A housekeeping note about Substack and Nazis

A few readers have emailed or commented recently to ask if I’m planning to move this newsletter off of Substack because of, well, “the Nazi stuff.” The short answer is a not-particularly-strongly-felt “no, for now.” My reasoning here is mostly practical and not at all ideological, and I’m not even sure it’s particularly interesting or sophisticated; if I were smart, I would probably just write a short paragraph and move on. But I suffer from an unfortunate brain disease where every few months I feel compelled to write thousands of words on the mechanisms of platforms, and my time at Gawker taught me that excessive transparency in matters like this helps make up for other deficiencies.

“The Nazi stuff”

In November, The Atlantic published a piece by Jonathan Katz with the ominous title “Substack Has a Nazi Problem,” detailing a number of explicitly white-nationalist publications that had set up shop on the platform. The article was followed up by an open letter from 247 Substack writers asking Substack’s three co-founders “Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism?” Hamish McKenzie, one of the co-founders, wrote a response on Substack establishing that Substack would not moderate those publications: “we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.”

Last week, the tech journalist Casey Newton met with Substack to ask the company to remove publications he’d found that violated the company’s explicit prohibition against specific threats of violence. Substack acquiesced, but also front-ran Newton’s story with a leak to a Substack run by the IDW gadfly Michael Shellenberger (most popular post: “Pelosi Attack Suspect Was A Psychotic Homeless Addict Estranged From His Pedophile Lover & Their Children”), establishing that Newton had found only six newsletters and they were pretty small. Although at first Newton claimed victory, he later reversed course and decided (urged, from what I can tell, by his readers, many of whom had canceled their subscriptions so as not to send money to Substack) that the company hadn’t lived up to whatever commitments he’d secured, and announced on Friday that Platformer would be leaving Substack. Other prominent Substacks, many of which I share some significant subscriber overlap, also announced plans to depart the platform--among them Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day, Hunter Harris’ Hung Up, and Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At.

Over the course of this saga, such as it is, around 20 paying Read Max subscribers have canceled their subscriptions so as not to direct any more money to Substack. (For context, this is about one percent of my total paid subscribership, so it’s more than “a rounding error” but less than “major.”) A number of other readers have suggested I move newsletter providers, or asked if I will; as I’ve told those people, for mainly practical reasons (explored below) I’m staying on Substack, but, as is often the case in 2024, I feel pretty ambivalent about all of this.

Why I stay on Substack (for now)

It might be useful at this point to explain what the point of using Substack is in the first place. Substack, after all, takes a 10 percent cut of my subscription revenue, while its rivals (the most famous of which is called Ghost) perform most of the same functions but settle for monthly or yearly fees that, at least in my case, would amount to a figure between 2 and 5 percent of my 2023 gross revenue, depending on the tier I chose. In some sense it should be a no-brainer to switch: Not only am I saving money, I am unlikely to suddenly find myself an unwilling party to a bitter war over content moderation.

Part of the answer is that, as a piece of software, Substack does a tremendously good job at its required sending-emails tasks.¹ (“Sending and receiving emails properly” is, genuinely, one of the hardest things to make a computer to do.) But the real reason Substack is worth the tithe to me (or has been so far) is its “network effects.” In addition to “writing emails” and “sending emails,” the other main thing you need to do as a subscription-newsletter proprietor is find new readers. Even if you don’t want the business to grow in absolute terms, and would be happy to maintain a constant level of revenue, subscription businesses need to bring in new subscribers to make up for “churn,” or the regular portion of subscribers who cancel.

What makes Substack valuable to publishers is that it leverages its size and newsletter network to bring me new subscribers without me having to do anything. To cite one obvious front-facing example: A few years ago Substack introduced a feature through which you could pick a other newsletters to “recommend”; your recommendations would appear on your newsletter’s homepage, and, even more importantly, become part of the sign-up flow to your newsletter. When readers sign up for newsletters that have chosen to “recommend” Read Max, they are given the option (actually, they are opted in, which is always better) to subscribe to Read Max as well--without me, or the other newsletter, having to do anything at all.

