Submerged

April 13, 2023 10:17 PM

Substack has a big problem. The CEO of Substack was interviewed by The Verge. It might just be the most disastrous techbro interview ever.
posted by fallingbadgers (92 comments total)

It's so incoherent that I can't read enough to know if it's disastrous.
posted by Ickster at 10:30 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also, both links are to the same thing; did you mean for one of them to go somewhere else?
posted by Ickster at 10:31 PM on April 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

It might just be the most disastrous techbro interview ever.

Impossible!
posted by Going To Maine at 10:37 PM on April 13, 2023

Substack might be one of the leading platforms for right-wing speech. They're not just hosting it; they're enabling the writers to make a living from it. Of course Substack is not going to be clamping down on their speech anytime soon.

Here's their top paid politics newsletters.
posted by meowzilla at 10:40 PM on April 13, 2023 [15 favorites]

As a non-tweeter it's funny to see that some considered Twitter the best marketing engine for their Substacks.
Because Metafilter is the best marketing engine for substacks.
posted by shenkerism at 10:40 PM on April 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

@Ickster I tried to find a way to link to the jaw dropping section on racist postings but alas The Verge does not have Anchors so I just posted the same link twice because the whole piece is just so so This Is Fine Dog
posted by fallingbadgers at 10:45 PM on April 13, 2023

I read through the interview thinking, well this is normal incoherent techbro bullshit, and then I got to the content moderation questions and, wow…

Substack is fine with becoming Stormfront, as far as I can tell.
posted by Kattullus at 10:47 PM on April 13, 2023 [19 favorites]

The most egregious part comes about 2/3 of the way down; you can skim until you see a massive block of bold text. Substack Notes is the brand new Twitter-like service that Substack is rolling out.

Nilay Patel, interviewer: No, I really want you to answer that question. Is that allowed on Substack Notes? “We should not allow brown people in the country.”

Chris Best, Substack CEO: I’m not going to get into gotcha content moderation.

NP: This is not a gotcha... I’m a brown person. Do you think people on Substack should say I should get kicked out of the country?

CB: I’m not going to engage in content moderation, “Would you or won’t you this or that?”

NP: That one is black and white, and I just want to be clear: I’ve talked to a lot of social network CEOs, and they would have no hesitation telling me that that was against their moderation rules.

CB: Yeah. We’re not going to get into specific “would you or won’t you” content moderation questions.
[...]
NP: You have to figure out, “Should we allow overt racism on Substack Notes?” You have to figure that out.

CB: No, I’m not going to engage in speculation or specific “would you allow this or that” content.

NB: You know this is a very bad response to this question, right? You’re aware that you’ve blundered into this. You should just say no. And I’m wondering what’s keeping you from just saying no.

CB: I have a blanket [policy that] I don’t think it’s useful to get into “would you allow this or that thing on Substack.”

There's a section later on where the CEO refuses to give recent revenue money, talks about how they would be thrilled to invest in things that don't make any money, and talk about how the top 10 newsletters got $25 million last year, a list that likely includes Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex). But "we're losing money by handing out big paycheques to reactionaries" is more of a "dog bites man" I suppose.
posted by Superilla at 10:48 PM on April 13, 2023 [57 favorites]

It's funny because I thought it was pretty fine for the first half, I was curious when it would go off the rails.
posted by Carillon at 10:49 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Perhaps I should have added a link to Gerald Ratner
posted by fallingbadgers at 10:55 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

And yet, it’s so much worse on video.
posted by sixswitch at 11:26 PM on April 13, 2023 [23 favorites]

I ain't reading all that. I'm happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:42 PM on April 13, 2023 [17 favorites]

The memes deliver
posted by Carillon at 11:59 PM on April 13, 2023 [28 favorites]

Oh! That video is a must see. We had Matt Taibbi get roasted earlier this week in a painful interview, now this guy, who's next?
posted by zardoz at 12:01 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's strange and interesting to me because the first half of the interview is a set of questions delivered deliberately to elicit corporate CEO-speak, effectively advertising Substack to readers/listeners/writers/advertisers/investors. But then the interview turns on a quick
dime when it comes to getting said CEO to crack on hard questions about racism. Not a typical interview for Americans, I'm guessing, where hard questions get asked.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:06 AM on April 14, 2023 [16 favorites]

