Former Big Tech comms person here. I agree both the initial Substack messaging around this and the subsequent spin have been poor. But comms wouldn’t be the ones interpreting Substack’s policies and whether they were violated, or determining the what those policies would be in the first place. Comms can’t fix bad policy. And in 2024 there are no comms efforts capable of fixing a policy of “we’re ok with monetizing Nazis because FrEe sPeeCh.”
It seems pretty obvious to me that Substack underestimated the coordinated and sustained pushback from the community and thought they could wait it out. Hamish’s note had big [Founder voice] “all we need is to **explain** what we’re doing and then people will understand it!” energy that I’ve all too often seen bulldoze over comms people behind the scenes trying to get leaders to acknowledge their policy is bad and unsustainable. It was only when the brand damage became too great they had to adjust course, and then it gets cast as a comms/PR problem. But at its core it’s a leadership and policy problem.
I guess what I'd say is that the company ought to have a comms person who is senior enough to be able to say to leadership "fellas. Think two weeks ahead. This is going to turn out poorly for us, because the current policy interpretation is indefensible. Let me do my job here."
The bigger the org, the less likely they'll have a senior-enough person filling that role. Substack is still relatively small though, it seems to me.
Still, it's a point well taken. This starts from policy and leadership. Good comms can't fix indefensible policy or daft leadership.
I don't think they have any strategic advisors? They seem to rely on their own advice.
Not nitpicking about your thoughts on "comms", because I take that to encompass every step of this saga, including their verbatim comms. (Will "obviously" make the problem worse ... Really, on which planet is it obvious? Jeez. Do they even sanity check before issuing comms?)
I was going to point out this very thing. The comms team is paid by the company to craft the party line. Clearly, the issue at hand was that Substack 1) wanted Nazi money and 2) thought they could get it by staying quiet about their Nazi writers.
The statement emerged not because the comms team finally figured out how to do their job, but because the company finally admitted its two objectives during this mess were incompatible.
No it’s plainly obvious that Substack, as a business, didn’t want Nazi money—the Nazis didn’t them make ANY money, certainly not enough to piss on, and by the time they dedicated two hours of staff time to Dealing With The Nazi Problem the entire amount was a net loss anyway. None of this was a financial or business decision.
What Substack wanted was to Be Left Alone, specifically those making leadership decisions wanted to be left alone, and they approached this as a problem from day one to be minimized to the point where the decision making leaders would not have had to deal with it.
The chosen path of conduct, as so often, was NOT a business decision and shouldn’t be ascribed as such, because in terms of revenues and costs it is entirely indefensible. This was a decision about FEELINGS, and the sensitive feelings of some leaders who didn’t like their decisions (or in this case, lack thereof) being questioned and were uncomfortable about engaging the policy because of those feelings. They finally are figuring out how to turn most of the questions off, though at more cost.
It reminds me of how offended when I get when companies issue statements like “N Corp believes on free speech” and I’m like you better fucken not, you’re only allowed to care about making money. It’s your jackass CEO who pretends to believe in free speech.
Based on my own long observation of the dominant culture of Silicon Valley (by no means confined to the geographical region known as Silicon Valley), I suspect a major part of the problem is that they just don't want to think about it. Nazis are uncommon in Silicon Valley (fascists more broadly are somewhat more common), but the place is lousy with libertarians. The essence of libertarianism is a pretense that society is (or should be) a voluntary association of autonomous individuals. It follows that politics is (or should be) just a rhetorical game. It may be amusing from time to time, but having to take it seriously is a nuisance and a burden to be shouldered only when truly necessary (e.g., when threatened with a tax increase).
To be sure, libertarians have no monopoly on treating politics as if it were just a rhetorical game. Many affluent white people who don't call themselves libertarians do likewise. More than a few such people call themselves journalists.*
By the way, to this day, I refer to him - when I must refer to him - as Bretbug Stephens. Thanks for that.
Yeah, I tried to get at this in the Mouse-Shit-Nazis essay last month:
"Tech libertarianism is, fundamentally, an ideology for people who are both cheap and lazy. That is the great advantage that attracts businesspeople to adopt a libertarian perspective on speech regulation. If your first instinct about content moderation is “I would rather not think about this, it shouldn’t be my problem, and I definitely don’t want to spend any resources on it,” then libertarianism is the ideology for you."
