All the Garbage I Found on Substack

January 18, 2024 6:27 AM

Josh Drummond takes a harder look at Substack content, and departs for Ghost.
posted by Shepherd (52 comments total)

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm subscribed to quite a few newsletters these days. I've had a lot of emails in the past ten days from people announcing they're moving to Ghost. I don't know if it will move the needle within Substack, but they're going to be left with nothing but a business of Nazis and cranks.
posted by Braeburn at 6:59 AM on January 18 [5 favorites]

Thanks for sharing this. I listened to a recent episode of Hard Fork as to why Platformer is leaving Substack.
posted by Toddles at 7:05 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]

Nazis and cranks are very profitable from a "getting paid to deliver fecal matter to the waiting mouths of morons" perspective.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:11 AM on January 18 [8 favorites]

That was a good piece. It's good that people are calling out Substack for enabling Nazis; it's better and more effective when someone makes the (painful) effort to actually do a little digging and *show* the actual Nazism (and anti-vaccine rubbish, etc.). And then taking the time to explain how the money flow works, and estimate Substack's profit from it, is terrific.

When you do that, you have the evidence to back up a conclusion like this:

"In fact, it makes me think Substack might be primarily a disinformation ecosystem — with a bunch of credible writers bolted on, to be the acceptable public face of a company that exists mainly to monetize the internet’s limitless supply of garbage."

Well done. And now I'm going to take the advice the author gave at the beginning, and go take a shower.
posted by martin q blank at 7:20 AM on January 18 [35 favorites]

it's better and more effective when someone makes the (painful) effort to actually do a little digging and *show* the actual Nazism (and anti-vaccine rubbish, etc.)

Yeah -- I know "Substack has a Nazi problem" isn't new news here, but I appreciated a lot of the work done to actually show the receipts; possibly helpful to others who are dealing with Substackers on the edge but who are choosing willful ignorance.
posted by Shepherd at 7:24 AM on January 18 [8 favorites]

How is Ghost substantively different from Substack, aside from being new and as of yet unpopulated by terrible people?
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:56 AM on January 18 [3 favorites]

Substack vs Ghost (according to Ghost)
posted by pracowity at 7:59 AM on January 18 [1 favorite]

Ghost's ToS prohibits content that "promotes discrimination, bigotry, racism, hatred, harassment, abuse or harm against any individual or group" while Substack has no such prohibition. (Of course, you can self-host Ghost and do whatever you want as long as your hosting and mail provider doesn't mind)
posted by credulous at 8:01 AM on January 18 [5 favorites]

Lordy. I finally read the whole thing. I'd seen a blurb from Gin & Tacos and laughed at the particular screenshot, which was actually from this article. I don't pay for very much journalism, but I try to pay for what I actually read. I pay for the Texas Observer, I pay for one Patreon account, and I pay for two subscriptions on Substack. I don't spend any real time in Substack itself- I get my emails, read them, and keep trucking. So I cancelled my paid subscriptions with a link to this article in the "why do you want to do this" box.
posted by PuppyCat at 8:01 AM on January 18 [7 favorites]

One of the real challenges for the people I know who write Substack newsletters is that they are so much cheaper than the alternatives, and for authors who aren't really making any money anywhere, that couple hundred a month can be pretty critical. And the thing is, Substack is cheaper because they're subsidizing their service with their top-tier ragebait headliners and their "free speech", anything-goes policy (and probably a bunch of VC, let's be honest.) So moving to a service that (for free newsletters) costs a prohibitive amount of money, or (for paid newsletters) means a significant drop in revenue in addition to the inevitable loss of current subscribers, is a substantial decision.