Saying the loud parts quietly is certainly a new twist
posted by fullerine at 12:12 AM on April 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

I guess that's useful for EU regulators...
posted by trig at 12:31 AM on April 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

Also so glad to see Sarah Palin's "gotcha" usage is still around
posted by trig at 12:32 AM on April 14, 2023 [10 favorites]

They sucked his brains out!: the interview turns on a quick dime when it comes to getting said CEO to crack on hard questions about racism

The thing is, I think it wasn’t meant to be a hard question. My read is that Nilay Patel thought he was handing Chris Best an easy question where Best could say ‘of course that kind of blatant racism will be moderated’, but Best took that question and decided to make it really clear that he has no problem with racism being published on Substack.

It’s not Lucy taking the football away from Charlie Brown when he’s about to kick it, so much as Charlie Brown taking the football, drawing a hitler mustache and fringe on the football, and saying the football is his only friend now.
posted by Kattullus at 12:34 AM on April 14, 2023 [103 favorites]

The only way to interpret this is that Substack is happy to amplify bigots. But this was already obvious.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 1:13 AM on April 14, 2023 [15 favorites]

I don't really understand Nilay Patel's assertion that a newsletter company that platforms bigots is somehow better than a twitter clone that platforms bigots.

Also how on earth did Elon Musk accidentally end up making exactly the right decision in this situation I don't think it has ever happened before.
posted by zymil at 1:27 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Substack wanting to be both a publisher AND a Twitter style message board means that it will be caught by all the legislation.
posted by fallingbadgers at 1:44 AM on April 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

meanwhile twitter is becoming substack (among other 'X' things)
Twitter to let users offer content subscriptions in monetization push - "Twitter-owner Elon Musk said on Thursday users of the social media platform will be able to offer their followers subscriptions to content, including long-form text and hours-long video."
posted by kliuless at 2:34 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's the position "popularized" by CloudFlare head Matthew Prince whenever it comes out that he's doing business with fascists and bigots - that "free speech" obligates turning a blind eye to hateful speech and bigotry and taking a stand on hate is "censorship". Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous because "nobody owes you a soapbox" has always been a key point of free speech - but one of the positions of free speech "absolutists" as of late has been that letting someone suffer the consequences of their speech is somehow "censorship", and thus we're obliged to leave a seat for the hateful.

As the interview demonstrates, this position is as incoherent as it is reprehensible. (It also shows why Prince would never do an interview with someone like Patel, who would bluntly ask him about why he does business with hate.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:58 AM on April 14, 2023 [24 favorites]

Disappointing, but not surprising. I only subscribe to one writer on Substack—Roy Edroso... formerly of Alicublog (he still occasionally posts there though, too). I have been following Roy for maybe even two decades (?) and when he took his blog to a pay model I gladly coughed up enough for a year's worth of content. Roy is very left wing and a damned good writer. Funny as hell, too.

Ah, well.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:41 AM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

My good friend and nice person runs a Substack. Do I ask if he’s cool with this? Or let him keep chugging away…
posted by BlunderingArtist at 4:48 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

To me this makes it clear that anyone using this platform should leave asap, like Elon’s Twitter. You can’t support this monster and consider yourself a conscientious person. Do we need a 12 step program to get decent people to stop using?
posted by waving at 5:06 AM on April 14, 2023 [10 favorites]

Ugh, I recently started looking at Substack as I wanted a channel to write more with a subscriber component and it was so easy to set up. Looks like I'll be moving on from them. It's a shame. There are a number of Substacks I subscribe to and enjoy. But this is just unconscionable.
posted by synecdoche at 5:06 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Couple days ago, Spoutible announced they'll soon allow users to monetize their posts/accounts and will take a zero cut of it.
posted by dobbs at 5:17 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

the interviewer is at least as incoherent as the interviewee, and the big reveal here is a hypothetical they made up to corner the guy and he refused to answer it.

