What the Heck is Substack? 🥞
Read now (3 mins) | A post that helps you make sense of this platform.
WHAT'S SUBSTACK?
Contrary to the sweet smell of Maple Syrup you might be catching from my emoji, Substack is not a short or submission stack of pancakes. Substack is simply a platform where creators (like us!) can publish podcasts, articles, videos, and updates directly to readers. Subscribing means you'll get our podcast episodes straight to your email and you have early access to videos from each episode. You do NOT have to pay to subscribe. You don’t even have to subscribe to be reading this page.
WHY SIGN UP FOR OUR SUBSTACK?
First, you do not need to sign up for Substack. You can listen to the Autistic Culture Podcast, for free, anywhere you get your podcasts. Just type in the name of the show and we will come up. But when you follow our show through our Substack page, instead of just listening to us on a podcast player, there are a few advantages. But, the free subscription has 3 main benefits:
📧 BENEFIT NUMERO UNO - Email reminders when new episodes come out! (Because it's easy to forget to listen)
🎥 BENEFIT NUMERO DOS - Early access to video versions of each episode if you are into that sort of thing!
📑 BENEFIT NUMERO TRES - Complete transcripts of each episode if you would rather read or read along!
WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THE PAID OPTIONS?
We believe that celebrating Autistic Joy is our greatest act of resistance in a world that was not made for us, and some days feels like it seeks to destroy us for being who we were born to be. We make our main podcast totally free, but it’s quite expensive to make and is a huge time commitment.
Just to break it down for you we have to pay for domains, web hosting, storage services, editing services, audio engineering, transcript and show note services, technical coders to put the episodes up, and a lot of admin - more than you are probably imagining! There is so much we want to do that we just don't have the budget for.
As a thank you to those who can help us defray our costs we have some extra and bonuses including a private book club, live calls with me, early access to my book, Am I Actually Autistic?, discounts on tshirts and stickers, and the option to have a piece of your writing in our annual paid subscriber literary anthology, Neurodivergent Narratives.
So, if you do have the budget for it, we would love to welcome you to our producer circle as a paid supporter of the show or even give a gift subscription.
HOW DO YOU SIGN UP?
Here's exactly how it works, step-by-step:
1. You should see an option in the top right corner to either upgrade or subscribe. Click that button. (If you aren’t on the site, you would just go to AutisticCulturePodcast.com/subscribe.)
2. You'll first see a landing page asking for your email. You have 2 options. You can enter your email or you can continue without entering your email. If you entered your email, congrats! You are subscribed. If you skipped that step read on.
3. Once your email is in the system you'll be presented with subscription options. It will say Choose a Subscription Plan.
IMPORTANT: One of these plans is completely free (labeled as "None"). Just choose the free option to access all our standard content without cost.
Once you've subscribed, you'll get our latest posts delivered directly to your email inbox. You can also browse older posts on our Substack page anytime.
Also, Substack has an app, but you absolutely do NOT need to download it. The app is entirely optional—it just provides another way to conveniently read content if you prefer apps. You can fully access our content and subscribe without ever touching the app.
WHY ARE WE USING SUBSTACK INSTEAD OF FB, TWITTER, or TIKTOK?
Simply put, Substack aligns better with our values. It's also the only platform like this not owned by billionaires. The owners are 3 guys from New Zealand, Canada, and Japan—Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi. Now that does not make them perfect (cuz they aren't) but when Vivian's estranged father who shall remain nameless tried to buy the company, they told him to eff off and then systematically poached Twitter's top creators. I appreciate that. I think Hamish said it best recently on a podcast/substack of a guy I don’t even like (you can find the full name at the bottom), but here’s what he said:
I think the foundation of it, the thing that makes it different for Substack versus the likes of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X, is that our model creates different conditions that produce different types of results, different behaviors and different content, rewards different behaviors and rewards different content than those other machines reward.
On those other machines, you're rewarded for keeping people scrolling. Keeping people maximally engaged in the feed, keeping their emotions maximally peaked. On Substack, you're rewarded for demonstrating that you're a trustworthy voice that it's worth continuing to show up for. Even if you don't always agree with the writer, you've invited them into your inbox for a subscription, even if it's a free subscription: that's a big barrier to jump over. And you can punish that writer by unsubscribing if they lose your trust. Even more extreme is you can pay with your money out of your pocket to say I really trust you and then the writer's responsibility is to keep living up to that standard and keep living up to that trust. When you change the business model that drives the whole platform, then you change the outcomes. You change the culture of the platform.
Unlike other platforms, Substack allows user greater control over what they see, because readers and subscribers are the customers instead of making the advertisers the customers. By taking direct payments from the subscribers instead of making money like a TikTok influencer from ads and advertisers, I am incentivized to serve you instead of playing like an algorithm game hoping to go viral in the social media context. A small percent of our subscribers are paying for bonus content from us, and the Substack platform takes 10% of that which seems fair and better than selling our souls for free access and sponsored content. This ensures our communication isn't controlled by algorithms or large corporations. This means fewer distractions, no selling of your data, and more direct, meaningful interactions between us and you.
