Programming note: Hello, people of the ‘dillo! You’re reading this edition of HWTA at/via my new home on WordPress. If the tech goddess is smiling upon us, my migration from Substack to the new platform has gone smoothly and most of y’all won’t notice a thing. Paid subscribers will, however, note that they’ll no longer be charged for content going forward; I’m moving to an all-free subs model and relying on a tip jar + a biannual pledge drive to fund my work for reasons that I detail below. If you were an annual paid subscriber on Substack, I know who you are and I’ll reach out to you directly with some exclusive content/offers and to make sure you feel you’ve gotten your money’s worth. Anyone with questions/concerns about my sunsetting paid subscriptions can always reach me at andrea dot grimes at gmail dot com and I’ll do my absolute best to make sure you feel taken care of.

Armadillos aren’t a naturally migratory species — unless and until their present environs become inhospitable. As it happens, the armadillos of Texas are migrating, due to climate change.

And now Home with the Armadillo is migrating, too — to what I hope will be friendlier, more sustainable newsletter climes.

Blogging is how I got started as a writer; not as a fresh college grad or even a young adult but as an adolescent — a kid, really. My first blog was a Geocities website that I coded by hand in the sixth grade. The background was bright yellow; the text alternated between neon-vomit green and hyperlink blue. The content: half Beatles fansite and half “lunch log,” a Page Six-style daily recounting of what my friends and I ate for lunch in the school cafeteria, with all the attendant dramas: Who sat by whom. Who was absent. Who lost their retainer and had to go digging in the Texas heat through a series of steaming Dumpsters to find it (me) (twice). (Thanks in no small part to the “lunch log” forcing me to pay attention to what my friends ate — and therefore which trash bags to prioritize for excavation.)

When it came time to crank up the ole’ internet posting machine again a couple of years ago, Substack was right there. I’d joined the platform back in 2019 but never used it consistently; I knew the site paid some writers directly, offered big advances to folks who brought in big followings, and supported their darlings with editors and various other resources, promotions, etc. I had the vague sense that some of those writers were awful people with terrible politics, but I didn’t look too closely at it. It was an easy platform to set up — from a UX/design point of view, my main complaint was (and remains) that it will let you do one thing and one thing only with a photo: put it in the middle of your text. I started sending out regular-ish newsletters in early 2022, launched my weekly abortion news roundups in May 2022 after the Dobbs leak, and then, in early 2023, started taking paid subscriptions. I made a few thousand dollars, built a subscriber list of just over 2,700 folks, and started rebuilding my bloggy brand as a lefty Texas feminist and political writer after years out of the game.

In the last couple of months or so, things really started to take off. I’d finally done enough networking with other Substackers that the “recommendations” function was starting to pay off for me. I hosted live-chats on Substack throughout the Ken Paxton impeachment trial, getting to know dozens of my readers every day. It was fun, pure and simple. I suspected I was on the verge of breaking into a new publishing level, a level with better visibility and maybe even some real name recognition.

So I jumped ship.

Because the thing they say about planting trees — the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now — is roughly translatable to Substack. The best time to get on Substack was never. The best time to leave is now.

As an activist journalist, I knew I couldn’t continue to excuse and ignore Substack’s fundamentally predatory, exploitative publishing model indefinitely, and I wanted to get off the platform before it became even harder to leave — before I had hundreds instead of a few dozen paid subscribers. Before my list swelled to five digits. Before I became truly reliant on network recommendations to build and maintain my audience. Before — and I was already feeling this, somewhat — the pressure to churn out content for the paid subscriber machine killed the fun of it all.

The sad and plain truth is that the Venn diagram of the highest-earners on Substack and the worst people on Substack isn’t exactly a circle, but it’s pretty close. And Substack uses the good reputations of thoughtful, justice-minded people (and just regular folks trying to make a living!) to obfuscate and legitimize the fact that what’s keeping the platform afloat — and indeed, what makes it attractive to techy investors — isn’t a frank and fair exchange of ideas on the open intellectual marketplace, but some of the most actively dangerous, presently harmful, and expressly fascist politics and policies at play in the world today: white supremacy, transphobia, and anti-science/anti-vaccination propaganda.