I don't get the outrage. this is clickbait.
posted by lkc at 5:19 AM on April 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

Is this guy a choad for saying this? Yeah, definitely. Is he unusual in c-suites? No, demonstrably not - things like racism, homophobia, and global warming are still up for debate in most of those places. The interviewer threw him the gentlest softball and he fumbled it hard.
posted by The River Ivel at 5:26 AM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think his approach traffics signs of the car-crash to come from the get go:
Nilay: Do you feel more settled now as a CEO?

“I’ve learned a ton in the past two years, and I feel like being a CEO of a startup like this, the job is being bad at the current thing. And then, as soon as you start to feel like you’re getting okay at it, you just earn the right to go to the next mini-game that you’re newly bad at. And so I always feel like I’m constantly learning a lot and struggling to be on top of the thing that I currently have to do. But the whole time, I feel like I’m learning a ton, and it’s been very exciting.."

That is an attempt at a CEO-typical "vital to always be learning" response that I think he was reaching for - but here it is expressed in the manner of "we start off being shit at what we do - and as soon as we feel a little like we are becoming a little less shit, we move the goal-posts so we're shit again - lest we get bored".
posted by rongorongo at 5:29 AM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

I disagree, the interviewer's big thing in all their recent work is content moderation. He wrote the Welcome to Hell, Elon open letter after the Twitter sale went through. Nilay's position is that all of these social companies are content moderation/political problems not technology problems.

The Substack CEO has to have known this. He has been interviewed by Nilay before.
posted by mmascolino at 5:29 AM on April 14, 2023 [33 favorites]

It's not just about whether this CEO is good or bad. Using substack not only supports him personally but also supports a platform where people go to make money off of hate speech, and it increases their discoverability. (And it supports the broader tech mentality that says this is all fine, it's all a game anyway, you can get away with anything, and people are just pretending to care.)
posted by trig at 6:03 AM on April 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

(Also the bar for "acceptable" content moderation is so low! I don't hear anybody complaining about Reddit anymore, despite the various cesspools that are still there.)
posted by trig at 6:06 AM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

the big reveal here is a hypothetical they made up to corner the guy and he refused to answer it.

I envy your Internet where that example wasn't a severely watered-down version of comments that are already flying on Substack Notes.
posted by Etrigan at 6:11 AM on April 14, 2023 [24 favorites]

All corporate owned social media sites are run by absolutely shitty people and utterly horrible for our civilization, because the needs of the corporation to make money for the shareholders surpasses the needs of the people (e.g. the users) who are not shareholders. Fucking period. God why do we keep having to be surprised by this shit. Stop using corporate social media unless you have some overwhelming need to connect with people you can't reach any other way (and then busy yourself with finding that any other way). Fuck! Fuck!
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:28 AM on April 14, 2023 [12 favorites]

The core problem (as with Twitter and Facebook and etc) - is that these are private companies doing 'public' things but without taking on any of the responsibility of operating for and 'on' the public.

TV stations, Newspapers have (mostly) codes of ethics, boundaries they have to stay within, etc. Why not all these Internet companies? Seriously - there was this golden shit moment in the late 90's early 2000's when all the garbage was hanging out there, then the really horrible stuff got dialled back in, but a river of hate speech has persisted - because it brings in revenue.

It's wrong to believe that it's a viable, long-term strategy. The market is not, in fact, there. You can convince people it's the cost of doing business, but in the long term you have to keep the shit-flingers away from the grannies or they won't show up. I get that the trick is to get the grannies' inner shit-flinger to come out and exploit that - but this is exactly the Trump problem, it's detrimental to the long-term health of society (cf: Nazis. No, really, its the same slow-creep racism that ultimately led to the destruction of a nation and society).
posted by From Bklyn at 6:33 AM on April 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

I don't get the outrage.

OK. Pay attention to this discussion then, you might learn something.

... a hypothetical they made up to corner the guy and he refused to answer it.

The question is hardly a stretch as a hypothetical. It's a daily experience on the Internet, a scenario that plays out regularly on Substack. An issue Substack is famous for having a position on. Where they are fine if they publish racist and other deplorable content.

I would have respected Chris Best more if he'd just said "I believe in absolute free speech and we let people publish things, even racist things". I would criticize that position and can give you a long essay on why it's wrong. But at least it's a position.

