I’ve been tired of Substack platforming white supremacists, Nazis, neo-confederates, and so many of the worst people on the internet for a long time now. So I made a browser extension for all of us.
Kill Yr Substack intercepts every Substack link you click and redirects it to the web snapshotting site archive.is. The request to Substack never fires, which means that they never see your traffic, which means that their numbers go down. You still get to read the thing tho.
In case you think I’m being hyperbolic about Substack’s whole deal, here’s some background from people who cover this beat for a living:
- Rolling Stone: Substack Loses Major Newsletter Platformer Over Nazi Content
- Ars Technica: Substack’s Nazi problem won’t go away after push notification apology
- The Atlantic: Substack Has a Nazi Problem
And then, last week, Substack promoted Andrew Tate as their #1 new “bestseller”. Just out there touting a convicted rapist and human trafficker like it’s something to celebrate. Cool company. Great leadership.
Now the nerdy shit…
About three years ago I wrote a userscript that redirected substack.com posts to archive.is. It worked fine, but asking someone to install one thing (an extension like Greasemonkey or one of its derivatives) just to turn around and install a second thing (a script) always felt like too much of an ask.
Installing a single thing that handles everything for you tho? That’s a much easier pill to swallow. So I packaged the whole deal up as a proper browser extension.
It works on *.substack.com out of the box, but a lot of Substacks live on custom domains now. Substack has become pervasive enough that sometimes I click through on what I think is an article or a blog post just to be greeted by a “secret” Substack on a custom domain. Most of the time I end up closing the tab on something I was mildly interested in and moving on with my life, annoyed that I sent them traffic.
Fortunately, the extension handles those too…
First time you land on a Substack with a custom domain, a content script sniffs the page for known platform fingerprints:
- The
generatormeta tag. - Stylesheets and scripts from the
substackcdn.comdomain. - Substack’s React components.
- RSS feed links pointing back to
substack.com.
Kill Yr Substack sees any of those and the page automagically redirects to archive.is. But it doesn’t end there. The extension makes sure that the domain also gets cached and every future visit from your browser is blocked at the network level, same as *.substack.com. No second chances.
It’s the perfect crime.
As of right now, the extension is available for Chromium and Firefox derivatives. I’d do one for Safari, but I don’t feel like paying Apple $99 a year for the privilege.
Once I stop being self conscious about the state of my code, I’ll get the source up on GitHub. Promise.
Oh. The original userscript still exists too. It doesn’t do the handy custom domain caching that the extension does, but it will redirect Substack traffic to archive.is for you.
If you already have Greasemonkey or one of its derivatives installed, or you’re using Safari, go ahead and grab the “old” version (recently rewritten with custom domain detection) from here:
Look. I know that some of you still fuck with people on Substack. Honestly, you should stop reading them. Every newsletter subscription and pageview over there is a vote. Each one tells Substack’s leadership and investors that the platform is growing. That their strategy is working. That platforming a convicted rapist won’t affect their bottom line. That giving white supremacists a seat at the bar isn’t a big deal.
So let’s do our part to screw with their business model.