I’m sure there’s some awful shit out there on my new chosen platform, WordPress. After all, it’s a twenty-year-old behemoth of a web publishing apparatus. But WordPress is not, I think, hoping you see my name and its name in the same sentence. WordPress’s brand is not reliant on my generating subscriber income in order to subsidize its ability to publish — and be associated with — some truly vile motherfuckers. That means a lot to me, and it should have meant more to me, sooner. I cannot say I wasn’t warned. I can say I was eminently lazy about the whole thing, and quietly hoped Substack would somehow … stop sucking? … and make my newsletter life even easier.

But I finally migrated to WordPress because I couldn’t square the person I wanted to be — privately, publicly, or politically — with Substack’s shitty politics, really their politics of pretending to be apolitical while relying on right-wing extremism for the substance of their business model.

If you’re not familiar with how Substack works: their approach is, basically, to collect a sizable fee from many thousands of small-time bloggers like me (via subscribers, perhaps like you) in order to fund and recruit big-name writers to the platform. Some of the big-name writers are really neat, wonderful, talented people with great ideas and interesting perspectives who are trying to make the world a better and more just place (and even succeeding).

But a lot of Substack’s name-brand writers — certainly its most profitable — are outright and unapologetic fascists, racists, Nazis, and transphobes, and Substack doesn’t just not mind it, but actively courts, cultivates, and pays those writers to produce the deliberately controversial and often expressly offensive content that drives traffic and dollars to the system. I’m not sure how many Substack writers and readers know that cultivating dangerous, fringe ideas is so absolutely essential to Substack’s business model — I didn’t know it myself, really, and it’s my job as a media critic to pay attention to that sort of thing.

It really just got to a point recently where I couldn’t justify using my writing — and my subscribers’ money — to fund the work of Substack’s banner assholes. I’m under no illusion that there’s nothing in or on the vast world of WordPress I might find loathsome, but at least here I’m not forced to contribute 10% of my earnings directly to Substack’s doofusy c-suite Bay Area tech bros so that they can shore up a business model that is expressly built on recruiting, defending, retaining, and promoting some of the most odious assholes publishing in the English language today, such as: white supremacist Richard Hanania (who recently appeared on Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie’s hypey podcast), anti-vaxxer Robert Malone, and transphobe Graham Linehan (whose bigotry was so odious he actually managed to get himself kicked off of Twitter). There’s also Bari Weiss, the right-wing scold cosplaying as a journalist who’s made a lucrative career out of complaining about being canceled, and noted creepo/liar/Elon Musk apologist Matt Taibbi. And there’s Freddie deBoer, the contrarian dipshit who’s so far left that he’s fully wanked himself into the good graces of some of American media’s highest-profile right-wing assholes, and the king bozo of ~ just-asking-questions ~, Matt Yglesias. The list really, really goes on.

Add to that roundtable of chucklefuckery the fact that Substack’s management can only be described as somewhere on the spectrum between willfully ignorant and gleefully unconcerned when it comes to content moderation, with a downright enthusiastic tolerance for bigotry on the platform that has driven many writers away, and much sooner than me. I’m not connecting any unseen dots here; Substack CEO Chris Best is open about all of this. It wasn’t any one of these things that prompted me to finally pack up and leave, but rather the whole ecosystem amid our fucked-up political climate.

I should say that I’ve been a happy-enough proponent of Substack until the very recent past. I’ve helped a half-dozen or so folks set up their own Substack newsletters; it’s an extremely easy, beginner-friendly platform that relies on writers believing that there’s nothing simpler than getting thousands of people to pay $5 a month for your stray thoughts. There are great — like really great, once-in-a-generation-great — writers on Substack, who are writers of color, who are trans writers, who are disabled writers, who are feminist writers, who are writers from a variety of marginalized backgrounds, and those writers’ work is fundamentally and essentially worthy of support and amplification. The worst thing I can think of is for the noise of Substack’s worst names to overshadow that great work. So I’m not naming anybody here, because this isn’t about anybody besides me and how I feel about my own piddly wankery.

