Writers - Do You Really Own What You Publish?
*Photo by [Pavel Danilyuk](https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-holding-a-placard-8553778/)*
In the last four years, I’ve ridden the wave of social media. I’ve amassed thousands of followers, and my posts were read by millions.
It’s empowering… until it isn’t.
This year, I chose to stop publishing on LinkedIn, Medium, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. My reach on each of these platforms dropped from 100% of my follower base to around 10%. My voice was being suppressed.
I wasn’t writing anything particularly controversial. This is all just part of the social media life cycle. Platforms offer attractive terms to lock in users. They distribute our articles, posts, and thoughts widely to attract eyeballs for advertisers.
Writers learn to play the algorithm to maximise reach and engagement. Maybe they even manage to monetize their writing.
But when the platforms reach what they deem to be maximum usage and membership, they begin to reduce the benefits on offer. They ask writers to focus on specific topics, suppress non-mainstream opinion, or punish or ban any writers who don’t follow new rules. Big tech companies always eventually turn on the money tap by forcing users to suffer endless adverts and even make writers pay to reach the audience they have built.
Newsflash: there is no company too big to fail. Digg, Google+, Myspace, Vine and many more socials have died. Self-reported active user numbers cannot be trusted. Meta recently trialed AI profiles to prop up falling usage projections on Instagram and Facebook. X is now a dumpster fire of bots, scammers, and rage bait. It has been co-opted by a megalomaniacal oligarch to spread his own worldview. And LinkedIn feeds are drowning in unsolicited AI-generated business twaddle. The social giants are entering the death spiral.
# What happens in a social-media death spiral?
Users don’t see the value in posting, so they move elsewhere.
I wasn’t feeling rewarded for the thousands of hours I spent on LinkedIn, so I quit. I went from earning $20+ an article on Medium to pennies. Literal pennies. Bye bye, Tony Stubblebine. I learned that if you don’t own the distribution mechanic, you get left writing into the wind.
Ultimately, writers will dedicate their energy to where they see a benefit. They should spend time and create value in the place most similar to their ideal world.
For writers in 2025, that place seems to be Substack. Open rates are high and the platform is adding social features to generate more engagement in app. Substack is [experiencing massive growth](https://backlinko.com/substack-users) in active (and paid) subscriptions. Yet, it is following the same pattern as Medium in and LinkedIn in become self-cannibalising. Many of the most popular accounts write about ‘how to grow’ or ‘how to make money’ on Substack. Queue the eye rolls.
For me, it’s not the promised land where writers can earn a living. Of course, it’s no walk in the park to earn paid subscribers. Further, Substack users can only receive payment via Stripe. This excludes writers from 149 of the World’s countries. Does that seem open and fair to you?
Even with all this going on, there is a much bigger factor that should influence your choice of platform — ownership.
# Do writers really own their words?
Who reads the terms and conditions? Nobody. That’s who.Writers (including me) rush to all platforms which promise to give us benefits such as pay, distribution, and audience growth.
In exchange, companies request access to and shared ownership of our content. They can use our words to train LLMs, analyse trends, repurpose, and to spy on us.
Governments can and will request access to social media profiles. They seek to control the use of those platforms. Founders and CEOs who refuse to comply may be held personally accountable and put on trial, just as [Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, was](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78lgzl919go) in France. Big tech owns our content, and governments threaten platforms into obedience.
As much as it benefits society to suppress harmful or dangerous content, companies simply can’t be censors 24/7. Growing platforms like [Bluesky are already struggling to moderate content effectively](https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/02/bluesky_growing_problems/). Without a strong economic incentive to moderate, companies will simply refuse to do it (as long as the threat of criminal charges does not prevail).
To sum up: No privately owned social media network offers writers the opportunity to own and distribute their work in order to receive a fair and equitable benefit.
Enter NOSTR…
# Decentralizing Social Media
**Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays** (NOSTR) is not a platform; it’s an open protocol.
By signing messages with their private keys (a long string of characters), users generate “events”. These events (messages/updates/media/transactions) are then broadcast through a series of “relays.”
Developers can use the protocol to build various applications that retrieve and distribute these events to other users. These ‘clients’ can range from microblogging sites like X and long-form distributors like Substack to visual media platforms like Instagram. Plus, NOSTR is also a whole lot more than that (but this is a topic for another day).
Decentralized tools offer the only hope against the dominance of AI and big tech in a top-down autocratic system designed to control us more than the thought police ever could.
<img src="https://blossom.primal.net/93a44d9bfe3c768e41d8bfef52415131af3ca21814a23870a029f1a947288cc8.webp">
*Diagram courtesy of River.*
So why should writers opt out of their big audience pool to write on some ‘protocol’?
**Ownership, fair rules, and fair value.**
- **Ownership**:
While privately run corporations can suppress the ideas they want, NOSTR provides a censorship-resistant alternative. No individual actors can restrict content or accounts.
Your private keys provide **permanent access** to the messages you have signed. No one else has access to them. And while some clients provide a delete function, there is no way to force all relays to respect a delete request. Not only do writers own what they publish, but it’s a permanent record.
- **Rules:**
Traditional social media platforms use proprietary algorithms to curate and order our feeds. **NOSTR has no algorithm**. NOSTR clients display messages chronologically or based on user-defined criteria, removing the influence of opaque algorithms that could manipulate user engagement and visibility of posts.
Put simply, distribution and consumption is down to the user, not to the creator or the platform. And everyone works to the same rules.
- **Value:**
Harmful content and spam affect all of us. There is no way to stop malicious content from being published on NOSTR, but two factors control its consumption.
1. Clients are experimenting with strategies such as requiring proof-of-work with each note or requiring verification badges.
2. Quality control is enforced by the value transferred by the protocol.
Bitcoin micropayments have become the monetary lifeblood flowing in the decentralized world. The ability to ‘zap’ users actual monetary value (e.g. a few cents) provides a clear display of which messages are valuable and which are unwanted. In time, as more users adopt the mechanic of value transfer, spammers will see their approach is not bearing fruit.
The beauty of using bitcoin in this way is twofold. Firstly, it is truly equitable — anyone in the world can receive it instantly and it cannot be stopped. And the system of frictionless micropayments offers content creators (artists, podcasters, musicians, writers) a way to earn money for the value they produce. Put simply, this could save creativity from doom.
Think people still want all content for free? Think again. Try zapping a writer from the Philippines, an artist from Peru, a Congolese musician, or a poet from Poland to show them you enjoyed what they produced. THAT is truly empowering.
Not convinced?
The best thing about NOSTR for writers is that **you are early**.
By being an early adopter with a low time preference, you can build a sizeable audience as new users discover the protocol.
Of course, topics like bitcoin, freedom tech, and privacy are well covered, but if you write in another niche, you could be ‘quids in’.
# Conclusion:
By adopting a long-term strategy and sticking to their principles, readers, writers and all other creatives can build a better world on social media. It doesn’t matter that it is imperfect. There will always be flaws in any society. But decentralized protocols like NOSTR can offer writers what they truly want — ownership, fair rules, and fair value.
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Philip Charter is a totally human writer who helps bitcoin-native companies and clients stack major gains through laser-focused content. Find out more at [totallyhumanwriter.com](https://totallyhumanwriter.com)
He is also the editor of the cypherpunk and freedom fiction project, [21 Futures](https://21futures.com).
