They paid a secret group of writers...
March 18, 2021 8:22 AM Subscribe

"Substack has an editorial policy, but no accountability. And they have terms of service, but no enforcement." Annalee Newitz describes Substack as a scam (and a predatory publishing model). They link to Jude Doyle's discussion of the way the platform promotes TERFs.
posted by yarntheory (139 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite

Substack is just yet another venture that's trying to use other people's content to prop up a business model where they become the necessary middle-person between users and content creators. I keep hoping we'll eventually go full circle back to the blog / self-publishing model.

Yes, it's more difficult to attract an audience by DIY'ing it than to put your content on Substack/Medium/platform-du-jour but it's also not trading off control and giving somebody else a huge amount of control over your content.

Newsletters do seem to be having a moment right now, I briefly considered "should we have a Substack" for the company publication I run (our newsletter process is ... complex) but decided against it b/c of these issues. Someday I hope content producers across the board will just have an allergic reaction against any form of businesses that hope to insert themselves as the content parasite between user and producer. All we end up doing is helping to create a platform that's ultimately going to use their size against us (see Google, Facebook, etc.).
posted by jzb at 8:37 AM on March 18, 2021 [21 favorites]

There are people in the comments pointing out that the only reason that blogs stopped working was that Google Reader went away. I still access the internet through RSS feeds (specifically at feedly.com although there are others), and it's still far and away the best way to see content that you want. That's how I know whenever Metafilter has a new post. :)
If everyone went back to accessing feeds like civilized people, then sites like substack would be redundant.
If I didn't have to create a Substack account to post this there I would, but oh well.
posted by PennD at 8:49 AM on March 18, 2021 [52 favorites]

I am so glad someone posted this here. I respect and admire Annalee, but her piece on Substack is filled with errors and misunderstandings of how and why Substack is doing what they're doing.

It is helpful to think in terms of several analogs: book publishing and older newsletter platforms like MailChimp. Substack is giving one year advances against revenue, to a wide range of writers with demonstrably large followings as bloggers or on social media. Some writers are turning down such offers, because they expect they will make more my keeping the traditional split. Many many many more Substack users are just taking advantage of the free service, like Tinyletter.

Why is substack doing this? OF COURSE to encourage as many writers as possible to move to their newsletter service and either immediately or eventually start a paid component, of which Substack keeps 10%. This is content-neutral marketing for them. Just because any of us doesn't like the views of a particular author on Substack does not therefore mean Substack has a content agenda. They are trying to attract as many prolific, widely-followed authors as they can.

And, uh, yes, they are "another venture that's trying to use other people's content to prop up a business model where they become the necessary middle-person between users and content creators." Wait until you hear about *cough* MetaFilter. Or MailChimp. Or Tumblr. Or Penguin Random House.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:52 AM on March 18, 2021 [23 favorites]

Substack, but with a co-op model. Payout in proportion to your audience time-on-site consumption, cross-network. Still has that nasty capitalism winner-take-all vibe, but at least there's less middleman rent-seeking.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 8:55 AM on March 18, 2021

Just because any of us doesn't like the views of a particular author on Substack does not therefore mean Substack has a content agenda.

So, if there is no content agenda, and there might not be, who are some non-TERFY, left-wing writers who are in the Substack Pro program? I take your point that the existence of TERFY right wingers in the program doesn't prove that the program is only TERFy right wingers, but if it's content neutral, there should be just as much evidence of the non-TERFy left wingers in the program, I would think? Has the author just cherry-picked their data, or do we really not know who the non-TERFy writers are? Because I think it would be telling if we don't.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:01 AM on March 18, 2021 [16 favorites]

at Substack, where their editorial policy is to cover up who writes for them

I don't follow this. Everyone I follow on Substack is clearly identified. Everyone who wants me to follow them, ditto. Who's invisible, besides the people the author deems editors?
posted by doctornemo at 9:02 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Here is Substack's statement on the topic.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:03 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

(Could folks bear in mind that Newitz's pronouns are they/them?)
posted by yarntheory at 9:03 AM on March 18, 2021 [38 favorites]

The problem is that Substack has become the platform of choice for people whose entire identity is tied to being bigots who were "cancelled" for falling afoul of the precise ethics and standards that would have prevented them from making it their playground...if Substack had ever bothered to have them in the first place.

Also, people can whine all they want about Substack being a neutral arbiter, but inaction (and especially the kind we see in their statement) is still taking a stance, which in this case is supporting one of the biggest online harassment crusades currently ongoing.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 9:09 AM on March 18, 2021 [27 favorites]

Who's invisible, besides the people the author deems editors?

I think the emphasis is "who writes for them", i.e. who's getting the quarter-million advances vs. who's being used as rhetorical cover/to draw in new writers.

To directly point to Jude Doyle's example, using Daniel Lavery & Nicole Cliffe as the draw, "I was sold on this platform with the idea that our values and core audiences were in sync. I know for a fact that other colleagues of mine were also enticed to sign on with those two names; somebody may have been enticed with mine, though I doubt I’m Toast-level enticing."

And then funding Glenn Greenwald, Freddie de Boer, Matt Yglesias, Jesse Singal & Graham Linehan ffs. Setting aside people who use the platform but aren't funded by it, that's a pretty noxious crowd. It takes a lot of work to be sufficiently toxic/overt in their transphobia as to get Twitter to ban them.

That's not "we're a neutral platform, we aren't picking sides", that's explicitly an editorial policy involved there.

And I think the key distinction between Substack & Metafilter, per above, is that Substack's funded & angling for expanding to become the primary/sole player in its space. That's what VC companies to a one do. They love the idea of the "two-sided marketplace", especially one where they've grown the market & proceeded to claim a monopoly role (if all goes as planned in fevered pitch-deck meetings).
posted by CrystalDave at 9:15 AM on March 18, 2021 [28 favorites]

Everyone I follow on Substack is clearly identified.

The beef isn’t that things are published anonymously (they aren’t). The accusation is that Substack is framing their service as an allegedly open platform, but then using the proceeds from small-scale contributors to fund active promotion of personalities and viewpoints those contributors might well object to, but refusing to disclose who or what it’s trying to promote.

For comparison, there’s an ethical similarity between this alleged business model and money laundering. Your criminal enterprise owns a bunch of legitimate coin-op laundromats, and all your cocaine money ends up booked as income from the cash business. Likewise, Substack is claimed to have started a publishing outlet to promote specific viewpoints, but is disguising, and deflecting criticism from, its editorial motives behind a smokescreen of innocuous small-time operators. If true, the journalistic implications are every bit as bad as Newitz suggests.

Uber’s only real innovation was to unleash the “we’re just a platform” defense on an unwitting world.
posted by gelfin at 9:29 AM on March 18, 2021 [30 favorites]

As a quick example, I googled "Matt Yglesias Substack," and found his blog. There's absolutely nothing to indicate that he's a paid writer for Substack.

If you are even aware that "Substack Pro" exists, you can't find a list of who's sponsored. You can google "Substack Pro writers" and you'll get this page, but they don't disclose who those writers are.

In other words, Newitz is correct. Even if a few details are off in their post (and who could blame them, since Substack is NOT being transparent), the thrust of the argument that Substack is an ethical mess is completely right.
posted by explosion at 9:38 AM on March 18, 2021 [38 favorites]

Here's a post where someone is trying to figure out who actually is getting paid (or at least was given an offer) by Substack. There's no official list anywhere. It definitely looks like they were interested in attracting folks from the Trans People Keep Attacking My Free Speech For Some Reason crew.
posted by theodolite at 9:42 AM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

They gave money to Yglesias and Linehan.
They are bad.

