Thinking out loud about platforms, and Tate, and whether I should just stop

This is not a polished piece. This is me typing to find out what I think. Corrections and contradictions are not bugs.

So here's the thing. Andrew Tate turned up on Substack a couple of weeks ago and shot to the top of the new bestsellers list with over a million followers, and all the writers I respect started having the same conversation, which was: do we stay, do we leave, where would we go, is Ghost better, has anyone tried Ghost, is Ghost actually different or just Substack minus the bits we currently hate.

And I've been reading those conversations with the odd feeling you get when you realise you've been in a room for a while and you haven't quite been paying attention to the decor. Because Tate didn't appear overnight. He's been there for eighteen months, posting to audiences of two, five, ten hearts per post, and Substack's algorithm quietly decided in April 2026 that his content was bestseller material. It's not that the platform failed to notice him. It's that the platform finally noticed him in the way platforms notice things that generate revenue.

And it's not just Tate. There's been a slow drift. More manosphere stuff. More of the people who were kicked off Meta and TikTok and YouTube under European dangerous-individual provisions finding a home where nobody was going to kick them off anything. Substack's whole pitch was always minimal interference, let the writers write, and I liked that when it was a pitch about letting me say whatever I wanted without some content moderator in Menlo Park deciding I was dangerous. I'm less keen on it now that it turns out the same policy covers alleged human traffickers.

Anyway. So the move that's happening is a lot of people are migrating to Ghost. Russell Nohelty wrote the most coherent version of this, structural rather than ethical — the 10% cut, the missing API, the reporting that tells you nothing, the feature roadmap that prioritises Notes over the actual newsletter — and at the end he sort of quietly mentions that he was tired of defending Substack for its platforming choices. The ethics was the last reason, not the first. That's honest, I think. The ethics clarify the decision but rarely cause it.

Ghost is a UK non-profit foundation. No shareholders. Takes 0% of your revenue, charges a flat fee. No Notes, no cross-recommendation engine, no bestseller list. Which is the structural answer to "how do we stop Ghost becoming Substack" — the mechanism through which Substack promoted Tate into everyone's feeds literally does not exist on Ghost. You can't algorithmically amplify a Tate on a platform that has no algorithm. There's your protection.

Except.

Except, and this is where I keep getting stuck, if Ghost has no recommendation engine, no cross-promotion, no bestseller list, no Notes, no discovery layer of any kind — then what exactly am I paying them for? Email delivery? I can get email delivery from about fifteen services for less money. A place to write? I already have three of those. They're called mindblownpsychology.com and leehopkinswriter.com and quiethalf.com and they run on WordPress and I own the domains and I own the servers and nobody is going to algorithmically boost an alleged trafficker into my readers' feeds because there are no feeds. There's just my site and their inbox.

Which raises the awkward question. Why did I ever go to Substack in the first place.

And the honest answer is: because of the neighbourhood. Because Substack in 2022 and 2023 felt like a collection of serious writers and thinkers, and being on the same platform as them felt like being in the same pub as them, and the recommendation engine meant that sometimes someone I admired would point a finger in my direction and a few of their readers would wander over. That was the value. Not the email delivery. Not the editor. The cultural proximity. The pub.

But the pub now has Tate in the corner with 1.1 million followers shouting about what women are for, and the landlord is taking 10% of his bar tab and putting him on the chalkboard as the featured drinker of the month. And the other people in the pub, the ones I liked, are slowly putting on their coats.

So the Ghost question is really: do I want to move to a different pub that doesn't have Tate in it but also doesn't really have anyone else either, because the whole point of Ghost is that there's no pub, just a bunch of separately-owned houses? And the answer I keep circling back to is that I already have a separately-owned house. Three of them. I don't need Ghost to sell me the experience of owning my own house when I already own my own house.

