Gruber went on an anti-Substack tear over the weekend. It started Saturday with links to the whole Nazi notification thing and Substack’s “shaky” business model, and culminated that day with The Substack Branding and Faux Prestige Trap:

Less commented upon but just as bad is the branding trap. Substack is a damn good name. It looks good, it sounds good. It’s short and crisp and unique. But now they’ve gotten people to call publications on Substack not “blogs” or “newsletters” but “substacks”.

A friend, trying to be complimentary, once said to me, “Your Substack is neat and interesting, too.” I very nearly died inside. Don’t call it a Substack.

Gruber was back on Sunday with links on leaving Substack and Substack’s $100 million VC raise (provocatively titled “Substack Raised Another $100 Million, Which, I Bet, Is Already Being Flushed Down the Same Toilet as Their First $100 Million”), where he astutely notes:

If their business model were actually as simple as described, they’d already be profitable and wouldn’t have needed to raise another $100 million. They’ve already got a lot of subscribers. They’ve already got a stable of high-profile writers. They already keep 10 percent of what subscribers pay.[…]

What would validate Substack’s strategy is showing proof of actual profits and profitable growth. And if they had actual profits and profitable growth they wouldn’t have needed to raise another $100 million. […]

I firmly believe one could build a very nice business taking 10 percent of subscription revenue for a blogging/newsletter platform, if you could get as nice a roster of popular writers to build on the platform as Substack has. I do not think that’s a $1 billion business, though. And if it were, they should, at this point, be able to get there on their own, without additional funding. They should have achieved profitability lift-off long ago.

One might get the impression that Gruber isn’t a fan of Substack.

(Neither am I—Substack is X/Twitter for “intellectuals.” No one should use either.)

He then delivers his coup de grâce:

But what do I know, other than running a profitable independent website for the last 20 or so years?

Twenty years. Zero VC funding.

Burn.