But Chris Best isn't honest enough to say what he thinks or what his company's policies are. Or maybe he's afraid to. So he gives no answer at all and increasingly looks like a jackass as Patel won't let him dodge the question. Best pretends being asked is unfair or that the company hasn't had time to think about it. Those deflections are lies. Even if they were true it would be completely irresponsible to not have an answer to Patel's question.
posted by Nelson at 6:48 AM on April 14, 2023 [42 favorites]

Annoying - will have to move my newsletter now b/c not helping these clowns make money. I wonder what people like Heather Cox Richardson will do going forward...
posted by leslies at 6:52 AM on April 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

FFS, I signed up for Substack just a few months ago. It seemed so simple and harmless. I should have done more due diligence.

I guess in 2023, one must assume every new platform is born enshittified unless proven otherwise.
posted by swift at 7:13 AM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

I ain't reading all that. I'm happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.

It's funny to be in a public spat with Elon Musk and still come out looking like the asshole. If that happens in this interview (also not reading that).
posted by grobstein at 7:24 AM on April 14, 2023

But Chris Best isn't honest enough to say what he thinks or what his company's policies are. Or maybe he's afraid to.

Let's be blunt - Best isn't willing to tell the truth because he knows that doing so will get content producers walking, and trying to be discount Quillette won't work (because Quillette occupies that position.) So he's trying to weasel his way around the question, with a pinch of DARVO tossed in.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:25 AM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

What kind of unprofitable company is Substack? Is it more like Uber or Gab?
posted by Selena777 at 7:32 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Annoying - will have to move my newsletter now b/c not helping these clowns make money.

Ditto. Maybe better suited for an Ask, but what are the alternatives?

I know there are a lot of email list SaaS options but I liked Substack because it made the content I wrote for my newsletter accessible as though it were also a website. That meant I didn't need to worry about building, managing, or paying for a separate web presence, and Substack's site was very easy to build and work with.
posted by synecdoche at 7:32 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wait. You’ve invested in companies where you haven’t seen their financial information?

Yes.
posted by doctornemo at 7:34 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's a publishing platform, whatever they can publish that makes them cash, they're going to publish. I don't get the surprise.
posted by kingdead at 7:36 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Here was a recent Ask with some alternatives.
posted by Stacey at 7:48 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

That AskMe is pretty thin on good alternatives.

FWIW Ghost is the one I hear most when mentioned as a Substack alternative. But I have heard from several folks there's nothing that works as well as Substack as a product. I don't think Substack has social network lock-in the way Twitter or Facebook does. The complaints I've heard about the competitors have been mostly about execution and product quality. That could get better.
posted by Nelson at 7:58 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

in that big bold block, Patel faults himself for the structure of the "brown people" question, which gave Best an out. And instead of refocusing and sharpening the question, to eliminate the "out," he just repeated himself. (Which, given how incredulous he must have been after Best's response, is kinda understandable. I've done a lot of interviews; been there.)

Fortunately, Patel and Best made it crystal-clear with this followup and answer, a bit later, which everyone should note:

So if Substack Notes becomes overrun by racism and transphobia, that’s fine with you?

We’re going to have to work very hard to make Substack Notes be a great place to have the readers and the writers be in charge, where you can have the kinds of conversations that you find valuable. That’s the exciting challenge that we have ahead of us.

Wow. Just, wow. Guess I gotta kill my Substack, too.
posted by martin q blank at 8:07 AM on April 14, 2023 [13 favorites]

I guess, thinking about it, when it comes to providing a subscription model to provide revenue to people or outfits creating stuff one might like... how is Substack doing anything substantially different from OnlyFans or Patreon? I mean, aside from the new Twitter clone, and letting you offer your stuff for free if you want. What are they doing that is different?
posted by hippybear at 8:08 AM on April 14, 2023

I'm actually confused about why Substack is a good product. What's so great about newsletters? I guess one answer is, it's a way to monetize writing in a landscape where that's hard to do. But I can't get with wanting to receive updates in my email. My email is chaos. For me as a reader, it's just a worse technology than following blogs by RSS used to be (although I don't do that anymore, either).

