"... usually coupled with the theory that the people they choose are problematic"--Isn't that pretty much the controversy? The rest is window dressing.
Yes, the idea that people have a deep-seated problem with Substack's payment model rather than the views of the highest-profile people on the platform strains credulity. I mean, assume good faith and all that, but I think it's blatantly clear that criticism of the payments is a stalking horse for the belief that many people writing via Substack should not prohibited from presenting their views to the public at all.
I think the essay Freddie deBoer put out today also touches on a factor: journalism as a business is in really, really rough shape. If you're a journalist who's been laid off twice and is struggling financially because the rates for pieces are a pittance, it's gotta be infuriating to see the Freddie deBoers (and the Scott Alexanders) raking in good money. People are now fighting over what appears to be an ever-shrinking pie.
Even more than that. The Substack model making clear there is a lot of cross-subsidization going on in regular media. I'd guess that in a publication like the NYT, 20% of the writers generate 80% of the traffic (even within areas).
Substack allows top professional journalist, and talented essayist like Scott and Matt Y., bypass publishers, reach readers directly, and make the big bucks, while not-so-good writers and not-top journalists are left behind.
It's also yet another nail in the coffin of hard news, which thought it was the main point of newspapers until Craigslist revealed they were actually advertising circulars with a sideline.
Which is nothing against Substack, which strikes me as a good thing. But I kind of hope someone figures out a workable model for shoe leather reporting before all the sides of journalism that turn out to have been propping it up are fully pulled out.
I'd actually take out a subscription to such a service. It seems though that isn't really possible currently without subsidising bloated opinion sections I don't give two hoots about.
There's no shortcuts. People need to actually pay for shoe leather. The de-bunding we've seen across the board in recent decades means you can't bury the cost in a different income stream like you used to - it needs to self-fund.
In a world where nobody is willing to buy news, nobody will sell news.
Both viewpoints are fundamentally correct. The basic change that created the modern winner-take-all economy is that better communications, a more interconnected world economy and general unbundling of services lets people pay for the high-quality goods and services they want and ignore the lower-quality stuff they don't want. This is great for consumers.
The problem this creates is that most people probably are not capable of meaningfully contributing to those high-quality goods and services. This includes most of those consumers. The proportion of the economy where this is true is rapidly growing, and even if it's not true for you already, it will probably arrive in industries near you before too soon.
One approach to take is that the now-sidelined people should just crawl under a bridge and die. I feel rather strongly that this is not an acceptable solution. The only reasonable solution I can think of is UBI.
I take a slightly different tack than Tuna, but he's right that your phrasing and "winner-take-all economy" are basically Russel Conjugations.
The fundamental force here is the reduction of friction offered by the internet. It's the exact same reason why there's a natural monopoly on search engines and near-monopoly on social media networks. As Andrew Yang says, nobody wants to use the second-best search engine. As Scott Galloway points out, brands are far less important when everybody can just google "best wireless speaker 2021" and read some reviews. Products don't need to be transported to your proximity before you decide to buy them. Writers don't need to be aggregated and redistributed via highly-opinionated middle-men in the form of newspapers and magazines. Even Substack, within 2 years, will significantly reduce their 10% cut.
Everybody wants the best possible version of any given good (why wouldn't you?), and since digital goods can have effectively infinite supply and zero marginal costs, this naturally leads to "the winners taking all."
I'd like a world where low-quality journalists still get food, housing, and fulfilling lives, without the public having to pretend they're offering a useful service. So UBI or something like that.
It also turns journalism into even more of a lottery profession than it already is.
With the old model, pre-Craigslist, there were entry-level journalism jobs that paid an adequate wage. But the tightening that has happened means that it's increasingly the case that you don't get offered a staff job (or a long-term freelance contract - many opinion columnists are freelancers on long-term contracts) until you've proven that you can do the job by having done it for a period of time. The only way that you can do that is through a series of unpaid internships, or by writing as a freelancer and just not getting enough work to get by.
If substack-type disaggregation is where we are going, then the top writers will make even more money, but the only way to get that sort of money is to build up an audience by writing well over a long period of time. Which means that the only ways to break in will be either to be rich enough to just keep writing without pay until you build an audience, or to start writing while doing another job (or while being a student). Eventually you build an audience.
But this means that people who have the potential to be great writers but would need training or interactions with other writers, or who have other jobs so demanding that they don't have time to write enough to get good - those people never get the chance to break through.
It also means that someone could write excellently for years and build an audience of a few hundred who really like them, but never break out of that into enough readers to be able to make a living - they just don't get the break they need. The number of times I've been looking something up from 2010 or 2006 and found a blog that was really well-written and insightful and lasted three or four years and then gave up because they never got into five figures of readers for anything they ever wrote is probably approaching triple digits. Those writers just gave up on blogging.
You're argument is, basically, that someone who wants to earn a living as a reporter/essayist deserves to be well paid to do so even though he or she does not have the proper skills or only appeals to a handful of readers.
An author may appeal to many readers if they got the chance, and in the past they had the institutional backing to get that chance. And as Richard said, during this time they were ADEQUATELY paid, not well-paid.
I think someone who wants to express opinions and have people pay attention to them should start by offering them for free. If they're popular enough, he can try to sell them--in internet terms, put them behind a paywall. No one owes him a living for exposing his deathless wisdom to an indifferent public eye. All in all, I don't see a big difference between guaranteeing op-ed writers a paycheck and guaranteeing novelists sales. Or, for that matter, guaranteeing half-baked lecturers tuition proceeds.
If that's what you think my argument was then I expressed it badly.
My point was that there's a real danger that what we end up with is not the best essayists from amongst those people who want to be and what we're getting is the best essayists from among a combination of some people who had family wealth to be able to devote time to it and some people who wrote as a hobby and got lucky.
