Just make sure to change your favicon and change the “Powered by WordPress” footer to “Not Powered by Substack” to keep people from calling you a Boomer Millennial hailing from the year of our Lord 2003.
(Also Tumblr! Tumblr is still free! Tumblr just has very little monetization, though. By contrast you can paywall WordPress with extensions if you want. Though if you’re legitimately insane you could also try self-hosting Ghost or some even more niche CMS.)
EDIT: and if you move to Tumblr, people might confuse you for David Karp (no “f”)!
Dave: love the newsletter. Followed you for awhile now.
I respect what anyone feels they have to do to stay relevant and solvent in the current media environment. The only thing I wanted to say is that I think if you turned subs on you’d EASILY make enough money to be in the black, even if you moved to another service. Not saying you should definitely move but I wouldn’t make financial considerations part of your calculation. That is all.
Keep up the amazing work and thanks for a great year of newsletters!
I am playing with Buttondown, and so far I like it, but I have like 20 subscribers, so the free plan works well for me so far. It is more work, but I am a bit of a geek. I moved from Ghost to Substack, and the main differences were less customizability on Substack, but far easier to grow an audience on Substack. The community and recommendations just work here, and it feels forced at Ghost.
The one thing I hate about Substack is that they pre/post-pend the "Pledge Your Support" to try to guilt me into turning it into a revenue stream for them. What I write is very niche, so it just isn't palatable to my small audience to *pay* for my content. And it is a hobby for me.
Now, if I got to say 1,000 subscribers I would rethink that, but I don't believe I will ever have to cross that bridge.
Reading your posts has been a bright spot in my life, and I will follow should you leave!
Substack has raised $7,809,219 out of their goal of $100,000,000, after a pre-money valuation of $585,000,000. This equates to something like 1.3% of equity. I think we can all agree that this effort has been *extraordinarily* successful.
Interesting ... this valuation seems completely over the top from a technological point of view. And how valuable is the network really? It is an interesting experiment, but if the value of the network comes from moderation than Substack is on the wrong track if it wants to get big and make money.
If you move to a paid subscription, consider charging less than $100. Maybe $99.99 would do it, but $100 is a fair chunk of even my relatively generous media budget. Another possibility to consider is offering monthly sponsorships. If you move to a service that charges around $90 a month, I wouldn't be surprised if you find monthly sponsors or perhaps half sponsors. Let people sign up ahead so you can cover the year ahead. Subscriptions can feel daunting.
I used to buy interesting magazines at Reading International in Cambridge, MA. I'd grab several at a time, and often would pick up several issues of the same magazine a few times a year. Only in one or two cases did I sign up for a subscription even though the subscription price was sometimes less than the multiple issue prices. (Issues cost about $5 back then, so that would be $20 now. That's a casual purchase. $100 is still a big purchase.)
I think the problem is more fundamental. I call it democratic governance. As an example, on the one hand one wants a public sphere that is censorship resistant, on the other hand people want to enjoy socializing, meeting, discussing. More generally, we want a society where everybody is free to do what they want, but also a society where its members are freedom to collectively build public goods. These two aims contradict each other. Afaics, nobody has proposed a solution to this problem yet ...
I read quite a bit about the Substack Nazi Problem and see both arguments. This newsletter is one of the more interesting ones on this topic.
"Moderation costs money and isn’t any fun. Substack wants to be a revolutionary platform for the creator economy, without spending money on the not-fun stuff."
"And then [Cloudfare] realized that you don’t get to be an important platform and also ignore how your tools are being used."
My best case scenario is a situation where writers and readers can choose. There will be sth like Substack which covers the extreme right and left as well as some dissenters that are more difficult to categorize. Then there will be platforms with other identities. Finally, there will be writers who just run their own server. Btw, as setting up platforms is getting easier there will be a lot of competition for Substack.
It's just a sad old trope that's been so over used. Nazis... Maybe it's the exhaustion of seeing anyone someone disagreed with called a Nazi.
Are there asshole white people? Yes. Might they claim Nazi ideology? Certainly. We also have authors who support the CCP who have concentration camps for Uyghur, kill them, and killed tens of millions more than Nazis.
There's currently a lot of support for Hammas who has the stated claim to do the same thing that the Nazis tried (and were allied with them in WWII)
You also have openly avowed socialists/communists longing for the USSR... whose ideology was just as nationalistic and murderous.