And yet, most folks I know are working on making it.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:31 AM on January 18 [9 favorites]

One thing to know is, if you have a Substack and you quit Substack, doing so will unsubscribe you from every newsletter you might be following there. I didn't know they had linked my subscriptions, which I started long before I started toying around with Substack for myself, to my Substack. So when I deleted my account a couple of months ago when all this conversation started, I had to re-subscribe to the couple of email newsletters I still want to get.
posted by hippybear at 8:32 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]

Not at all surprised to learn that, yet again, Russia funds the operation and promotion of extremist right-wing, pro-Nazi, pro-right-wing-Israel, pro-TERF, pro-racism, anti-vaxxing misinformation sites. Substack is just another network to spread and amplify garbage that eats away at basic civility and human rights.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:33 AM on January 18 [19 favorites]

Jeez, practically anything can get you labeled a Nazi these days. I mean, does simply reiterating the ideas found in Goebbels' diary make you a Nnnn... yeah? Yeah? Oh. OK.
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:38 AM on January 18 [17 favorites]

Interesting substack -> ghost migration post focused on self-hosting, technical details from Molly White: https://citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/. Does not sound all that easy.
posted by advil at 8:45 AM on January 18 [6 favorites]

I am a Gen Xer and I've lived a healthy chunk of my life online and/or tethered to the internet intimiately.

But dang, if it was 1994 again and someone told me that the internet would be a blast but it was definitely going to bring Nazis back to prominence, I could probably have got by with zines or some shit.

The whole damned enterprise just seems that much less appealing when nearly every aspect of it seems to include amplifying Nazis.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:46 AM on January 18 [49 favorites]

What an unpleasant thing to read first thing in the morning.

I mean, it's one thing to know intellectually that the nazis and antivax goons and antitrans hatemongers are out there, but to actually see example after example laid out, with their horrific spew of lies and vileness --- well, it's a bit overwhelming.

And that one who is said that viruses don't exist? Lord jeebus help us.
posted by Saxon Kane at 8:47 AM on January 18 [3 favorites]

This is gross and I applaud people for leaving, but I do worry this is just how the internet is. I hate how centralized corporate media has become, but at least if I pay a bit for WaPo, NPR, Guardian, etc. and get a mix of fact-checked content (some of which I disagree with) I don’t feel like I’m contributing to the “doing my own research” problem. Not to compare with the Nazi problem, but some of my lefty/progressive friends also go hunting for nonsense that aligns with their assumptions and I can’t have a reasonable conversation with them anymore. It’s different substacks and tweets than these of course.
posted by caviar2d2 at 8:55 AM on January 18 [6 favorites]

That was… a lot. Brace yourself.

I recently got a Molly White email that was a sort of interim post between Substack and self-hosting, where she talked about the process of migrating in some detail, including the order in which to migrate your subscriber lists and so on to retain the most useful data. In case you’re trying to do it.

I think this is the web version.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:58 AM on January 18 [6 favorites]

but I do worry this is just how the internet is

There are countries that manage to have laws making group libel prosecutable. All of these social media companies have managed to make tools that avoid presenting neo-Nazi material that would be illegal in Germany, for example. Or, while I disagree with the applications, can more effectively censor political speech in more authoritarian countries. It’s a business decision enabled by the US’ regulatory framework (or lack thereof), not an inevitability.
posted by eviemath at 9:09 AM on January 18 [11 favorites]

To be clear: Molly White migrated to her own self-hosted instance of Ghost, not the Ghost product you can pay them to host for you. Most of the stuff in that article is about what she had to do to get things set up for her own hosting, and you wouldn't need to do if you just used the Ghost-as-a-service product as they sell.

(it costs less - not nothing, but less - if you host it yourself, but the tradeoff is a bunch more work like this)
posted by parm at 9:11 AM on January 18 [4 favorites]

internet's limitless supply of garbage

prior to That Man taking it over, I was in a continuous battle employing just the Twitter block function to curate my feed to something I could safely consume on a daily basis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
Epistemically exploitative bullshit: A Sartrean account
posted by torokunai at 9:18 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]

I do worry this is just how the internet is

It doesn’t have to be. When confronted with this material, the people who run Substack very explicitly and with full reflection announced to the world that they were fine with their site being used this way,
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:38 AM on January 18 [9 favorites]

To be clear: Molly White migrated to her own self-hosted instance of Ghost, not the Ghost product you can pay them to host for you.

Right, but there was a bunch of stuff about how to remove things from Substack while still retaining say, your list of subscribers and their support tiers, which apparently get wiped if you do them out of order, which would apply to a creator whatever platform they were moving to.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:16 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]

I know of a few people who have successfully migrated from Substack to Buttondown. I don't know the details, but supposedly they have a tool that migrates everything, including subscribers and payments.
posted by indexy at 10:45 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]

And that one who is said that viruses don't exist? Lord jeebus help us.

