Loading... (+ the Etiology of the Substack Disease)

Decision paralysis and over-analysis, here we come.

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man. (Wikimedia Commons)

In this last week of 2023, I did two things.

One, and by far the most important of the two, the one that transcends all the online stuff, I visited my parents for a hearty holiday lunch.

Two, I read a seemingly endless amount of posts, opinions, and rants about Substack and the ‘Issue’, capital I. The result? Several sleepless nights and stubborn heartburn.

Substack has become a Nazi bar, Substack is a garden of Eden (with merely a few bad apples, as all gardens of Eden have). Substack should police all the things, Substack should not police a damn thing.

How did we get here?

Well, in 2017, three dudes thought, “Hey, what if we developed a service that combines blogging with newsletter tools for people who don’t have the time or technical know-how to set it up from scratch?” Aww, baby Substack.

I will assume that those three dudes read the modern start-up bible, Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. So, the dudes knew they needed two things: first-mover advantage and fast scaling. First-mover advantage alone is not a guarantee for business success, especially not in rapidly changing markets. No, to keep the business ball rolling in your preferred direction, you need to rapidly expand your user base or monopolize an existing one — aka establish a fertile ground for (potential) profits to ensure that the investors keep drooling. So, in the online realm, you need engagement. Good or bad, doesn’t matter. What drives engagement? Controversy. Hence the Substack Pro program controversy in 2021. Hence the hands-off moderation approach. Hence everything.

The story reaches the present day with an identity crisis. Substack does not know what it wants to be. A platform? A (meta-)publisher? A(nother) social media distract-a-thon? Because it doesn’t know what it wants to be, it doesn't know how to deal with certain - let’s say - demagogues of malicious intent. Substack’s triumvirate waves a see-through free speech flag to try to cover up their identity crisis, their inconsistencies, and, frankly, their disingenuous communication.

It is the nature of the beasts, moguls, and mongrels that startups create to gluttonously devour their piece of the attention economy. This is the etiology of Substack’s sickness, if you will. Controversy drives engagement, engagement drives profit. Platforms and service providers will (almost?) always choose profit in the end, even if they began with noble intentions. Substack is a company. While it pontificates making a great home for writers, a ‘new economic engine for culture’, its first consideration is profit. In this, it is far from unique.

The problem of dubious content moderation, then, is larger than Substack (which is in no way an excuse for the ‘not-really sorry’ excuse by Substack's triumvirate!).

Alicia Kenworthy

makes a similar observation in an insightful Note that suggests it’s not only a Substack problem, but a Silicon Valley problem¹ and

S Peter Davis

has a great post in which he calls it the Hard Problem of social media.

Such is the sad truth. Another sad truth is that Substack’s less salubrious side now feels emboldened by the laissez-faire attitude of its rulers. Venturing into Notes - Substack’s attempt to emulate the best and worst of other social media platforms - has quickly become an experience not unlike jumping into a pool that may or may not contain toxic waste. Enter at your own risk.

There are blatantly fascist and transphobic publications on Substack that grind every gear in my groaning body. Yet, during hours of reading others’ thoughts on this, I have found many more wonderful, inclusive, and creative people here. This place is (still?) the home of intimidatingly good and thoughtful writers. They are not the ones who should be driven away, regardless of who Substack’s upper echelon abets. I am well aware that this is a privileged view from a privileged position. But make no mistake. No platform is safe from this (though others may be handling moderation issues better than Substack if we’re being honest). Malicious intent finds a way to slither through moderation policies like snakes find their way into Eden².

I have lost many hours of sleep over this, even if this newsletter is still a tiny fledgling looking for wings. While I wait a little longer to see where all this goes, I offer you a promise: I will give you nuance, not clickbait³. Kindness, not hate. Transparency, not pretense. I will relentlessly hunt down my own biases and address them, be open to feedback, and remain respectfully willing to (respectfully) have my convictions challenged. I will add my whispers to the chorus of writers and creators who call out Substack’s double standards.

In return, I would like to ask you for a little more patience while I figure out the next steps, if any, for this little home of ideas that we’ve built together.

Will I pack up and leave (or end Thinking Ahead altogether)? Perhaps, at some point. But not today. If you have the time, I recommend the nuanced thoughts of

Ken White

and those of

Radley Balko

, which are pretty close to my own.

My only resolution for the new year is to face (some of) the many fears that paralyze me. Not overcome them, not banish them. Face them and, like water finally flowing after frozen years, no longer break under pressure, regardless of which direction it comes from.

In the Book of Five Rings (~1645), Japanese swordsman/philosopher Miyamoto Musashi suggests:

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.

Sounds like a plan.

May the new year bring you everything you hope for!

1. Coincidentally also the topic of the first proper post of Thinking Ahead. I guess I should have seen all this coming…

2. As a biologist, I find this metaphor outrageously unfair to snakes.

3. Sadly, this too seems to become ever more prevalent on Substack, especially now that it has decided to push the social media route, including a burgeoning pivot to audio and video.