Until today, I didn’t know but just assumed there were probably Nazis on substack because, well, they’re everywhere. There’s no algorithm funnelling them to me, I’m not manipulated by any incentive or opportunity structure to engage with them or unintentionally reward them. I get an email directly from John Ganz that contains his newsletter. There’s no homepage with a bunch of shit on it I don’t want to see or that is selling me something or “recommending” that I look at something else. If all non-Nazis abandon substack, they lose their livelihood and substack becomes (yet another) fully Nazi platform that continues to make lots of money, just like it does now. Not to sound (c)rudely utilitarian, but what the fuck is the point of that?
I agree entirely here. This whole business of platforming, I don't know.... I just find it sort of tiresome. If you look at Germany, which has no compunctions about banning, blocking, and declaring as "anti-constitutional," you'll see the limits of "deplatforming" as a political strategy. Political parties and movements have to be defeated politically--you can't confuse a victory in the realm of public opinion with an actual political victory. In the case of Twitter, the algorithim was specifically designed to shove this stuff in your face; here, I think the idea that simply being on Substack you're supporting Nazism is going to be a tougher sell. Also, maybe I haven't been following this closely, but who is the Nazi in question? Hanania?
Good points. I expect Hanania is probably on here, perhaps even worse. The good thing is you’d have to go look for them to find out. They’re not crawling through the woodwork uninvited every time you open your eyes, like the usual fare on offer. In any case, I can’t really envision any substack boycott scenario that doesn’t punish good writers and the people who read them more than it causes pain to substack or any Nazis it hosts. Substack doesn't run on an advertising model, and advertisers are the usual targets of online boycotts to encourage behaviour changes in the platform, and even those have mixed results. The only guarantee from this proposed boycott is that good writers and their readers would suffer and the Nazis would not.
Hanania was shoved into my feed multiple times before I had to block. Substack cannot be blocked and as someone who tries to understand where others are coming from I still get a lot of Nazi adjacent garbage from Substack and the Notes algorithm.
"The only guarantee from this proposed boycott is that good writers and their readers would suffer and the Nazis would not."
Yep, basically this. I suppose also, deep down, I just don't think Hanania and his ilk should be blocked, or that blocking him would really do any good? On the contrary, Hanania himself is proof positive that the more tightly controlled opinions in the mainstream outlets are, the more someone like him can build up an audience using an online outlet and then use the size of that audience to force his way in.
Ehhhhhh… the USPS is, despite neoliberal efforts to the contrary, still a government agency and still bound by the First Amendment not to discriminate.
By contrast, Substack is a private company and *protected* by the First Amendment in its decision to censor e.g. sex workers and promote (and pay!) literal swastika-armband Nazis.
Though seriously ugh why am I saying this just go read the Substackers Against Nazis chain letter for yourself since you *obviously haven’t* and I shouldn’t be spoon-feeding it to you:
I admit I was being more than a bit facile. Apologies for that. But I do agree with brother Ganz’s view that depriving himself of a venue to share his decidedly fascist opposing views and losing readers for those laudable views is not the reasonable reaction to the fact that Substack is offering its pages to those with despicable views. In fact, it’s reasonable to suppose that such a reaction might be self defeating.
Our blind willingness to conflate public and private is a real concern. When we no longer understand the difference, what's the harm in just making it all private (that is, for profit alone).
> Graeme Orr replied to your comment on An Issue of Concern.
>
> This isn't about constitutional law restraints or freedoms. It's a question of practical ethics. As JG implied, for the site as a whole it is about whether to invite further pile-ons. And for those who campaign to pressure it, whether they appreciate the unintended consequences of such campaigns. They seek to purify, to defend lines in sand, to limit discrimination; but then so did the well-heeled lobbies that just shook MIT, UPenn and Harvard.
“your comment” links here, but the “View Comment” link is dead, so either he or John must have deleted it:
Anyway I posted a reply on the broken link (which Substack lets you do), and it posted out-of-thread (because Substack is a technical dumpster fire).
So here’s what I posted that ended up out of thread (but should have been in response to Graeme’s comment that disappeared):
> Graeme Orr’s comment just disappeared, but I think what he was saying is that the open letter is an “international Jewish conspiracy” to destroy Substack.
Substack may be a private company, but aping the Supreme Court has probably never failed to make idealistic techbros more appealing to investors (haha Citizens United haha). Which is the only thing they care about, since you seem to be swept up in a PR campaign that is not meant for the little people.
You’re demanding a change in culture of capitalists who will use your response as data supporting their agenda. Substack has successfully trolled you.
I’m on far too high a dose of SSRIs to be triggered. I’m pathologically verbose under the best of circumstances lol (yes I know the best insults are short and sweet, so you could perhaps work on brevity yourself, no? Or perhaps you could consider prolixity a sign of good faith, rather something deserving of a milquetoast attempt at a put-down while simultaneously agreeing with me.)
What annoys me more than a VC-backed tech company being weird and underhanded—quelle surprise!—is people acting like this behavior is anything other than inevitable.
Section 230 is ersatz common carrier regulation.
As for Substack… I really don’t care what Substack does. I’m more concerned with the Substack *users* who think their monopolistic overlords are inclined towards any sort of benevolence.
Hence my preference for paid hosting and open-core software, where the infrastructure providers know their place and don’t get all uppity like our whiny bois Chris, Hamish and Jairaj here. Boohoo! People want to censor you? Get off my lawn!
Whatever leverage workers have over management is collective, right? If it is possible by making noise to create a tipping point where the big players on Substack feel they have to at least pretend they aren't sympathetic to Nazis, then maybe management will back down. Surely you leaving alone at great cost is not how leverage is exerted. And, for that matter, those punishing you for Substack's actions without themselves organizing in some collective form also aren't acting effectively with their scattershot punishments, preferring (in confused good faith, I'm sure) the appearance of political purity to constructive politics. So goes Internet activism.
When I signed up, I already knew Bari Weiss was one of the biggest names on this platform and that Substack actively supports her and others toxic to democratic discourse. The question is not: "how do I remain untainted by association with my enemies?" It is: "what is worth it to me to work towards winning over them and live well in the process?" Supporting your contributions is still worth it to me. So there you go.
Thanks. This also led me to the humorous insight that a social media boycott is an inherently oxymoronic idea. Raise awareness of why you should ignore this site!
The actual decision to leave a platform at any level of involvement, and the complicity engendered by continued participation, is one of attrition that is basically the opposite of actually using social media. Attrition or change of heart, it doesn’t really matter - it’s still so much embarrassment at putting away your video games/pornography.
Much better to create your own communities than boycott the Nazi bar with nowhere else to get a watered-down drink. The furries know where it’s at.
Of course the stars do sometimes nonetheless align, and a social media network manages to self-immolate despite having hundreds of millions of users.
I mean, unless you think a website filled with people complaining about screenshots interspersed with ads for semen-theft services is somehow more lively than a thousand-member anime catgirl digital polycule.
