open source, which means anyone, anywhere can use it how they see fit, provided they know how to host their own website. With no investors, he feels no pressure to scale up quickly. (The figure varies depending on how many readers a publication has.) Its free-spirited CEO and cofounder John O’Nolan, who uploaded videos of his nomadic lifestyle to YouTube for many years, is currently camped out in Florida. Rather than take a cut of subscriber revenue like Substack, Ghost’s paid hosting service, Ghost Pro, takes a fee, starting at $9 a month. The business models of Substack and Ghost are also completely different. Many in the exodus had a similar destination: Ghost, a nonprofit publishing platform that bills itself as “the independent Substack alternative.” He wasn’t the only unhappy one other high-profile Substackers announced their decisions to leave for this reason around the same time. The platform had permitted content from writer Graham Linehan that Yanyi saw as anti-trans and in violation of Substack’s policy. But he was too unhappy with Substack’s moderation to stay. Substack’s platform was easy to use, and he’d been granted an advance as part of the company’s fellowship program, allowing him to grow a healthy, engaged audience.
Yanyi had agonized over the decision to leave the newsletter publishing startup. “It was right before the Trans Day of Visibility,” he says, “and I thought it was important for me to make the switch that day.” Still, he decided to add one more task: pull “The Reading” off of Substack by the end of the month. Between teaching at Dartmouth, editing a literary journal, preparing a forthcoming book, and running a creative advice newsletter called “The Reading,” his schedule was stuffed. This past March, poet and critic Yanyi was very busy.