This gets at why I've been kind of waiting for Substack to step (or fall) over a line. So while the Nazi dustup makes for a great comm case study, in my own mind I can't separate it out from the larger context of the company's techie structure and culture.
To me the most important question is what do left-of-center Substackers do next? To date we've been more focused on critiquing Substack than stepping back and looking at the larger question of how can we build small-scale publishing capacity in ways that better align with our democratic values?
For example, should there be a mass, coordinated exit from Substack? If so, what are the best choices for where to land given our specific publishing needs? There have been some side conversations about these questions but they have lacked depth.
Exactly. That's why I think of him as Bretbug. Dave did a real public service there, exposing Stephens as the bedbug, er, pompous and thin-skinned bully he is.
Substack seems rather naive. This 'content' stuff shows it.
Off topic: But their actual business also has issues from most customer's perspectives. It doesn't scale if one has to subscribe to many columnists, not compared to a newspaper where I get all of these (plus more) together. If one columnist writes one article each week (there is no guarantee), and one pays $7 per month for that, each single column costs $1.75 to read. That is more expensive than an entire newspaper. It is like one has to subscribe to each individual journalist of a paper. So, this model works a bit, but as long as there are no affordable micropayments per column in the same range of about 1/40 of the cost of a newspaper, it is horrendously expensive and it will not scale as a business a people make decisions not so much on individual cases, but more on on patterns. The individual case here (if you're really interested in a single monetising writer) might be OK, the pattern (let's take out 10 subscriptions for 10 article writers) isn't. And people will (mostly?) decide to buy based on a pattern they see. Buying a very expensive lunch/latte as a rule is far too expensive, so the pattern is avoided by some. But doing that while on holiday or as a single separate treat is OK as it is not a pattern. Human intelligence is 90% 'speedy and efficient pattern execution'.
I think you're ultimately right about the business model, unless we assume a society with levels of wealth inequality where (a) a small subset can easily afford to subscribe to lots of solo writers (the patronage model) and (b) the writers who succeed all learn to cater to that small subset.
That's a bad society, and one that I don't believe would have much longevity. But it's very much the model of society that I suspect most of venture capital holds to be both real and just.
And the *actual* business model for the past few years has been (1) take a bunch of VC dollars, use it to subsidize writers, (2) hope that this leads to scale and brand popularity, (3) cross your fingers that additional revenue sources crop up later.
That was Medium's business model as well. It worked until it didn't. Writers, especially in the U.S., where journalism receives scant public funding and has been collapsing for decades, hop from platform to platform, absorbing that VC subsidy. That's not a *good* situation, by a long shot. But it often makes the best of a bad situation.
I am wondering if we have reached peak newsletter economy, where fatigue and the persistent drip-drip of $5, and $10 per month combine to put the brakes on.
I do know that I have far too many that I pay for (and to be clear, I WANT to help those writers) that while I can afford it, it does go far beyond the annual spend I make for The Atlantic, WaPo and NYT, where I get a LOT more for my money.
Plus writers begging other writers to become a paid subscribers is a snake eating its tail business model. It's notable how few - often none - newsletter writers pay for other newsletters, then bewail the challenge of converting free subscribers to paid subscribers. It's like an in joke that everyone refuses to acknowledge, no matter how many times its pointed out.
I would just add that Substack (or is it “the newsletter industry”) has fundamentally changed my reading and subscription patterns. Stalwarts for me like the New Yorker, Atlantic and New York now seem to have too much I don’t like, causing me not to subscribe consistently - whereas the wide choice of somewhat niche newsletter writers allows me to have a very high satisfaction ratio per article/dollar.
I guess one day the fun will be over. But this is a golden age for me.
I can understand that. What I like about edited journals is the added value of that editing. The selection. Apart from the time and energy involved finding the valuable stuff, selecting all of my own would increase the risk of me creating my own bubble even more than I already (as we all) do. Anyway, I would like to pay, but not when it's going to cost an unreasonable arm and a leg per 'story'.
