From the looks of it, the platform will
need a respirator. For the past few years, there have been numerous articles
written about Substack and its glaring lack of content standards. Hate speech
isn't buried in the corners; it's front-facing, and at times, centered. In
2024, The Atlantic published a piece by Jacob Stern titled
"Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb," detailing how the platform had
allowed scores of white-supremacist, neo-confederates, and explicitly Nazi
newsletters to operate freely. In late March 2026, the issue cycled through the
social sphere again, prompting creators to question and many to remove their
work from the platform.
Let's be clear about what Substack
actually is: a private equity-backed venture where revenue, above all else, is
the bottom line. If monetizing hate generates income, the attitude has been, so
be it. Free speech, in their framework, includes hate speech, and
unfortunately, the two are served upside by side, regardless of who gets hurt
in the process. Substack was not built by writers. It was built by investors.
The Writer Exodus
Concerned over Substack's ideological drift, notable creators have been leaving or seriously considering it. Sportswriter Joe Posnanski, who had built a following of over 47,000 on the platform, cited his desire to distance himself from the platform's growing association with politically extreme voices. "When you search my stories online, you see Substack above my name," he said. "Whenever something would blow up a little bit with Substack, I was somehow connected to that, and I didn't like that at all." Digiday
Rival newsletter service Beehiiv reported that nearly 3,000 creators jumped from Substack to its platform in the past year, with close to 1,000 of those departures occurring in just the first quarter of 2025. Digiday
The Business Model Problem
Beyond the hate speech crisis, Substack has a structural problem that quietly eats into writers' earnings. The platform takes 10% of all paid subscription revenue, and on top of that, Stripe charges roughly 3.6% per transaction, making the total effective cost somewhere between 13 and 16% of a writer's gross earnings. That may sound manageable at first, but once a writer crosses roughly $1,500 per month in paid subscriptions, a flat-fee alternative platform starts saving money and, by $5,000 per month, a writer is paying roughly seven times more on Substack than they would elsewhere. Ruzuku
Then there's the deeper math problem: only one to five percent of free subscribers ever convert to paid, meaning a writer needs 10,000 or more free subscribers just to generate meaningful income. That's an enormous amount of labor before the model starts working in a creator's favor. Ruzuku
The Pivot to Advertising
A July 2025 report highlighted Substack's $100 million fundraising round, which pivoted the platform toward advertising, a notable departure from its original subscription-only ethos. For a platform that built its brand on the promise of a pure, direct relationship between writer and reader, the move toward ad revenue signals that the idealistic pitch was always secondary to growth. webpronews
Who It Was Built For — And Who It Wasn't
Substack was built for scale, not for community. Its architecture rewards the already famous, the already followed, and the already loud. For writers who are women, writers of color, or anyone existing at the margins of what the algorithm decides is "mainstream," the playing field was never level to begin with. When hate speech is the neighbor, the burden of that proximity falls hardest on the very people that speech targets.
Enter Chatmosa
Chatmosa is a new platform and a necessary one. Created by women, it is designed from the ground up as a safe space for women and people of color to publish, build community, and be heard without the shadow of extremist content hanging over their work. Alongside publishing articles, Chatmosa gives you the flexibility to produce and distribute podcasts easily and effectively across multiple platforms. Your voice, written or vocal, in one place with your followers and new fans to engage with you.
The contrast with Substack couldn't be sharper. Where Substack is a financial instrument dressed up as a writers' platform, Chatmosa appears to be something rarer: a space actually built with its community in mind.
The question isn't really whether Substack is dying. It's whether it deserves the loyalty of the writers particularly writers of color and women who built so much of its value in the first place. Chatmosa may be the answer that those writers have been waiting for.