Not to mention her shout-out to the folks who "continue to refute not only virus existence but also the wider concept of pathogens."
posted by nickmark at 10:54 AM on January 18 [3 favorites]

Without wishing to drag on anyone who is just shifting now a reminder that earlier on Substack was paying and promoting TERFs, and asides from being gross in itself support for TERFs is as sure as sign as any that a platform is going to have an ambivalent or supportive attitude towards Nazis later on - an early warning sign to be taken note of for next time.
posted by Artw at 11:01 AM on January 18 [26 favorites]

Family and friends lured me back to FB, where my feed is an unending horror show of antisemitic, sometimes violently so, posts. I wish I could say this surprises me, but it doesn't. Somehow FB has decided that the specific species of antisemitism I need to see is the "all Jews are convert imposters and the real Hebrews are X," where "X" is unsurprisingly the race or ethnicity of the poster. Sometimes it throws in a nominally pro-Palestinian post which includes a call to destroy all Jews (I've seen "Hitler didn't go far enough" comments aplenty, and I've stopped bothering to flag them because they never, ever get taken down).

The thing that surprises me isn't that people suck and are racist, fascist goons. It's that anyone is willing to pay actual hard currency for newsletters which are, in essence, carbon copies of one another, with the same arguments, stated in the same manner, with the same manipulated images and dead-end citations in support. What are people paying for? It's like paying for cable so you can watch the same rerun of Jackass on permanent loop.
posted by 1adam12 at 11:14 AM on January 18 [6 favorites]

They're not really paying for the newsletters in that case, are they? They're paying to support the people who are writing the newsletters. They're paying to ensure that the writers continue to have enough money to keep writing and keep spreading their hateful ideas.

It's like when you donate to a charitable organization and they send you a quarterly newsletter. Except bad.
posted by Jeanne at 11:37 AM on January 18 [8 favorites]

Nazis and cranks are very profitable from a "getting paid to deliver fecal matter to the waiting mouths of morons" perspective.

Are they very profitable though? Are there that many of them?

I’ve figured it’s the cost of moderating the sites that keeps people from squelching them.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:39 AM on January 18

It's like when you donate to a charitable organization and they send you a quarterly newsletter. Except bad.

Yeah, I mean, most of the authors I know who have paid newsletters are basically getting money from them for the same reasons people subscribe to Patreon - the content is part of it, but the feeling that you are supporting someone you want to support is the bulk of the reason.

I’ve figured it’s the cost of moderating the sites that keeps people from squelching them.

It is aaaaaabsolutely the cost of moderation. Any time a company (rather than an individual crank) starts talking about "free speech", you can safely assume that they just don't want to, or can't, budget for the moderation it would require. Every so often the income loss from banning people is what they're afraid of, but usually it's just that moderation is expensive. (The income loss is usually just a fear, and not a reality, because being *un*moderated loses you more business than you're getting from the people you'd ban, but I'm not sure Substack is in precisely that position.)
posted by restless_nomad at 11:42 AM on January 18 [1 favorite]

As the linked article also says moderating for Substack means LOSING revenue, because Nazis are more likely to have a higher paying reader percentage than other writers.

This is literally Substack allowing Nazi content to remain on the platform because that content earns them money.
posted by hippybear at 11:46 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]

Not to mention her shout-out to the folks who "continue to refute not only virus existence but also the wider concept of pathogens."

I would like to invite her to come and lick all of the surfaces in my norovirus bathroom. Come on, it's not as if there's anything real there!
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:47 AM on January 18 [3 favorites]

I mean, the bare minimum that Substack could do is not allow Nazi content to be monetized at all, not by Substack, not by the writers. If moderating the platform is too expensive and you simply have to allow the content to some extent, you do NOT have to allow it to make you or anyone else money. This is where Substack is really failing in my opinion.
posted by hippybear at 11:48 AM on January 18 [1 favorite]

The thing is, Nazis are profitable. And if you have a for profit thing on the internet, then banning Nazis is a bad financial decision.

And, even if the Nazis aren't incredibly profitable, but just the cost of moderating them is greater than the monitary value of the Nazis they're not going to get rid of them.