On the dashboard, Substack claims that 262 of my current paid subscribers came through “Other Substack Network,” which includes “recommendations” and front-page promotion on Substack itself. The number of paid subscribers brought in through Substack alone--13 percent of my subscribers--covers the company’s cut. But Substack’s size and network benefits me in other ways.² Here’s a screenshot from my Substack dashboard, showing (basically) how entangled with Substack my current crop of subscribers were when they originally signed up for my newsletter³:

More than half of my subscribers are paying with credit cards that had already been saved by Substack when they signed up for another newsletter. I’m sure (or I hope) that many, or even most, of those people would have been happy to type in their credit card information on a separate site--but how many? One of the funny (“funny”) things about running a subscription newsletter as a journalist is realizing how much of this particular job is sales and marketing. Lubricating the “funnel” that takes people from non-readers to free readers to paid subscribers--by, say, ensuring that they don’t need to go find their wallet to put their credit-card information down--is as important as “writing good stuff.”

For people who already have large Substack followings, or large followings on other platforms where they can promote their newsletters, these network effects may not be as meaningful, and switching to a fee-charging provider probably makes business. Read Max, however, is still relatively small and insecure, and the passive growth I enjoy from being on Substack is significant, both in offsetting churn and in placing the newsletter and my work on stable footing. Switching to an alternative carries both the short-term risks of transfer and the longer term risks of losing a significant engine of growth. These risks may be small and ultimately worthwhile--I’m sure I’m overestimating the role of Substack’s network effects and growth hacks in my growth. But Read Max represented something like 80 percent of my income last year, and I am not yet confident in its sustainability, so I feel extremely risk-averse about it.

The downside of a newsletter “platform”

If Substack’s ability to assert itself as a platform instead of a service is good (for publishers) because it can leverage network effects to drive growth⁴, it has the strong disadvantage of, well, all the things that we know are difficult about platforms from their recent insertion as intermediaries into our social, political, cultural, and commercial worlds--chief among them the fraught question of Content Guidelines. In its capacity as a platform, Substack is also responsible for moderating what appears on that platform; once you are taking advantage of the network for your own gain, it’s no longer enough say you’re simply selling services to willing customers.

This is a familiar problem for platforms, but I think the Substack version of it has a funny wrinkle. Usually controversies over content moderation happen because platforms don’t care about moderation enough, and let Nazis or teenage Georgian spammers or weird Spider-Man videos run rampant without any kind of oversight. Substack, by contrast, has exacerbated its problems by caring about moderation too much. I largely agree with Ken White that Substack’s platform and the nature of its network effects are different than, say, Twitter’s:

Substack’s also right that it’s built a platform that’s qualitatively different than many others. On Twitter, Nazis were constantly in my face, I had to painstakingly block them one by one, and the interface recommended that I follow them. Here I generally only encounter them if I look for them or, very occasionally, if one wanders into my comments for me to block. You can publish here and comment here and never encounter Nazis stuff here. With respect to my friend Mike Masnick, I think that makes it a bit less like his Nazi bar analogy and more like a Nazi-tolerant banquet hall. You can have your niece’s quinceañera or your parents’ 50th anniversary there and probably won’t feel much of an impact from the fact that they’re always booked solid on April 20 unless you think about it. Put another way, it’s more like selling your books or goods on Amazon if Amazon allowed lots of overtly Nazis stuff instead of just thinly veiled Nazi stuff.

So I am not inclined to denounce people who publish on Substack nor assert that fleeing Substack is the only moral choice. I think that reasonable minds can differ on the morality of renting a walled garden at an estate that also rents walled gardens to Nazis, especially when the other walled gardens on the market are all rife with their own problems. I think reasonable minds can differ on the ethos of creating a platform that makes a conscious decision not to moderate based on most content.

But instead of invoking this (reasonable, if obviously not unimpeachable) defense as a cover, or doing any of the million other things it could have done to deflate this controversy (beginning with releasing a “we’re looking into this!” statement that never gets follow-through⁵ and ending with just banning the Nazis and moving on), Substack instead chose to stand up and say: We’ll never ban Nazis⁶! We won’t even demonetize them!

I steered clear of writing about Substack’s decision not to ban the Nazi blogs for a couple weeks because (1) I figured they would eventually ban them (they did) and that would put the matter to bed (it didn’t) and (2) if I am totally honest, I don’t feel particularly strongly or urgently about it. I think banning white nationalists is a pretty straightforward, bare-minimum, no-brainer policy for any platform, but “white nationalists are on Substack” is not a problem I’m actively worrying about at the moment. I’m even sympathetic to the general idea that moderation policy shouldn’t be reactive to bad press and should err on the side of liberalism rather than caution--especially in the case of Substack, which is highly compartmentalized and still relatively small and (in its capacity as a platform) uninfluential.⁷

Even if I don’t feel strongly about the actual decision, however, I do feel quite strongly about Substack’s own public communication around the matter. I feel strongly that it sucks. As White says, McKenzie’s statement should probably be interpreted as a marketing exercise. Substack believes that asserting the primacy of free speech (in this case narrowly understood as a near-absence of regulation) over any other concern is good branding. And I understand why: There is a large and obsessively engaged audience of people for whom content moderation and speech norms are urgently important issues, and those people are eager to align themselves with a company that vocally expresses the same level of urgency. (Just as I’m sure Ghost is more than happy to pick up the slack on the other side.)