I guess as a writer it is a bit easier than having a blog can be, just because it doesn't ask you to set anything up or make any decisions other than what it's called. Idk!
posted by grobstein at 8:10 AM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

Grobstein it's useful as a way to stay in touch with people in a longer form way than a social media post without requiring them to go to a site or set up RSS - so really is an alternative to mailchimp or constant contact. I like its simplicity so am annoyed at having to figure something else out but clearly a moral imperative now.
posted by leslies at 8:14 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

This guy actually thinks that subscription newsletters is a new culture transforming thing. I cannot imagine huffing that many of your own farts to believe that and say it out loud. What a world.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 8:21 AM on April 14, 2023 [27 favorites]

That AskMe is pretty thin on good alternatives.

I actually said oh no aloud when I saw the answers to that Ask because I had a similar question and it left me thinking that there isn't a good alternative to Substack. Tumblr continues to be terrible for longform writing and was never intended for that, and Dreamwidth is... I mean, I miss 2003 LJ too, sometimes.
posted by betweenthebars at 8:32 AM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

I’m not surprised by this for a different reason. The interviewer is basically asking him to go on the record in a way that might open up his company to a bunch of legal problems and/or influence a very unsettled and contentious legal area. I think he does come off as a jerk, but heads of companies are not just going to say “well I’m the head of Exxon, but yeah I agree with you that fossil fuels are terrible.”

Which is another reason that legislation and regulation is the only way to solve this.
posted by caviar2d2 at 8:39 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

But I can't get with wanting to receive updates in my email. My email is chaos. For me as a reader, it's just a worse technology than following blogs by RSS used to be (although I don't do that anymore, either).

Big same. I don’t want email ever, from anyone. Email is for enemies, that’s what the E stands for.
posted by rodlymight at 8:56 AM on April 14, 2023 [11 favorites]

What kind of unprofitable company is Substack? Is it more like Uber or Gab?

The answer to this question is related to the answer to this question:

how is Substack doing anything substantially different from [others]

What Substack did that was substantially different from other platforms was take a whole bunch of VC money and use it to pay a bunch of big names for exclusivity, attempting to corner the market for subscription newsletters. Converting VC money into market share without enough of a way to turn that market share into a profitable business is more like Uber than Gab. But this has turned out to be a problem, because the ongoing commitment to pay those people is more than Substack's revenue. And that's important because VCs are a low interest rate phenomenon, and Substack has run out of a lot of its runway, making a push for retail investors that basically put a spotlight on how bad its finances are. They have a line of credit they say they haven't touched yet, but the cheap money is all gone.

Really, there are three different pieces to this and they all make Substack look bad:

1. They don't want to admit they have a moderation problem;
2. Not only do they have a moderation problem, they spent a lot of money to acquire content from writers "from all sides," which has resulted in them paying some pretty horrible people, and some people find that hard to ignore;
3. Their business model relied (directly or indirectly) on low interest rates and they don't seem to have had a backup plan.

That first Verge article focuses on a weird side effect of the way Substack is doing its accounting. "Partnership expenses" (the money that Substack is fronting those writers) is categorized under revenue, resulting in an overall negative revenue line for 2021 (and they haven't made 2022 numbers public). They must have their reasons for including those expenses in the revenue line, but it certainly looks odd to anybody who hasn't lost their mind to Silicon Valley startup math.
posted by fedward at 9:25 AM on April 14, 2023 [10 favorites]

Converting VC money into market share without enough of a way to turn that market share into a profitable business is more like Uber than Gab.

Yeah what seems weird about this business model to me is, Why would newsletter host be a network monopoly? It's a commodity, basically. Why would you ever think you could make money on this?
posted by grobstein at 9:41 AM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

The interviewer is basically asking him to go on the record in a way that might open up his company to a bunch of legal problems

What are you talking about? It's perfectly legal for a platform to decide it will moderate its content and suspend/ban users who violate its ToS. Might some misguided users decide to try to sue if this happens to them? Sure, I suppose, them's the breaks though. They're going to get laughed out of court.

It's perfectly possible for Substack to choose not to platform racism, hatred, and bigotry. Now, if they have decided that they're going to platform hate, just fucking say so, or learn how to dance around the question better. This guy fumbled the ball and now is rightly getting roasted for how obvious he made it that, actually, Substack if fine with profiting off of hate.
posted by axiom at 9:53 AM on April 14, 2023 [14 favorites]

The interviewer is basically asking him to go on the record in a way that might open up his company to a bunch of legal problems

Absolutely right. I mean if you decide to moderate your platform in a way that eliminates certain viewpoints, like racism, or fascism, or trans-erasure, or whatever? And if you start deleting comments that have that content in them or banning users who post that kind of thing?