Using masses of mid-rate bloggers as cover was a neat trick though.
posted by fullerine at 9:44 AM on March 18, 2021 [14 favorites]

I appreciate this post. I had been thinking of starting a Substack, and it does not look good to me now.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:45 AM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

Why is anyone trying to parse out the exact motivations of Substack's management? Do you think it would make things better if they decided to pay bigots large advances because it's good business?
posted by skymt at 9:49 AM on March 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

Anyone that hosts Graham Linehan's bull**** is never getting a single red cent from me. Sorry, good/nice writers on Substack.
posted by signsofrain at 9:55 AM on March 18, 2021 [11 favorites]

So if I'm understanding this correctly, Substack's model appears to be like Uber saying "hey, come drive for us, some of our drivers are really successful and you can be too!" except the drivers they refer to are secretly being paid full-time salaries, and on top of that, some of them are bigots who got fired from Lyft for being abusive.
posted by niicholas at 9:56 AM on March 18, 2021 [38 favorites]

Yeah, it's not really important to me whether Hamish is a secret transphobe or just an amoral tech guy who thought he could make money catering to the Harper's Letter crowd. My guess is a little of both.
posted by theodolite at 10:11 AM on March 18, 2021 [12 favorites]

In a different blog post entitled "Why We Pay Writers", they offer the following:

We see these deals as business decisions, not editorial ones. We don’t commission or edit stories. We don’t hire writers, or manage them. The writers, not Substack, are the owners. No-one writes for Substack – they write for their own publications. We cannot contact their readers without explicit permission, and we make no attempt to influence their content, other than requiring that they adhere to the content guidelines that apply to all writers on Substack (read our stance on content moderation for more). The only thing we ask for in return is a commitment to a minimum publishing frequency so we know they’re giving it an honest shot.

I'm having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around "it's a business decision not an editorial one" thing. I mean, sure, they exercise very little editorial oversight over any of the people who publish on substack, $250K deal or not. But at the same time it feels... disingenous? misleading? ... to claim that the decision of who to offer deals to doesn't constitute at least implicitly some kind of editorial decision. It feels like a somewhat more subtle version of Uber's insistence that their drivers aren't actually employees because they don't tell them when to clock in.

Also, saying they "don't hire writers" feels a little off as well. I imagine they're probably not W-2 employees. But, they're paying these Substack Pro writers for a year's worth of articles and it's not structured like an advance at all (earlier in this blog post they actually contrast the Substack Pro model from their earlier model which was indeed an advance). It seems to be just straight-up pay for labor. That sounds like employment to me.
posted by mhum at 10:11 AM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

(By the way, anyone who would like to use a Substack-esque platform for a blog/newsletter but would prefer to go with an indie who is NOT venture capital-backed, I'm enjoying Buttondown. Indie, privacy-sensitive, and the founder did a free import for me from my previous odd platform; Buttondown offers built-in import from Tinyletter, Substack, and Mailchimp.)
posted by brainwane at 10:14 AM on March 18, 2021 [16 favorites]

There are people in the comments pointing out that the only reason that blogs stopped working was that Google Reader went away. I still access the internet through RSS feeds (specifically at feedly.com although there are others), and it's still far and away the best way to see content that you want.

Reader was big but I think it is important to remember that this wasn’t a random Google product cancellation but part of a coordinated war with Facebook to wall off the open web. Even before the outright fraud in Facebook’s “pivot to video” both companies were putting a lot of pressure on publishers to adopt Facebook/Google+ claiming higher use and ad rates.

I still use a feed reader (NewsBlur.com has a few Mefites) but I think trying to get larger adoption back will involve wider awareness of the degree to which that was a trap. The big gap is how this works for subscriptions or ads - I use exactly one site which offers feeds for paid subscribers, and that seems like a hard problem given how the ad-tech industry has distorted the web.
posted by adamsc at 10:18 AM on March 18, 2021 [14 favorites]

Substack is Bitchute for text.
posted by acb at 10:21 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Why is substack doing this? OF COURSE to encourage as many writers as possible to move to their newsletter service and either immediately or eventually start a paid component, of which Substack keeps 10%. This is content-neutral marketing for them.

Maybe that's their intent, but it's no more neutral, or defensible, than the claim that YouTube's and Facebook's algorithms are content-neutral because they're only seeking to amplify what gets a large audience.

When it comes to companies amplifying hate speech because it makes them money, I'm no happier that those decisions are made by humans.
posted by sgranade at 10:25 AM on March 18, 2021 [24 favorites]

"When it comes to companies amplifying hate speech because it makes them money, I'm no happier that those decisions are made by humans."

I agree, @sgranade. Plus the fact that they are keeping who they are paying, and how much, a secret; does not look good. If Matt Yglesias is getting paid 250K to write for substack; I am not inclined to pay for subscribing to his newsletter. I would rather pay someone who is NOT being paid by Substack. Plus it looks like a place where all the writers who were 'cancelled', for one reason or another to congregate. I, like you, prefer not to support a 'neutral' medium that is enabling this crap.
posted by indianbadger1 at 10:39 AM on March 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

I have such bad timing because I was just gearing up for a Substack, which I will think over now and *sigh* look at alternatives.

But I can explain why this bothers me.

If they were "just" providing a platform, and they were splitting the revenue with morally shitty writers as equally as really great ones, while it would make me a bit uncomfortable, I would perceive it possibly more along the lines of a payment processor with some hosting capabilities or possibly social media, than an editorial platform.

An editorial platform however, deliberately defines a demographic (other than "people who read, with credit cards/Pay pal/whatever") and goes after that audience through the highlighting, promotion, and financial support of content they think will be relevant to that audience.

As long as Substack was not doing that, I put it in the social media/processing category.

But if they are giving advances/money to specific writers, they are making some kind of decision about what content is valuable. Whether it's of value to their business or to their audience (if you can really pretend to divide it like that), it is a value judgement. And I am much, much pickier about where I land my creative efforts and my eyeballs when it comes to editorial direction than payment processing or even social media.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:51 AM on March 18, 2021 [11 favorites]

If anyone's looking for a zero-effort zero-frills publishing platform that costs a few bucks a month, the Hey email service recently launched their own platform.
posted by theodolite at 10:55 AM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

I hate this proliferation of platforms and payment schemes. Everyone just move to Bandcamp.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:58 AM on March 18, 2021 [14 favorites]

Seriously, if you want an ethical internet, instead of "Uber for X", try "Bandcamp for X"

Of course that would just handle the economic fairness side of things. Policing content is a harder issue.
posted by gwint at 11:31 AM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

I genuinely do not understand the appeal of Substack at all. It's a platform for blogs that email me? With the option to charge for those emails? I guess it's nice having a way to directly support writers baked into the platform, but this is a website launched in 2018 trying to solve problems that haven't been a problem since 2002.

It's no surprise they're funneling money to big-name writers to try to make their service seem more valuable, and even less surprising that they have zero interest about the quality of those writers beyond their big names.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:35 AM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

substack apparently paid graham linehan to join their platform.

last month, graham linehan went on a queer dating app, and then published screencaps with trans women's faces on his substack newsletter.

the specific posts are still available and easily googleable, and he has continued to post hateful, anti-trans screeds.

these are a few of substack's content guidelines, emphases are mine:

Hate
Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that call for violence, exclusion, or segregation based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes serious attacks on people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.

Private information
You may not publish or post other people's private information (such as home phone number and address) without their express authorization and permission. We also prohibit threatening to expose private information or incentivizing others to do so.

so when you cis folk claim that this is "content neutral marketing" and they don't have a "content agenda", even as they allow posts from people they paid to remain on their site even as they violate their own content guidelines?

fuck. that. bullshit.
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:40 AM on March 18, 2021 [58 favorites]

I heard of this via's someone's Substack, in which they said they will now look into other options. I'm expecting that everyone else on Substack will be saying the same very soon.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:47 AM on March 18, 2021

wtf! that is some hateful and transphobic bs by graham linehan.
i used to be someone else is correct, linehan violated substack guidelines. keeping linehan as a paid substack writer makes it very clear that the business model is ethics neutral, as in, who cares about ethics.
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:52 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Substack is pretty obviously just OnlyFans for journalists. No shit paying well-known controversialists to be early adopters is part of the scam.
posted by atoxyl at 11:56 AM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

This is content-neutral marketing for them. Just because any of us doesn't like the views of a particular author on Substack does not therefore mean Substack has a content agenda. They are trying to attract as many prolific, widely-followed authors as they can.