Nazi bars at least still have alcohol. Maybe get a bit more Schnapps in your bloodstream before calling other people stone cold sober here? Even if as we all know the historical Nazis preferred a carefully formulated speedball to anything as base as mere alcohol.
Alcohol would interfere with my devious machinations of helping old people turn their phones on and off again, thanks; I'll remain sober-curious. Few things are worse than American drinking habits.
Besides, we're supposed to be talking about *free* speech here, and alcohol costs money as well as killing brain cells.
When I spilled a Blue Hawaii on my iPhone 4 back in 2009 or 2010, it popped up a message saying “This Accessory is not Compatible with iPhone”, which seems strangely apt here.
I think people would do well to realize that what a platform which resolutely protects its audience from hurtful or offensive ideas looks like is Disney Plus.
That's kind of the irony here. Had Substack sold ads to Madison Avenue as part of its core original business model, the Nazi stuff would be gone, and the user base would have nothing to do with it.
Anyway, from the historically grounded wisdom here to Hanania's dorm room chauvinism to Yglesias and Noah Smith's one-weird-tricking, Substack has been an invaluable resource for understanding the contours of the situation in Israel in a way the mainstream media can't or won't. I don't take that for granted.
(All of that said "cut out the fucking swastikas so our payment processors don't pull the plug on everyone" seems like a pretty simple bar to clear without getting into a whole seminar on the bounds of speech tolerance.)
I mean Substack may not quite be a “Nazi bar”, but it’s obviously been in the early stages of becoming one for quite some time.
I’m not one to penalize people who derive their living from said steadily degrading establishment… which is not to say that I wouldn’t still encourage the nicer bartenders to look at similar paying positions at the other, less toxic bars in town…
I mean is it? Substack is not like Twitter, it's a pretty bespoke non-viral space.
I would not blame Stripe if they were unwilling to participate in a Nazi cosplay subscription service, but I've never seen that content and don't feel complicit in stuff I'm not reading or seeing here at all.
And as for more on-the-rails racist dimwits like Hanania, I guess I do on some level see tolerating that (which an actual editorial publication wouldn't and shouldn't) as the price of doing business to allow writers I do like and want to support, such as this one, to let their freak flag fly a bit.
As of yet, Substack’s nascent social algorithm hasn’t made Nazis ubiquitous in the comments, but if the people commenting that Substack’s recommendation algorithm is the main reason to stay here are to be believed, it’s only a matter of time before said algorithm turns Substack into a “Nazi bar”.
To emphasize my point: if the algorithm is Substack’s selling point, then the algorithm makes Substack writers vulnerable to Nazis. And if the Substack algorithm *doesn’t* make Substack writers vulnerable to Nazis, then I can’t see the Substack algorithm providing much value to Substack writers.
Or, to put this another way, which is how the Substackers Against Nazis letter puts it: if you have an algorithm, you are, by definition, policing it, so it’s reasonable to expect that the algorithm behave predictably and consistently so that people can choose whether they want to engage with it.
The problem with Substack and Nazis is that Substack claims to be a neutral hosting provider while also claiming to provide network effects and, indeed, overtly using said network effects to promote Nazis. You can’t be both these things at the same time.
The June 2023 article on Substack Recommendations at https://reletter.com/blog/substack-recommendations/ seems to say it's just about substack writers recommending other newsletters to their subscribers, is there a separate algorithm for generating recommendations that weren't selected by people, or are you talking about this system allowing Nazis to cross-promote one another?
I’m not the one saying that there’s a magical special algorithm, though if you ever hit the subscribe button you’ll know there’s a sheet of recommendations immediately following it.
As I see it, either Substack has an algorithm that’s useful to both normies and Nazis, or it doesn’t have an algorithm that’s useful to anyone, in which case there’s no reason anyone should be sticking around while their IT guy tries to lecture them about craniometry or white birthrates of whatever.
Get a new IT guy! Find one who has better taste in anime or perhaps an even tamer hobby like furry porn! He’ll probably be better at the job, too!
Sorry. Your dreams have hit the Graham Lineham ceiling (Black Books, The IT Crowd). Please consult with your nearest Deadpool/Ryan Reynolds stan for any nascent life choices you're making. https://comicbook.com/news/deadpool-is-a-hufflepuff/
Yeah, I get that everyone needs to make a living, but the fact that we are now saying we have to begrudgingly tolerate Nazis to do that should give us all pause. There is a lot more going on here than simply choosing to support the platform or not. I wonder what the response would have been even a decade ago in a similar situation. It seems to me that Substack and the silicon valley money machine is succeeding in their goal of forcing us into the freedom of moral ambiguity.
I think a big factor here is that Substack gained its network effects by marketing itself as less restrictive than other platforms, with a fairly easy path for authors migrating on and off, and advanced support for custom domains.
Just good luck to anyone trying to migrate their paid subscription base, though…
This is to say that the only reason the bartenders at Substack’s almost “Nazi bar” are tolerating the increasing number of literal swastika-armband Nazis is that Substack is using underhanded tactics to make it difficult for said bartenders to gain comparable employment at competing bars.
…which in turn is to say that, like everything always seems to be, this is fundamentally a labor issue.
Anyway my attitude towards alternatives to Section 230 is that the US government should declare websites “public accommodations” under all applicable anti-discrimination laws (for both patrons and employees).
Under the “public accommodation” standard, proprietors are not, e.g., prohibited from doing business with Nazis, but proprietors are nonetheless liable when, e.g., Nazis harass the proprietor’s customers or employees.
Obviously right-wingers hate this approach.
(Also I’m surprised Substack isn’t literally blocked in the EU at this point.)
Thanks for providing some clarity on the issue. I agree this is fundamentally a labor issue and in a separate comment I stated my feeling that this is a pervasive issue for all of us--not just Substack writers. But I also don't think writers here should prefer the nuanced approach because that only allows the situation to further entrench itself. But I'm just watching from the sideline while my own industry continues down it's own awful path.
IMHO, you’re imprecise to call it a labor issue. It’s a venture capital issue. 0 to 1 is indeed sociopathic suicidality “gone viral”, but neither Henry Ford nor Thomas Edison are rolling in their graves about free speech issues.
The point is that Edison (aka Silicon Valley, Microsoft) was arguably worse than Ford (aka Walmart, whoever) on the issues, because the opposite of good is not evil but indifference.
I don't have any intent to depart either Substack or your subscription, but I think you dodged the most persuasive part of Katz's piece: the founders of Substack have not only stuck to their guns about an unusually low moderation barrier (which is fine with me), they have also proactively used their own corporate resources to *promote* white nationalists like Hanania. There is a middle path model available that adopts a minimal moderation stance, but that 1) will not monetize hate and enforces that policy consistently, and 2) won't actively promote Nazi trash. Substack may think it is obligated on principle to allow disreputable ideas on its platform, but it does not follow that they are also obligated by those same principles to give Nazis a hand up, as they are clearly doing.
