Lyz

This might have been my last year taking kids out trick or treating 😭

Speaking of women musicians who have men in their lives who need to be thrown in the sea...

Read it for free! www.patreon.com/posts/dingus...

No I’m insane

occasionally I read a wikipedia entry that is so baldly self-promotional that I wonder how it came to be

Top Substack writers depart for Patreon A platform better known for paid podcasts is poaching top newsletter talent. Patreon has successfully lured some top Substack newsletter writers — including Anne Helen Petersen, Lyz Lenz, and Virginia...

I wish the reporter would have contacted me I would have given spicier quotes than my BlueSky posts www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/top-...

Baby’s first Times Square billboard

Cancer killed his parents. He’s facing the same disease alone — and unhoused. Marcus Ford, like other Black men around the country, lives with a higher risk of dying from cancer due to factors out of his control. But Medicaid cuts may take away his treatment.

What does our health care system look like? What does our social safety net look like?

It looks like Marcus. At 61, he spends most nights riding the Chicago Red Line or looking for a park bench or bus stop, trying to find sleep. He recently finished radiation treatment for prostate cancer.

Fire The Consultants The Democratic party must move on from the same old stale, carefully poll-tested politics and get back to solving voters' problems. There are only three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Democra...

For my newsletter, I took a deeper look at the electoral record of WelcomePAC, a centrist group that produced that 352 page document advising Democrats to moderate once again.

Turns out the campaigns they work for aren't winning. www.burnsnotice.com/fire-the-con...

I bet you can google it yourself, my guy

Hiring a glorified shit poster isn’t working out

lmao no

I really feel like targeting @katmabu.bsky.social with criminal charges is going to backfire for the administration.

My friends just brought their baby over to see me in a dragon costume and I gave them gifts and booze and I realized, I am a grandma now.

Substack should be the name of a domme's polycule, not a newsletter platform.

Only white guys get to be authentic | Men Yell at Me by Lyz Lenz Get more from Men Yell at Me by Lyz Lenz on Patreon

Today's Must-Read by @lyz.bsky.social
1/2 "It’s understandable that in response to Trumpism, we want a savior. But holding up vaguely rural white dudes as potential Christ figures doesn't hold. You can’t just run a guy with hairy forearms & a Carhartt jacket & expect him to win independents..

Getting off Substack is the right move. I would compare it to moving from an app like Garageband to Ableton or Logic. Or switching from clip art to creative stock images. My business has grown. My readership has grown. Substack fills your list with junk signups, takes your money, and holds you back.

I’ve been thinking of it as a controlled burn for a field. Or pruning. And all businesses move. So I hope to grow back better

I so enjoy having tech support and there have been moving pains. This is how I support myself and my kids. So seeing the numbers plummet gave me a panic attack on the first day. But within two weeks I’m over 70% back to what my previous paid rate was. And I’m hoping it continues to grow.

Also for transparency Patreon wooed me over, is compensating for the move, and as part of that I’m helping them test and ask for new features to make the product better

Yes, no one was getting my newsletter. There was no tech support. The people who couldn’t get the newsletter were forced to read it on the app. And beyond the moral arguments of the platform. It’s just not good business. It’s actually bad business.

Buying kids food and paying a mortgage is a very compelling argument to me. But you judge how you need to.

A lot of people have their income wrapped up in Substack and that makes it hard to move. Especially if you don’t have other forms of income or support. It’s worth remembering that.

💯 I benefited from that deal with Substack and I’m benefiting from it with Patreon.

One of the reasons I didn’t leave earlier was my business was so enmeshed with Substack they made it so hard to leave. So to further your point, it’s not as writer friendly of a platform as they say. And the “growth” that you get addicted to over there isn’t good growth. At least not anymore.

Only white guys get to be authentic | Men Yell at Me by Lyz Lenz Get more from Men Yell at Me by Lyz Lenz on Patreon

In response to this piece a person commented that I’m not offering solutions. I am. Don’t abandon the base in favor of middle of the road humping white men. It’s not that hard. www.patreon.com/posts/142289...

Only white guys get to be authentic | Men Yell at Me by Lyz Lenz Get more from Men Yell at Me by Lyz Lenz on Patreon

While women are being forced out of the workforce, children are going hungry, and people are being rounded up by ICE in warrantless raids, white male pain continues to be a Page 1 story. — @lyz.bsky.social

This is such a condescending way to put it. I was one of many writers who was given a substract deal to work on my newsletter full-time after I was fired from my newspaper job in 2020

This idea of unlimited free growth and followers at all costs is actually really bad and makes all our lives a worse. Anyway stay or go. But this guy can miss me with his business insight. If it what he was doing was good for writers they wouldn’t be leaving.

And if those growth features were working I wouldn’t have left. I was getting tons of new free subscribers but my open rates were tanking, my paid conversions were flat, it looked okay on paper but it wasn’t good for business.