How to Use a Platform You Despise (And Not Pretend You Don't)

What happens when Stripe decides you don't exist

Eman Mohammed

I have been hesitant to fully commit to Substack for over a year. Sitting with that reluctance, I’ve come to see it is not merely about the platform itself, but about the invisible infrastructure beneath it, as in the systems that decide whose voice travels and whose stays trapped.

Much of my resistance comes from what I’ve witnessed of Stripe’s role in the creator economy. Platforms like Substack become entangled in patterns of extraction that echo the power imbalances I’ve spent years documenting. And dreading.

What troubles me most is the way transaction fees drain independent creators already surviving on almost nothing. A photographer I know who teaches online classes loses nearly a quarter of her students’ payments before the money ever reaches her. She has begun raising prices just to break even, pricing out the very people who need her work. And now I find myself in the same limbo. Every percentage point cuts deep when margins are this thin. There is a kind of violence in that steady, invisible siphoning. Isn’t there?

What disturbs me more deeply is the consolidation of power. Stripe has become a gatekeeper, determining which creators and businesses are allowed to participate in the digital economy at all. Even more audaciously, after months of Substack team assuring me they’re “working on it,” Stripe became an authority concentrated in private hands, deciding who may earn a living and whose work simply disappears. I have watched them terminate accounts on political and ideological grounds, Palestinian organizers, sex workers, labor advocates. They play referee and player at once, claiming technical neutrality while shaping what speech can sustain itself. I have lived inside that silencing, more than once.

Their “risk assessment” systems remain opaque ( I newly learned this word, it means not transparent) , leaving creators in the dark and without recourse when flagged or cut off. I have been asked by a robot whether I am a robot. The absurdity is the point wallah, it is the mechanism of our dehumanization. Robots don't feel, so they don't care. Income vanishes. Audiences fracture. The work stops.

So why am I here? ugh. Not because I believe Substack is noble or that I can reform the system from within, none of that. That language has always struck me as naive, like colonizers promising to improve colonialism with better aesthetics. I am here because the alternative is silence, and silence extracts its own cost.

I use what is available while working to make it obsolete. I will build in the cracks, direct relationships with readers, communities that do not rely on gatekeepers, infrastructure that does not concentrate power or play god with people’s livelihoods. So when you complain, I do listen, and when you start winning, I bite my tongue and continue to listen. This is not compromise, it is survival camouflaged as pragmatism. I am not afraid to name it as such, even as I dream of something better rising in its place. No reform, new and fresh start.

But until then,I need your voice to hear mine, dear reader. This is one of those conversations where I have to ask: where do we go from here?

I genuinely hope you stay.