>From a political point of view, if you consider yourself a leftist or progressive, I think the correct strategy would be to compete for reach on all platforms—within reason, of course.
For me, it comes down to this: this platform seems to be pretty transparently on a mission to tilt speech in one direction, whenever it sees fit. It amplifies pretty far right voices and pretends to counteract them by amplifying "liberals" of the Bari Weiss variety. It seems to have a pretty clear mandate of shifting the Overton window, and I have to weigh my support for your excellent writing calling Peter Thiel a fascist against the material reality that 10% of that support will go to an engine actively working towards his vision.
I don't want to diminish how much it sucks to be in your position. Another substacker I emailed about ending support replied with a link to their Patreon, which I immediately suscribed to. Could this be something you offer as well, to us unwilling to keep funding Substack directly?
In the comments on Molly White’s post with the Substackers Against Nazis chain letter, she explains some of the technical issues with the alternatives to Substack. She initially tried rolling her own with Patreon and MailChimp, but it was a disaster, hence ending up at Substack shortly thereafter.
Other people I follow have or are currently moving to alternatives such as Ghost or Beehiiv, though migrating is obviously a huge pain particularly when one already has a large paid subscription base.
All that said, my position is that depending on a privately owned closed platform is always going to lead to this problem. It would be much better if utility-style alternatives were more feasible. The closest thing is probably “open core” software, since that allows one to pay for managed private hosting without being exclusively beholden to the platform maintainer (as with Substack).
Yes, I’ve mentioned Ghost in other comments on this post. Specifically, John Ganz’s peer Spencer Ackerman migrated from Substack to Ghost a while back, so he would probably have a useful perspective on the issues and logistics involved in doing so.
And FWIW Patreon has been fielding lots of complaints from creators recently, so the grass is not necessarily greener.
As I understand it, what Ghost provides that your average blog CMS does not is the special sauce for payment processing and for getting emails past Google’s spam filter.
(I posted a big long comment about this elsewhere in this comment section.)
It isn't that much secret sauce. Yes, they use Stripe (I think) for payment processing, and that is the same as SubStack, they have cool capabilities to handle the subscription and repetitive charging thing.
The email delivery success is handled not by Substack, but Mailgun, and that is the same as Ghost (either Pro or self hosted).
No, the real secret sauce is the tools for creating, promoting, and the community features that help people find you. Ghost has something akin to that, but I left Ghost because it was frankly terrible at driving traffic to my sites. The Notes feature, and the Recommendation engine are the serious value adds that Substack provides, and it is a huge example.
But Ghost's founders are similar to Hamish and team in their libertarian leanings on speech, so I suspect it would be a matter of time especially if you go the Ghost Pro route
(Ghost does allow you to self host, and most hosting providers have single button installs scripted up, but you then have to take the responsibility for installing updates, and maintaining security. Not for the faint of heart, but not horrible either)
I will add that I am playing with ButtonDown, and so far I like it, but it lacks a lot of the niceties of Substack. What I really like is that they have rational pricing, and you can see precisely what you get for your monthly fee (above and beyond the free tier). No VC money backstopping, and incentives to pester us small players to monetize our niche-y publications. I like that a lot (although the "standard plan" at $29 a month is a heavy lift to use a custom domain. I might do it anyway.
I don’t have much direct experience with Ghost, but the fact that it is an “open core” product and the fact that writers pay the for-profit affiliate directly for hosting make it less subject to the sorts of underhanded tactics Substack has been employing here.
In other words, Ghost’s business model is much more legitimately libertarian than Substack’s. And it’s hard to see the Nazis Substack promotes as legitimately libertarian, either. (Right-wing libertarians have thoroughly appropriating the “libertarian” label is somewhat unique to the United States.)
As for the recommendation algorithm, see my other comments about it can’t be both useful and invulnerable to Nazis at the same time. If a recommendation algorithm is, indeed, useful, then it is by definition taking an editorial stance, and it should be entirely reasonable to expect that editorial stance not to promote Nazis.
All good points. Especially on the recommendation algorithms.
When Ghost first started, they hosted their paid servers in The Netherlands because they had virtually no restrictions. There's a reason that a lot of CSA content gets hosted out of their datacenters. Alas, I believe that has changed somewhat (the CSA abuse being served out of NL).
John you’re appreciated. Please continue the good work. Your job deserves respect. We should all respect our Job specially if it feeds us. Happy holidays!
First, I 100% agree with your position. And like I wrote under Popehat's post on this (Ken White is a god) I will move with you wherever you go. I enjoy your writing that much, and I am glad to pay for it.
Second, I am beginning to look at moving my two (was three) Stacks to another solution. I do not do the paid thing (one is niche for Product Management, one is my shitposting site) so I am not urgent in my needs, but I would have let it ride until I saw the nonsense that Hamish posted, and damn, these dudes are clueless.
I get it, the VC funding of growth is drying up in the post-ZIRP era, and the few hundred thousands of dollars that the monetized white nationalist/Nazi shit sweeps into their coffers is hard to turn down, but running a business isn't easy, and being the top dawg means that they get to make decisions.
The number of the stacks I subscribe to that are contemplating an exit strategy is alarming.
But I also believe that the leadership here will keep playing footsie until some of the big rainmakers depart. Where will they go is open for debate, but go I suspect they will - eventually.
If the entire profession of journalism hadn't collapsed and left subscription platforms as - almost literally! - the only way to make a living by writing, perhaps we wouldn't have to go through this rigamarole of trying to hold each individual writer responsible for moral and ethical decisions over which they are not consulted or personally able to extert any influence.
Substack isn’t the only subscription platform you know… and there are other alternatives beyond Patreon or YouTube or Instagram or whatever. None of these have an exclusive relationship with the credit card processors or email providers. There are plenty of other options for delegating the Stripe-Mailgun plumbing than just the whiny VC guys…
As I understand it, Substack does let you export your mailing list, but it doesn’t facilitate transferring paid subscriptions despite putting your name on them for credit card transactions.
That said, Spencer Ackerman successfully made the move from Substack to Ghost a while back, so if that’s something you’d be interested in considering you could ask him for advice about logistics.
(It’s a small world, so I sort of assume that you, Spencer Ackerman, and possibly idk even Peter Beinart regularly bump into each other at the one narrow-aisled Key Food in NYC that we all go to. I jest. Though I think we can all agree the store’s vegan selection has gotten better in recent years.)
Anyway! If you derive significant personal income from Substack, that does put you in the position of probably being able to afford the overhead of paid hosting, e.g. with Ghost, whereas Substack takes a larger cut in order to offer a free tier.
Again, yes, I know migrating is a pain, hence the suggestion of asking Spencer Ackerman how he pulled it off.