But as more and more bad news has come out about Substack, its management, and the writers it works the hardest to retain, I myself didn’t have an answer to the question “Why are you publishing here?” that I felt genuinely good about. Because my answer was lazy. It was privileged. It was very much rooted in the but-everyone-else-is-doing-it school of not-doing-better. Basically: it seemed like it would be an expensive hassle to leave Substack. It would be much easier to stay put, kick 10% of my earnings into a pool with a bunch of well compensated bigots, and generally keep my head stuck deep down in the sand.

And indeed I can now confirm that it is, in fact, an expensive hassle to leave Substack. But if you’re feeling the same pull to separate your money, your brand, and/or your intellectual work from Substack, I’ll tell you how I did it, and why.

First: I surveyed the readers of my most-viewed newsletter content — my weekly abortion news roundups — and asked how they felt about Substack and my publishing there (among lots of other things that were super helpful, thanks to everyone who responded!).

Second: I compared costs and revenue across Substack and eight other platforms that provide substantially the same newsletter/web publishing services. I looked at ROI for my current level of subscriptions (2,755 subscribers, of which 90 are paid subscribers ranging from $5 monthly or $50/$75 annually) and at ROI if I doubled my paid subscriber base, which I’m roughly on track to do each year based on past performance stats.

Third: I drank a(some) bottle(s) of wine about how I actually feel about blogging/newslettering. I interrogated what I like and dislike about paid subscription models, what really motivates me as a writer/creator, and what has historically served me best in terms of parlaying the writing I choose to do for myself, regardless of remuneration, into outside paid gigs (i.e., writing for publications, consulting on content/messaging strategies for orgs and individuals, speaking engagements, etc.).

I arrived at a few key takeaways, which I’ll break into subject-matter areas.

My gut feelings:

• I don’t like for my name (or my “brand,” ugh) to be associated with Substack, even though I appreciate and respect many dozens of writers who use the platform and will continue to subscribe to their work, sometimes as a paying reader.
• I don’t like using a paid subscription model for my writing. The sense of obligation (imagined, mostly, but real enough in practice to this ADHD brain) to churn out content, especially for paid subscribers and to be a “good” Substacker by increasing engagement on the platform, severely dampened the love I have for writing in general — instead of excitement, I noticed myself feeling dread at the prospect of starting a new draft.
• Constantly being in sell-paid-subscriptions-mode-or-else really sucks.
• I don’t have a lot of faith in subscription models for writing these days, and I say this as a paid subscriber to several dozen newsletters. It’s a truism by now that major news outlets are flailing in part because of subscription fatigue, and I feel a lot of guilt/weirdness myself around not getting around to reading the majority of things I support as a paid subscriber! I think there might be better ways of funding independent journalism/writing that give the overloaded, over-mediated readers of today a little more grace and a lot less nagging/pressure to get the hot-take-bang for our limited bucks.
• Speaking of takes: I’m mostly an opinion writer, commentator, and messaging/social media expert. I’m a passable reporter, but I don’t do a lot of it these days unless it’s for an outside publication or my own curiosity. I don’t feel great charging regular subscribers for my stray thoughts, as the most interesting (and pay-worthy ones) inevitably fail to occur on a reliable basis. I dislike having to come up with fully-formed takes just for the sake of it, and my having to come up with takes almost certainly ensures my publishing the most milquetoast iterations of the genre.
• Blogging — for free or for tips — has historically been pleasurable (I like publishing whatever I want to publish, whenever I want to publish it) and even profitable (in terms of improving my visibility as a writer) for me. But hype behind paid newsletters — not free blogs with tip jars — as a model seems mostly to come from purveyors of paid newsletter platforms. Huh! Funny, that.