But book publishing, which you make the analogy to, isn't just content-neutral marketing. Book publishers have editors and are selective about what they publish. If, hypothetically, Random House published a bunch of transphobic people's transphobic writing, nobody would be surprised to see other writers be repelled by that and not want to do business with Random House (not that many are in a position to refuse to work with such a large conglomerate).

Your argument that they're just trying to make a lot of money without regard for the nature of the content they're paying to put out into the world isn't wrong; it's just a summary of the problem. If you go out and select a group of writers and negotiate to pay them for their words, you're an editor now, no matter how much you want to call yourself something else. If those writers write a bunch of transphobic stuff, you're an editor of a transphobic publication. And if the needs of your business are that you've decided it will pay off to select and pay a bunch of writers with substantial followings who are outspoken about stuff that many normal publishers have decided they don't want to publish, you shouldn't be surprised to discover you're the publisher of a bunch of views that many of us don't hold in particularly high esteem and that we'll judge you for it.

It's part of a persistent pattern of companies that would prefer to call themselves technology platforms instead of publishers because the latter comes with several centuries worth of baggage about the role and responsibility of publishers while the former is about making a lot of money in a content-neutral way. But it's impossible to be content-neutral on the internet (for then you have chosen the path of spammers, scammers, and Nazis, without even getting into the really horrifying stuff), and Substack isn't even pretending to be that because they're outright selecting and paying a group of writers (note: it's not clear to me that Graham Linehan, who has clearly used Substack for repugnant things that would seem to obviously violate their policies, is among that group; does anyone know for sure that he's part of Substack Pro?), which is the exact thing a publisher does. They want to make editorial decisions but not be subject to any criticism for them, and it just can't work that way.
posted by zachlipton at 11:56 AM on March 18, 2021 [33 favorites]

They gave money to Yglesias and Linehan.
They are bad.

I don’t particularly like Matt Yglesias but as far as the content they’re actually putting out these days this feels like the weirdest pair of writers on the list to juxtapose.

(Because Linehan is far worse, to be clear, and actively hateful).
posted by atoxyl at 12:03 PM on March 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

Wait until you hear about *cough* MetaFilter.

You guys are getting paid??
posted by evidenceofabsence at 12:05 PM on March 18, 2021 [17 favorites]

They gave money to Yglesias and Linehan.
They are bad.

I don’t particularly like Matt Yglesias but as far as the content they’re actually putting out these days this feels like the weirdest pair of writers on the list to juxtapose.

(Because Linehan is far worse, to be clear, and actively hateful).

The writers that Jude Doyle lists as being terrible are kind of all over the map in terms of “degreees” of terribleness (not interested in doing a specific ranking, thanks), but I’ve browsed Linehan’s substack and it seems pretty explicitly anti-Trans in its mission statement and form. It’s a poster child for substack’s problems.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:12 PM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

>I appreciate this post. I had been thinking of starting a Substack, and it does not look good to me now.
"In order for evil to win, good people need only do nothing" has sunk to "In order for evil to win, good people need only show up and participate."
posted by k3ninho at 12:12 PM on March 18, 2021

I too am trans and I have to say anyone giving money and/or a platform to Jesse Singal or Graham Linehan can claim to be neutral all they want, they are actively harming me and people like me.

Also Matt Yglesias sucks
posted by an octopus IRL at 12:12 PM on March 18, 2021 [32 favorites]

If the $250K is an advance, how does it work if the writer doesn't bring in that much in a year?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:20 PM on March 18, 2021

Sorry if I wasn't clear: my comparison with book publishing only related to the notion of an advance against (or in lieu of) royalties. According to the Substack Pro writers who have revealed details of their arrangement, they are foregoing the customary 90% of paid revenue for the first year in exchange for a guaranteed amount. (No one will know for sure until the first year is over which deal might have been better for each Pro writer.)

What counts as editorial involvement is a separate issue, as is the willingness any of us might have for our content to be distributed by a company that also works with people we object to. Quickly looking up a few of the folks mentioned in this thread, Jesse Singal's new book is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Matt Yglesias' by Penguin Random House.
posted by PhineasGage at 12:23 PM on March 18, 2021

I feel like I'm the last person left who wants to get content by navigating to the home page of a blog or website. Any site I've worked on for the past decade or so has gotten the vast majority of its traffic through social links to individual pages and next to none from people navigating directly to their site.

Typing in a URL and hitting enter lets me actively seek out information rather than having it pushed to me. It also gives me access to a curated selection of articles and grants me the opportunity to get a sense of who's doing that curation and what they're about.

Apps are fine, but I've yet to see a stand-alone media app that felt like a genuinely necessary alternative to a regular-ass website that doesn't take up space on my device or make a dozen permission requests.

Social media sites are good for pointing me toward articles I might not otherwise have come across, but going to sites that I trust and enjoy provides a far better ratio of signal to noise.

And I need fewer mailing lists in my life. They clutter up my inbox, making it hard to find actual correspondence, and even when I enjoy them, reading them feels more like a chore than something I'm doing by choice.

In short, I'm beginning to suspect that I've become a cranky old woman, and I think I've found the cloud at which I'd like to shake my fist.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 12:33 PM on March 18, 2021 [18 favorites]

If the $250K is an advance, how does it work if the writer doesn't bring in that much in a year?

That's the number for Matt Yglesias (I hadn't seen confirmed $ numbers for anyone else). Here's how it breaks down for him: he charges $8/month to paid subscribers and normally Substack takes 10% (like Bandcamp). With the "Pro" deal, he gets the advance and Substack instead takes 85% for the first year. The break even line for this is 3,500 paid subscribers. If he manages to average more than that, he would have been better off not taking the advance. So there is a bit of a gamble being made by both parties here.
posted by 3j0hn at 12:33 PM on March 18, 2021

I'm gonna admit I don't see the difference between posting along with these people on Substack and posting along with them on Twitter.

1. graham linehan isn't on twitter
2. twitter's business is not, at the moment, directly paying people to tweet on their platform

i admit i don't understand why that's not an apparent difference to you.

---

speaking of other transphobic writers on substack, jesse singal, bari weiss and their "free speech" crowd have effectively shut trans writer julia serano up--she's deleted her twitter presence to avoid his and bari weiss's follower's harrassments.
posted by i used to be someone else at 12:38 PM on March 18, 2021 [14 favorites]

Jesse Singal's new book is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Matt Yglesias' by Penguin Random House.

Yeah, but this is the equivalent of FSG bringing Yglesias, Greenwald, Taibbi, Singal, Linehan, Siskind, de Boer, et al. on board all at once, which would also raise eyebrows (and hackles).

You mentioned that Substack is offering advances to a wide range of authors, but it's hard to tell if that's true given the lack of transparencey about who's getting paid, and it seems an awful lot like Substack has, instead, placed its bet on a very particular range of writers.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 12:49 PM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

speaking of other transphobic writers on substack, jesse singal, bari weiss and their "free speech" crowd have effectively shut trans writer julia serano up--she's deleted her twitter presence to avoid his and bari weiss's follower's harrassments.