Also, no, I’m not going to cancel my paid subscription; I’m just going to be pathologically helpful about nudging Substack authors I support to look at alternative hosting solutions.
Well, the following is a comment I left on Molly White’s post about the open letter:
Have you looked at any of the other options more recently? Spencer Ackerman and 404 Media both use Ghost, while Rusty Foster is imminently moving to Beehiiv.
I’m not familiar with Beehiiv, but if you ever switch to Ghost please ask them to support paywalled RSS for text posts lol. (They exclusively use passwordless logins, which break everything.)
[…]
On the upside with Ghost, at least, if you pay them for hosting, they’re more likely to listen to your feedback than Substack is, even if that’s an extremely low bar…
[…]
Ghost is MIT-licensed and maintained by a nonprofit, kind of like WordPress, but running Node.js instead of PHP and consequently quite a bit less creaky. And IIRC the main thing that’s gated for Ghost is monetization, along with, I assume, whatever backroom deals keep Gmail from preemptively blocking their emails. Both these things are very, very difficult to roll your own, ridiculous on the level of trying to host a blog off one’s home internet in 2023.
[…]
The main thing I’m trying to get at is that Ghost’s open-core model makes it less beholden to right-wing VCs, and the fact that writers pay Ghost directly for hosting gives Ghost an incentive to be more responsive to technical complaints.
Yes, having a first-party hosting option does create some conflicts of interest, but if you look at other open-core hosting services, like Owncloud and Nextcloud, if there is some governance dispute it’s much easier for a portion of the developer base to decamp and create a competing product, monetizing and promoting literal Nazis being a good example of such a governance dispute. (Nazis are AFAIK not what happened at Owncloud.)
By contrast, Substack is take-it-or-leave it, even for senior developers and executives. Substack is a baby you can’t cut in half. Open-core software, on the other hand, is more like a starfish that will happily regrow from dismembered parts given the nourishment to do so.
[I should probably edit this into something more coherent. Also yes your reservations about other platforms are presumably different from Molly White’s.]
It seems like migrating paid subs is not seamless, nor is it for the faint of heart. In short, the "you own your content, your subscibers, and data" is not as clear. Molly is a talented engineer, able to roll up her sleeves and dive into scripting and coding to get it all to work, but when I read that yesterday I now understand the reticence of some of the larger sites to not move.
Not precisely lock-in, but not easily transportable either.
Still more and more of the 'Stacks I sub to are moving. Ryan Broderick from Garbage Day, Casey Newton at Platformer, and Ken White from Popehat are all in flight.
I'm in a similar position, though not as difficult, since Substack isn't a major source of income. But I have readers, fellow writers I want to engage with and a small base of paying subscribers. If there was an organised move away, I'd follow it. But I can't raise the energy to do it myself right now, having walked away from my 15k Twitter followers last year.
Unlike on Twitter, the existence of Nazis/racists here is an abstract fact rather than something I am regularly confronted with, even on Notes. So, I'll just complain and hope something changes.
As mentioned by someone else here Buttondown and probably others will happily do nearly all the work to help you ditch Chris, Hamish and Jairaj without trying to sell you on phrenology or eugenics while they’re at it:
Its clearly not “in your face” here — one can avoid the Nazis on substack aside from the odd troll. This is a very important point for me, because recruitment and radicalization is my main concern.
I’d rather Substack had a more restrictive moderation policy surrounding hate/incitement, But as it stands today, it does not appear to me to be a serious point of radicalization like 4chan or 8chan became. The radicalization that festered there resulted in incitement of several mass murder terror events.
My $0.02 — its worth complaining about but not leaving over. At least not unless it gets considerably worse.
Fwiw, I thought Ken White’s nuanced piece on this topic resonated very well.
I'm basically in agreement with you on all of these topics, sc.
1) fascists and nazis are bad
2) open letters are a lot less bad than nazis, but not great
3) it's beyond absurd for anyone to punish you, a vocal and incisive anti-fascist, if they want to fight fascism
At the same time -- is there anything that you and other prominent substackers could do quietly, by way of non-public letters? I asked Matt Yglesias what he thought about this kerfuffle, and he did not reply, but it seems to me that someone with his amount of traffic is in a position of almost equal bargaining power with the platform: like you, he has a lot to lose by leaving, but substack would lose a lot if he left, as well. (I am assuming, without any access to the numbers, that you have fewer subscribers than MY has).
Substack depends on its writers to bring in subscribers, just as you depend on this platform to pay your bills. If you can aggregate your leverage to make it a platform that has fewer downsides, then that seems worth doing.
And that does not require open letters, and may be easier to do without them.
Yglesias isn't going to be saying a word, dt. The Nazi-curious/Nazi-protective/hates liberals crowd are his core audience on this platform, and thus his main source of income. Nothing going to happen there.
elm
he always said he'd write whatever they wanted if right-wing rich guys paid him enough to say it
I get it, but, like, this isn’t Rumble (or even Twitter). It’s not so inextricably intertwined with the far right that it’s in essence a Nazi BRAND. Not yet, at least.
I don’t know. Again, I get it, but it seems premature.
Until today, I didn’t know but just assumed there were probably Nazis on substack because, well, they’re everywhere. There’s no algorithm funnelling them to me, I’m not manipulated by any incentive or opportunity structure to engage with them or unintentionally reward them. I get an email directly from John Ganz that contains his newsletter. There’s no homepage with a bunch of shit on it I don’t want to see or that is selling me something or “recommending” that I look at something else. If all non-Nazis abandon substack, they lose their livelihood and substack becomes (yet another) fully Nazi platform that continues to make lots of money, just like it does now. Not to sound (c)rudely utilitarian, but what the fuck is the point of that?
I agree entirely here. This whole business of platforming, I don't know.... I just find it sort of tiresome. If you look at Germany, which has no compunctions about banning, blocking, and declaring as "anti-constitutional," you'll see the limits of "deplatforming" as a political strategy. Political parties and movements have to be defeated politically--you can't confuse a victory in the realm of public opinion with an actual political victory. In the case of Twitter, the algorithim was specifically designed to shove this stuff in your face; here, I think the idea that simply being on Substack you're supporting Nazism is going to be a tougher sell. Also, maybe I haven't been following this closely, but who is the Nazi in question? Hanania?
Good points. I expect Hanania is probably on here, perhaps even worse. The good thing is you’d have to go look for them to find out. They’re not crawling through the woodwork uninvited every time you open your eyes, like the usual fare on offer. In any case, I can’t really envision any substack boycott scenario that doesn’t punish good writers and the people who read them more than it causes pain to substack or any Nazis it hosts. Substack doesn't run on an advertising model, and advertisers are the usual targets of online boycotts to encourage behaviour changes in the platform, and even those have mixed results. The only guarantee from this proposed boycott is that good writers and their readers would suffer and the Nazis would not.