But it's always the Nazis. The nice thing about these Nazis is we can see them. We can watch them organize in the open.
It also says a lot when you find yourself surrounded by them. What does your writing have in common that the algorithm lumps you together.
My word of creative fiction and technology exploration has none. Apparently your world does? And that worries you that you're associated with them?
I didn't make an excuse for Nazis. In fact, what I'm doing is taking away an excuse to poorly label them. I also am not suggesting they do not exist. Neither of those were my argument. My argument was against censoring them.
Because censoring them doesn't stop them from being assholes. It makes them feel oppressed and opressed people always feel more justified. Freddie deBoer has a great analysis on the topic. He's been accused of being a Nazi because of the intellectualy vapid trope instead of undersanding what's driving the ideology.
Freddie deBoer is an asshole and not-a-Nazi. I do not believe Substack should be deplatforming Freddies deBoer. None of the people who signed the letter believe that, afaik.
There are *actual* Nazis making money on this platform. One way that we know this is true is Substack's leadership releasing a statement saying, in effect "yeah there are Nazis on this platform and we don't like the ideology but <shrug emoji> we get 10% of their fees so its fine."
I understand your argument is that we do not have to interact with the actual Nazis who are using this platform -- that we can just ignore them and let them go away. And yes, true, it is easier to avoid them on a newsletter platform with embedded social features than on some other social platforms.
I do not expect anything will dissuade you of that belief. You hold it strongly enough that you go searching for newsletters you do not subscribe to and pop into the comments to say they have written "the most ignorant post of 2023."
But it is not a belief that I am inclined to share. "Just ignore the actual Nazis and they will go away" has been tried before, and I have long-deceased relatives for whom it did not turn out so well.
I believe Substack's existing terms of service warrant deplatforming the actual-Nazis. I believe Substack isn't applying its existing terms of service because that would be a headache and they'd rather not invest resources into managing their actual-Nazi problem. I also, for the record, think if the existing terms of service are so porous that they permit actual-Nazis, then that's a pretty solid indicator that its about time to update those terms of service.
I didn't say we should ignore them. In fact, the comment you demanded a citation for suggests the opposite of ignoring them. Don't strawman my argument.
I also never said anyone suggested deplatforming Freddie deBoer. I provided his essay as a good example for why your argument of deplatforming is illogical.
And yes, your post demanding censorship is actually quite ignorant as are the rest of these comments. You consistently miss the actual nuance of an argument and go for the oversimplified and vapid 'Nazi' tropes.
Still wins the award for the most ignorant post of 2023. (I'm also still wondering why you find ourself surrounded by literal Nazis when I have absolutely zero in my milieu of creative fiction and scientific exploration)
And the simple reason I commented is because I think bad ideas need to be exposed and addressed as bad ideas whether they come from you or the literal Nazis adjacent to you.
I agree with you: I think it is good to have a place that doesnt censor. But Substack has become more than that. It is a place that builds communities, where writers and readers enjoy spending time together. A place where people like to hang out. Most people do not want to hang out with Nazis. And many people (rightly so, I would say) feel they need to actively oppose the spreading of white supremacy. The reason is that Nazis, as opposed to ordinary assholes, are much more dangerous.
If we both agree so far, I dont understand your attack on David.
The article I linked does a pretty good job supporting my argument better than I could make it. My complaint is that David fell victim to a sad trope and poorly considered response. "Ban Nazis and if you don't then...."
To your comment on the Substack community, I'll go back to my comment above phrased a little differently:
My word of creative fiction and technology exploration has no Nazis.
Apparently the Author's world does? What's that say about the author's writing and associations that put him in contact with literal Nazis?
I'm in control of my community and associations. I can follow and unfollow anyone I want. I actually dug pretty deep into my substack community and couldn't find Nazis except, ironically, around left of center types and the trolls who left twitter.
Banning them doesn't stop them. Letting their ideas stay out in the open to be addressed works better. Threatening stubstack won't fix the problem with Nazis.
Last I checked, good ‘ol WordPress is still free.
Just make sure to change your favicon and change the “Powered by WordPress” footer to “Not Powered by Substack” to keep people from calling you a Boomer Millennial hailing from the year of our Lord 2003.
(Also Tumblr! Tumblr is still free! Tumblr just has very little monetization, though. By contrast you can paywall WordPress with extensions if you want. Though if you’re legitimately insane you could also try self-hosting Ghost or some even more niche CMS.)