I wonder if this is actually a category error. I've been treating "where do I publish quiethalf.com" as a question about which platform is better, when the actual question might be whether I need a platform at all. Platforms sell you three things: a place to write, email delivery to your subscribers, and discovery. I have the first. I can rent the second from any number of services for under ten dollars a month. The third is the thing Substack has and Ghost doesn't, and it's also the thing I'm now finding morally compromising. So the logic runs: the only reason to be on a platform is the thing that's gone bad. Therefore, don't be on a platform.

Which sounds clean when I type it like that. It sounds less clean when I think about actually doing it, because there's a reason writers have been funnelling themselves onto Substack for five years and it isn't stupidity. It's that discovery is hard. Really hard. If you're a niche writer — and I am, cheerfully, a niche writer, psychology and neurodivergence and menopause and Vietnamese expat life and the occasional contrarian essay is not a mass audience — then losing what little discovery you had is a real cost. My quiethalf.com has, let me check, a handful of paid subscribers in the single digits. That's not a revenue problem. That's a visibility problem. And Ghost doesn't solve it. Running a newsletter plugin on WordPress doesn't solve it either.

But then. If Substack's visibility engine is now also Tate's visibility engine, and the price of being findable by the readers I want is being adjacent to the readers he wants, maybe the calculation has changed. Maybe the discovery was never as valuable as I thought. I don't actually know how many of my subscribers came through Substack Notes versus came through my books or a link from a friend or a search result on MindBlown Psychology. Substack's analytics famously don't tell you. So I've been paying 10% of whatever revenue for a discovery engine I cannot actually measure and that is now delivering me into adjacency with a man who thinks women are chattel.

I keep wanting to make this neater than it is. The neat version is: Substack went bad, move to Ghost. The neater version is: platforms always go bad, don't use platforms. And both of those are true-ish but both of them skate past the real thing, which is that I liked being in the pub and now I can't be in the pub and I'm not sure what replaces the pub. Ghost isn't a pub. My own WordPress sites aren't a pub. The pub, it turns out, was always going to have this problem, because any room that gets big enough to be useful for discovery eventually gets big enough to be useful for the Tates, and there's no architecture that prevents that, because the same network effects that make pubs useful are the network effects that make them profitable to colonise.

Maybe the honest answer is that there is no replacement for the pub. Maybe the internet had a brief window — call it 2005 to 2015, roughly the period I was a social media evangelist before burning out and disappearing — where you could actually have intellectual community online without it being monetised into something ugly, and that window has closed, and what's left is either fragmented islands or colonised pubs, and you pick which one you can live with.

I own islands. Three of them. And I've spent the last year building pillar pages and content architecture on mindblownpsychology.com specifically so that people who are looking for what I write can actually find me without a platform's help. That work is already done. I'm not starting from zero. I'm starting from three domains, a body of published books, a decent SEO position on several niches, and an audience that mostly found me through my writing rather than through anyone's algorithm.

So why am I even still thinking about this.

I think partly because leaving Substack feels like losing something even though I've just spent 1,200 words arguing that I was never really getting anything, and partly because the Tate situation is the kind of news event that demands a response and moving platforms feels like a response, and partly because a version of me still remembers when Substack felt like the pub and wants the pub back, even though the pub now has a sex trafficker in it.

I don't think I'm going to move to Ghost. I think I'm going to, slowly and without ceremony, stop treating Substack as my publication home. I'll keep the account open because my single paid subscriber is owed the email they've paid for. I'll mention in passing, probably in this post, that new work will appear on quiethalf.com directly, or on mindblownpsychology.com, and that anyone who wants to follow it can subscribe there instead. And the Substack account can sit there doing nothing in particular, the way an abandoned allotment sits there, until I decide whether to tend it or walk away entirely.

What I don't want to do is make this a grand gesture. The grand gesture post — "Why I Left Substack" — is itself a Substack genre now, and it has a faint whiff of the thing it's objecting to, because it's still a piece of content optimised for Substack's attention economy. The person who leaves Substack noisily is still, for the duration of the leaving, performing on Substack. I'd rather just quietly be somewhere else.

I think that's where I am. I think. Check back in a month and I may have contradicted all of this. That's allowed. This was thinking, not deciding.

— Lee