First off, a bit of Gastrodome business. I experimented with some possible finger food for a cocktail party. Smoked salmon on toast with ginger butter was fine, a new variation on a green goddess dip for crudites was good. I made a cheesy artichoke puff mix to go on roasted peppers. The roasted peppers were too much of a mess but the stuffing mixture was good. I’d put the whole thing on some more durable base, probably baguette rounds. I also made a really nice variation on mac and cheese from Estaban Castillo’s Chicano Eats that mixes sausage and mushrooms into it.
On to Substack itself. There’s been some interesting crosstalk between newsletters on the platform over the past two weeks, in two primary veins of discussion.
The first is the ongoing rumble of disagreement about the platform’s approach to content moderation, which is to say, next to nothing, and about the extent to which the platform hosts or supports far right, white supremacist or fascist newsletters. Jonathan Katz’ article in the Atlantic was the major stimulus for this latest round of discussion but in some form or another it’s been a perennial issue, especially since the platform chose to promote the work of Richard Hanania.
I’m as annoyed as Katz and many other Substack writers by the complete silence of Substack’s management team about that profile but I am not surprised by it. Substack’s owners are like every other Big Tech management team in several ways. Most notably, they’re prone to dressing up decisions that are dictated by their business model and their own social affiliations as generalized stands on principle. They’re not as unhinged as Elon Musk about it, or as weaselly as Mark Zuckerberg, but they’re speaking from the same rough foundations.
What they say is that they’re dedicated to free speech and to building better conversations across political and social divides. They particularly do not sincerely mean the latter because the platform is (I think quite deliberately) mostly invisible to scrutiny by both outside observers and its own writers. It’s extremely difficult to browse the totality of the platform or build any comprehensive model of what is hosted on it. The only way you could begin to do so would be via a version of snowball sampling, e.g., to find a newsletter that wasn’t in your existing network via Notes or via some other discovery tool, then subscribe to all of its recommended newsletters, and just keep doing that until you had compiled a list of many hundreds of publications. Some of them you wouldn’t be able to read without paying, but most of them you’d at least be able get a sense of what they wrote about and what their typical readers were like.
I don’t actually blame Substack for making it hard to easily wander out of your own discursive neighborhood. While many of us worry about the “echo chamber” of social media, the fact is that even if you do believe in bravely debating or building bridges to your ideological opposites, public culture—especially social media—isn’t the right place to do it. The platforms that have trained a generation within particular algorithmic structures have cultivated ‘hot’ discourses of enmity and contempt, and it’s rarely clear whether you’re talking to a real and locatable person with genuine convictions or some kind of troll or manipulator who is trying to shift the nature of acceptable discourse. Or an “influencer” who is just offering to be whatever the paying customers want them to be.
Substack’s writers and the readers of newsletters on the platform should be clear, though. It’s difficult to discover the full range of what’s on the platform because the owners don’t want to spend any money at all on content moderation. They know that even a minimal investment in that direction can get very expensive very quickly. The only current platform that has succeeded in having something like community standards is Reddit, and that’s by cultivating a massive operation of volunteer moderators—an achievement that the current CEO of Reddit seems determined to destroy.
So the only thing Substack is really willing to do is provide writers and readers with tools to block content they don’t want to see. That’s what gets glossed as a principled commitment to free speech. It’s not: it’s a principled commitment to keeping the payroll as low as possible. It still leaves the platform vulnerable in ways that alarm me. I am ok being on a platform with writers and audiences I object to profoundly, especially if I can’t see them and they don’t get pushed on me. (More profiles in that direction would have me reconsidering.) But I think at a minimum that Substack’s owners should think very hard about what might happen if one set of newsletters started deliberately urging their readers to go and rubbish another set of newsletters. To my knowledge, that hasn’t happened yet, but it’s nearly an inevitability.
In general, Substack’s management doesn’t seem ready for the kinds of things that not only have happened on other platforms, but that eventually will happen on all of them. About the only thing they do seem armored up about is sexual content, and I think that’s primarily just because that could threaten the access to distributed banking services that is absolutely essential to their revenue stream. Writing back in June, the neuroscientist Erik Hoel was right that there is a predictable arc in the evolution of social media sites, and that interfaces and designs are no answer for the inevitably negative trends in behavior within a platform. I don’t think that’s “human nature” exactly, but the particular intersection of platform capitalism and the emergent culture that has grown within social media amounts to it. Substack’s owners are not in it for the long haul or deep believers in any principle. They want to get paid off and they’re not going to do anything that might interfere with that priority.
