By the scam logic, Instagram, Youtube, Patreon and Twitch are all scams. Each one sells the idea that you could become a famous creator and make lots of money. You could even argue that Twitch and Youtube have their own somewhat secretive editorial policy, approving or denying creator content with no clear consistency across the board.
Substack is not about trying to make it as a writer as opposed to working as a writer elsewhere. It’s about people who are not writers creating quality content, on a regular basis (the newsletter is a trick to commit to artificial deadlines), who otherwise wouldn’t even try. Not every YouTuber wants to have a Hollywood TV show. There’s a lot of great stuff on Substack that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
I think Substack as a concept is great, and great for the writers - right now. There are few enough early adopters that can command fairly large subscription fees (e.g.$10/mo). But as more and more writers jump to Substack that becomes untenable. I currently follow about a dozen Finance/Economics feeds. About 1/2 have jumped to Substack. Once they all go, it would cost me $120/mo. And that's just that topic area.
In the long run I think this will probably evolve into a Spotify or Readly model - one fee gets you all-you-can-eat. Again the few early adopters are raking it in, but I don't see that lasting.
I came here to write something similar to what Harold wrote above. The lack of an editorial policy is demonstrated by Doyle, et al being able to lie about Yglesias and – especially – Singal, who *never* had a Pro deal, because he...didn’t have a built in audience, which is the *key* driver of the program (obviously)!
The ire against Singal gives the game away: He had no Pro deal; they want to make him toxic enough that Substack has to choose between him (and yes, the others who may have had a Pro deal who also engage in wrongthink) and what they perceive to be their large cadre of allies. I hope they are mistaken, and that mainstream Substackers don’t take the bait and amplify their Tipper Gore-like cause.
I see Substack as the latest in the Kickstarter/Patreon/OnlyFans trend of internet services that make smaller projects viable through direct support from fans. And since a bigger audience just makes this more lucrative, what works for smaller projects works even better for bigger ones, which then get all the attention.
The Pro stuff looks like a straightforward risk-reward trade-off. I don't understand complaints that it's somehow misleading when it's obvious why someone would be offered one: If you already have a sizable audience. If you aren't sure if your audience will follow you to Substack and pay, perhaps Substack will take that bet, buying variable and uncertain cash flows with a lump sum or an annuity. Another company could offer this arrangement to the same effect, though it would be slightly more cumbersome.
This kind of makes me think the actual complaint is "Greenwald et al are on Substack and making money and I don't like that." I understand, as I don't like most of the people cited, but that's not Substack's fault.
How many crazy things to Doyle et al have to write before people stop taking them seriously? Doyle and Newitz's case here seems "blatantly wrong on every level" - Will that ever be meaningful?
This seems pretty much on the money. The one thing I'd add is that there *is* something a bit shady about how Substack rolled out though.
In short, when it was new, Substack got a lot of buzz because
(1) In a short period of time, lots of famous writers jumped ship from established media brands to write on Substack instead; and
(2) There appeared to be no central or coordinating force making them do so;
(3) so a lot of people (like me) reasonably inferred something like "boy, this model must have legs if so many writers all came to the same conclusion."
Whether you conceived of that conclusion as "There is more money to be made by being your own brand and not a cog in [NYT/Vox/whatever]" or "Revolt against editors!!" or something else, the non-disclosure of Substack's enticement methods allowed it to get more buzz than being honest would've been (by allowing people to believe (2) above). And there's something a little icky about that.
I don't think that any of this is a huge deal—certainly not as big a deal as it has become among the Twitterati. But I think that's what the folks who are upset are getting at—but not quite grasping.
In short, it's a "I can't believe they fooled me. I'm angry; they must have done something wrong." reaction.
I think the bigger question is around the business model. Why should we expect people to continue paying $5/month for the unedited writings of one person, when they can get a digital subscription to the entire nyt for the same price? I just don’t see this being sustainable in the long run.
To Every Action There Is An Equal And Opposite Criticism.
Substack has become another convenient target for the outrage industry, mostly because it has money -- from VCs I presume -- and is spending that money to achieve its goals. The horror! The horror!
