Substack Notes launched in April 2023 as a short form feed inside the newsletter platform, and at the time most critics wrote it off as a Twitter clone that would never achieve the scale needed to matter. Three years later, the conversation has shifted. Writers who spent a decade building audiences on Twitter, and who watched that audience scatter after the 2022 ownership change and subsequent platform shifts, are now treating Notes as their primary public feed. The platform crossed 50 million monthly active users in March according to figures CEO Chris Best shared on the company's quarterly creator call, and the engagement per user is higher than any major social product.
The writers driving the shift are a specific type. Freelance essayists, newsletter authors with paid subscribers, political writers on the center-left and center-right who got tired of the tone on X, and a growing contingent of fiction writers who use Notes to post work in progress. Names include Anne Helen Petersen, Heather Cox Richardson, Ted Gioia, Casey Newton, and hundreds of Substack writers with smaller but engaged audiences. The pattern they describe is the same. Notes feels like writing for readers who actually want to read. X feels like writing for an algorithm that wants to argue.
Part of the appeal is structural. Notes is tied directly to the Substack newsletter system, which means a single post can convert a casual reader into an email subscriber and eventually a paid subscriber in a way that Twitter never made possible. Substack reports that 30 percent of new paid subscriptions in 2025 originated from a Notes post or comment rather than a newsletter archive page or direct search. For a working writer, that conversion path is the whole game. Writing into a feed that actually supports your business is different from writing into a feed that extracts your attention and sells it to advertisers.
The economics are also shifting. Substack reached 5 million paid subscriptions globally this spring, up from 3.5 million a year ago, and the median revenue for writers in the top 1,000 crossed 200,000 dollars annually. That kind of economic traction creates a gravitational pull. Writers who are on the fence about where to invest their social energy look at those numbers and follow the incentives. It is not only ideological or aesthetic. It is a rational move toward a platform that rewards building a relationship with readers rather than cultivating a performance for strangers.
The tone on Notes is genuinely different from X. Posts are longer on average, around 280 to 1,000 characters instead of the rapid clip of shorter tweets. Responses tend to come from people who have read the writer before, which changes the quality of discourse. There is less dunking, less pile-on behavior, and less performative outrage. There is also a noticeable absence of anonymous accounts because Substack requires a working email, and most users sign in with the same identity they use on their newsletters. The platform has its own faults, including a noticeable monoculture around certain types of essayists and a feed that can feel insular if your interests sit outside the dominant categories. But the signal to noise ratio is higher than any comparable platform.
For Black and Latino writers in particular, Notes has offered something Twitter never fully delivered, which is a usable business engine. Writers like Kiese Laymon, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Roxane Gay, and dozens of less-famous but economically successful essayists have built paid audiences that would have been difficult to monetize on any other platform. The shift from free attention on Twitter to paid attention on Substack is a meaningful economic story that has not been reported on enough.
The risks for Notes are real. If the platform grows quickly enough to need traditional ad revenue, the incentives could shift in ways that compromise the current tone. If too many X refugees show up with the habits they built on that platform, Notes could start to feel like what it replaced. And Substack has historically been slow on content moderation decisions, which has caused high profile writer exits before. So far, the leadership has been clear about their commitment to the subscription model, and the writer retention numbers suggest the community is sticky.
For writers, essayists, and anyone whose work depends on building a direct relationship with readers, the question is no longer whether to try Notes. The question is how quickly to move. Twitter refugees who waited until late 2023 to build on Substack are now outpaced by those who started in 2021. The same pattern is playing out now. The quiet migration is already underway.