End of the Road Substack
Substack is actively hostile toward writers and I'm done.
Fuck your Pangram
Substack’s final act of hostility for me was the integration of Pangram. AI used as AI Scanners, are all full of shit. None of them work. They all produce false positives and they are all worthless. You’d think the idiots running this site would know that… Apparently not.
I’ve tested so many of these fraudulent and bullshit scanners with chapters from my novel that I wrote back in 2017 for NaNoWriMo and guess what, they all fail. I didn’t use any AI on it, because LLMs didn’t even exist publicly at the time. Yet they are saying that it looks like a portion was done by AI. Complete and utter bullshit.
Pangram is also bullshit. It thinks the 9/11 Commission Report, written in the early 2000’s, is AI written. Many have tested it… Even using Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, which it thinks was AI written. Pangram is a bullshit company lying to everyone and creating a scarlet letter for real writers.
Furthermore… I checked the space for Substack to NOT scan mu writing with AI and Pangram is AI. I don’t believe for one second that Pangram is not scanning our articles and Notes and not training off of them. We know they are, even when the bastards say they are not. Substack even took the line about “training AI” out of their publisher TOS. So now it’s just their “word” but nothing that they have to contractually have to stand behind.
Fuck your Dark Patterns
Once upon a time, writers could set paid subscribers to not auto renew. This allowed a writer to wind down paid subscriptions for whatever reason they wanted. After all, this writing thing is supposed to be our business and for us to make our own decisions right?
Giving writers that option is not good for Substack though. So they removed that option. Now you have to ask paid subscribers to cancel their subscription, raise all of your paid tiers so no one will buy a paid subscription, and then wait until each paid subscription reaches their end and cancel them then. Even if the paid subscriber cancels, that doesn’t mean you can kill your paid subscriptions. Never mind that the paid subscriber would still get all the content they were getting before. Nope… if you cancel the subscription from your side (even after they canceled form their side) you are on the hook for refunding any prorated amount of the subscription.
If you have dozens to hundreds of subscriptions, you are going to be locked into Substack for a very long time while you try to wind down your paid subs.
The people that paid for subscriptions for me have already canceled but I’m going to have to keep Stripe and Substack around until after April of 2027 just so I don’t get screwed by these dark patterns.
The kicker… I was planning to keep making content here but then the Pangram integration happened and I’m done.
Substack is a devious fucking piece of shit and I’m not playing their games. I’m not maintaining any content here or creating any new content here.
Migration
I’ve migrated all of my fiction off of this platform and into my Proton Drive. I’ll find somewhere else on the web to display it. I cannot in good conscious, continue to pretend that Substack has any good will toward writers after all of this shit above. We don’t even have a full fledged text editor. They couldn’t even give us that. Instead we got, AI Art, Podcasting, Videos, and Notes social networking. The writing tool… nope… not for you.
I will also be moving my subscriptions over to RSS feeds. I still want to read what others are doing, I’m just not going to be participating in this platform in the ways Substack demands.
The writers and many of the readers I’ve met here have been awesome. I just wish this platform could have been half as awesome as they were.
Fuck Substack.