As far as content policy violations are concerned, Doyle's case seems to be exaggerated or false. DeBoer has, as far as I know, not violated any of Substack's rules (https://substack.com/content) in the writing he posted on Substack. To condemn Matt Yglesias, Doyle cites harassment of Emily VanDerWerff on Twitter (summarized at https://emilyvdw.substack.com/p/the-witch ), which, while awful, was not done or supported by Yglesias himself. Glenn Greenwald is said to be "direct[ing] harassment at a female New York Times reporter", Taylor Lorenz, but the article in question (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/criticizing-public-figures-including) says nothing of the sort: instead, it accuses her of making false accusations (which seems plausible, but I do not know enough about the situation to know whether this is accurate), then criticizes her and other reporters for trying to portray legitimate criticism of them as harassment in order to delegitimize it, so that Doyle portraying Greenwald and DeBoer's criticism as harassment actually supports Greenwald's point. Graham Linehan has been accused (e.g. https://www.metafilter.com/190808/They-paid-a-secret-group-of-writers#8080099 ) of doxxing trans-women: the article in question (https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/these-are-not-lesbians) consists of a series of pictures, ages, and sometimes first names and brief autobiographical paragraphs posted by trans-women on a lesbian dating site, and since Substack's anti-doxxing policy only bans "publish[ing] or post[ing] other people's private information (such as home phone number and address)", it seems likely that Substack did not consider the rule to cover what Linehan did; moreover, these pictures are clearly meant as evidence for Linehan's rhetorical point (i.e., that trans-women should not be considered women) rather than as targets for harassment. The only example of content violating the content rules that I have seen is by Mencius Moldbug:
Content rules (https://substack.com/content): "Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that call for violence, exclusion, or segregation based on protected classes."
Moldbug (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/5-the-land-its-people-and-their-dogs): "Columbia [his hypothetical neoreactionary-ruled America] does not currently have any autochthonous tribes, but “down on the rez” it has a lot of humans of recent autochthonous descent, who are indeed failing to thrive. They seem to need more freedom and challenge than agriculture-adapted populations, probably because tending crops is boring as hell. ... [P]re-agricultural populations are like Italian racecars: specialized. They do very poorly, except in their adaptive environment. Yes, this is probably a DNA thing. (For the skull-caliper buffs out there, domestication also decreases brain size in animals.) Unfortunately, an authentic autochthonous lifestyle demands a lot of land per human. Then again, Columbia has a lot of land per human. The idea of a state-sized prairie or forest ecopark with humans as the apex predator, though fantastic, is not at all absurd. It is a small step in principle from leaving uncontacted autochthonous tribes alone, Sentinel Island style, to voluntarily *restoring* an authentic ancestral culture."
And I have seen no indication whatsoever that Substack Pro is funding him.
Medium does the same thing. It pays writers and doesn’t disclose who and hopes more people will choose to write on their platform in hopes of making money. In Medium’s case, it’s harder for an aspiring writer to calculate how much they could make on Medium vs. Substack.
Do you believe that Substack should be liable for defamation suits filed against content on its platform? As you’ve said, we should treat every writer as if they are paid by Substack. It seems only reasonable then that they’d be considered the publisher of any libelous statement, regardless of author, big or small.
Coming very late to this party, but I have found Substack to be quite annoying and not worth my subscription. My experience was this. I subscribed to one newsletter, made a comment (which was respectfully disagreeing with the author and asking for more clarification), and got a very, very rude reply in response. I don't think authors should be allowed to troll their subscribers in this way. All I wanted was an explanation of why she linked three items which seemed to me unrelated. All she had to do was explain her thinking to me. But no, she chose to insult me and I ended my subscription. And now I'm resolved never to pay for any of this content in the future!
I think you're incredibly indulgent to Annalee who accuses people she disagrees with of "hate speech". So Matt Y is guilty of 'hate-speech' is he?
By the scam logic, Instagram, Youtube, Patreon and Twitch are all scams. Each one sells the idea that you could become a famous creator and make lots of money. You could even argue that Twitch and Youtube have their own somewhat secretive editorial policy, approving or denying creator content with no clear consistency across the board.
Always enjoy your articles, thank you!