Hanania was shoved into my feed multiple times before I had to block. Substack cannot be blocked and as someone who tries to understand where others are coming from I still get a lot of Nazi adjacent garbage from Substack and the Notes algorithm.
"The only guarantee from this proposed boycott is that good writers and their readers would suffer and the Nazis would not."
Yep, basically this. I suppose also, deep down, I just don't think Hanania and his ilk should be blocked, or that blocking him would really do any good? On the contrary, Hanania himself is proof positive that the more tightly controlled opinions in the mainstream outlets are, the more someone like him can build up an audience using an online outlet and then use the size of that audience to force his way in.
Amen. One may as well boycott the USPS because any fascist with a stamp can mail his views. Enjoy your time off.
Ehhhhhh… the USPS is, despite neoliberal efforts to the contrary, still a government agency and still bound by the First Amendment not to discriminate.
By contrast, Substack is a private company and *protected* by the First Amendment in its decision to censor e.g. sex workers and promote (and pay!) literal swastika-armband Nazis.
Though seriously ugh why am I saying this just go read the Substackers Against Nazis chain letter for yourself since you *obviously haven’t* and I shouldn’t be spoon-feeding it to you:
https://theracket.news/p/substackers-against-nazis
I admit I was being more than a bit facile. Apologies for that. But I do agree with brother Ganz’s view that depriving himself of a venue to share his decidedly fascist opposing views and losing readers for those laudable views is not the reasonable reaction to the fact that Substack is offering its pages to those with despicable views. In fact, it’s reasonable to suppose that such a reaction might be self defeating.
Our blind willingness to conflate public and private is a real concern. When we no longer understand the difference, what's the harm in just making it all private (that is, for profit alone).
…hence the perpetual efforts to privatize the USPS, without even the “Common Carrier” protections that exist for, e.g., telephone companies.
(If a society is going to have large private service providers, “Common Carrier” regulation is the least it can do.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
I agree that efforts to privatize USPS are odious.
From my email:
> Graeme Orr replied to your comment on An Issue of Concern.
>
> This isn't about constitutional law restraints or freedoms. It's a question of practical ethics. As JG implied, for the site as a whole it is about whether to invite further pile-ons. And for those who campaign to pressure it, whether they appreciate the unintended consequences of such campaigns. They seek to purify, to defend lines in sand, to limit discrimination; but then so did the well-heeled lobbies that just shook MIT, UPenn and Harvard.
“your comment” links here, but the “View Comment” link is dead, so either he or John must have deleted it:
https://email.mg1.substack.com/c/eJxUks1uozAUhZ8GdkHGmAALFplSpnSa0KidTDKbyD-XxBRshO3S5OlHSX_UWV3J91j36HyHUwsHPZ5yrvselPU_5l6KnCQJxhglvshRgnnCfMjDBMXJHMeI-NBT2e0PoGCkFsSe2m_bOUH-MRcNNJQ1TCSM4FRwaOIMGEE0IxmLI-7LHCNMUIhRSOIYkSAKBI04ijNK5gmmPEqD1L2KtNXMI6g_hIFxzFjKXwKue1-afTPC1UluRwd-lx-tHYwXLTxcericpilwatCD6-jYjFrZQMFkPFwOHi6pmkljHMx0M-NacRiVh8uPCDxcfibgRaXVL6C8qIDTfcjx5rTF3UvValQXt2_18y5ePU2S_8zOosyGvzfVfPm8npbFgtTFgTzc3A-77VrW7W20LH5Hq7YKl8XaVP2G8KuWT6t2cbrOm0nS7epctVryu418eL59W7aLt_qpMpVahTtZzSv145VHa7vDmWV_Nk7cLWWzDmSN3GP_uOVnIu-P0VQ86I7Nso2gbbxLN-e7X-LJqho3a-Ph-ehFhVECEl9pKxvJqZVaXbiHBEVZnMbo_409DfBVk0Eb-6FFKE3T9P3lqrkE3IG1MPqDY_vLF6ekPe1BUdaBeCc1ONZ9P3rpQOaP-SdfjyDojISjG4Yra-OY0D2VKm_1UR2oOvv2y48zMF47m4ZhNs_ifwEAAP__4yHzFg
Anyway I posted a reply on the broken link (which Substack lets you do), and it posted out-of-thread (because Substack is a technical dumpster fire).
So here’s what I posted that ended up out of thread (but should have been in response to Graeme’s comment that disappeared):
> Graeme Orr’s comment just disappeared, but I think what he was saying is that the open letter is an “international Jewish conspiracy” to destroy Substack.
Substack may be a private company, but aping the Supreme Court has probably never failed to make idealistic techbros more appealing to investors (haha Citizens United haha). Which is the only thing they care about, since you seem to be swept up in a PR campaign that is not meant for the little people.
You’re demanding a change in culture of capitalists who will use your response as data supporting their agenda. Substack has successfully trolled you.
Take a break, you’re triggered.
I’m on far too high a dose of SSRIs to be triggered. I’m pathologically verbose under the best of circumstances lol (yes I know the best insults are short and sweet, so you could perhaps work on brevity yourself, no? Or perhaps you could consider prolixity a sign of good faith, rather something deserving of a milquetoast attempt at a put-down while simultaneously agreeing with me.)
What annoys me more than a VC-backed tech company being weird and underhanded—quelle surprise!—is people acting like this behavior is anything other than inevitable.
Section 230 is ersatz common carrier regulation.
As for Substack… I really don’t care what Substack does. I’m more concerned with the Substack *users* who think their monopolistic overlords are inclined towards any sort of benevolence.
Hence my preference for paid hosting and open-core software, where the infrastructure providers know their place and don’t get all uppity like our whiny bois Chris, Hamish and Jairaj here. Boohoo! People want to censor you? Get off my lawn!
I support you.
Whatever leverage workers have over management is collective, right? If it is possible by making noise to create a tipping point where the big players on Substack feel they have to at least pretend they aren't sympathetic to Nazis, then maybe management will back down. Surely you leaving alone at great cost is not how leverage is exerted. And, for that matter, those punishing you for Substack's actions without themselves organizing in some collective form also aren't acting effectively with their scattershot punishments, preferring (in confused good faith, I'm sure) the appearance of political purity to constructive politics. So goes Internet activism.
When I signed up, I already knew Bari Weiss was one of the biggest names on this platform and that Substack actively supports her and others toxic to democratic discourse. The question is not: "how do I remain untainted by association with my enemies?" It is: "what is worth it to me to work towards winning over them and live well in the process?" Supporting your contributions is still worth it to me. So there you go.
thank you!
Thanks. This also led me to the humorous insight that a social media boycott is an inherently oxymoronic idea. Raise awareness of why you should ignore this site!
The actual decision to leave a platform at any level of involvement, and the complicity engendered by continued participation, is one of attrition that is basically the opposite of actually using social media. Attrition or change of heart, it doesn’t really matter - it’s still so much embarrassment at putting away your video games/pornography.