Subscriber feedback:

• My subscribers mostly didn’t care if I was on Substack and/or actively disliked that I used the platform.
• My paid subscribers didn’t really avail themselves of the perks/benefits offered (commenting ability, most notably), because they mostly subscribed just to be supportive of my work/career.
• My subscribers of any stripe, paid or otherwise, liked connecting with me via Substack chats better than availing themselves of the comments sections on my posts, but chats were overall a low-uptake benefit that I felt I could replicate elsewhere (Discord, maybe, stay tuned).
• I wasn’t seeing profitable conversion rates commensurate with the effort/stress/pressure of producing paid-only content/perks.

Publishing experience/platform usability:

• The death of Twitter/Twitter’s Substack hostility means I’ve already lost my core audience base and instead must rely on the Substack referral/writer network for newsletter audience expansion, further enmeshing me in a(nother) shitty publishing model run by untrustworthy Silicon Valley dudes.
• Substacks look like Substacks and only Substacks; customization options, especially for illustrations and promoting non-Substack content, are severely limited/non-existent. WordPress supports all manner of embeds and post customization, and has not historically subjected its users to the consequences of the many and various petty squabbles of dippy techlords.
• Substack alternatives (Beehiiv, Buttondown, and the like) are wading into a fickle market that is largely built to emulate the Substack grift, and I am not convinced that the paid newsletter model is sustainable in the long term for the average blogger or that those platforms will continue to exist in their present form. Ghost seems like the strongest non-Substack player in the field, but it’s out of my price range at my current subscriber level and considering my lack of desire to continue to push for paid subscriptions.
• I’ve used WordPress personally and professionally off and on since the early 2000’s and have confidence in its staying power as a brand and platform. I have better-than-average command of website building/publishing, and feel good about my ability to make an attractive website using this tech.
• WordPress has the lowest up-front costs combined with no significant limitations on subscriber numbers, and the most flexibility of any publishing platform next to Ghost, which would probably have been my choice had I decided to continue with a paid subscription model, though they brag about publishing some real right-wing stinkers as well (see: Quillette). (I’ll say that while Beehiiv looked very promising/affordable in this regard, I felt safer sticking with a more established company.)
• Substack has no up-front costs or hosting fees and is extremely easy to use, but the 10 percent cut the company takes from paid subs is a losing prospect in the long-term for folks like me, who have smaller followings and aren’t likely to break into the six-figure subscriber range (and even then, the cut Substack takes is proportionally ridiculous if you’re drawing enough paid subscribers to cover the comparatively nominal hosting fees on something like Beehiiv, Ghost, or Buttondown).

So here I am now: relaunching from way behind the starting line on WordPress. I spent about $200 out of pocket on hosting for HWTA and my serialized novel on WP. I’ve nixed paid subscriptions — goodbye to $3800 annually, and I’ll begin refunding Substackers ASAP as necessary — but I plan to conduct biannual pledge drives that I think can get me close to my previous Substack income, without the drag of outright subsidizing writers I despise, even if my contribution was just a piddly drop in Substack’s bucket. I’ll keep the tip jar open year round here for folks who want to support my work.

I will take some hits. I’ll probably annoy and lose some readers due to the migration, though WordPress supports easy subscriber migration and most folks should never notice a difference. I worry that Substackers will take my migration away from the platform as an attack on them personally if they decide to keep publishing there, but it isn’t, and that’s just silly self-aggrandizement on my part — I know as well as anyone why and how Substack has made itself an easy and attractive place to set up shop. I won’t be part of a recommendations network here on WordPress that drives traffic to my blog from other similar publications, so that’s a bummer, but there are some ad options I might explore. But when I’m not earning money on WordPress, at least I won’t be earning money for the next “fringe” thinker Substack decides to woo with a six-figure advance.

I don’t deserve any credit for doing this; I should have done it years ago. That I didn’t — and that I even launched my new fiction project on Substack a couple of months ago, which I’ve also now migrated to WP — is a testament to my own privilege, comfort, cowardice, and laziness. I’m hoping the expense, effort, and well-earned embarrassment will be worth it; whatever happens, I already feel better about hitting “publish” here.

If you’d like to support my move, please kick in a few bucks. If you’re curious about what comes next, well, you know what to do: