To repeat what I've posted at other Substacks I subscribe to:
- I have direct links in my bookmarks to BEAS, paulwells.substack.com, and the others. I don't see anything pushed at me by never visiting "substack.com" as such.
- Small papers that couldn't afford their own presses always had to go to a printers' - the U.Calgary student paper with all the community newsletters, club newsletters - and the 1970s Calgary branch of the KKK. No problem, as both being their customer did not cause letters columns to interact, or readers from one subjected to content from the other. Substack can let a reader do that, see above.
People imagine that Donald was the first pol to actually propagate conspiracy theories (think I'm repeating this, again, it deserves it; my Canadaland "Duly Noted" would be the same every week).
GW Bush peddled a ludicrous theory that Saddam would conspire with his arch-enemies (worse than America), the Islamists who wanted him brought down - to hand them a free nuclear bomb, no less. The NYT and WaPo not only did not debunk this pathetically obvious falsehood, they took the side of selling the war - NYT with Judy Miller, later disgraced and the NYT apologized, WaPo with 27 of 29 war op-eds in favour. What kind of "liberal" press keeps Noam Chomsky locked out for 25 years?
I think the big papers and the networks do provide one service to liberalism and progressivism: if THEY actually carry a story that harms the arguments or prospects of the right-wing, then, wow, it must be a serious story.
Hello Justin, I don’t see myself discontinuing my paid subscription to your Substack anytime soon. I always look forward to your journalistic dives, and I also appreciate that you keep the amount of publishing at a manageable level for me. I’m finding that people who publish daily or almost daily content don’t have the in-depth material I enjoy, plus I only have so many hours in a day for screen time. Wishing you an inspiring 2024.
Very much enjoyed this. One of the really good lines: "We have yet to discover the internet version of printing words onto dead trees and throwing them at peoples’ homes". What do you think of a model where a Canadian News aggregator allows authors and orgs to submit content, people subscribe, advertisers advertise, content providers split the income from subscriptions and advertisers, with a share reserved for the aggregator service. Allow people to subscribe to unmediated, or to various mediators - a cut needs to be saved for the mediators as well. Sound like a decent business model?
I like the idea and can tell you it's been talked about a lot, both here and in the U.S. Some Canadian progressive outlets have even launched a version of it.
I think the issue is figuring out equity. Lots of small/indy outlets simply don't make enough to pay the bills. Grant money and government subsidy are huge parts of their model. Centralizing can actually decrease the amount of subscription money (I.e. giving people access to many for the price of one) and can disadvantage you with grants. But like I said, some are trying it anyway and I'm keen to see how it works.
But the other problem is that small outlets don't necessarily want to work together. I'm not keen to join the progressive publishing hub because I think their ideology-driven work doesn't mesh with mine.
I would love to consider some kind of group deal with Paul Wells and The Line and maybe some others, if the economics work, but Substack doesn't (yet) make that possible. Maybe soon!
I very much appreciate this analysis and find some comfort in knowing that there are some journalists that see through the “corruption” of the so called mainstream media.
There's this remarkable SF author, John C. Wright. He is a converted Catholic who is very strong in his religious ideology. Outsider critics would say his real religion is Trump:
...but I would urge anybody to read a bit of Wright, to note that he's a on a whole different level of argument, pulling out Greek and Latin philosophers with ease, along with religious scholarship well beyond mine. The top issue today is about his earlier column on " Wokeness being a materialist restatement of Gnosticism." There's never violence threatened, no direct insults, Wright bans and deletes comments for such; it's more like the old USENET beat-downs called "fisking", after point-by-point critiques of Robert Fisk. It's instructive.
You should have a peek, Justin, it's a different kind of Trump debate.
A point? Yes, I have one! This very, very controversial material is hosted on his own blog, with all monetization and comment-handing provided by Disqus, who have been around a long time.
It seems to work for him; and Disqus, UNLIKE SUBSTACK, is like those newspaper printshops that handled both community newsletters and KKK newsletters in the age of newsprint: Mr. Wright's world does not interact with any other Disqus customers.
So what's wrong with them?
(reposting this now to Moscrop's note that he's moving to Ghost. Never heard of them, all-new relationship he's asking me to take up. Disqus account, I've had for many years.)
I think there are figures out there who have baked-in distribution models — sci-fi authors are a pretty great example of those who have massive captive audiences — who don't need the benefit of distribution systems like Substack. But I want to take advantage of every possible benefit in distribution I can get my hands on. I know there are a lot of people (like you) who have a good news regimen, and who deliberately open emails, visit homepages, etc. (Which I love.) But lots of others are driven by recommendations and suggestions. Substack is very good at grabbing those people and, slowly, getting them to live in the Substack ecosystem. Disqus is a great tool and is good at making people sticky in their engagement habits, but, as you note, it doesn't really do recommendation or outreach.
Substack is also great at automating upsells to paid subscriptions, which I *hate* doing.
I'm always super fascinated at how other people make this business work, and I think I'm always picking up tactics and strategies here-and-there. But I remain very fond of Substack's tools.
Thank-you, but it does reach the nub of it, which is that, save for those of us fastidious, self-blinkered SS users who just go straight to BEAS and other journalists, like a kid told to not even look at the corner-dealers on their way to school through a bad neighbourhood, SS functions not just to provide the digital equivalent of a printshop, but as advertising and promotion for all customers, increasing "reach". (I trust that word is getting a new definition in dictionaries, now a term-of-art in social media.)
I've realized in recent months, for all my Mastodon promotion, urging journos to switch, that it's pointless: it's not just that Barack and Beyonce and Swift are not leaving, neither are any government departments or functionaries at all 3 levels, which really traps the journos. Why would multiple Calgary ex-aldermen and Mayors all be quoted on their tributes to recent super-alderman-of-all-time, the late Dale Hodges, were 100% on X, and the story just pasted in several X screenshots? Is Naheed Nenshi a Musk-bro?
No, of course not. Luminaries and governments and corporate PR do not use X as a chat room, have no conversations at all; X, for the already-known, is a one-way announcement platform....and the one with the greatest reach.
It's ALL about wanting maximum "reach", from Taylor to TrafficNet.ca
With paper, you had to advertise your new paper in other papers, radio, TV; now publishing and promotion are all wrapped up in one technology that does both at once.
So, it means being in business, not just with a publisher that will take nazi business, but a promoter who will advertise the nazis, find THEM new readers, the same service they sell to BEAS. A profit-making corporation with the ability to sell "reach" - to promote - will not deny themselves any customers for their service, just as M. Jordan was happy to sell sneakers to Republicans.
Rock, meet hard place. The experience of Katy Perry and Naheed Nenshi on X suggest you'll be fine, save for a few extreme purists. SS-leavers will be like vegans that won't even walk into a restaurant that has some vegan options, but where they can smell the meat cooking, see it promoted on the menu, and so won't give them a dime. A small minority.
Thanks, Justin, I always enjoy your insights (minus the typos...) From a Canadian perspective, your non-mention of the Globe and Mail did surprise. It costs a fortune to subscribe (at least to the paper version) but most of the time delivers good journalism and has some columnists who consistently offer useful insights.
As for Substack's "Nazi problem," it does bother me and, following the example of Brigitte Pellerin, I'm considering moving over to Ghost. Its help desk's answer to the question how they handle this matter compared very favourably to Hamish McKenzie's. Its business model (a flat fee based on the number of subscribers; writers keep 100% of the revenue) also should be very attractive to many and makes people like me, who never intend to ask for paid subscriptions, feel better than being 'forced' to be freeloaders. I'm continuing to look into the pros and cons and your several references are helpful in that regard.
Y'know, I considered adding a whole aside about the Globe — which I think manages to do the Times' tactic better than the Times — but ultimately left it out. It would also be unfair as I'm hopelessly biased, given it's really the only Canadian outlet I still write for, and I'm very fond of our relationship.
I certainly can't criticize anyone for moving to Ghost or other platforms. I just really believe that letting perfect be the enemy of good is a sure-fire way for independent journalists, desperately trying to break through our distribution model, to kneecap themselves. Certainly some people think the benefit of a boycott outweighs the costs of abandoning a platform that's working well for them — my mental math says it's not.
No, I hadn't heard. Thanks for passing this on. Good to see that the Substack leadership is capable of listening. Meanwhile, my experiment with Ghost is not going very well so far (i.t.o. transferring my content over) : It looks like I'd have to do a fair amount of editing to make it look the way I want it.
I spend a lot of time worrying about online radicalization, and while there's a lot that we still don't really understand about it, one thing that seems to be a pretty common thread is that people might pick up ideas on 'big spaces' (pre-Musk Twitter, Facebook, Substack) the real radicalization occurs in smaller spaces, like 4chan, incel forums, private chats, etc. I think some people believe that if they can totally remove anything that could radicalize from those big spaces, maybe fewer people will go to those small spaces.
I entirely get the logic and I used to agree with it. But I think we've tried that expirement (Facebook banning QAnon, Twitter banning everyone pro-J6) and saw that it just made those actually radical spaces, like Gab, bigger and angrier.
Meanwhile, we're starting to appreciate the benefit of cross-cutting spaces. If something like Substack can radicalize, logic follows it can also deradicalize. So if Substack offers extremist publications, it offers orders of magnitude more publications on socialist politics, moderate conservatism, knitting, etc. And I think it's fair to say that it's recommendation algorithm is far more tilted towards positive than negative.
If I quit everything that took my money and hosted truly bad people, I wouldn't be able to use Cloudflare, WordPress, my web-hosting domain, Google, Protonmail, and a vast array of other services. Substack, at least as I see it right now, is at least offering a healthy and competitive information environment. Quitting that, I think, would make it worse.
(Sorry for the long-winded answers! Maybe I should have written something specifically about this affair)
Thanks! And I absolutely take your points, here. I've made some of my concerns known to Substack privately, and I'm cautiously optimistic that they're keen to find some alternative ways to deal with this problem.
Absolutely. But that's also my point: I don't believe that Substack is, say, recommending BE&S readers Nazi newsletters. I do *think* that it's probably recommending knitting blogs to readers of Nazi newsletters. If that changes — and Substack's algorithm starts rewarding extremist content — then I'll definitely reconsider this position.
I mean, I'd quibble with the idea that Substack "champions" them. I did quit Twitter explicitly because Musk geared his platform to serve the worst people. I think that's a pretty important distinction: Is the platform trying to encourage and entice its worst users, or is it merely tolerating them?
In a hypothetical where there are two identical Substacks, where one has Nazis and the other doesn't? Yeah, I'll go with the Nazi-free one.
And, yeah, I think a ban on Nazi symbols/icons/worship/etc is easy, clear, and doable. But considering we're talking about a small handful of publications, I'm not sure there needs to be mass action.
I think there is, however, a risk in trying to capture other, harder to define stuff. It becomes a constant game that requires more and more moderators, and leads to more and more wrong calls, and provokes more fracturing of the media/social media ecosystem. I think that's fine for a platform that's designed to be more apolitical, and for more social interactions (Instagram, e.g.) but I think it's ineffective and counter-productive on sites geared for news and politics.
But, also, reasonable people can disagree on this, I think.
We, your subscribers do care. Take care.
Thanks Wayne!
To repeat what I've posted at other Substacks I subscribe to:
- I have direct links in my bookmarks to BEAS, paulwells.substack.com, and the others. I don't see anything pushed at me by never visiting "substack.com" as such.
- Small papers that couldn't afford their own presses always had to go to a printers' - the U.Calgary student paper with all the community newsletters, club newsletters - and the 1970s Calgary branch of the KKK. No problem, as both being their customer did not cause letters columns to interact, or readers from one subjected to content from the other. Substack can let a reader do that, see above.
People imagine that Donald was the first pol to actually propagate conspiracy theories (think I'm repeating this, again, it deserves it; my Canadaland "Duly Noted" would be the same every week).
GW Bush peddled a ludicrous theory that Saddam would conspire with his arch-enemies (worse than America), the Islamists who wanted him brought down - to hand them a free nuclear bomb, no less. The NYT and WaPo not only did not debunk this pathetically obvious falsehood, they took the side of selling the war - NYT with Judy Miller, later disgraced and the NYT apologized, WaPo with 27 of 29 war op-eds in favour. What kind of "liberal" press keeps Noam Chomsky locked out for 25 years?
I think the big papers and the networks do provide one service to liberalism and progressivism: if THEY actually carry a story that harms the arguments or prospects of the right-wing, then, wow, it must be a serious story.
Hello Justin, I don’t see myself discontinuing my paid subscription to your Substack anytime soon. I always look forward to your journalistic dives, and I also appreciate that you keep the amount of publishing at a manageable level for me. I’m finding that people who publish daily or almost daily content don’t have the in-depth material I enjoy, plus I only have so many hours in a day for screen time. Wishing you an inspiring 2024.
Thanks Anne! And yes, ~once a week, deep dive, that won't change! (But the length of the deep dives might come down a wee bit.)
Very much enjoyed this. One of the really good lines: "We have yet to discover the internet version of printing words onto dead trees and throwing them at peoples’ homes". What do you think of a model where a Canadian News aggregator allows authors and orgs to submit content, people subscribe, advertisers advertise, content providers split the income from subscriptions and advertisers, with a share reserved for the aggregator service. Allow people to subscribe to unmediated, or to various mediators - a cut needs to be saved for the mediators as well. Sound like a decent business model?
I like the idea and can tell you it's been talked about a lot, both here and in the U.S. Some Canadian progressive outlets have even launched a version of it.