The other controversy roiling up Substack recently is related, but also has different implications. Probably the best piece to read to get some flavor of the cross-newsletter conversations would be Summer Brennan’s “How to Succeed on Substack”, which attracted a lot of negative responses as well as supportive ones.
I come into this kind of conversation in a sort of sanguine, detached way. Writing online has always been a kind of side gig for me, a way to practice a kind of roving generalist perspective that isn’t terribly welcome in academic life but without trying to leverage my online writing into a more prominent place in public culture for either the prestige or the money that might bring. I’ve had my invitations to write in a more persistent way in existing publications over the years and I’ve turned them down, just as I decided to end my inner flirtation with going the standard road towards administrative leadership a while back. Whatever I’m doing here, it’s not about grabbing the brass ring or making the big bucks. It’s about my relatively oddball sense of what public culture could be. This is a journal, a chronicle, an interweaving of personal life, professional labor, and public concerns. I’m happy to have what I write valued enough that some people pay for it, and if my work here did get more attention, I would be pleased if it were the right kind of attention.
So Substack’s perpetual nagging about how to succeed on their platform does irk me because it’s relentlessly focused on aggressive monetization. I also think their advice is flawed: they relentlessly hammer on the idea that good Substacks are focused on a single idea or theme because it’s easier for an unknown writer to build an audience that way. I think that’s true as far as it goes—it’s a standard kind of “market segmentation”. But at least some writers succeed with this publisher and many others not by the careful grooming of marketable subject matter but as writers—or as people.
Both Brennan and some of the people taking up a critical position against trying to “succeed on Substack” are doing something that precedes social media. These are familiar conflicts that have laced between writers, editors and publishers, going back to the print culture of the 18th Century. Publishers historically sometimes keep carrying a low-selling writer because they think they’re diamonds in the rough, sometimes to retain some long-tail readership that is interested in the writer, sometimes because they’re in a market niche that favors pushing out a ton of material rather than a highly curated product. Editors sometimes intercede with publishers for favored writers, or inveigh against writers that their publishers perversely favor. Writers who work with editors or publishers sometimes bicker and maneuver for the perceived favor of their publisher. Sometimes a writer who isn’t that great manages to get heavily read because they get relentlessly flogged by a publisher, or an editor promotes them intensively. Sometimes a great writer gets buried by the malice of a well-placed rival or the indifference of a shitty publisher. None of this is new.
I do think some of the critics—Elizabeth Tai has provided one of the most eloquent critiques—are right that Substack’s official vision of the platform is narrower than it ought to be, but they need to recognize that someday—perhaps sooner than any of us would wish—Substack will stop trying to make itself as big as it can be, stop trying to have the longest of long tails. At that point, it will begin the long (sometimes fast) decline that most social media platforms face when it becomes clear that their tech isn’t magic and their vision of a possible culture is clouded. There’s only so much money in them thar hills and I suspect they’ve about mined it all out.
The culture is vast. We’ve learned that there are so many people out there who have something to say, who have the writer’s craft in some form. Who are doing something worth knowing about. Who can make clever small videos or make clever art and craft. A publisher, no matter how big they talk, is not nearly so vast. So of course people are going to jostle for the favor of this publisher, and feel ignored or slighted when what they do is not in their marketing plan, when the Olympians offer to bring fire to the writers huddled in darkness. Of course people who depend on the platform as part of their gig are going to defend their position.
If Substack wanted to do something really original, they could start to imagine their writers as a kind of shareholder, and offer once a year, twice a year, to have a meeting with all of them, in a kind of AMA format. To make community while also answering questions about the money and its future. If they wanted to be original, they’d drop some of the Silicon Valley woo-woo and just admit that what they’re trying to do, in the end, is make enough money to be a going concern for however long that lasts.
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1829989.html
And another angle about how new social media will be relatively small and have a shared culture, but if they grow, they'll be getting people who aren't from the culture and some of whom will be awful people, and the stresses this puts on the the initial group and on moderators. Siderea thinks there's helpful knowledge in the social sciences, and I have no idea whether she's right.