Oh no! I just went to her website, though, and through the various links on there, verified that she still has a presence in lots of other locations, like Facebook, Instagram, Patreon, YouTube, and more. I'm really glad that she's still out there and writing. Her books saw me through a very difficult time.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 12:55 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

No, they were picked because they're bigots with a history of siccing their audiences on critics that do big numbers on Twitter.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 1:06 PM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

If I offer a salesman $250,000 and 10% of all their subscriptions that's called working on commission, not an advance. An advance doesn't start paying out until it's paid back.
posted by muddgirl at 1:10 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Didn't realize Weiss was on there, but it tracks. And how did I forget Andrew Sullivan?

It isn't everyone on the platform, but there are a whole lot of similarly minded, shunned-from-polite-society-for-being-a-toxic-shit writers on there, so it isn't surprising that people are getting the impression that Substack might be a well-to-do, long-form, mailing-list-based, UK Spectator-esque equivalent of Gab and Parler.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 1:12 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

If the $250K is an advance, how does it work if the writer doesn't bring in that much in a year?

I think another important aspect of the "Uber for X" business model is that VC money is fake and exists to be spent. If you can't find a reason for why giving Matty a quarter million dollars was a good idea, regardless of whether it makes them any actual money back, you probably aren't built for the "Uber for X" model.

So, unless Matty turns on them or his substack flops to an unignorably embarrassing degree to the point that it tarnishes substack as a platform (as a money maker, not as a content provider), I don't think he'll face any consequences for underperforming.
posted by Reyturner at 1:14 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

> i used to be someone else: "1. graham linehan isn't on twitter"

To be even more clear, Linehan isn't on twitter any more. He used to be on there but his completely out-of-control transphobia got him booted off the platform.
posted by mhum at 1:15 PM on March 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

...and his marriage.
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:30 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

"Company X pays money to people who hate and harass trans people," is NOT some kind of neutral, hey-it's-about-profit, free speech amirite? business model. By definition, it can't be. Hate is not neutral.

It's my kid, and lots of other people I care about, that are put in danger by that shit. Who have to worry about violence from people pumped up on the hate these writers push. Violent words lead to violent actions, and telling your readers, over and over, that one group of people is sick, is wrong, is dangerous, is perverse, leads others to commit violence, to discriminate against them, to legislate against them. Tons of anti-trans bills are coming in front of state legislatures this year.

So yeah: I really really want to know what the hell Substack is thinking, and whom they are paying. Because it's looking a whole lot like they want to profit off of shit that gets people killed.
posted by emjaybee at 1:35 PM on March 18, 2021 [28 favorites]

If I offer a salesman $250,000 and 10% of all their subscriptions that's called working on commission, not an advance. An advance doesn't start paying out until it's paid back.

Semantics. When your general model is $0 + 80% of revenue for paid writers, $250,000 in exchange for a lower commission rate is effectively an advance.
posted by explosion at 1:38 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's not "effectively an advance" if the structure changes based on the calendar and not based on sales.
posted by muddgirl at 1:47 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Newitz's assertion is that Yglesias could have sat on his butt for the first year, signed up no subscribers, and would still make $250k. Maybe they are wrong. We don't know because Substack keeps the details secret and so do the writers.
posted by muddgirl at 1:48 PM on March 18, 2021

Oh, look, Matt Yglesias just laid out the details of his deal.
posted by PhineasGage at 1:48 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Sorry, would still make 250k and switch to the higher commission structure the following year.
posted by muddgirl at 1:49 PM on March 18, 2021

Oh, look, Matt Yglesias just laid out the details of his deal.

Where? Can you link to the specific tweet where he lays out the details of his deal?
posted by muddgirl at 1:51 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Oh, look, Matt Yglesias just laid out the details of his deal.

Does it also explain why he keeps on participating in attacks on trans people?
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 1:53 PM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

Does it also explain why he keeps on participating in attacks on trans people?

Does he?
posted by atoxyl at 1:57 PM on March 18, 2021

No, they were picked because they’re bigots with a history of siccing their audiences on critics that do big numbers on Twitter.

This framing suggests that there was someone at Substack cackling away about “Ha Ha Ha! Let’s give the bigots a platform, that will make us money and help them attach people!” This is almost 100% likely to be false; at a minimum, it doesn’t really square with Substack initially reaching out to folks like Jude Doyle to get them to come onboard as well (unless you want to believe that the founders were out to play a really devious long game with a very specific niche target). Rather, Substack cares about getting content creators -of any size- who have passionate audiences and will pay money to follow them. People who have passionate followings have the ability to sic those followings on other people, and Substack doesn’t want to deal with the implications of that. That’s the end of it. They just don’t care about these issues and will avoid caring until they have no other option.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:57 PM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

Does he?

atoxyl: context. yglesias hasn't been anti-trans on the level of singal, herzog, linehan, and greenwald, but he has a tendency to have a lot really bad takes because he likes being contrarian to minorities.

for instance, here he is tweeting approvingly of lee fang, and denying the rise of anti-asian sentiment.
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:10 PM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

Well, the specific branding of “I couldn’t say what I really wanted at [old publication] but now you can get me unfiltered and uncensored” is obviously part of what they’re going for here. But no, it’s not about building a Substack army, it’s about who they think will draw eyeballs (and they are probably correct).
posted by atoxyl at 2:11 PM on March 18, 2021

that still doesn't explain why linehan, among others, are still on substack even though they clearly violate their content policy with outright bigotry

amorality and neutrality, in this case, are indistinguishable, especially if some of the bigots are actually getting paid.
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:12 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

amorality and neutrality, in this case, are indistinguishable, especially if some of the bigots are actually getting paid.

I think maybe you mean something more like “amorality” and “sin” are indistinguishable in this case? I would say that Substack’s default position is amorality, and that that default position, in the modern internet, has been shown to be compromised because of what it permits you to abide. Either way, substack is in a bad position if they are having to issue clarifying blog posts, and anyone going along with it needs to think about that. (Yglesias, for instance, could take his newsletter anywhere, or even to his own dang website if he wanted. The thing about being an influencer is that you do, in fact, have influence.)
posted by Going To Maine at 2:26 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

...and his marriage.

Which is how he finally managed to actually improve a cis woman's life.
posted by acb at 2:28 PM on March 18, 2021 [15 favorites]

atoxyl: context. yglesias hasn't been anti-trans on the level of singal, herzog, linehan, and greenwald, but he has a tendency to have a lot really bad takes because he likes being contrarian to minorities.

I guess I did know he was part of the letter thing. I’m just not sure I can recall him sticking his nose into trans issues directly which - well, that’s good, it’s exactly what Jesse Singal doesn’t do.

for instance, here he is tweeting approvingly of lee fang, and denying the rise of anti-asian sentiment.

I... am not sure I think his statement here is beyond the pale for that matter but that conversation should be another thread, because the whole concern I have with that discourse in the the first place is the stuffing of multiple intersecting issues into one bag. He’s certainly not the first person I’d go to for insight about it, though.
posted by atoxyl at 2:32 PM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

Yglesias pretty much confirms what Doyle's and Newitz's original accusations were - Substack wanted to attract controversial voices by offering them "no downside" commission structures. No one called it "charity" except Yglesias himself. What they are saying is that makes Substack a publication.

Substack wants writers to believe they are paying Substack a 10% fee while it's the other way around - Substack pays most writers a 90% commission to get their readers to subscribe to a subscription plan.
posted by muddgirl at 2:35 PM on March 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

Among those who acknowledge they have similar Substack Pro deals is MeFi fave Anne Helen Petersen.
posted by PhineasGage at 2:42 PM on March 18, 2021

The suggestion that Substack is "just" picking the most profitable writers to give deals to is far too generous, IMO. If that were the case, they might pick different writers. Ryan Broderick has a good take:

While many of the controversial writers that are suspected to be part of the Substack Pro program are hugely popular, the most popular user on Substack is Heather Cox Richardson, a 59-year-old history professor at Boston College. Richardson, as of December, had 350,000 readers on Substack. Her newsletter is on track to earn over $1 million this year ... if Substack wanted to really optimize, they’d recruit more writers like Richardson, who publishes an extremely thoughtful, but very straightforward newsletter about history that’s geared towards middle-aged women.