Substack is not about trying to make it as a writer as opposed to working as a writer elsewhere. It’s about people who are not writers creating quality content, on a regular basis (the newsletter is a trick to commit to artificial deadlines), who otherwise wouldn’t even try. Not every YouTuber wants to have a Hollywood TV show. There’s a lot of great stuff on Substack that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
I think Substack as a concept is great, and great for the writers - right now. There are few enough early adopters that can command fairly large subscription fees (e.g.$10/mo). But as more and more writers jump to Substack that becomes untenable. I currently follow about a dozen Finance/Economics feeds. About 1/2 have jumped to Substack. Once they all go, it would cost me $120/mo. And that's just that topic area.
In the long run I think this will probably evolve into a Spotify or Readly model - one fee gets you all-you-can-eat. Again the few early adopters are raking it in, but I don't see that lasting.
I came here to write something similar to what Harold wrote above. The lack of an editorial policy is demonstrated by Doyle, et al being able to lie about Yglesias and – especially – Singal, who *never* had a Pro deal, because he...didn’t have a built in audience, which is the *key* driver of the program (obviously)!
The ire against Singal gives the game away: He had no Pro deal; they want to make him toxic enough that Substack has to choose between him (and yes, the others who may have had a Pro deal who also engage in wrongthink) and what they perceive to be their large cadre of allies. I hope they are mistaken, and that mainstream Substackers don’t take the bait and amplify their Tipper Gore-like cause.
I see Substack as the latest in the Kickstarter/Patreon/OnlyFans trend of internet services that make smaller projects viable through direct support from fans. And since a bigger audience just makes this more lucrative, what works for smaller projects works even better for bigger ones, which then get all the attention.
The Pro stuff looks like a straightforward risk-reward trade-off. I don't understand complaints that it's somehow misleading when it's obvious why someone would be offered one: If you already have a sizable audience. If you aren't sure if your audience will follow you to Substack and pay, perhaps Substack will take that bet, buying variable and uncertain cash flows with a lump sum or an annuity. Another company could offer this arrangement to the same effect, though it would be slightly more cumbersome.
This kind of makes me think the actual complaint is "Greenwald et al are on Substack and making money and I don't like that." I understand, as I don't like most of the people cited, but that's not Substack's fault.
How many crazy things to Doyle et al have to write before people stop taking them seriously? Doyle and Newitz's case here seems "blatantly wrong on every level" - Will that ever be meaningful?
This seems pretty much on the money. The one thing I'd add is that there *is* something a bit shady about how Substack rolled out though.
In short, when it was new, Substack got a lot of buzz because
(1) In a short period of time, lots of famous writers jumped ship from established media brands to write on Substack instead; and
(2) There appeared to be no central or coordinating force making them do so;
(3) so a lot of people (like me) reasonably inferred something like "boy, this model must have legs if so many writers all came to the same conclusion."
Whether you conceived of that conclusion as "There is more money to be made by being your own brand and not a cog in [NYT/Vox/whatever]" or "Revolt against editors!!" or something else, the non-disclosure of Substack's enticement methods allowed it to get more buzz than being honest would've been (by allowing people to believe (2) above). And there's something a little icky about that.
I don't think that any of this is a huge deal—certainly not as big a deal as it has become among the Twitterati. But I think that's what the folks who are upset are getting at—but not quite grasping.
In short, it's a "I can't believe they fooled me. I'm angry; they must have done something wrong." reaction.
I think the bigger question is around the business model. Why should we expect people to continue paying $5/month for the unedited writings of one person, when they can get a digital subscription to the entire nyt for the same price? I just don’t see this being sustainable in the long run.
To Every Action There Is An Equal And Opposite Criticism.
Substack has become another convenient target for the outrage industry, mostly because it has money -- from VCs I presume -- and is spending that money to achieve its goals. The horror! The horror!
I generally agree with this, and I think if the people criticizing Substack are including Matthew Yglesias (who opposes extreme forms of cancel culture while generally agreeing with progressives on object-level policies) and Fredrik DeBoer (who by his own admission (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/statement) falsely accused someone of rape due to severe bipolar disorder for which he is now being treated, whose "vendetta" (https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-pay) against Sarah Jones appears to be nothing worse than an article arguing that the social structure of modern journalism causes many journalists to be narrow-minded toward other people but hypocritically much less critical of other journalists ( https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/freddie-nitro-edition-there-you-go https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/non-nitro-edition-substack-and-media ), and who is a leftist who criticizes parts of modern progressivism mainly because he thinks they're ineffective ( https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/antiracism-is-not-a-pr-campaign-for-black-people https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-is-the-blm-ask https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-cant-censor-away-extremism-or )) among the dangerous reactionaries Substack is enabling, then that says more about what a narrow Overton Window Doyle & al. are trying to restrict people to than it does about Substack's ideological goals.