I mean that's totally illegal for sure.

It's like having an unprofessional blue background or something -- I can't think of any content platform that could possibly survive the legal challenges from doing that.
posted by The Bellman at 9:59 AM on April 14, 2023 [16 favorites]

What Substack did that was substantially different from other platforms was take a whole bunch of VC money and use it to pay a bunch of big names for exclusivity, attempting to corner the market for subscription newsletters.

Further to that, they chose to pay assholes, which was a guaranteed way to raise their profile by baiting people like us into complaining about it.
posted by klanawa at 10:15 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

I just did a ctrl-f for the word Moderation and then searched from the bottom and wow, this guy really digs his hole, doesn't he? I think John and John summed it up best...
posted by Catblack at 10:29 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

What Substack did that was substantially different from other platforms was take a whole bunch of VC money and use it to pay a bunch of big names for exclusivity, attempting to corner the market for subscription newsletters.

Sounds like The Hundred.
posted by biffa at 10:30 AM on April 14, 2023 [9 favorites]

Substack is fine with becoming Stormfront, as far as I can tell.

Come on. A platform on which Heather Cox Richardson, Matt Yglesias, Dan Rather, Robert Reich, Shaun King, Michael Moore, and Chris Hedges are in the top 20 is hardly Stormfront.

Of course I see all the right-wingers in the top 20 too. But oversimplifying just makes us all stupider.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:54 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Come on. A platform on which Heather Cox Richardson, Matt Yglesias, Dan Rather, Robert Reich, Shaun King, Michael Moore, and Chris Hedges are in the top 20 is hardly Stormfront.

This is literally the "hate offset" argument, that platforming purportedly left wing voices somehow balances out providing hate a platform.

This is not how combating hate works.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:00 PM on April 14, 2023 [28 favorites]

Mike Masnick at Techdirt: Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become The Nazi Bar:

I get that he thinks his focus is on providing tools, but even so two things stand out: (1) he’s wrong about how all this works and (2) even if he believes that Substack doesn’t need to moderate, he has to own that in the interview rather than claiming that Nilay is playing gotcha with him.

If you’re not going to moderate, and you don’t care that the biggest draws on your platform are pure nonsense peddlers preying on the most gullible people to get their subscriptions, fucking own it, Chris.

Say it. Say that you’re the Nazi bar and you’re proud of it.

Ouch.
posted by fedward at 12:15 PM on April 14, 2023 [27 favorites]

it's actually kind of refreshing to see some free speech, technolib CEO flail about when asked a question about whether or not they will refuse to platform, amplify, and monetize hate speech

because a more practiced technolib CEO would just dodge by saying 'of course we don't permit terrible speech' wherein the definition of "terrible" is determined privately, according to the interest of shareholders, and probably only captures like 0.01% of the actual hateful, nativist content that appears

at least this way, people who are privileged enough to be apathetic about it aren't just throwing up their hands and saying 'what can ya do about it, society amirite' like they do re: Discord, Facebook, Twitter, etc
posted by paimapi at 12:33 PM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is literally the "hate offset" argument, that platforming purportedly left wing voices somehow balances out providing hate a platform.

Matt Yglesias is bigoted piece of shit who, among other things, called for anti-Trump protestors in DC to have their heads cracked and more recently fell for the obviously manufactured story about Washington University being part of a child genital mutilation ring. In other words, he's part of the hate, not an offset for it.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 12:33 PM on April 14, 2023 [21 favorites]

The interviewer is basically asking him to go on the record in a way that might open up his company to a bunch of legal problems

It's the other way around, isn't it?

It really is notable though how all these companies act like they've never heard of EU anti-hate speech regulations. I know America is the center of the world for these guys, but the EU isn't some tiny backwater and if you want to run a content platform there without compliant moderation you're opening yourself up to serious fines and eventual banning.