Yet another reason why capitalism sucks,

Which is why people try to make hosting Nazis a financial negative. You can't appeal to a corporation's better nature or sense of morality, they have neither. Corporations are a sort of slow AI working off a human substrate that are built to make profit and they have no other motives.

Which means we have to keep playing whack a mole with Nazis and focusing on one platform after another to try to get htem out, ideally while trying to create a non-profit oriented form of media that won't have a financial incentive to ignore Nazis.
posted by sotonohito at 12:06 PM on January 18 [4 favorites]

Also they probably just plain don’t dislike nazis. See the prior TERF thing. They are just more Jack Dorsey about liking Nazis than Elon Musk about it.
posted by Artw at 12:08 PM on January 18 [8 favorites]

Also they probably just plain don’t dislike nazis.

Well, that is the problem, isn't it? One would think being seen to give aid and comfort to Nazis would be socially problematic, but apparently it isn't. Or isn't enough.

I do hope the two Substack newsletters I get via email find a new host for their endeavors.
posted by hippybear at 12:14 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]

I know, right? Like, "hey, do you happen to be shitty to trans women" is just not treated as the red flag it really is. It's on the "do you beat your spouse" level, except they are nice enough to just tell you about it. But no, we can totally do business with people like that. And then BAM! Surprise Nazis.
posted by tigrrrlily at 12:17 PM on January 18 [23 favorites]

every single time, too. where anti-trans activists go, regardless of how "liberal" or "leftist" or "centrist" or "apolitical" or "moderate" or "politically homeless" or "independent" they are, nazis and fascists follow, and before long most of those activists and their followers start echoing and laundering that nazi rhetoric.

almost like it's not just a tell or the opening of a pipeline, but an attractor and accelerator.

anyway, substack had this problem many years ago and trans people flagged it and everyone else moved on, ignoring us.

which is different from medium, which at least arrested/slowed its complete fall into bigotry.
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:54 PM on January 18 [14 favorites]

apparently even josh drummond points this out

I want to close with an apology. I really liked Substack. It gave me the chance to write what I like and have my work seen: something every writer wants. I was enamoured to the point of inviting several friends to the platform — some of whom became quite big publishers. But in doing so I ignored the voices of critics, including trans people, who pointed out how Substack had purposely recruited prominent TERFs to the platform, to spread their particularly cruel form of contagious disinformation against some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.

...

Until now, we just chose not to notice.

emphasis mine
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:35 PM on January 18 [9 favorites]

tigrrrlily: "hey, do you happen to be shitty to trans women" is just not treated as the red flag it really is. It's on the "do you beat your spouse" level, except they are nice enough to just tell you about it.

Print, clip, and save for reference, as needed. QFT.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:35 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]

About "is this just what the Internet is like," I'm going to go with yes, it's what people are like.

I'm sure I'm not the only one here, who used to dream (while waiting for those files to download at 1200 baud) about the day when there would be fast connections everywhere, and everyone would have a computer, and they could use those connections to talk to each other, even PUBLISH, without gatekeepers. Disintermediated many-to-many communication would be Power to the People, power to Stick It To The Man.

I had no clue what kinds of things people would use disintermediated publishing to say. And how many takers the worst of them would find.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 4:28 PM on January 18 [8 favorites]

As the linked article also says moderating for Substack means LOSING revenue, because Nazis are more likely to have a higher paying reader percentage than other writers.

First of all the article quotes some very low numbers (low 1000s) for Nazi subscribers. It’s more likely that the cost of even a single moderator would eat the entire profit.

For anti-vaxxers however there is real money in play, to the tune of 250,000 subscribers. Substack losing their cut of that would hurt, moderators or no.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:54 PM on January 18

The only reason hosting Nazis is profitable is because the country's laws are set up that way. I think that you will find Nazism is profitable even in non-capitalist countries. If FB and other global platforms are able to comply with Germany's anti-Nazi legislation in Germany, then they can apply the same anti-Nazi policies globally. We just need to find rules that make internet platforms accountable.