The whole naive 'free speech absolutism' also turns me off, though. Do I want to support a platform like Substack or Twitter that contributes to the destruction of shared norms and values — i.e. society — by (a) making sure almost all of these values cannot/will not be 'enforced' (to harsh a word, but I know no better now) (b) being 'the place to be'? E.g. how is Twitter still around? It is around because it still has that almost unassailable position of being 'the place to be' (for instance because classic media use it as a source, has any Mastodon 'toot' ever been shown in a TV show as 'news'?) and not taking part is missing opportunities. But it is the ethical choice to make.
it feels like a year ago there was much more clarity around moderation/trust and safety at Substack: whoever runs the sub-site is responsible for moderating it, and Substack decides who can use their services according to whatever is in the ToS.
when they (and I guess I mean Hamish, I remember that interview) deployed the "Notes" feature during Twitter's implosion and then responded to "but what about moderation?" with a shrug, this kind of nonsense feels like it became a matter of time as a follow-on. an impressive level of foot-shooting.
yeah I think it was Nilay Patel who interviewed them and was basically like "REALLY guys? That's your answer? You... realize this is going to bite you in the ass in like six months, right?"
Chris's answer to that question was astonishing, because it was almost like he'd never thought about it before.
But not because it hadn't occurred to him. Because he'd *chosen* not to think about it.
Folks like Nilay and Anil Dash were almost immediately saying "Substack is a problem and you should not invest your talents there," and they were right, and like a lot of writers I didn't listen to them because I figured Substack would fix it when it went from a theoretical to a real issue. Wrong.
I 100% agree. Once they began the algorithmic surfacing of things, once they made a "feed", and especially the addition of Notes, it became not "infrastructure" but "platform" and that raises the requirement that they police the new proto-Social Media site they have created.
It was just a matter of time until the mouse shit became too large to ignore.
I think it's important to note that the Nazis they announced they're kicking off the platform are all tiny little newsletters that aren't making them any money. They kept the ones they profit from.
I.e., this isn't them turning over a new leaf and trying to do better. It's them trying _again_ to distract people by saying/doing something performative while continuing to profit just as much from Nazis on their platform.
The unequivocal fact remains: Substack is perfectly OK with profiting from Nazism.
The stance they've come to is "okay fine we will enforce terms of service in extreme cases." That's hardly bold moral leadership on Substack's part.
But there is, I think, a meaningful difference between "we are literally fine with actual Nazis here. Not our problem." and "We don't want to start traveling down a slippery slope, but there are lines and we will take action when they are crossed."
The former makes you Gab. The latter makes you, well, Twitter before the Elon takeover.
I just don't think this is them taking action because of crossed lines. The distinguishing feature of the accounts they suspended isn't that they crossed any particular line that they're unaware of other accounts crossing; it's that they're not making any money for Substack.
They left in place Nazi accounts they know about that are making money.
But, reportedly, that's the list Casey submitted to them.
I had assumed the leaks about, "it was only 6 accounts" was just spin, but apparently Casey did say, "here are the 6 worst accounts I found, let's start there."
Sadly, I don't think it will be clear. I'm sure other people will start reporting account and, in most cases, nothing will happen, and there won't be any clear information about what does get flagged as violating the TOS.
Personally, the thing I want to keep at the forefront is a push for transparency -- which would also be valuable for legitimate free speech concerns.
Is this proven? Katz asserts he’s found sixteen such newsletters, but as far as I know he (perhaps understandably) hasn’t identified them. Newton independently tried to find Nazi content on Substack and the tiny ones you mention were apparently the best he can come up with. Is there any independent corroboration of Katz’s claim?
I certainly agree with you. I'd also say we should pace ourselves... 2024 is going to be an exceptionally long political year. If any of us are focused on Substack drama in October 2024, I will consider that a grave misstep. There is time and space for it in January though, I think.
Former Big Tech comms person here. I agree both the initial Substack messaging around this and the subsequent spin have been poor. But comms wouldn’t be the ones interpreting Substack’s policies and whether they were violated, or determining the what those policies would be in the first place. Comms can’t fix bad policy. And in 2024 there are no comms efforts capable of fixing a policy of “we’re ok with monetizing Nazis because FrEe sPeeCh.”