I think the issue is figuring out equity. Lots of small/indy outlets simply don't make enough to pay the bills. Grant money and government subsidy are huge parts of their model. Centralizing can actually decrease the amount of subscription money (I.e. giving people access to many for the price of one) and can disadvantage you with grants. But like I said, some are trying it anyway and I'm keen to see how it works.
But the other problem is that small outlets don't necessarily want to work together. I'm not keen to join the progressive publishing hub because I think their ideology-driven work doesn't mesh with mine.
I would love to consider some kind of group deal with Paul Wells and The Line and maybe some others, if the economics work, but Substack doesn't (yet) make that possible. Maybe soon!
I very much appreciate this analysis and find some comfort in knowing that there are some journalists that see through the “corruption” of the so called mainstream media.
Excellent as always! Thank you for constantly expanding and granularizing my understanding of things.
There's this remarkable SF author, John C. Wright. He is a converted Catholic who is very strong in his religious ideology. Outsider critics would say his real religion is Trump:
https://www.scifiwright.com/2024/01/summary-2020-presidential-election-fraud/
...but I would urge anybody to read a bit of Wright, to note that he's a on a whole different level of argument, pulling out Greek and Latin philosophers with ease, along with religious scholarship well beyond mine. The top issue today is about his earlier column on " Wokeness being a materialist restatement of Gnosticism." There's never violence threatened, no direct insults, Wright bans and deletes comments for such; it's more like the old USENET beat-downs called "fisking", after point-by-point critiques of Robert Fisk. It's instructive.
You should have a peek, Justin, it's a different kind of Trump debate.
A point? Yes, I have one! This very, very controversial material is hosted on his own blog, with all monetization and comment-handing provided by Disqus, who have been around a long time.
It seems to work for him; and Disqus, UNLIKE SUBSTACK, is like those newspaper printshops that handled both community newsletters and KKK newsletters in the age of newsprint: Mr. Wright's world does not interact with any other Disqus customers.
So what's wrong with them?
(reposting this now to Moscrop's note that he's moving to Ghost. Never heard of them, all-new relationship he's asking me to take up. Disqus account, I've had for many years.)
I think there are figures out there who have baked-in distribution models — sci-fi authors are a pretty great example of those who have massive captive audiences — who don't need the benefit of distribution systems like Substack. But I want to take advantage of every possible benefit in distribution I can get my hands on. I know there are a lot of people (like you) who have a good news regimen, and who deliberately open emails, visit homepages, etc. (Which I love.) But lots of others are driven by recommendations and suggestions. Substack is very good at grabbing those people and, slowly, getting them to live in the Substack ecosystem. Disqus is a great tool and is good at making people sticky in their engagement habits, but, as you note, it doesn't really do recommendation or outreach.
Substack is also great at automating upsells to paid subscriptions, which I *hate* doing.
I'm always super fascinated at how other people make this business work, and I think I'm always picking up tactics and strategies here-and-there. But I remain very fond of Substack's tools.
Thank-you, but it does reach the nub of it, which is that, save for those of us fastidious, self-blinkered SS users who just go straight to BEAS and other journalists, like a kid told to not even look at the corner-dealers on their way to school through a bad neighbourhood, SS functions not just to provide the digital equivalent of a printshop, but as advertising and promotion for all customers, increasing "reach". (I trust that word is getting a new definition in dictionaries, now a term-of-art in social media.)
I've realized in recent months, for all my Mastodon promotion, urging journos to switch, that it's pointless: it's not just that Barack and Beyonce and Swift are not leaving, neither are any government departments or functionaries at all 3 levels, which really traps the journos. Why would multiple Calgary ex-aldermen and Mayors all be quoted on their tributes to recent super-alderman-of-all-time, the late Dale Hodges, were 100% on X, and the story just pasted in several X screenshots? Is Naheed Nenshi a Musk-bro?
No, of course not. Luminaries and governments and corporate PR do not use X as a chat room, have no conversations at all; X, for the already-known, is a one-way announcement platform....and the one with the greatest reach.
It's ALL about wanting maximum "reach", from Taylor to TrafficNet.ca
With paper, you had to advertise your new paper in other papers, radio, TV; now publishing and promotion are all wrapped up in one technology that does both at once.
So, it means being in business, not just with a publisher that will take nazi business, but a promoter who will advertise the nazis, find THEM new readers, the same service they sell to BEAS. A profit-making corporation with the ability to sell "reach" - to promote - will not deny themselves any customers for their service, just as M. Jordan was happy to sell sneakers to Republicans.
Rock, meet hard place. The experience of Katy Perry and Naheed Nenshi on X suggest you'll be fine, save for a few extreme purists. SS-leavers will be like vegans that won't even walk into a restaurant that has some vegan options, but where they can smell the meat cooking, see it promoted on the menu, and so won't give them a dime. A small minority.