I propose that any company that controls 49% or more of its market be subjected to administrative law. That means the market-dominating company can be challenged in court to justify its decisions. No company, even FB, can survive 367 000 individual court challenges asking FB to justify their decision to not take action to remove hateful content after that content was flagged. What we need is an actualization of our right to reply to Nazis.
posted by SnowRottie at 5:32 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]

I actually find it convenient that I can devote a single brain cell to TERFs, Nazis, anti-vaxxers, virus-deniers, &c., and not bother to distinguish between them.
posted by signal at 6:33 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]

I am curious what the tipping point for the general public was. I heard a year or two ago that Substack was taking money from a suspiciously large number of nazis and antivaxers, but it was one of those that if you tried to tell anyone about it, most of them didn't care and you don't want to be the person that screams about every website that is problematic as well, that would be most of them and people get tired of listening to you.

But then one day, everyone was leaving and finding alternatives.

It reminds me of J. K. Rowling, who I remember hearing was a TERF in 2018 or 2019 but few people outside the trans community cared, and then one day it seems like everyone knows she is a horrible human, but I can't tell what changed with her statements or what she is doing.
posted by Canageek at 6:57 PM on January 18 [8 favorites]

I think in both cases time was a factor. People were rooting for both Substack and Rowling to clean up their acts and eventually it became clear it wasn’t going to happen.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:46 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]

Though I had read Casey Newton's post about taking Platformer off Substack, I hadn't listened to his discussion about it with his cohost on Hard Fork podcast episode that Toddles linked to above. Though I was happy with his decision, I had been a tiny bit disappointed by his reasoning, which was essentially that Substack used to be just a newsletter service, and had become instead a kind of social network, and that change was big enough to be its own trigger point for him. Because for me, the obvious trigger point was that Substack was happy to take money from Nazis, TERFs, and various other hatemongers (let alone that it seems more than feasible that they paid sizeable advances to various hatemongers in their early years).

After listening to the podcast, I understand his point much better, because he puts it into the context of how YouTube and various other content platforms have responded to the same issue as Substack, and just how idiotic Substack's position is from a content moderation perspective. Though I still think that the optimal point to leave Substack was when it was clear that they were a-okay with monetizing transphobia, I can at least now understand the case for this being the final straw for some people.

And ultimately I don't really care why people decide to take a stand against hatemongers, I'm just happy when people do, because there are lots out there who never do.
posted by Kattullus at 2:51 AM on January 19 [5 favorites]

I am curious what the tipping point for the general public was.

For me, I don’t use substack and didn’t follow anyone on substack until the past year or so - and I guess the folks I’m friends with likewise didn’t use substack or subscribe to any substack newsletters - and simply hadn’t heard of either their TERF problem or their adjacent Nazi problem until it got posted about here a couple months ago. (I don’t read everything on Metafilter, so likely missed some earlier comments. But I think our first FPP on the topic was over the past year?)
posted by eviemath at 4:59 AM on January 19

Jkr, bigot, went from dipping her toes in the TERF pool, the almost sorta plausible deniability... To publishing thousands of words defending and expounding her bigotry. Impossible to miss the lighting of that beacon, and so many Potter fans were and are deeply hurt by her actions. Much of the cast of her movies also produced very clear pro-LGBT statements, adding more visibility.
posted by Jacen at 7:48 AM on January 19

I don't think it's necessarily time so much as when non-trans people finally start raising the alarm about something that's not just anti-trans bigotry, that's when people start paying attention.

I'd like to point out that the people who initially celebrated that Substack was going to do something and then quickly realized it was a whole lot of nothing only really spoke about Nazis. And then maybe anti-vaxxers. Anti-trans bigots barely merited a mention in most cases.

To reiterate tigrrrlily: anti-trans bigotry is always a leading indicator, but seemingly for anyone who isn't trans, it's never a dealbreaker.
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:51 AM on January 19 [8 favorites]

“A housekeeping note about Substack and Nazis,” Max Read, Read Max, 19 January 2024
posted by ob1quixote at 12:20 PM on January 19

A lot of my favorite bloggers from SBNation found their way over to substack a few years back. Given their general level of awareness i'm sure this is something that they've thought about for months at this point, but so far non have made a statement or given any hint they may move. One recently moved away from patreon in the last few months and in a decision between ghost and substack, they chose substack.

I guess I'm sharing this to say, fuck it must be hard to try to make a buck in writing/journalism.
posted by midmarch snowman at 3:44 PM on January 19 [1 favorite]