It seems pretty obvious to me that Substack underestimated the coordinated and sustained pushback from the community and thought they could wait it out. Hamish’s note had big [Founder voice] “all we need is to **explain** what we’re doing and then people will understand it!” energy that I’ve all too often seen bulldoze over comms people behind the scenes trying to get leaders to acknowledge their policy is bad and unsustainable. It was only when the brand damage became too great they had to adjust course, and then it gets cast as a comms/PR problem. But at its core it’s a leadership and policy problem.
This is well put, agreed.
I guess what I'd say is that the company ought to have a comms person who is senior enough to be able to say to leadership "fellas. Think two weeks ahead. This is going to turn out poorly for us, because the current policy interpretation is indefensible. Let me do my job here."
The bigger the org, the less likely they'll have a senior-enough person filling that role. Substack is still relatively small though, it seems to me.
Still, it's a point well taken. This starts from policy and leadership. Good comms can't fix indefensible policy or daft leadership.
I don't think they have any strategic advisors? They seem to rely on their own advice.
Not nitpicking about your thoughts on "comms", because I take that to encompass every step of this saga, including their verbatim comms. (Will "obviously" make the problem worse ... Really, on which planet is it obvious? Jeez. Do they even sanity check before issuing comms?)
I was going to point out this very thing. The comms team is paid by the company to craft the party line. Clearly, the issue at hand was that Substack 1) wanted Nazi money and 2) thought they could get it by staying quiet about their Nazi writers.
The statement emerged not because the comms team finally figured out how to do their job, but because the company finally admitted its two objectives during this mess were incompatible.
No it’s plainly obvious that Substack, as a business, didn’t want Nazi money—the Nazis didn’t them make ANY money, certainly not enough to piss on, and by the time they dedicated two hours of staff time to Dealing With The Nazi Problem the entire amount was a net loss anyway. None of this was a financial or business decision.
What Substack wanted was to Be Left Alone, specifically those making leadership decisions wanted to be left alone, and they approached this as a problem from day one to be minimized to the point where the decision making leaders would not have had to deal with it.
The chosen path of conduct, as so often, was NOT a business decision and shouldn’t be ascribed as such, because in terms of revenues and costs it is entirely indefensible. This was a decision about FEELINGS, and the sensitive feelings of some leaders who didn’t like their decisions (or in this case, lack thereof) being questioned and were uncomfortable about engaging the policy because of those feelings. They finally are figuring out how to turn most of the questions off, though at more cost.
It reminds me of how offended when I get when companies issue statements like “N Corp believes on free speech” and I’m like you better fucken not, you’re only allowed to care about making money. It’s your jackass CEO who pretends to believe in free speech.
Based on my own long observation of the dominant culture of Silicon Valley (by no means confined to the geographical region known as Silicon Valley), I suspect a major part of the problem is that they just don't want to think about it. Nazis are uncommon in Silicon Valley (fascists more broadly are somewhat more common), but the place is lousy with libertarians. The essence of libertarianism is a pretense that society is (or should be) a voluntary association of autonomous individuals. It follows that politics is (or should be) just a rhetorical game. It may be amusing from time to time, but having to take it seriously is a nuisance and a burden to be shouldered only when truly necessary (e.g., when threatened with a tax increase).
To be sure, libertarians have no monopoly on treating politics as if it were just a rhetorical game. Many affluent white people who don't call themselves libertarians do likewise. More than a few such people call themselves journalists.*
By the way, to this day, I refer to him - when I must refer to him - as Bretbug Stephens. Thanks for that.
*Cf. https://splinternews.com/bipartisanship-means-i-dont-understand-what-politics-1796268741 .
Yeah, I tried to get at this in the Mouse-Shit-Nazis essay last month:
"Tech libertarianism is, fundamentally, an ideology for people who are both cheap and lazy. That is the great advantage that attracts businesspeople to adopt a libertarian perspective on speech regulation. If your first instinct about content moderation is “I would rather not think about this, it shouldn’t be my problem, and I definitely don’t want to spend any resources on it,” then libertarianism is the ideology for you."
This gets at why I've been kind of waiting for Substack to step (or fall) over a line. So while the Nazi dustup makes for a great comm case study, in my own mind I can't separate it out from the larger context of the company's techie structure and culture.
