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?
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.
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 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?
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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?
Amen. One may as well boycott the USPS because any fascist with a stamp can mail his views. Enjoy your time off.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.