EDIT: and if you move to Tumblr, people might confuse you for David Karp (no “f”)!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Karp
Great reflections Dave! And you for the reading list to work through over the festive period 😊
*thank you
Dave: love the newsletter. Followed you for awhile now.
I respect what anyone feels they have to do to stay relevant and solvent in the current media environment. The only thing I wanted to say is that I think if you turned subs on you’d EASILY make enough money to be in the black, even if you moved to another service. Not saying you should definitely move but I wouldn’t make financial considerations part of your calculation. That is all.
Keep up the amazing work and thanks for a great year of newsletters!
Looking forward to more of your work. Happy holidays!
I am playing with Buttondown, and so far I like it, but I have like 20 subscribers, so the free plan works well for me so far. It is more work, but I am a bit of a geek. I moved from Ghost to Substack, and the main differences were less customizability on Substack, but far easier to grow an audience on Substack. The community and recommendations just work here, and it feels forced at Ghost.
The one thing I hate about Substack is that they pre/post-pend the "Pledge Your Support" to try to guilt me into turning it into a revenue stream for them. What I write is very niche, so it just isn't palatable to my small audience to *pay* for my content. And it is a hobby for me.
Now, if I got to say 1,000 subscribers I would rethink that, but I don't believe I will ever have to cross that bridge.
Reading your posts has been a bright spot in my life, and I will follow should you leave!
If you’re really, *really* niche, you could always move to Tumblr.
In all fairness, Substack is partly crowd-funded and owned by its users: https://on.substack.com/p/wefunder
I had completely forgotten about that.
Substack has raised $7,809,219 out of their goal of $100,000,000, after a pre-money valuation of $585,000,000. This equates to something like 1.3% of equity. I think we can all agree that this effort has been *extraordinarily* successful.
Interesting ... this valuation seems completely over the top from a technological point of view. And how valuable is the network really? It is an interesting experiment, but if the value of the network comes from moderation than Substack is on the wrong track if it wants to get big and make money.
If you move to a paid subscription, consider charging less than $100. Maybe $99.99 would do it, but $100 is a fair chunk of even my relatively generous media budget. Another possibility to consider is offering monthly sponsorships. If you move to a service that charges around $90 a month, I wouldn't be surprised if you find monthly sponsors or perhaps half sponsors. Let people sign up ahead so you can cover the year ahead. Subscriptions can feel daunting.
I used to buy interesting magazines at Reading International in Cambridge, MA. I'd grab several at a time, and often would pick up several issues of the same magazine a few times a year. Only in one or two cases did I sign up for a subscription even though the subscription price was sometimes less than the multiple issue prices. (Issues cost about $5 back then, so that would be $20 now. That's a casual purchase. $100 is still a big purchase.)
I think the problem is more fundamental. I call it democratic governance. As an example, on the one hand one wants a public sphere that is censorship resistant, on the other hand people want to enjoy socializing, meeting, discussing. More generally, we want a society where everybody is free to do what they want, but also a society where its members are freedom to collectively build public goods. These two aims contradict each other. Afaics, nobody has proposed a solution to this problem yet ...
I read quite a bit about the Substack Nazi Problem and see both arguments. This newsletter is one of the more interesting ones on this topic.
"Moderation costs money and isn’t any fun. Substack wants to be a revolutionary platform for the creator economy, without spending money on the not-fun stuff."
"And then [Cloudfare] realized that you don’t get to be an important platform and also ignore how your tools are being used."
My best case scenario is a situation where writers and readers can choose. There will be sth like Substack which covers the extreme right and left as well as some dissenters that are more difficult to categorize. Then there will be platforms with other identities. Finally, there will be writers who just run their own server. Btw, as setting up platforms is getting easier there will be a lot of competition for Substack.
Winner of the dumbest and most ignorant post of 2023. Congrats. You beat Trump's tweets.
Wow. So exciting. Do I get a trophy?
It's just a sad old trope that's been so over used. Nazis... Maybe it's the exhaustion of seeing anyone someone disagreed with called a Nazi.
Are there asshole white people? Yes. Might they claim Nazi ideology? Certainly. We also have authors who support the CCP who have concentration camps for Uyghur, kill them, and killed tens of millions more than Nazis.
There's currently a lot of support for Hammas who has the stated claim to do the same thing that the Nazis tried (and were allied with them in WWII)
You also have openly avowed socialists/communists longing for the USSR... whose ideology was just as nationalistic and murderous.