To me the most important question is what do left-of-center Substackers do next? To date we've been more focused on critiquing Substack than stepping back and looking at the larger question of how can we build small-scale publishing capacity in ways that better align with our democratic values?
For example, should there be a mass, coordinated exit from Substack? If so, what are the best choices for where to land given our specific publishing needs? There have been some side conversations about these questions but they have lacked depth.
Great comment, but I have to add that I think of him as Bretbug because of Dave.
Exactly. That's why I think of him as Bretbug. Dave did a real public service there, exposing Stephens as the bedbug, er, pompous and thin-skinned bully he is.
Substack seems rather naive. This 'content' stuff shows it.
Off topic: But their actual business also has issues from most customer's perspectives. It doesn't scale if one has to subscribe to many columnists, not compared to a newspaper where I get all of these (plus more) together. If one columnist writes one article each week (there is no guarantee), and one pays $7 per month for that, each single column costs $1.75 to read. That is more expensive than an entire newspaper. It is like one has to subscribe to each individual journalist of a paper. So, this model works a bit, but as long as there are no affordable micropayments per column in the same range of about 1/40 of the cost of a newspaper, it is horrendously expensive and it will not scale as a business a people make decisions not so much on individual cases, but more on on patterns. The individual case here (if you're really interested in a single monetising writer) might be OK, the pattern (let's take out 10 subscriptions for 10 article writers) isn't. And people will (mostly?) decide to buy based on a pattern they see. Buying a very expensive lunch/latte as a rule is far too expensive, so the pattern is avoided by some. But doing that while on holiday or as a single separate treat is OK as it is not a pattern. Human intelligence is 90% 'speedy and efficient pattern execution'.
I think you're ultimately right about the business model, unless we assume a society with levels of wealth inequality where (a) a small subset can easily afford to subscribe to lots of solo writers (the patronage model) and (b) the writers who succeed all learn to cater to that small subset.
That's a bad society, and one that I don't believe would have much longevity. But it's very much the model of society that I suspect most of venture capital holds to be both real and just.
And the *actual* business model for the past few years has been (1) take a bunch of VC dollars, use it to subsidize writers, (2) hope that this leads to scale and brand popularity, (3) cross your fingers that additional revenue sources crop up later.
That was Medium's business model as well. It worked until it didn't. Writers, especially in the U.S., where journalism receives scant public funding and has been collapsing for decades, hop from platform to platform, absorbing that VC subsidy. That's not a *good* situation, by a long shot. But it often makes the best of a bad situation.
Great comment.
I am wondering if we have reached peak newsletter economy, where fatigue and the persistent drip-drip of $5, and $10 per month combine to put the brakes on.
I do know that I have far too many that I pay for (and to be clear, I WANT to help those writers) that while I can afford it, it does go far beyond the annual spend I make for The Atlantic, WaPo and NYT, where I get a LOT more for my money.
Yep.
Plus writers begging other writers to become a paid subscribers is a snake eating its tail business model. It's notable how few - often none - newsletter writers pay for other newsletters, then bewail the challenge of converting free subscribers to paid subscribers. It's like an in joke that everyone refuses to acknowledge, no matter how many times its pointed out.
I would just add that Substack (or is it “the newsletter industry”) has fundamentally changed my reading and subscription patterns. Stalwarts for me like the New Yorker, Atlantic and New York now seem to have too much I don’t like, causing me not to subscribe consistently - whereas the wide choice of somewhat niche newsletter writers allows me to have a very high satisfaction ratio per article/dollar.
I guess one day the fun will be over. But this is a golden age for me.
I can understand that. What I like about edited journals is the added value of that editing. The selection. Apart from the time and energy involved finding the valuable stuff, selecting all of my own would increase the risk of me creating my own bubble even more than I already (as we all) do. Anyway, I would like to pay, but not when it's going to cost an unreasonable arm and a leg per 'story'.
