Occasionally a critic will claim that Substack is a “walled garden.”

That’s 100 percent wrong. No walled garden would let you export your mailing list, content, and even payment relationships at any moment.

Substack helps you grow an audience and then lets you take the audience with you if you want to leave the platform. That puts Substack in service of writers, not as owners of them. And the only way Substack makes money is by helping writers make money.

This is a critical distinction between Substack and other platforms. And it’s critical to understanding the media moment we’re in. If a media critic doesn’t get that, they’re not worth listening to.