I see no reason to be generous to Substack. Amid this brouhaha, their CEO tweeted, "Defund the thought police." Even amorality would be an improvement on this shit.
posted by adrianhon at 2:47 PM on March 18, 2021 [39 favorites]

Over to ButtonDown I go, or to one of the alternatives mentioned above.

My newsletter has no commercial potential and will forever remain free of charge, but I will not give a single click more to what seems like an especially hateful pyramid scheme.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 2:49 PM on March 18, 2021

I've been on Buttondown for a couple of years now and it's served me well. The owner seems to be a nice guy and when I ran into bugs or problems, he replied to my emails promptly!
posted by adrianhon at 2:53 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Shouldn't everyone who wants to undermine Substack start a free newsletter there, which generates no revenue and saddles them with increasing server, bandwidth, and coding costs? (grin)
posted by PhineasGage at 2:54 PM on March 18, 2021

The fact that writers feel they have more opportunity to be critical of, and more space to decide whether to do business with, a brand new newsletter company than the handful of giant book publishers who dominate the industry doesn't seem like a gotcha. If you really think someone's a hypocrite for doing a deal with Trump's publisher (or an imprint thereof) while having concerns about working with Substack, ok, but that's a critique that boils down to "you can't have concerns about anything as long as you participate in capitalism."
posted by zachlipton at 2:55 PM on March 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

Nah, they'd probably be able to monetize the sharp rise in the user base
posted by chavenet at 2:55 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think maybe you mean something more like “amorality” and “sin” are indistinguishable in this case? I would say that Substack’s default position is amorality, and that that default position, in the modern internet, has been shown to be compromised because of what it permits you to abide.

i said what i said.

substack is framing this as "neutrality".
their behavior is "amoral".

i suppose the argument could be made that it's "immoral" too.
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:58 PM on March 18, 2021

Ah! I would baseline frame substack’s behavioral as “amoral” and just ignore their claims to anything, but I do not think these are real disagreements.

I see no reason to be generous to Substack. Amid this brouhaha, their CEO tweeted, “Defund the thought police.” Even amorality would be an improvement on this shit.

abjure abjure abjure
posted by Going To Maine at 3:43 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

A huge part of being an editor is in what you leave out and how you choose to channel attention. In that sense, MetaFilter has a strong and transparent editorial policy: the mods don't need to spellcheck or move commas to make their editorial stances known!

I appreciate the way Newitz's discussion makes the cumulative weight of individual choices by the owners of a platform visible.
posted by yarntheory at 4:28 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Seems like it would have been trivial to check "Has this person been banned from Twitter?" as an extremely low bar, but they didn't do it, which makes it deliberate.
posted by benzenedream at 6:11 PM on March 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

Seems like it would have been trivial to check "Has this person been banned from Twitter?" as an extremely low bar, but they didn't do it, which makes it deliberate.

I’m finally catching up on all of the background reading linked here, and it seems like there’s a running premise that many of us (including myself) may have unthinkingly bought in to: that Graham Linehan is a Substack Pro. This doesn’t seem to be the case. Doyle mentions Linehan (rightfully) as someone pretty obviously using the platform for gross activities and Substack is to some degree profiting from those activities, but there’s no evidence that he was given some sort of sweet deal to come aboard. Linehan is, quite possibly, making money from his gross newsletter -and Substack is deriving some benefit from it- but the notion that he simply signed up does, I think, substantially changes the tenor of the discussion - even if it hardly puts the platform in the right. (If someone has evidence of him as a Pro, I’d love to see it.)
posted by Going To Maine at 7:42 PM on March 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

Substack, in the previously-linked statement on the matter:

The group includes a diverse set of viewpoints – though none that can be reasonably construed as anti-trans – and a range of backgrounds.

Emphasis added to the bit that easily proves that Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi have zero credibility.
posted by bixfrankonis at 7:59 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

That isn’t evidence that Graham Linehan is a Substack Pro. That’s a weak sauce statement (apparently Michael Tracy might be a Substack Pro?), but it doesn’t provide any evidence about Linehan, who is only part of the discussion because a) he’s using Substack and is terrible, and b) was mentioned by Doyle.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:03 PM on March 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

I haven't seen any indication that Graham Linehan is a Substack Pro, but I can understand the confusion given that the list of Substack Pros is secret, the site is explicitly recruiting and doing special deals with a certain group of writers (and Jesse Singal was explicitly recruited but says he wasn't offered a special deal), and the site's become a place where a bunch of transphobes have gone. Substack's position is something like "we're a platform where anyone can sign up, but they have to follow our rules, but we don't necessarily enforce them even if Linehan used his newsletter in ways obviously incompatible with the rules and basic human decency, so we're not really morally responsible for what anyone does on the platform, but also we hand-pick a bunch of writers who we paid money to ourselves and won't tell you who they are." If you say you exercise editorial control by selecting and hiring some writers, and they're indistinguishable from the rest of the writers on the site, people are going to naturally fault you, fairly or not, for what other writers do too.

I’m not saying Substack specifically set out to cater to transphobes, but it so happens that due to the nature of our society, if your site is geared around finding writers who "sometimes those who engender the fiercest opposition," have more than worn out their welcome at normal media companies with colleagues and HR departments, yet still have a decent number of quite loyal followers who will pay real money to read their writing, and you don’t really enforce any sort of editorial policy even if you claim to have one, you’re going to be fishing in the bit of the pool that’s well-stocked with transphobes.
posted by zachlipton at 8:33 PM on March 18, 2021 [17 favorites]

Also, Greenwald, who was seemingly offered a Pro deal that he didn't take, today used Substack to publish this nonsense, a newsletter that contains a number of things that are, at best, gatekeeping attacks against specific trans people, which I'd imagine many would argue "can reasonably be construed as anti-trans."
posted by zachlipton at 9:02 PM on March 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

@EmilyVanDerWerff:

The Substack thing has been going on a week now, and the assorted folks who are so mad about being told their actions support transphobia STILL won’t say so much as “Idk, this guy seems like he sucks” about noted anti-trans bigot (and Substack publisher) Graham Linehan.

I have been told MULTIPLE stories from people who took concerns about Linehan to Substack’s management and were stonewalled.
IT IS USEFUL TO THIS COMPANY to have a transphobe on the platform if that transphobe makes them money.
This is the clearest case imaginable.

These range from small-time publishers to people in the Pro program, by the way. The most anybody was told was “We’re investigating.”
How much investigation do you need to do with this guy? He’s a bigot, and his newsletter ALREADY VIOLATES Substack’s code of conduct.

posted by Going To Maine at 9:26 PM on March 18, 2021 [16 favorites]

Seems like one thing people are getting bogged down with here is intent vs impact. We can't know what is in the heart of Substack, nor is that especially important. What they do, and their impact, is important:

They pay (a few) people to write. Traditionally, we call that 'publishing'.
They were not upfront about that, and continue to refuse to share which writers they pay. This shields them from accountability for the fact that
They pay some writers to write pieces that are offensive.
They also allow writers who have hateful views and harmful behaviors to publish through them, and refuse to be transparent about if they are also paying those people (see above).

It doesn't matter if these guys have transphobia in their hearts, they are providing a platform for it, possibly paying for it, and definitely profiting off it.

It also doesn't matter if they believe they are a publisher: they are picking writers, and paying them, to write. Even those they don't pay are subjected (inconsistently) to content moderation, ie editing. Sure they're skimping on editorial costs but, they are publishing.
posted by latkes at 10:34 PM on March 18, 2021 [15 favorites]

if Substack wanted to really optimize, they’d recruit more writers like [Heather Cox] Richardson, who publishes an extremely thoughtful, but very straightforward newsletter about history that’s geared towards middle-aged women.