Thanks, Justin, I always enjoy your insights (minus the typos...) From a Canadian perspective, your non-mention of the Globe and Mail did surprise. It costs a fortune to subscribe (at least to the paper version) but most of the time delivers good journalism and has some columnists who consistently offer useful insights.
As for Substack's "Nazi problem," it does bother me and, following the example of Brigitte Pellerin, I'm considering moving over to Ghost. Its help desk's answer to the question how they handle this matter compared very favourably to Hamish McKenzie's. Its business model (a flat fee based on the number of subscribers; writers keep 100% of the revenue) also should be very attractive to many and makes people like me, who never intend to ask for paid subscriptions, feel better than being 'forced' to be freeloaders. I'm continuing to look into the pros and cons and your several references are helpful in that regard.
Y'know, I considered adding a whole aside about the Globe — which I think manages to do the Times' tactic better than the Times — but ultimately left it out. It would also be unfair as I'm hopelessly biased, given it's really the only Canadian outlet I still write for, and I'm very fond of our relationship.
I certainly can't criticize anyone for moving to Ghost or other platforms. I just really believe that letting perfect be the enemy of good is a sure-fire way for independent journalists, desperately trying to break through our distribution model, to kneecap themselves. Certainly some people think the benefit of a boycott outweighs the costs of abandoning a platform that's working well for them — my mental math says it's not.
I'm sure you've also seen that Substack has done a slight course correction: https://www.platformer.news/p/substack-says-it-will-remove-nazi
No, I hadn't heard. Thanks for passing this on. Good to see that the Substack leadership is capable of listening. Meanwhile, my experiment with Ghost is not going very well so far (i.t.o. transferring my content over) : It looks like I'd have to do a fair amount of editing to make it look the way I want it.
I spend a lot of time worrying about online radicalization, and while there's a lot that we still don't really understand about it, one thing that seems to be a pretty common thread is that people might pick up ideas on 'big spaces' (pre-Musk Twitter, Facebook, Substack) the real radicalization occurs in smaller spaces, like 4chan, incel forums, private chats, etc. I think some people believe that if they can totally remove anything that could radicalize from those big spaces, maybe fewer people will go to those small spaces.
I entirely get the logic and I used to agree with it. But I think we've tried that expirement (Facebook banning QAnon, Twitter banning everyone pro-J6) and saw that it just made those actually radical spaces, like Gab, bigger and angrier.
Meanwhile, we're starting to appreciate the benefit of cross-cutting spaces. If something like Substack can radicalize, logic follows it can also deradicalize. So if Substack offers extremist publications, it offers orders of magnitude more publications on socialist politics, moderate conservatism, knitting, etc. And I think it's fair to say that it's recommendation algorithm is far more tilted towards positive than negative.
If I quit everything that took my money and hosted truly bad people, I wouldn't be able to use Cloudflare, WordPress, my web-hosting domain, Google, Protonmail, and a vast array of other services. Substack, at least as I see it right now, is at least offering a healthy and competitive information environment. Quitting that, I think, would make it worse.
(Sorry for the long-winded answers! Maybe I should have written something specifically about this affair)
Thanks! And I absolutely take your points, here. I've made some of my concerns known to Substack privately, and I'm cautiously optimistic that they're keen to find some alternative ways to deal with this problem.
Absolutely. But that's also my point: I don't believe that Substack is, say, recommending BE&S readers Nazi newsletters. I do *think* that it's probably recommending knitting blogs to readers of Nazi newsletters. If that changes — and Substack's algorithm starts rewarding extremist content — then I'll definitely reconsider this position.
I mean, I'd quibble with the idea that Substack "champions" them. I did quit Twitter explicitly because Musk geared his platform to serve the worst people. I think that's a pretty important distinction: Is the platform trying to encourage and entice its worst users, or is it merely tolerating them?
In a hypothetical where there are two identical Substacks, where one has Nazis and the other doesn't? Yeah, I'll go with the Nazi-free one.
And, yeah, I think a ban on Nazi symbols/icons/worship/etc is easy, clear, and doable. But considering we're talking about a small handful of publications, I'm not sure there needs to be mass action.
I think there is, however, a risk in trying to capture other, harder to define stuff. It becomes a constant game that requires more and more moderators, and leads to more and more wrong calls, and provokes more fracturing of the media/social media ecosystem. I think that's fine for a platform that's designed to be more apolitical, and for more social interactions (Instagram, e.g.) but I think it's ineffective and counter-productive on sites geared for news and politics.
But, also, reasonable people can disagree on this, I think.