But it's always the Nazis. The nice thing about these Nazis is we can see them. We can watch them organize in the open.
It also says a lot when you find yourself surrounded by them. What does your writing have in common that the algorithm lumps you together.
My word of creative fiction and technology exploration has none. Apparently your world does? And that worries you that you're associated with them?
Do you think it is ok to make an excuse for Nazis as just being assholes? How would you reply, for example, to Talia Lavin https://www.npr.org/2020/11/04/931527391/white-supremacy-and-its-online-reach ?
I didn't make an excuse for Nazis. In fact, what I'm doing is taking away an excuse to poorly label them. I also am not suggesting they do not exist. Neither of those were my argument. My argument was against censoring them.
Because censoring them doesn't stop them from being assholes. It makes them feel oppressed and opressed people always feel more justified. Freddie deBoer has a great analysis on the topic. He's been accused of being a Nazi because of the intellectualy vapid trope instead of undersanding what's driving the ideology.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/these-rules-about-platforming-nazis
<Sigh.>
Freddie deBoer is an asshole and not-a-Nazi. I do not believe Substack should be deplatforming Freddies deBoer. None of the people who signed the letter believe that, afaik.
There are *actual* Nazis making money on this platform. One way that we know this is true is Substack's leadership releasing a statement saying, in effect "yeah there are Nazis on this platform and we don't like the ideology but <shrug emoji> we get 10% of their fees so its fine."
I understand your argument is that we do not have to interact with the actual Nazis who are using this platform -- that we can just ignore them and let them go away. And yes, true, it is easier to avoid them on a newsletter platform with embedded social features than on some other social platforms.
I do not expect anything will dissuade you of that belief. You hold it strongly enough that you go searching for newsletters you do not subscribe to and pop into the comments to say they have written "the most ignorant post of 2023."
But it is not a belief that I am inclined to share. "Just ignore the actual Nazis and they will go away" has been tried before, and I have long-deceased relatives for whom it did not turn out so well.
I believe Substack's existing terms of service warrant deplatforming the actual-Nazis. I believe Substack isn't applying its existing terms of service because that would be a headache and they'd rather not invest resources into managing their actual-Nazi problem. I also, for the record, think if the existing terms of service are so porous that they permit actual-Nazis, then that's a pretty solid indicator that its about time to update those terms of service.
I didn't say we should ignore them. In fact, the comment you demanded a citation for suggests the opposite of ignoring them. Don't strawman my argument.
I also never said anyone suggested deplatforming Freddie deBoer. I provided his essay as a good example for why your argument of deplatforming is illogical.
And yes, your post demanding censorship is actually quite ignorant as are the rest of these comments. You consistently miss the actual nuance of an argument and go for the oversimplified and vapid 'Nazi' tropes.
Still wins the award for the most ignorant post of 2023. (I'm also still wondering why you find ourself surrounded by literal Nazis when I have absolutely zero in my milieu of creative fiction and scientific exploration)
And the simple reason I commented is because I think bad ideas need to be exposed and addressed as bad ideas whether they come from you or the literal Nazis adjacent to you.
I agree with you: I think it is good to have a place that doesnt censor. But Substack has become more than that. It is a place that builds communities, where writers and readers enjoy spending time together. A place where people like to hang out. Most people do not want to hang out with Nazis. And many people (rightly so, I would say) feel they need to actively oppose the spreading of white supremacy. The reason is that Nazis, as opposed to ordinary assholes, are much more dangerous.
If we both agree so far, I dont understand your attack on David.
The article I linked does a pretty good job supporting my argument better than I could make it. My complaint is that David fell victim to a sad trope and poorly considered response. "Ban Nazis and if you don't then...."
To your comment on the Substack community, I'll go back to my comment above phrased a little differently:
My word of creative fiction and technology exploration has no Nazis.
Apparently the Author's world does? What's that say about the author's writing and associations that put him in contact with literal Nazis?
I'm in control of my community and associations. I can follow and unfollow anyone I want. I actually dug pretty deep into my substack community and couldn't find Nazis except, ironically, around left of center types and the trolls who left twitter.
Banning them doesn't stop them. Letting their ideas stay out in the open to be addressed works better. Threatening stubstack won't fix the problem with Nazis.
Ready to fork over my 6, 8 or 9 dollars a month as needed.
I will follow you and pay for the privilege.