The whole naive 'free speech absolutism' also turns me off, though. Do I want to support a platform like Substack or Twitter that contributes to the destruction of shared norms and values — i.e. society — by (a) making sure almost all of these values cannot/will not be 'enforced' (to harsh a word, but I know no better now) (b) being 'the place to be'? E.g. how is Twitter still around? It is around because it still has that almost unassailable position of being 'the place to be' (for instance because classic media use it as a source, has any Mastodon 'toot' ever been shown in a TV show as 'news'?) and not taking part is missing opportunities. But it is the ethical choice to make.
it feels like a year ago there was much more clarity around moderation/trust and safety at Substack: whoever runs the sub-site is responsible for moderating it, and Substack decides who can use their services according to whatever is in the ToS.
when they (and I guess I mean Hamish, I remember that interview) deployed the "Notes" feature during Twitter's implosion and then responded to "but what about moderation?" with a shrug, this kind of nonsense feels like it became a matter of time as a follow-on. an impressive level of foot-shooting.
yeah I think it was Nilay Patel who interviewed them and was basically like "REALLY guys? That's your answer? You... realize this is going to bite you in the ass in like six months, right?"
Chris's answer to that question was astonishing, because it was almost like he'd never thought about it before.
But not because it hadn't occurred to him. Because he'd *chosen* not to think about it.
Folks like Nilay and Anil Dash were almost immediately saying "Substack is a problem and you should not invest your talents there," and they were right, and like a lot of writers I didn't listen to them because I figured Substack would fix it when it went from a theoretical to a real issue. Wrong.
That's right, it was Nilay Patel. And it was Chris Best, not Hamish, but hey! they seem aligned on it. found a snippet of it: https://www.tiktok.com/@decoderpod/video/7221602731998498094
I 100% agree. Once they began the algorithmic surfacing of things, once they made a "feed", and especially the addition of Notes, it became not "infrastructure" but "platform" and that raises the requirement that they police the new proto-Social Media site they have created.
It was just a matter of time until the mouse shit became too large to ignore.
This is one of those posts that's good enough I'm mad at the author because I wish I wrote it.
I think it's important to note that the Nazis they announced they're kicking off the platform are all tiny little newsletters that aren't making them any money. They kept the ones they profit from.
I.e., this isn't them turning over a new leaf and trying to do better. It's them trying _again_ to distract people by saying/doing something performative while continuing to profit just as much from Nazis on their platform.
The unequivocal fact remains: Substack is perfectly OK with profiting from Nazism.
Good note, yes.
The stance they've come to is "okay fine we will enforce terms of service in extreme cases." That's hardly bold moral leadership on Substack's part.
But there is, I think, a meaningful difference between "we are literally fine with actual Nazis here. Not our problem." and "We don't want to start traveling down a slippery slope, but there are lines and we will take action when they are crossed."
The former makes you Gab. The latter makes you, well, Twitter before the Elon takeover.
I just don't think this is them taking action because of crossed lines. The distinguishing feature of the accounts they suspended isn't that they crossed any particular line that they're unaware of other accounts crossing; it's that they're not making any money for Substack.
They left in place Nazi accounts they know about that are making money.
I think you're giving them too much credit here.
But, reportedly, that's the list Casey submitted to them.
I had assumed the leaks about, "it was only 6 accounts" was just spin, but apparently Casey did say, "here are the 6 worst accounts I found, let's start there."
Fair enough. I guess we wait and see where their line is then.
Sadly, I don't think it will be clear. I'm sure other people will start reporting account and, in most cases, nothing will happen, and there won't be any clear information about what does get flagged as violating the TOS.
Personally, the thing I want to keep at the forefront is a push for transparency -- which would also be valuable for legitimate free speech concerns.
That said, I also think this is correct and well said: https://substack.com/@russellnohelty/note/c-46934312
Is this proven? Katz asserts he’s found sixteen such newsletters, but as far as I know he (perhaps understandably) hasn’t identified them. Newton independently tried to find Nazi content on Substack and the tiny ones you mention were apparently the best he can come up with. Is there any independent corroboration of Katz’s claim?
Doesn't it just come down to arrogance? I've noticed that it's a feature, not a bug.
I certainly agree with you. I'd also say we should pace ourselves... 2024 is going to be an exceptionally long political year. If any of us are focused on Substack drama in October 2024, I will consider that a grave misstep. There is time and space for it in January though, I think.