I mean, if he wanted to absolve himself from having to take a personal stand he could have just said "Substack's moderation is compliant with relevant regulation such as the DSA, which specifies standards for hate speech."
posted by trig at 12:46 PM on April 14, 2023 [11 favorites]

Come on. A platform on which Heather Cox Richardson, Matt Yglesias, Dan Rather, Robert Reich, Shaun King, Michael Moore, and Chris Hedges are in the top 20 is hardly Stormfront.

I didn't realize Shaun King was still grifting years after he's been exposed multiple times for taking people's money and doing nothing.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:58 PM on April 14, 2023 [11 favorites]

Someone I know uses Buttondown for a newsletter. It's a one-man operation and seems fine for what it does. I understand why a variety of writers continue to use Substack despite the many other despicable writers who also use it. The technology solves a variety of problems for many writers and it has a lot of built-in marketing tools that help promote their work, and that's incredibly valuable. If a newsletter is how you pay your rent, moving to a different platform is a major gamble.

Parker Molloy, a media critic and writer, uses Substack to publish her newsletter The Present Age. MetaFilter fave Daniel Lavery publishes his newsletter, The Chatner, on Substack as well. Grace Lavery, Daniel's wife, used to publish on Substack and walked away. Another writer, Jude Doyle, also left Substack. According to Vice, "they were upset that Substack was publishing — and in some cases offering money upfront to — authors they say are 'people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.' "

Molloy, Grace Lavery, Daniel Lavery, and Doyle all identify as transgender (among other things). They have not made identical choices. What's the cliché, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism? Maybe there are no ethical publishing platforms under capitalism, either. I do not know. I do subscribe to several newsletters published on Substack because the writers are good, and we have shared values. Substack does seems to be having some financial difficulties, as mentioned way above, so perhaps it, too, will collapse soon enough.

TL;DR: This particular Substack cofounder is a fucking asshole. Also, he is not the only one, at least based on older interviews with different cofounders. Thanks for the post, OP!
posted by Bella Donna at 1:36 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

more recently fell for the obviously manufactured story about Washington University being part of a child genital mutilation ring.

Um, what?
posted by flamk at 1:48 PM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

The most recent Work Appropriate podcast outlines the reasons writers are going to publishing their own newsletter really well, especially a) for writers who are for various reasons outliers or straight-up locked out of traditional media or b) writers who for whatever reason aren't up for the clickbait/outrage game that is online content in a lot of places these days.

I think it's interesting people here are like "why would you ever read a Substack?"

My experience is almost directly opposite - I've found some great voices examining issues that would have been really hard to place in traditional media. It's made me want to look in my email again. (Which is nothing short of miraculous.) I love that my dollars go to the creator and not to the ad sales but also that there's some solid free content (which I have not found on Patreon - there's some, but it's not very regular.) I can support writers, go down to free for a bit, go up to paid for a bit, and spread my dollars around and keep discovering new writers. And I don't have to keep track of a zillion tip jars and pay pal things.

For writers...I think Substack just gets how writers want to write content, and customize their pitches for the paid content, but not really manage anything else - no updating Wordpress plugins, no having to build a sales funnel or make connections to payment systems.

None of this addresses all the bad shit about Substack, I'm just saying why it's a thing at all.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:05 PM on April 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

Matt Yglesias is bigoted piece of shit who, among other things, called for anti-Trump protestors in DC to have their heads cracked and more recently fell for the obviously manufactured story about Washington University being part of a child genital mutilation ring. In other words, he's part of the hate, not an offset for it.

Possible to post links to this? I don't doubt it but I also did some initial googling and didn't find this and . . . don't want the random searches that would get me to these cites on my current machine's browsing history haha
posted by kensington314 at 2:08 PM on April 14, 2023

Um, what?

The Useful Idiots Fueling the Right-Wing Transphobia Panic
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 2:08 PM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think the EU point raised earlier in the thread is the big problem.

Even if Substack are happy to become the Nazi bar the EU won’t be and will simply cut them off.
posted by fallingbadgers at 2:15 PM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Come on. A platform on which Heather Cox Richardson, Matt Yglesias, Dan Rather, Robert Reich, Shaun King, Michael Moore, and Chris Hedges are in the top 20 is hardly Stormfront.

