The Punk-Ass Bitches at Substack Tried to Take Away My Perfect URL
I’m demanding answers
Yesterday I received an email that shook my world.
It was from Substack, the newsletter platform that has subsumed a menagerie of working journalists by paying them outsize sums to send little emails. It has also made it very easy for the layman creative to create their own account to send little emails, which is what I did in 2018 when I nabbed the perfect and coveted URL politics dot substack dot com.
What Gavin from Substack emailed me about was that my perfect Substack URLwas being taken away from me without my consent. Apparently some anti-Claire conspirator DEMANDED politics.substack.com, and I was informed that since I was “inactive” on the site, I’d be relegated to the worst URL I’ve ever heard of in my entire life, politics123.substack.com.
Gavin’s initial email
This seems personal. Strategic. Cunning. Glenn Greenwald-style sabotage, one could say, though for liability reasons, I won’t.
To remind you all what the hell I am going on about: I wanted to be a political cartoonist for three days in June 2018 on Substack, years before canceled journalists and silenced wonks fled their staff jobs for blogging.
One of my best (of three) political cartoons on politics.substack.com
Always an early adopter, I was able to snag the rare URL of politics.substack.com. But political cartooning is no longer my passion, so I decided I wanted to sell my very special URL for $80 to $800,000, which I wrote about in an article for this website titled “Hi Glenn Greenwald, Would You Like to Buy My Substack?”
Of course, I asked the bigwigs at Substack if this was all right. To quote my own article:
Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s cofounder, told me, “We haven't heard of any such sales, and we don't have any rules prohibiting that yet. I hope you make $20 million.”
Lulu Cheng Meservey, VP of Communications at Substack, said, “That’s fascinating! Can’t wait to see how it goes. The good thing here is that you have full ownership of your content, IP, and mailing list, everything. In theory an NFT would probably be possible too. No brigade of corporate lawyers to deal with here since everything is yours.”
With their explicit blessings, I went forth and emailed not only the Substack converts who might be looking for a landing page to drive traffic, but also to political writers and figures.
Substack herself wants me to make $20 million on the sale and produce a companion NFT!!!!!! And yeah, I’m willing to do nudity, tastefully!!
Back in the summer, I emailed about 20 politics-adjacent writers and internet figures, including Matt Yglesias (who I accidentally called “Glenn” in the greeting as the result of a copy-paste error for which I take full ownership), Chasten Buttigieg, and Bari Weiss. Nobody, besides Charlotte Clymer, even emailed me back. Clymer did not want the URL, but was entirely supportive.
LGBTQ+ activist Charlotte Clymer, the only person to respond to my email. “That's so kind of you to offer,” she said. “But I'm happy with what I have. I know you'll find a great buyer.”
I’ve never written an email from my phone before. Who am I, Heather “Yummie Tummie” Thomson or one of the ballers on Ballers? I’m not that busy! However, as I was on an airplane at the time, I wrote an uncharacteristically direct email to “Gavin” if that is even his name.
My email to Gavin. You deserve better than what I gave you, Gavin.
This “Gavin” character, to his credit, remedied the situation immediately.
Gavin, this isn’t on you.
But in the 21 minutes between my email and his returning of the URL and “sincere apologies,” I became one of those nasty women we used to hear so much about. I was roaring, just like in the song “Roar” by Katy Perry. My coworker Brandy said she knew “a lot of lawyers.” I was ready to fly to New Orleans, where she lives and where her lot of lawyers presumably dwell, and get the Ragin’ Cajun James Carville on their asses.
And even though my perfect URL has been returned to me, I still couldn’t calm down. Someone was out to sabotage me, to steal my $80 to $800,000 potential that is rightfully mine! I needed names. And I needed them now.
Me, eating crow, but still curious.
Gavin did not respond to my email. If you’ve got any information about who was trying to take my perfect Substack URL away from me, feel free to reach out. Especially if you’ve got Glenn access.
Until I get some answers here, my belief in free speech has ironically been decimated by the little email platform that has become a refuge for the so-called oppressed.