What the actual fuck? Because she herself is a middle-aged woman, her work can't possibly have any appeal outside of her own demographic? She's a historian who brings her vast knowledge of 19th century America to explaining (brilliantly) the current political context, and she has a large and appreciative audience. This comment makes it sounds like she spends her time talking about menopause and cats. It's unbelievably disrespectful.
posted by jokeefe at 10:51 PM on March 18, 2021 [26 favorites]

An edit for above: I'm obviously not the only person who called this out, as the paragraph in the original article has been rewritten. But still, he said it, even if he erased it later.
posted by jokeefe at 10:54 PM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

I didn't expect to be persuaded by Newitz's allegation that Substack is a scam, but yes; yes it is; and that's why their two–tier program is secret: the scam lies in leading people to believe that Big(gish) Name Writers found Substack's platform so gosh–darn attractive that they were willing to accept its standard terms; but we now know that was not the case.

It's not like a traditional publisher with more than one imprint, though: it's a traditional publisher combined with a vanity press that tells its authors of course you pay to get published that's how it's always done. That's pretty much inexcusable, even though the standard Substack deal isn't itself predatory. Substack's authors are making decisions based on the perceived actions of others, but it now turns out they were deceived.

I can't comment on the transphobia, but even as a cisgendered male I have to say that it doesn't pass the sniff test. And it wouldn't even really matter, because in my experience pretty much every platform that doesn't actively police bigotry is subsequently found to support it.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:11 AM on March 19, 2021 [14 favorites]

jokeefe: You're right, that was a disrespectful way of putting it, I should've noticed better.

In all of this, Substack is only following the trail laid down by Medium. In one of its many previous iterations, it used to pay well-known writers and journalists a lot to post on the platform, often with very nice illustrations and possibly editorial support. The fees I was told about were equal to the biggest newspapers and magazines in the world. But their posts were not marked as having been paid for by Medium, and I don't think the information was publicly shared elsewhere.

The end result is that a lot of people reading those articles or visiting Medium.com may have thought, "Wow, famous writer [X] posts here for free and they featured it on the home page! Clearly they're a smart operator, maybe I should also start writing here for free, too."

I found it very distasteful at the time; I don't think they do it in the same way any more, though. Also, it didn't generate as much blowback because they didn't commission utter assholes.
posted by adrianhon at 2:24 AM on March 19, 2021 [10 favorites]

zachlipton: "Also, Greenwald, who was seemingly offered a Pro deal that he didn't take, today used Substack to publish this nonsense, a newsletter that contains a number of things that are, at best, gatekeeping attacks against specific trans people, which I'd imagine many would argue "can reasonably be construed as anti-trans.""

Everytime I think Greenwald is the worst person ever, he goes and says something even worse.
posted by octothorpe at 5:40 AM on March 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

However—and this is really the point I want to make, the reason why I am walking you all through this Substack mishegas—this is also how book publishing works. And yet many of the writers who are leaving Substack because they offer money to objectionable writers also have contracts with publishers who offer money to objectionable writers.

This is basically the "Yet you participate in society! Curious." argument. Jude Doyle has an alternative which allows them to pay the bills, so they're leaving substack. If they had no other way to stay housed and fed, they probably wouldn't.

How many of us work for employers whose values align substantially with our own? How many of us can think of a way to make a living doing only things that align with our values? I know some people who live like that. It's tough and precarious and you need to have the right personality because your housing and finances are going to be very limited and uncertain forever and if you catch some bad breaks you're going to depend on charity clinics and luck. Also you need to have, like, three jobs and it helps if you have a lot of charisma. It's not impossible if it's what you truly want but it's very difficult.

~~
I feel like we're heading a little bit back to the bad old days of metafilter, perhaps because so many of the more vocal trans mefites seem to have left.

It may seem cutely funny and ironic and whatever to have all these contrarian fifty-ish white guy anti-trans bloggers out there making lots of money and getting lots of clicks, but to actual trans people I guarantee you that it's very scary and depressing, and I know because I'm one. I've been watching things get worse and more dangerous for trans people in the UK for years now and the spillover is definitely here.

These people are well-actually-ing trans kids into suicide, because that's what happens when you organize popular support for anti-trans laws and policies. Trans kids can't live as their actual genders, trans kids get denied medical care and puberty blockers, trans kids have to see the limited progress we've made in the past few years rolled back. And that's how you get a high trans suicide rate.

Trans people kill themselves because of this stuff. If you follow a lot of trans people on twitter, you see that people try very hard to survive but employment precarity and harassment and the constant stream of hate wears people down, and then one morning there's a notification that so and so killed herself last night.

You need to understand this. When these men do their stalking and harassment and so on, it's fun for them and maybe it's kind of fun for you and it generates lots of clicks and money, but it's really a way to immiserate and kill a bunch of people you don't know who are very far away and live lives worse than yours.

It also gets me because it's so phony. None of these people's lives are impacted in any way by trans people. Trans people are just a thing for them to use to make a culture war - a good thing to use, because most people don't care. Trans people easily cease to be people and get turned into symbols about whom everyone can have an opinion precisely because you don't know any of us. And you don't care to, because if you did you'd have to stop bloviating and back-patting.

Trans people do not have to be marginalized. Before and outside colonialism, trans people have existed in relative peace with stable social roles. But we've created a society where we take it for granted that to be trans is to be marginal, hated, physically endangered, laughed at and perpetually a talking point for a lot of worthless rich white people.
posted by Frowner at 7:50 AM on March 19, 2021 [84 favorites]

Re. Heather Cox Richardson--Broderick didn't actually edit the newsletter. The part that adrianhon quoted is still there. Also, Broderick may have taken that characterization from this article in the New York Times, which states: "Many of those newly energized Americans are women around Dr. Richardson’s age, 58, and they form the bulk of her audience." So...perhaps that's not such an outrageous characterization after all?
posted by zeusianfog at 3:35 PM on March 19, 2021

Noah Smith agrees with some of what Newitz says and not other parts.
posted by doctornemo at 6:23 AM on March 20, 2021

I don't know who Noah Smith is but most of his defenses are wrong.

"It's exactly like a book advance" while describing nothing like a book advance. Again what's he's describing is called a commission structure and Pro writers can choose to take a salary with a lower commission.

Second book deals are not secret. Publishers advertise who they give deals to (you can subscribe to I believe it's called Publishers Lunch to get notified in near real time) and while the exact numbers of the deal are perhaps not shared there is a euphemistic code that everyone knows.

Third I am gathering from the way writers are tiptoing around their Pro deals that Substack has asked writers to keep the details of their Pro deals secret, which is not something publishers ask of the authors they publish. I am excited to be told I'm wrong about this last fact!
posted by muddgirl at 6:57 AM on March 20, 2021 [10 favorites]

We have already gone back and forth about pont 1 so I won't repeat. You are wrong on point two: not all book deals are announced, and some are kept secret for all kinds of personal and competitive reasons. On point three, both Substack leadership and several of the individual writers have publicly stated that it was entirely up to the writers whether to announce the existence or the terms of their deal.
posted by PhineasGage at 7:27 AM on March 20, 2021

I agree, let's not go back and forth.

