SubStack has behaved like yet another capricious Big Tech company. So I’ve fired them!
Two days after Australia’s Under-16s social media ban took effect, I saw this screen when I logged into SubStack:
Using Australia’s Online Safety Act as an excuse, I’m now blocked from using SubStack unless I verify my age. For Australian users who already have a credit card on file with SubStack, they do not need to perform age verification. But for me, without a credit card on file, the only way to age verify is to send my biometric information (180 degrees video selfie) to Persona, an overseas private company.
When you look at the screenshot above, two things stand out:
- “Improve Persona’s platform” – what do they mean by that? Is my biometric information going to be used to train Persona’s AI models? The “Privacy Policy” link appeared to be broken. So I cannot see their privacy policy.
- “Redacted” – After 7 days, my biometric information will be “redacted”. Should they be deleted instead? Can my ‘redacted’ biometrics information be ‘un-redacted’ by hackers?
I reached out to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman-Grant. I told her that while I understand the need for age verification, I object to sending my biometric information to an overseas private company. She personally told me that,
Substack is not covered under our legislation – it is not a social media site. We require a waterfall approach in any case. Sorry about your frustrations
Julie Inman-Grant
So, what SubStack had done is completely unnecessary. And I believe they know it. But they still do it anyway, presumably as part of their battle against government regulators. Even if they want to age verify, there are plenty of more secure and private options like using Digital ID and supplying credit card details.
So, I’ve decided to FIRE SubStack
I have decided to follow my own advice in my own article, Is your business a serf under social media’s feudalism?:
If you want to be the master of your destiny, then your business needs its castle, which is in the form of a website. Not only that, but you also need to have a strategy to make your website the focal point of your online presence. Rented land, in the form of a Facebook/Instagram page/group, cannot be the focal point of your online presence. You need to find a way to nudge and direct your leads, visitors and customers from the Facebook lord’s rented land towards your castle (website).
Over the past few days, I manually transferred all the key articles in my SubStack site to this website and transferred my entire SubStack subscriber list to my own email list.
This is not the first time I fired a Big Tech company
Back in April 2022, I fired Medium and moved all my content to SubStack.
I had been a regular contributor to Medium for a couple of years. Slowly, I had been accumulating followers and had been earning a small sum of royalties consistently. In fact, through me, Medium had earned a paid subscriber!
All these came crashing down on that day. I received this email from Medium:
A few weeks ago, we sent you a notice that your account might be removed from our Partner Program, because it did not meet our eligibility requirement of having at least 100 followers. We’re sorry to inform you that your account still has not met this requirement, and as a result, it has been removed from our Partner Program.
In one swoop, my consistent monthly revenue went down to ZERO.
There were many speculations on why Medium chose to do that. Some say they were doing that to fight spam. Others say it was for fighting low-quality content. Whatever the reasons were, I was not happy about that. One of the reasons why Medium was such a great place to hang out was the awesome content that its writers contribute.
I was one of those writers.
But Medium chose to show me the middle-finger. So, why should I work for free and continue to contribute to making it an awesome place? Of course not!
Sure, Medium had every right to do that. I too had every right to delete all my content on Medium and migrated to SubStack instead.
And now, another Big Tech company like SubStack showed me the middle finger. So, I migrated my important content from SubStack to my own website. Very soon, I will delete my SubStack account.