But for those of us outside that audience, who for the sake of convenience I will refer to as “normal people,” this kind of posturing over content moderation is (at best) tedious and annoying. At worst, it sounds like total intellectual and moral bankruptcy. And it essentially drafts my newsletter--and my readers--into an exhausting culture war that I have personally sought to avoid. (Not always successfully, admittedly.)

My irritation here is somewhat childish and selfish: After a decade of it, I’m sick of this particular fight, exhausted by the circularity and intractability of the arguments and the self-contained performance of the debate, such as it is. But more importantly, I have an obvious business interest. Substack’s silly posturing may be good marketing for Substack, in the narrow sense, but insofar as it furthers Substack’s already damaging institutional association with reactionary mouth-breathers like Shellenberger it’s absolutely terrible marketing for me and my silly little computer blog.

Look, speaking as a person, I recognize that disputes over content moderation are natural consequence of platform structures, and their difficulty is not a reason to avoid them. But as a business owner, I would prefer a Boring Platform that makes intermittent content-moderation controversies go away through the sheer force of bland and nonspecific statements. Substack, from what I can tell, will never be that company, which makes me think my ceiling for growth here is probably lower than I’d previously imagined.

The newsletter fantasy

For a while now, subscription newsletters like this one have been sold--by Substack, among others--as something like “the future of media.” It’s an appealing sales pitch, especially if you, like me, have spent most of your career in media awaiting layoffs and acquisitions, your employers reliant on venture capital and programmatic ad markets, your work subservient to platform distribution. As an owner-operator, selling your content to readers over direct distribution, you can avoid the various markets and hierarchies of the broad tech-media ecosystem.

Of course, this is as much of a fantasy as the now-dead faith that scale alone would make digital media profitable. Small newsletters are as subject to the desires (and mistakes) of platforms and their owners as anyone else--and from the new position of being individual publishers, often with different incentives and interests, in theoretical competition with one another, with associated difficulties in coordinated action.

I don’t think that means newsletters are a dead end for media, or that we should all abandon them. I love doing Read Max, and I think the readers like it, too; so far, running a newsletter has hewn pretty close to the promised fantasy of escape. But “the Nazi stuff” has been a good reminder that “everyone start a paid newsletter” is not a long-lasting solution to any of the problems that plagued media in 2012 or 2017 or now.

So where does that leave us? The summary of my hand-wringing ambivalence is something like: I think Substack should ban Nazis as a matter of course and am glad they eventually did so, but I am not particularly worried about the current level of Nazis on Substack; I should probably switch newsletter providers and expect I will be forced to eventually, but am cautious about doing so at Read Max’s current size and growth rate; I am sick of content-moderation disputes but also apparently unable to prevent myself from writing 2,500 words about one.

1. For all that I’m about to talk about Substack’s network effects, I want to underline that the product itself is excellent, and the excellence of the product is an underrated component of its success, because it is simply not as sexy or controversial as the platform network effects. In particular, Substack’s CMS is the best I’ve ever used in a long career of using many different in-house and often quite malformed CMSes, though all I really mean by this is that Substack’s CMS works 99 percent of the time.

2. Ghost and other alternatives have some similar “recommendation”-type features. But because those companies generally regard themselves as services instead of “platforms” (and, indeed, because this is a selling point for them) the network effects aren’t available in the same way.

3. The numbers are presented without a ton of context or transparency, and the presentation is obviously stacked to give Substack maximal credit, but based on interactions with subscribers I have no reason to doubt that the figures are mostly accurate.

4. The six words before this footnote mark the worst six-word sequence in the history of this newsletter; I’m so sorry.

5. It isn’t lost on me that I’m suggesting Substack avoid a controversial issue by producing a short anodyne statement that it never acts on when I am writing an unnecessary 2,500-word post on the same controversial issue instead of just telling people “I’m looking into it.”

6. Unless they’re doing porn.

7. It seems very obvious to me that Substack’s prominent transphobes and anti-vaxxers are doing much more significant real-world harm, and yet most of us seem to have made our peace with their continued presence on the platform.