I don’t know if you been following much the not-the-news lately but it’s been a strange couple of weeks for Authors Online. I don’t mean this or that inconsequential literary list and assorted albeit foreseeable reactions to it — it’s been a strange couple of weeks because the environment in which Authors Online promote their work is changing, and I’d say it isn’t changing for the better.
Earlier this month Substack announced the roll out of a product called Notes. Notes is very similar to Twitter, only that instead of getting retweeted you get restacked, and other lame differences of the kind, plus more significant ones, like the absence of an algorithm or adverts. This caused Twitter’s owner to throw his toys off the pram and suddenly Substack was all but banished from Space Musk’s site. First, tweets that included Substack links couldn’t be retweeted, or even liked. Then the ban went as far as Twitter marking every link leading to Substack as potentially malicious (which might be a…