All In

Liberty Papers 0.1

Liberty Papers is five months old so it felt like a good time to review our progress and give our readers an idea of what we’ve learned and how we plan to go forward. We’d also like to open the floor for feedback. Please let us know in the comments below or reply to this email with any feedback. What do you hope we improve? What subjects should we write about going forward?

By the Numbers

Growth and engagement have been extremely promising. We’re past 350 subscribers and climbing. (Thank you for all the recommendations and restacks!)

Growth has not been linear but it has been steady. The organic growth seems to have taken a promising upward turn lately.

up and to the right

Social Media

In the beginning, most new subscribers came from Twitter with the help of some influential friends on FinTwit. They and their vast network of subscribers did us the honor of subscribing and retweeting their posts which you can see as sharp upward spikes in the graphs above. Elon put an X to all of that when he downranked Substack shares in Twitter’s newsfeed algorithm. The tweet of our most recent piece on the Magna Carta garnered a mere 26 impressions in 24 hours.

Substack, downranked

Similarly, Instagram Threads was a reasonable source of activity earlier on. They have also clearly downranked Substack in their algorithm.

So, like our friend Doomberg who recently went all in on Substack and Substack Notes and abandoned Twitter/X, we are doing the same. The rival platforms are neither as pleasant to use nor are they as useful. That we have relatively fewer followers on the other platforms makes it an easy choice. The main thing that gives us the confidence to go all in on Substack is the steady influx of new subscribers coming in through the Substack Network. The vast majority of new subscribers come with the following referral tag:

On a more practical note, spreading attention between Twitter, Threads, Instagram, and Substack has been rather exhausting. Narrowing our focus will have practical benefits to our well-being as we delete legacy social media apps.

The Work of Our Lives

This is both a passion project as well as an attempt to attain personal sovereignty. We will eventually turn on the paywall. After that point, all new posts will be for paid subscribers. The tentative plan is to go paid in the Spring of next year or when we reach 10,000 free subscribers, whichever comes first. We hope to earn your business by grappling with engaging topics and asking questions that make you think perhaps more deeply about things you care about. We welcome all readers and hope that we can count among our customers those who disagree with us as well as those who agree.

Legacy media platforms have relinquished the privilege of providing people with even-handed takes on events happening in the world. We hope to fill a small part of that void by writing about timely topics with the hope of pushing back against the steadily encroaching tyranny that is seeping into the zeitgeist. Starting this venture has been an absolute pleasure. We hope it has been as inspiring and thought-provoking for you as it has for us.

Promises

We will not sell your email address or any other information you give to us in confidence.

Trust is everything to us. Part of what we’re pushing back against through our writing is the erosion of trust that has been growing in society, particularly since the pandemic. Trust lost is nearly impossible to regain. Our greatest honor will be to have earned your trust. We may be often wrong, but we believe what we write. We value our readers too highly to do otherwise.

We will not accept payment to write about specific topics.

Everything we write about will be things we are curious about or interested in. Intellectual integrity and authenticity are part of earning and retaining your trust. If we’ve chosen to write about something, it will be an authentic expression of our curiosity, inspired occasionally by your suggestions.

We will not accept advertisers.

It’s essentially impossible to be sponsored by advertisers and to be free from commercial pressures and the bias that that introduces.

Conclusion

Substack’s commitment to free speech is why we’re here. It’s all too easy for online platforms to succumb to pressure from investors, corporate sponsors, or governments to control the speech on their platforms. Substack has succumbed to none of these to the best of our knowledge. We’re betting our careers on this. We’re incredibly honored and excited that you’re coming with us on this journey. Thank you for reading, for your feedback, and for your encouragement. It means the world to us.