I didn't realize Shaun King was still grifting years after he's been exposed multiple times for taking people's money and doing nothing.

Oh, trust me, I'm no fan of Shaun King, but I think my point stands.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:24 PM on April 14, 2023

Kara Swisher had an interview with Best. I didn't listen to the whole thing because he seemed like he was saying sentences that had no content. This seems kind of consistent with that, but like I said I didn't listen to the whole Swisher interview. Typically, she doesn't shy away from difficult topics and is willing to push her guests, although she does try to 'both sides' her views a lot.
posted by bluesky43 at 3:22 PM on April 14, 2023

Also Bill McKibben has a substack, as does Robert Reich and Steven Beschloss, all of which I enjoy reading (I'm not defending substack so please).
posted by bluesky43 at 3:23 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh, trust me, I'm no fan of Shaun King, but I think my point stands.

Was your point this?
posted by Pyrogenesis at 9:16 PM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

Annalee Newitz lays out again why substack is a scam.

“Substack isn't a novel thing whose trajectory we can't predict. Go into this shit with your eyes open. And don't act surprised when it turns out that Substack is flushing you down the toilet and asking you to thank them.”
posted by ursus_comiter at 9:53 PM on April 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

Well, rich, white, techbro is a racist (for those of you who may feel this hits too close to home, read: is ok with racism. Yes, I know, you only vote republican for their economic policies.) is such a surprising twist in 2023.
posted by evilDoug at 6:37 AM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

First, a nitpick about a personal pet peeve. Nothing about being a hosting service is the same as being an "enterprise software vendor". People paying you for hosting technology are not "buying software".

I wish Substack would take responsibility for the way they are actively making the world a worse place, and I wish people with politics that centered around empathy and human welfare wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Alas.
posted by signsofrain at 10:31 AM on April 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

People paying you for hosting technology are not "buying software".

I don't think anyone who writes anything hosted by Substack is paying for that hosting. Which, at its core, is why their business model is going to fail.
posted by hippybear at 12:44 PM on April 15, 2023

Oh, trust me, I'm no fan of Shaun King, but I think my point stands.

Was your point this?

Nah, my point was exactly what I said very clearly in my first comment.

I don't particularly care about Substack. I'm not invested in either attacking or defending it. I just pointed out, correctly, that it ain't Stormfront, and that it includes many prominent left and center-left voices.

But don't let me stop you from misrepresenting my point, or attempting to conflate a nuanced observation with tolerance of the intolerable.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:02 PM on April 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, trust me, I'm no fan of Shaun King, but I think my point stands.

Was your point this?
posted by Pyrogenesis at 9:16 PM on April 14

Yeah, I think we can all agree that Shaun King is a miserable human being who exploits people for a living under the guise of a progressive umbrella. What happened with The North Star is criminal.

Putting that aside (please), the MeFi link to the askme thread responses to Miranda was pretty amazing. A total derail but wow, Mefites are incredibly caring and I hope things turned out ok with Miranda!
posted by bluesky43 at 2:14 PM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

This guy actually thinks that subscription newsletters is a new culture transforming thing. I cannot imagine huffing that many of your own farts to believe that and say it out loud. What a world.

You say this like we are not a world where fart jar sales are ancient news.
posted by srboisvert at 5:53 PM on April 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wow. Just, wow. The first half of the interview wasn't really worth reading, being just more of the same stupid CEO drivel, but then it got interesting! Anytime a CEO can readily answer a question, the answer is meaningless. But when they can answer, but choose not to, they tell you more than any carefully-rehearsed stock interview answer ever could.
posted by dg at 8:38 PM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Finally trying to finish reading this thing. What strikes me is the tech-world verbal tic that both the interviewer and the interviewee share -- starting almost every statement with "So..." That really grates on me, for some reason.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:52 AM on May 5, 2023

I do think it was interesting that he doggedly refused to answer the question about moderating racist content, but answered the one about moderating copyright violations in a heartbeat.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:14 PM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think "So..." grates because it's patronizing and a mark of condescension. From the reporter it means "here's something from the real world," and from the (tech) interviewee it means something like, "here's another way you're ignorant about business/technology/one-drop blood testing."
posted by rhizome at 2:00 PM on May 6, 2023 [1 favorite]