Much better to create your own communities than boycott the Nazi bar with nowhere else to get a watered-down drink. The furries know where it’s at.
Of course the stars do sometimes nonetheless align, and a social media network manages to self-immolate despite having hundreds of millions of users.
I mean, unless you think a website filled with people complaining about screenshots interspersed with ads for semen-theft services is somehow more lively than a thousand-member anime catgirl digital polycule.
Nazi bars at least still have alcohol. Maybe get a bit more Schnapps in your bloodstream before calling other people stone cold sober here? Even if as we all know the historical Nazis preferred a carefully formulated speedball to anything as base as mere alcohol.
Alcohol would interfere with my devious machinations of helping old people turn their phones on and off again, thanks; I'll remain sober-curious. Few things are worse than American drinking habits.
Besides, we're supposed to be talking about *free* speech here, and alcohol costs money as well as killing brain cells.
When I spilled a Blue Hawaii on my iPhone 4 back in 2009 or 2010, it popped up a message saying “This Accessory is not Compatible with iPhone”, which seems strangely apt here.
tfw the real enemy is phones being too water-resistant to destroy by dunking in a nice margarita anymore…
I think people would do well to realize that what a platform which resolutely protects its audience from hurtful or offensive ideas looks like is Disney Plus.
That's kind of the irony here. Had Substack sold ads to Madison Avenue as part of its core original business model, the Nazi stuff would be gone, and the user base would have nothing to do with it.
Anyway, from the historically grounded wisdom here to Hanania's dorm room chauvinism to Yglesias and Noah Smith's one-weird-tricking, Substack has been an invaluable resource for understanding the contours of the situation in Israel in a way the mainstream media can't or won't. I don't take that for granted.
(All of that said "cut out the fucking swastikas so our payment processors don't pull the plug on everyone" seems like a pretty simple bar to clear without getting into a whole seminar on the bounds of speech tolerance.)
I mean Substack may not quite be a “Nazi bar”, but it’s obviously been in the early stages of becoming one for quite some time.
I’m not one to penalize people who derive their living from said steadily degrading establishment… which is not to say that I wouldn’t still encourage the nicer bartenders to look at similar paying positions at the other, less toxic bars in town…
I mean is it? Substack is not like Twitter, it's a pretty bespoke non-viral space.
I would not blame Stripe if they were unwilling to participate in a Nazi cosplay subscription service, but I've never seen that content and don't feel complicit in stuff I'm not reading or seeing here at all.
And as for more on-the-rails racist dimwits like Hanania, I guess I do on some level see tolerating that (which an actual editorial publication wouldn't and shouldn't) as the price of doing business to allow writers I do like and want to support, such as this one, to let their freak flag fly a bit.
As of yet, Substack’s nascent social algorithm hasn’t made Nazis ubiquitous in the comments, but if the people commenting that Substack’s recommendation algorithm is the main reason to stay here are to be believed, it’s only a matter of time before said algorithm turns Substack into a “Nazi bar”.
To emphasize my point: if the algorithm is Substack’s selling point, then the algorithm makes Substack writers vulnerable to Nazis. And if the Substack algorithm *doesn’t* make Substack writers vulnerable to Nazis, then I can’t see the Substack algorithm providing much value to Substack writers.
Or, to put this another way, which is how the Substackers Against Nazis letter puts it: if you have an algorithm, you are, by definition, policing it, so it’s reasonable to expect that the algorithm behave predictably and consistently so that people can choose whether they want to engage with it.
The problem with Substack and Nazis is that Substack claims to be a neutral hosting provider while also claiming to provide network effects and, indeed, overtly using said network effects to promote Nazis. You can’t be both these things at the same time.
The June 2023 article on Substack Recommendations at https://reletter.com/blog/substack-recommendations/ seems to say it's just about substack writers recommending other newsletters to their subscribers, is there a separate algorithm for generating recommendations that weren't selected by people, or are you talking about this system allowing Nazis to cross-promote one another?
I’m not the one saying that there’s a magical special algorithm, though if you ever hit the subscribe button you’ll know there’s a sheet of recommendations immediately following it.
As I see it, either Substack has an algorithm that’s useful to both normies and Nazis, or it doesn’t have an algorithm that’s useful to anyone, in which case there’s no reason anyone should be sticking around while their IT guy tries to lecture them about craniometry or white birthrates of whatever.
Get a new IT guy! Find one who has better taste in anime or perhaps an even tamer hobby like furry porn! He’ll probably be better at the job, too!
Sorry. Your dreams have hit the Graham Lineham ceiling (Black Books, The IT Crowd). Please consult with your nearest Deadpool/Ryan Reynolds stan for any nascent life choices you're making. https://comicbook.com/news/deadpool-is-a-hufflepuff/
Yeah, I get that everyone needs to make a living, but the fact that we are now saying we have to begrudgingly tolerate Nazis to do that should give us all pause. There is a lot more going on here than simply choosing to support the platform or not. I wonder what the response would have been even a decade ago in a similar situation. It seems to me that Substack and the silicon valley money machine is succeeding in their goal of forcing us into the freedom of moral ambiguity.
I think a big factor here is that Substack gained its network effects by marketing itself as less restrictive than other platforms, with a fairly easy path for authors migrating on and off, and advanced support for custom domains.
Just good luck to anyone trying to migrate their paid subscription base, though…
This is to say that the only reason the bartenders at Substack’s almost “Nazi bar” are tolerating the increasing number of literal swastika-armband Nazis is that Substack is using underhanded tactics to make it difficult for said bartenders to gain comparable employment at competing bars.
…which in turn is to say that, like everything always seems to be, this is fundamentally a labor issue.
Anyway my attitude towards alternatives to Section 230 is that the US government should declare websites “public accommodations” under all applicable anti-discrimination laws (for both patrons and employees).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations_in_the_United_States
Under the “public accommodation” standard, proprietors are not, e.g., prohibited from doing business with Nazis, but proprietors are nonetheless liable when, e.g., Nazis harass the proprietor’s customers or employees.
Obviously right-wingers hate this approach.
(Also I’m surprised Substack isn’t literally blocked in the EU at this point.)
Thanks for providing some clarity on the issue. I agree this is fundamentally a labor issue and in a separate comment I stated my feeling that this is a pervasive issue for all of us--not just Substack writers. But I also don't think writers here should prefer the nuanced approach because that only allows the situation to further entrench itself. But I'm just watching from the sideline while my own industry continues down it's own awful path.
IMHO, you’re imprecise to call it a labor issue. It’s a venture capital issue. 0 to 1 is indeed sociopathic suicidality “gone viral”, but neither Henry Ford nor Thomas Edison are rolling in their graves about free speech issues.
The point is that Edison (aka Silicon Valley, Microsoft) was arguably worse than Ford (aka Walmart, whoever) on the issues, because the opposite of good is not evil but indifference.