Noah Smith says right in his essay that joining Substack Pro would require him to quit his day job. So did they require a certain number of posts per week? Or was it a straight up non-compete? He doesn't disclose any details of this totally not secret Substack Pro deal that was offered to him.
posted by muddgirl at 7:52 AM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

Most likely: his paying employer, Bloomberg, prohibits their staff writers from writing for other outlets, too.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:04 AM on March 20, 2021

Well is writing for Substack Pro a job or not? Noah Smith tries to compare Substack Pro to traditional book publishing, but if I publish a book with Macmillan I don't work *for* Macmillan.
posted by muddgirl at 8:21 AM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

He seemed pretty reasonable even if I didn't agree with everything he said but he didn't respond to the problem of hateful content which is one of the central problems
posted by latkes at 8:55 AM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thank you, adrianhon.
posted by jokeefe at 12:10 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

He seemed pretty reasonable even if I didn't agree with everything he said but he didn't respond to the problem of hateful content which is one of the central problems

Given that he supports eugenicists and other neoreactionary thinkers, of course he wouldn't - that would be shitting where he eats.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:44 PM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

You are wrong on point two: not all book deals are announced, and some are kept secret for all kinds of personal and competitive reasons.

Yes, but is doing so the standard, or is it the exception? If most book deals are openly announced (which wouldn't be surprising, as a deal announcement is a form of advertising), then the fact that some deals aren't doesn't change the fact that disclosure is the traditional course, and that nondisclosure can, in such a setup, look potentially questionable barring a good justification. Something doesn't need to be perfectly applicable to be the standard.

On point three, both Substack leadership and several of the individual writers have publicly stated that it was entirely up to the writers whether to announce the existence or the terms of their deal.

Which misses the point - when the whole issue is "you shouldn't be hiding that you're making deals to pay writers to come on board", arguing that it was up to the writers to disclose is passing the buck. Not to mention that at this point we can't trust the statements that are being made, since both sides have a vested interest in not admitting that Substack was secretly making deals with writers at this point.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:04 PM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

Noah Smith (Twitter) is a Bloomberg columnist.
posted by doctornemo at 6:56 PM on March 20, 2021

Noah Smith (Twitter) is a Bloomberg columnist.

Yes, and he's been an open proponent and defender of neoreactionary ideology, which tends to be more than a little bit bigoted. The fact that he chose to ignore the elephant in this particular room called bigotry says a lot about where he stands.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:40 PM on March 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

You are wrong on point two: not all book deals are announced, and some are kept secret for all kinds of personal and competitive reasons.

The publishing world isn't really a good analogy here. Authors don't generally get 85% of sales: my browsing indicates that there are lots of different rates in different markets but 10-20% of book sales is typical. So the standard deal for book publishers is comparable to Substack Pro (although those authors get a very large bonus as well as the equivalent of royalties); there isn't a real equivalent to regular Substack, except perhaps vanity presses.

And I reiterate what I said earlier: no reputable publisher would degrade its imprints by offering some authors the opportunity to have their book published under the terms of a vanity press. Their imprints are an investment; they make editorial decisions to preserve the value of those investments. Substack is doing the opposite of this: it pretends it's making no editorial decisions (like a vanity press), but it's secretly raising the perceived value of the platform by paying high(er) profile authors to publish their works there.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:50 PM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

This thread's use of "secret" is amusing. Substack did not announce a slate of Pro users, for reasons they eventually explained quite clearly in their own blog post. Meanwhile several of those users - with Substack's explicit prior agreement - publicly discussed their deals, while some others who turned them down also publicly discussed that. Seems odd to label any of that as "secret" or believe a private company has to check with MetaFilter before implementing their own marketing and promotion plans.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:56 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

The point of the use of the word "secret" is because SubStack was engaging in exerting editorial control by choosing to offer deals to specific writers without engaging in the other side of that and disclosing which voices were the ones that they were giving their imprimatur to. The fact that they didn't tell their writers that they had to keep their deals mum doesn't change that they hid through lies of omission that they were giving certain individuals and their voice their official imprimatur (because that's what entering into a deal with someone that isn't offered to all does.)

And I'm sorry, but SubStack's self-serving statement on the matter is contradictory. If you are so "proud" of the people you're looking to enter into a financial relationship with, why hide their names? (The answer, of course, is that as the names of people who got offers have come to light, it's clear that several are people that SubStack doesn't want to be visibly tied to, but would like to pull in their fanbases.) Beyond that, the simple reality is that the culture is shifting as marginalized voices gain purchase, and a lot of free speech "absolutist" canards are being revealed to be empty. If SubStack wants to create a space for contrarian voices who take potshots at the dispossessed, that's their prerogative - but we are not obligated to be silent about it.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:18 PM on March 20, 2021 [13 favorites]

People want to know, not really unreasonably, whether Substack explicitly recruited and cut special deals with writers who have pretty quickly gotten down to the business of using the site to publish stuff that's transphobic and has served to direct a stream of harassment at others. That says something about who Substack is and what they're building, which particularly matters given Substack's growing role when it comes to disseminating journalism and The Discourse.

Substack would like to have it both ways—they want the revenue from these writers without any responsibility for what they're disseminating—and so they want to obscure who they've gone out of their way to recruit to their site for fear people will judge them for it and question their editorial policy choices.

They need not run their marketing and promotion plans by MeFi, no, but if their marketing and promotion plans involve significant efforts to recruit, say, Glen Greenwald and Jesse Singal to their site to write the kind of stuff Greenwald and Singal have been writing on Substack lately, the very least you can do is not keep repeatedly dismissing the people who care and have some concerns about that.
posted by zachlipton at 9:32 PM on March 20, 2021 [16 favorites]

or believe a private company has to check with MetaFilter before implementing their own marketing and promotion plans.

The post is on this very topic -- the marketing and promotion plans of Substack. This seems like a bad faith effort to shut down discussion.
posted by benzenedream at 10:07 PM on March 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

One deleted. PhineasGage, please check the community guidelines . You've explained your position; now you need to check your privilege, and let the conversation continue without claiming too much space or shutting down other voices, especially those from marginalized groups who have a lot more skin in this game.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:15 AM on March 21, 2021 [4 favorites]

And I reiterate what I said earlier: no reputable publisher would degrade its imprints by offering some authors the opportunity to have their book published under the terms of a vanity press.

Counterexample: Penguin Classics, whose lineup include's Morrissey's autobiography and/or his wretched novel.
posted by acb at 9:02 AM on March 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Penguin was pandering to Morrissey by publishing his autobiography under their “Classic” imprint, but it wasn't a vanity press deal AIUI: they made their money from sales, not author contributions.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:19 PM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Substack Is a Scam in the Same Way That All Media Is

There may be something distasteful about the fact that Substack benefits from journalists’ financial desperation. But ultimately the core problem here is not that a newsletter platform is helping cash-strapped writers squeeze some tips out of their Twitter followings. The problem is that legions of talented journalists are going underemployed, even as statehouses across the country are going under-covered. Forcing Substack to disclose every contract that it has ever offered will not free us from the scam that is the modern media industry. Only publicly financing the Fourth Estate can do that.
posted by mecran01 at 2:26 PM on March 24, 2021

Internet Encyclopedia Brown and sometime troll / Slate writer has just signed up with Substack Pro, and she talks about it a bit in her initial newsletter: “Welcome to Trashberg”

In building Substack Pro, as my friend Brian Feldman points out in his own excellent newsletter, the company made the active decision to privilege certain voices that had won followings on other platforms, while remaining entirely agnostic about how those followings were won in the first place. Substack says these deals are business decisions, not editorial ones. To the extent that there is a coherent distinction to be made, the upshot is that Substack, in chasing high-follower media personalities, has essentially outsourced editorial considerations to the other platforms—Twitter, mainly—where those reputations were cultivated. I assume that's why I'm here. It's also why so many woke-bashing, gender-critical culture warriors are here. Substack is longform media Twitter, for good and for ill.

posted by Going To Maine at 2:36 PM on March 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

While reading this, I briefly daydreamed about basically making an open source clone of Substack, like, self-hosted, so writers could put it up on their own servers, so no cut would be going to Substack. (Maybe a cut to developers? Dunno.) That would help writers get away from Substack.