As far as content policy violations are concerned, Doyle's case seems to be exaggerated or false. DeBoer has, as far as I know, not violated any of Substack's rules (https://substack.com/content) in the writing he posted on Substack. To condemn Matt Yglesias, Doyle cites harassment of Emily VanDerWerff on Twitter (summarized at https://emilyvdw.substack.com/p/the-witch ), which, while awful, was not done or supported by Yglesias himself. Glenn Greenwald is said to be "direct[ing] harassment at a female New York Times reporter", Taylor Lorenz, but the article in question (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/criticizing-public-figures-including) says nothing of the sort: instead, it accuses her of making false accusations (which seems plausible, but I do not know enough about the situation to know whether this is accurate), then criticizes her and other reporters for trying to portray legitimate criticism of them as harassment in order to delegitimize it, so that Doyle portraying Greenwald and DeBoer's criticism as harassment actually supports Greenwald's point. Graham Linehan has been accused (e.g. https://www.metafilter.com/190808/They-paid-a-secret-group-of-writers#8080099 ) of doxxing trans-women: the article in question (https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/these-are-not-lesbians) consists of a series of pictures, ages, and sometimes first names and brief autobiographical paragraphs posted by trans-women on a lesbian dating site, and since Substack's anti-doxxing policy only bans "publish[ing] or post[ing] other people's private information (such as home phone number and address)", it seems likely that Substack did not consider the rule to cover what Linehan did; moreover, these pictures are clearly meant as evidence for Linehan's rhetorical point (i.e., that trans-women should not be considered women) rather than as targets for harassment. The only example of content violating the content rules that I have seen is by Mencius Moldbug:
Content rules (https://substack.com/content): "Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that call for violence, exclusion, or segregation based on protected classes."
Moldbug (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/5-the-land-its-people-and-their-dogs): "Columbia [his hypothetical neoreactionary-ruled America] does not currently have any autochthonous tribes, but “down on the rez” it has a lot of humans of recent autochthonous descent, who are indeed failing to thrive. They seem to need more freedom and challenge than agriculture-adapted populations, probably because tending crops is boring as hell. ... [P]re-agricultural populations are like Italian racecars: specialized. They do very poorly, except in their adaptive environment. Yes, this is probably a DNA thing. (For the skull-caliper buffs out there, domestication also decreases brain size in animals.) Unfortunately, an authentic autochthonous lifestyle demands a lot of land per human. Then again, Columbia has a lot of land per human. The idea of a state-sized prairie or forest ecopark with humans as the apex predator, though fantastic, is not at all absurd. It is a small step in principle from leaving uncontacted autochthonous tribes alone, Sentinel Island style, to voluntarily *restoring* an authentic ancestral culture."
And I have seen no indication whatsoever that Substack Pro is funding him.
Thanks for the heads up. No I know to avoid the scribbles of Ms Newitz in the future. Self referential art is sooo postmodern :-)
Medium does the same thing. It pays writers and doesn’t disclose who and hopes more people will choose to write on their platform in hopes of making money. In Medium’s case, it’s harder for an aspiring writer to calculate how much they could make on Medium vs. Substack.
Do you believe that Substack should be liable for defamation suits filed against content on its platform? As you’ve said, we should treat every writer as if they are paid by Substack. It seems only reasonable then that they’d be considered the publisher of any libelous statement, regardless of author, big or small.
Coming very late to this party, but I have found Substack to be quite annoying and not worth my subscription. My experience was this. I subscribed to one newsletter, made a comment (which was respectfully disagreeing with the author and asking for more clarification), and got a very, very rude reply in response. I don't think authors should be allowed to troll their subscribers in this way. All I wanted was an explanation of why she linked three items which seemed to me unrelated. All she had to do was explain her thinking to me. But no, she chose to insult me and I ended my subscription. And now I'm resolved never to pay for any of this content in the future!
I'm kinda late to the discussion, but this is the stuff Graham has been doing on his blog (cw: transphobia, misgendering, harassment):
https://grace.substack.com/p/graham-linehan-should-be-kicked-off