Capital being a labor issue is econ 101 my dude
I don't have any intent to depart either Substack or your subscription, but I think you dodged the most persuasive part of Katz's piece: the founders of Substack have not only stuck to their guns about an unusually low moderation barrier (which is fine with me), they have also proactively used their own corporate resources to *promote* white nationalists like Hanania. There is a middle path model available that adopts a minimal moderation stance, but that 1) will not monetize hate and enforces that policy consistently, and 2) won't actively promote Nazi trash. Substack may think it is obligated on principle to allow disreputable ideas on its platform, but it does not follow that they are also obligated by those same principles to give Nazis a hand up, as they are clearly doing.
Yeah, the biggest problem with Substack corporate is that they are clearly, flagrantly full of shit.
Short, to the point, and accurate. I give that a 9.9
>From a political point of view, if you consider yourself a leftist or progressive, I think the correct strategy would be to compete for reach on all platforms—within reason, of course.
For me, it comes down to this: this platform seems to be pretty transparently on a mission to tilt speech in one direction, whenever it sees fit. It amplifies pretty far right voices and pretends to counteract them by amplifying "liberals" of the Bari Weiss variety. It seems to have a pretty clear mandate of shifting the Overton window, and I have to weigh my support for your excellent writing calling Peter Thiel a fascist against the material reality that 10% of that support will go to an engine actively working towards his vision.
I don't want to diminish how much it sucks to be in your position. Another substacker I emailed about ending support replied with a link to their Patreon, which I immediately suscribed to. Could this be something you offer as well, to us unwilling to keep funding Substack directly?
In the comments on Molly White’s post with the Substackers Against Nazis chain letter, she explains some of the technical issues with the alternatives to Substack. She initially tried rolling her own with Patreon and MailChimp, but it was a disaster, hence ending up at Substack shortly thereafter.
Other people I follow have or are currently moving to alternatives such as Ghost or Beehiiv, though migrating is obviously a huge pain particularly when one already has a large paid subscription base.
All that said, my position is that depending on a privately owned closed platform is always going to lead to this problem. It would be much better if utility-style alternatives were more feasible. The closest thing is probably “open core” software, since that allows one to pay for managed private hosting without being exclusively beholden to the platform maintainer (as with Substack).
[EDIT: I misspelled Beehiiv.]
Thank you. Just to clarify, my suggestion to John was to setup a Patreon as a concurrent alternative for payment, not instead of a Substack.
PS: Ghost is supposedly an open core product, so that may be the more sustainable platform to migrate to.
Yes, I’ve mentioned Ghost in other comments on this post. Specifically, John Ganz’s peer Spencer Ackerman migrated from Substack to Ghost a while back, so he would probably have a useful perspective on the issues and logistics involved in doing so.
And FWIW Patreon has been fielding lots of complaints from creators recently, so the grass is not necessarily greener.
As I understand it, what Ghost provides that your average blog CMS does not is the special sauce for payment processing and for getting emails past Google’s spam filter.
(I posted a big long comment about this elsewhere in this comment section.)
It isn't that much secret sauce. Yes, they use Stripe (I think) for payment processing, and that is the same as SubStack, they have cool capabilities to handle the subscription and repetitive charging thing.
The email delivery success is handled not by Substack, but Mailgun, and that is the same as Ghost (either Pro or self hosted).
No, the real secret sauce is the tools for creating, promoting, and the community features that help people find you. Ghost has something akin to that, but I left Ghost because it was frankly terrible at driving traffic to my sites. The Notes feature, and the Recommendation engine are the serious value adds that Substack provides, and it is a huge example.
But Ghost's founders are similar to Hamish and team in their libertarian leanings on speech, so I suspect it would be a matter of time especially if you go the Ghost Pro route
(Ghost does allow you to self host, and most hosting providers have single button installs scripted up, but you then have to take the responsibility for installing updates, and maintaining security. Not for the faint of heart, but not horrible either)
I will add that I am playing with ButtonDown, and so far I like it, but it lacks a lot of the niceties of Substack. What I really like is that they have rational pricing, and you can see precisely what you get for your monthly fee (above and beyond the free tier). No VC money backstopping, and incentives to pester us small players to monetize our niche-y publications. I like that a lot (although the "standard plan" at $29 a month is a heavy lift to use a custom domain. I might do it anyway.
The site I am playing with is https://buttondown.email/pmdude/archive - clearly very niche
(and I recall our banter before, great to see you here too!)
I don’t have much direct experience with Ghost, but the fact that it is an “open core” product and the fact that writers pay the for-profit affiliate directly for hosting make it less subject to the sorts of underhanded tactics Substack has been employing here.
In other words, Ghost’s business model is much more legitimately libertarian than Substack’s. And it’s hard to see the Nazis Substack promotes as legitimately libertarian, either. (Right-wing libertarians have thoroughly appropriating the “libertarian” label is somewhat unique to the United States.)
As for the recommendation algorithm, see my other comments about it can’t be both useful and invulnerable to Nazis at the same time. If a recommendation algorithm is, indeed, useful, then it is by definition taking an editorial stance, and it should be entirely reasonable to expect that editorial stance not to promote Nazis.
All good points. Especially on the recommendation algorithms.
When Ghost first started, they hosted their paid servers in The Netherlands because they had virtually no restrictions. There's a reason that a lot of CSA content gets hosted out of their datacenters. Alas, I believe that has changed somewhat (the CSA abuse being served out of NL).
Have a great holiday!
John you’re appreciated. Please continue the good work. Your job deserves respect. We should all respect our Job specially if it feeds us. Happy holidays!
First, I 100% agree with your position. And like I wrote under Popehat's post on this (Ken White is a god) I will move with you wherever you go. I enjoy your writing that much, and I am glad to pay for it.
Second, I am beginning to look at moving my two (was three) Stacks to another solution. I do not do the paid thing (one is niche for Product Management, one is my shitposting site) so I am not urgent in my needs, but I would have let it ride until I saw the nonsense that Hamish posted, and damn, these dudes are clueless.
I get it, the VC funding of growth is drying up in the post-ZIRP era, and the few hundred thousands of dollars that the monetized white nationalist/Nazi shit sweeps into their coffers is hard to turn down, but running a business isn't easy, and being the top dawg means that they get to make decisions.
The number of the stacks I subscribe to that are contemplating an exit strategy is alarming.
But I also believe that the leadership here will keep playing footsie until some of the big rainmakers depart. Where will they go is open for debate, but go I suspect they will - eventually.
I am here for you John!
If the entire profession of journalism hadn't collapsed and left subscription platforms as - almost literally! - the only way to make a living by writing, perhaps we wouldn't have to go through this rigamarole of trying to hold each individual writer responsible for moral and ethical decisions over which they are not consulted or personally able to extert any influence.
Ah, nevertheless.