Unfortunately, that would also give tools to the assholes.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:01 PM on March 24, 2021

Grace Lavery has joined Substack Pro, and relaunched her substack as The Wassock’s Review, starting with a typically sharp take on the issue of anti-trans substack writers, focusing on Graham Linehan.
posted by Kattullus at 6:51 AM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Lavery has also written a second post, An Explanation and some Rules on why she joined Substack Pro, Graham Linehan's ongoing harassment, Substack's failure to enforce its terms, deplatforming, and other topics.
posted by zachlipton at 10:32 AM on March 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

Lavery has been banned from commenting on her own posts.

Which … the fuck Substack?!
posted by Kattullus at 2:43 PM on March 28, 2021

"Woopsy" seems to be the cause, but I still have a little "meet the new boss, it's the same as the old boss" about it.
posted by rhizome at 5:16 PM on March 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Money is nice, but entering into a business arrangement with people that don't care if you have human rights or not never ends well.
posted by benzenedream at 5:18 PM on March 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

Nathan Tankus explains why he is leaving Substack:

Having produced a hit with Substack, I was willing to be a positive “success story” for the website’s PR. I was happy to be featured by their podcast. Over time however, my willingness to contribute to Substack’s positive image has dropped markedly. Major journalists and opinion writers with pre-existing platforms began to leave large publications with editorial oversight for Substack. They largely or fully attributed their departures to “illiberalism” or persecution because of their “ideology”. Their immediate Substack output tended to revolve around the supposed excesses of “woke culture” and “cancel culture”. These writers seem to treat obscure internet controversies as far more important than the actual life-threatening crises we’ve been experiencing for the past year. It began to be embarrassing to be associated with “Substack”, when this is the reputation they’ve been taking on.

[...]

More personally, I can’t ignore that Substack is particularly benefiting from and encouraging a culture of anti-trans bigotry. They’ve done this at a time when there is a powerful movement to roll back the bodily autonomy and healthcare of trans people. Just last week, Arkansas Senate passed a law banning gender-affirming healthcare for trans kids, including reversible (and medically recommended) puberty blockers and hormones. If the governor’s veto is overruled, this will kill and irrevocably harm trans children — and it is the point. This year, over 80 similar ‘model bills’ aiming to roll back trans rights and outlaw treatment have been proposed in numerous state legislatures.

Some of Substack’s most prominent writers are contributing to this climate of bigotry. Other prominent Substack writers are feeding it by disingenuously defending their commentary and coverage of trans issues. Their contribution is all the more troubling coming from writers who style themselves as “center-left”, thus legitimizing bigotry that would otherwise be associated with Trump and the Republican Party. This is exactly how transphobia entered the mainstream in the United Kingdom, leading to a harsh rollback of trans rights there.

Given this growing ecosystem of anti-trans writers and their defenders, I can’t in good conscience continue doing business with Substack. My fiancé is trans, the professional editor I hired to edit Notes on the Crises is trans, and many other people I care about are trans as well. I hope that I would still leave Substack even if I didn’t know any trans people personally. However, the reality is that I’m much more aware of the pain this upsurge of criminalization is causing trans people than I otherwise would be. I know all too well the ignorant folly of the arguments that are being used to sow doubt, confusion and fear among non-trans people. I would never take part in propagating these dangerous canards, and can’t associate myself with people making a career from it.

posted by kliuless at 10:10 PM on April 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

Something seems to have happened in the last 24 hours, where Singal turned from "associating me with anti-LGBTQ laws that cite my work is a threat against me" to "OMG these bills are horrible, it's such a mystery as to how they came to pass." I doubt it's actually a good-faith pivot, largely because Singal (and Greenwald/Weiss et al) owe the entirety of the careers and popularity on being bad-faith actors, so I'm wondering if they've exposed themselves to lawsuits or other legal action and are now trying to squirm out of the consequences of their behavior.

If so, I wish them the worst of luck and hope that if they go down, they take Substack with them.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 6:31 AM on April 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

Ben Smith's latest NY Times column looks at the Substack controversy.
posted by PhineasGage at 6:29 PM on April 11, 2021

Jude Doyle is (rightfully IMO) pissed:

There's another Media Piece About Substack out there. Once again, I not only spoke to the writer, I gave him contact information for three other high-profile trans writers who left the platform. None of us are quoted; Daniel and Grace Lavery, who stayed with Substack, are.

This is on top of the media podcast that interviewed several trans people, then tapped a cis reporter to read my blog post aloud on air. Or the interview where the reporter attributed my motives to personal dislike & cut things off when I wouldn't stop talking about transphobia.

There's a distinct push to make trans people's critique invisible. Predictably, the Laverys are being used to further that - hey, they did quote SOME trans people! - and propped up as the Good, Reasonable Ones, unlike the Bad Trans who left. I wonder how they feel about that.

I don't know if Ben Smith is on friendly terms with the Substack transphobes or what, but as Doyle notes the omission of any other trans writers (including Emily VanDerWerff, who was interviewed but never quoted) seems almost deliberate. What's even more worrisome is that Smith doesn't even mention Linehan or his awful behavior, makes Singal out to be just A Guy With Controversial Opinions, and completely omits the fact that Grace Lavery was chased off of Twitter last week by Substack's little band of howling monkeys.

Speaking of which, said howling monkeys are (rather predictably) pointing to the article as if the Laverys are on their side and playing this up as if they're the aggrieved parties, sometimes devolving into mocking their critics as extremists and fascists. There's also no mention made of Andrew Sullivan's article yesterday about "the trans question" (yes, those are his words), which is basically a transphobic screed denouncing trans activism before detailing how and why trans people don't deserve basic human rights.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 7:32 PM on April 11, 2021 [6 favorites]

The Ben Smith has been slightly rewritten. Grace Lavery sent in a clarification that has been acted upon, and from my memory of what I read before there seem to be other changes too.

Linehan is obliquely mentioned, though I think it was there before too, as someone who makes fun of trans women, which is a ludicrously wrong-headed description of his harassment campaign. Though they do link to Lavery’s piece calling for Linehan’s ouster from Substack.
posted by Kattullus at 12:54 AM on April 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yes, just read the oblique mention of Linehan and did a bit of a double take. That ain’t it, chief.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:55 AM on April 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

In a move that everybody saw coming, Yascha Mounk's startup Persuasion has also started posting anti-trans propaganda:

No one denies the existence of detransitioners. However, the "just asking questions" crowd is trying to put them at the center of the debate over trans rights. "Some kids think they're trans but it turns out they're not!" Articles like this are key to entrenching that narrative.

When we say there's a direct line from polite centrist concern-trolling to the odious anti-trans laws sweeping the country, this is what we mean. How could a law banning puberty blockers for children *not* be the obvious recommendation to come from a paragraph like this?

Persuasion has been around for nearly a year. This is, as far as I can tell, the first thing they've ever published on trans rights. Nothing about the legal threats, no mention of the challenges trans people actually face. Just a first-person essay full of TERF talking points.

When the Harper's letter came out last year, trans people noted that it felt like a personal attack because the "let's debate provocative ideas" crowd always ended up platforming transphobia. The signatories called them hysterical and yet here we are.

posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 8:57 AM on April 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Having finished the Smith piece it seems mostly fine, it’s a media piece about media issues. Those issues should be broadened a bit -telling that Smith didn’t ask/quote Grace Lavery on Linehan- but it feels like a media dude writing a media column.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:08 AM on April 12, 2021

"mostly fine"?

Substack has been facing a mutiny from a group of writers who objected to sharing the platform with people who they said were anti-transgender, including a writer who made fun of people’s appearances on a dating app

this is the only reference to linehan, and it enormously underplays what linehan does with his substack.
posted by i used to be someone else at 6:47 AM on April 13, 2021 [2 favorites]

The Linehan thing is egregious, no doubt.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:40 AM on April 13, 2021

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