Substack isn’t the only subscription platform you know… and there are other alternatives beyond Patreon or YouTube or Instagram or whatever. None of these have an exclusive relationship with the credit card processors or email providers. There are plenty of other options for delegating the Stripe-Mailgun plumbing than just the whiny VC guys…
As I understand it, Substack does let you export your mailing list, but it doesn’t facilitate transferring paid subscriptions despite putting your name on them for credit card transactions.
That said, Spencer Ackerman successfully made the move from Substack to Ghost a while back, so if that’s something you’d be interested in considering you could ask him for advice about logistics.
(It’s a small world, so I sort of assume that you, Spencer Ackerman, and possibly idk even Peter Beinart regularly bump into each other at the one narrow-aisled Key Food in NYC that we all go to. I jest. Though I think we can all agree the store’s vegan selection has gotten better in recent years.)
Anyway! If you derive significant personal income from Substack, that does put you in the position of probably being able to afford the overhead of paid hosting, e.g. with Ghost, whereas Substack takes a larger cut in order to offer a free tier.
Again, yes, I know migrating is a pain, hence the suggestion of asking Spencer Ackerman how he pulled it off.
Also, no, I’m not going to cancel my paid subscription; I’m just going to be pathologically helpful about nudging Substack authors I support to look at alternative hosting solutions.
Well, the following is a comment I left on Molly White’s post about the open letter:
Have you looked at any of the other options more recently? Spencer Ackerman and 404 Media both use Ghost, while Rusty Foster is imminently moving to Beehiiv.
I’m not familiar with Beehiiv, but if you ever switch to Ghost please ask them to support paywalled RSS for text posts lol. (They exclusively use passwordless logins, which break everything.)
[…]
On the upside with Ghost, at least, if you pay them for hosting, they’re more likely to listen to your feedback than Substack is, even if that’s an extremely low bar…
[…]
Ghost is MIT-licensed and maintained by a nonprofit, kind of like WordPress, but running Node.js instead of PHP and consequently quite a bit less creaky. And IIRC the main thing that’s gated for Ghost is monetization, along with, I assume, whatever backroom deals keep Gmail from preemptively blocking their emails. Both these things are very, very difficult to roll your own, ridiculous on the level of trying to host a blog off one’s home internet in 2023.
[…]
The main thing I’m trying to get at is that Ghost’s open-core model makes it less beholden to right-wing VCs, and the fact that writers pay Ghost directly for hosting gives Ghost an incentive to be more responsive to technical complaints.
Yes, having a first-party hosting option does create some conflicts of interest, but if you look at other open-core hosting services, like Owncloud and Nextcloud, if there is some governance dispute it’s much easier for a portion of the developer base to decamp and create a competing product, monetizing and promoting literal Nazis being a good example of such a governance dispute. (Nazis are AFAIK not what happened at Owncloud.)
By contrast, Substack is take-it-or-leave it, even for senior developers and executives. Substack is a baby you can’t cut in half. Open-core software, on the other hand, is more like a starfish that will happily regrow from dismembered parts given the nourishment to do so.
[I should probably edit this into something more coherent. Also yes your reservations about other platforms are presumably different from Molly White’s.]
Over at Buttondown, the migration page does show that it is pretty damn easy to move over paid subscribers as part of the process: https://docs.buttondown.email/migration-guides/substack
I would be extremely surprised if Ghost isn't taking advantage of this too.
That’s useful to hear!
The esteemed Molly White has made the move to a self-hosted Ghost install, and documented the process here that she followed (created really).
https://citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/
It seems like migrating paid subs is not seamless, nor is it for the faint of heart. In short, the "you own your content, your subscibers, and data" is not as clear. Molly is a talented engineer, able to roll up her sleeves and dive into scripting and coding to get it all to work, but when I read that yesterday I now understand the reticence of some of the larger sites to not move.
Not precisely lock-in, but not easily transportable either.
Still more and more of the 'Stacks I sub to are moving. Ryan Broderick from Garbage Day, Casey Newton at Platformer, and Ken White from Popehat are all in flight.
C'est la vie.
Thank you. As I result of this thoughtful message, and my total agreement with your position, I upgraded to a paid subscription.
I am more than happy to continue supporting your excellent work here, as I'm sure many of your readers are. Happy holidays!
I'm in a similar position, though not as difficult, since Substack isn't a major source of income. But I have readers, fellow writers I want to engage with and a small base of paying subscribers. If there was an organised move away, I'd follow it. But I can't raise the energy to do it myself right now, having walked away from my 15k Twitter followers last year.
Unlike on Twitter, the existence of Nazis/racists here is an abstract fact rather than something I am regularly confronted with, even on Notes. So, I'll just complain and hope something changes.
As mentioned by someone else here Buttondown and probably others will happily do nearly all the work to help you ditch Chris, Hamish and Jairaj without trying to sell you on phrenology or eugenics while they’re at it:
https://docs.buttondown.email/migration-guides/substack
I have similar sentiments.
Its clearly not “in your face” here — one can avoid the Nazis on substack aside from the odd troll. This is a very important point for me, because recruitment and radicalization is my main concern.
I’d rather Substack had a more restrictive moderation policy surrounding hate/incitement, But as it stands today, it does not appear to me to be a serious point of radicalization like 4chan or 8chan became. The radicalization that festered there resulted in incitement of several mass murder terror events.
My $0.02 — its worth complaining about but not leaving over. At least not unless it gets considerably worse.
Fwiw, I thought Ken White’s nuanced piece on this topic resonated very well.
https://popehat.substack.com/p/substack-has-a-nazi-opportunity?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2
I'm basically in agreement with you on all of these topics, sc.
1) fascists and nazis are bad
2) open letters are a lot less bad than nazis, but not great
3) it's beyond absurd for anyone to punish you, a vocal and incisive anti-fascist, if they want to fight fascism
At the same time -- is there anything that you and other prominent substackers could do quietly, by way of non-public letters? I asked Matt Yglesias what he thought about this kerfuffle, and he did not reply, but it seems to me that someone with his amount of traffic is in a position of almost equal bargaining power with the platform: like you, he has a lot to lose by leaving, but substack would lose a lot if he left, as well. (I am assuming, without any access to the numbers, that you have fewer subscribers than MY has).
Substack depends on its writers to bring in subscribers, just as you depend on this platform to pay your bills. If you can aggregate your leverage to make it a platform that has fewer downsides, then that seems worth doing.
And that does not require open letters, and may be easier to do without them.
Yglesias isn't going to be saying a word, dt. The Nazi-curious/Nazi-protective/hates liberals crowd are his core audience on this platform, and thus his main source of income. Nothing going to happen there.
elm
he always said he'd write whatever they wanted if right-wing rich guys paid him enough to say it
I get it, but, like, this isn’t Rumble (or even Twitter). It’s not so inextricably intertwined with the far right that it’s in essence a Nazi BRAND. Not yet, at least.
I don’t know. Again, I get it, but it seems premature.
Not for lack of trying lol