That means that a lot of people who would be good miss out, either because they can't write themselves into being good writers without help and training, or because they can't spend the time on it because they have a demanding job (or because they aren't as committed to writing as, say, Scott Alexander, who does have a demanding job and also writes a lot). I'd like to have a system where there are some people whose job it is to read lots of writing (more than someone who isn't doing it full-time can read), identify writers with potential and then offer them careers at a lower level to build up. In sports, you'd call them "scouts". Ideally, you'd still have the superstars bringing in a lot of money, but some fraction of this being directed to building up lower-level writers to provide the next generation.
There are similar problems with other "lottery professions" like acting; if there's a barrier to entry you can easily end up with the only people succeeding being those from a narrow background who can afford to spend the money and time needed to break through. The traditional "actors waiting tables in Los Angeles trying to get a break" is fine. The problem arises when your system expects them to work unpaid as junior actors while trying to get a break, because then they can't earn enough waiting tables to survive, and only a few that get lucky early on, a few that find non-traditional paths get in; the majority becoming people whose parents have enough money to support them while they have no income for a few years. This is exactly what is happening with both traditional journalism (internships) and this sort of internet journalism.
Reporting - and I should have started with "opinion journalism" rather than just "journalism" - is a completely different question that I didn't really address and don't intend to; I know a lot less about it.
One could be snarky and tell those laid off "journalists" to "learn to code." But more appropriate advice would be "learn to say something useful and interesting." The cookie-cutter propaganda pieces in the MSM explaining why "X is racist" are basically commodity work that could be better written by an AI at this point.
Bourgeois media inherently must propagandise, that's part of the job description. Scott Alexander has been chosen by substack for exactly the same reason.
These are media companies owned by capitalists and run for their benefit.
The writers are the workers either way. I imagine there are plenty of people working at the NYT who receive considerably less on their paycheck compared to Scott. The similarity is that both are owned by capitalists. This is why both are bourgeois media outlets.
Imagine the rage at Thomas Friedman. He has not written a new column since 1995, tells obvious lies (my cabdriver said...) and is married to an heiress. But he does not retire.
And likely even more so because it sounds like the Substack writers have no editorial oversight. Just generate traffic and eyeballs and you too can be well-paid! For a journalist, it's likely salt in the wound because of all the oversight that comes with being part of a front-line media organization.
But similarly, if you're an author who can't sell a lot of books, it must be hard to resist the temptation of envious resentment against best-selling authors. That's nevertheless no excuse for trying to censor one's more successful rivals.
Yes, there's no reason to suppose that Substack can enforce a monopoly on the workarounds. But that just means censor-centric journalism is even more threatened. They spring a new leak every time someone gets around the gatekeepers. Why did this one drive them particularly nuts? Maybe because they've learned they can count on Amazon to get on board with the censorship program, but they can't figure out a good way to bully Substack.
^^ Agreed, I thought the claims of a scam felt incredibly flimsy. I'd be curious to know what the entirety of Substack's pool of writers looks like and how much of it leans in the direction of those called out in The Hypothesis post. I'm not assuming it's more, less or representative, but just interested to see how their universe looks based on ACT's account of how his own onboarding went.
I don't think anyone is even claiming that. The claim I usually see is "Substack is offering giant sums of money to these awful anti-woke writers, therefore they're funding right-wing bigotry".
That said, Scott's response is still relevant. "They're offering a platform to these awful anti-woke writers, but they're underpaying them" does rather take some wind out of the argument's sails.
I'm curious as to how "assume good faith and all that" consistent with the argument that it's "blatantly obvious" that people are lying and just want to prevent people from having a voice?
Yes. That's a clever but very culture-war quote to throw around. You can tell from reading his Substack that he's pretty upset about the chain of events that led him to Substack, and perhaps even more upset about the anger being thrown at him now for being on it.
In retrospect, maybe we shouldn't have turned "ethics in journalism" into a snarl word where we have a cultural agreement to regard anyone who worries about it as a bad actor.
The thing is, the people who claimed it was a bad thing are the very same people who were targeted for their questionable journalistic practices. There's obvious reasons why they wouldn't want people questioning such things.
Ironically, the people who were actually for reforms actually won that, too; all of the game publications started publishing disclosures of personal/financial links to people/companies they were reporting on after GamerGate.
That's why it became the alt right vs the alt left - because the gamers who were actually interested in journalistic reforms got what they wanted and stopped caring, so it was only the people who were upset over it for political reasons who were left.
You might want to revisit Chomsky and Herman's "Manufacturing Consent" in light of this Scott, your first review of it was very bad and made many mistakes.
The thing is that the substack model isn't about optimising for eyeballs, though, it's about optimising for subscribers. You don't get money on substack by persuading people to click on your article, you get money by persuading them that you're so interesting and insightful that they actually want to pay ten bucks a month just to see what you write in the future.
The natural winners in this sort of ecosystem seem to be people who are mainstream in their views (since people won't pay people that they disagree with, and most people have mainstream views) but heavily critical of the media (since I'm not going to pay real money unless I feel I'm getting value added compared to what I get for free from cnn.com). And from a quick look at the headlines on the substacks of people like Taibbi, Yglesias and Sullivan, that seems to be the sort of content that's getting produced.
Being "controversial" doesn't get you very far in this game at all.
Which is an inherently ridiculous argument when they admit _in the very article_ that they do not know who got paid. They have _no idea_ whether or not these people are problematic because they don't know who they are but they _assume_ that they must be problematic. It's one of the most ridiculous things I've heard in a while.
Which is of course, why they are making it about "unfairness" or "scams" or whatever. They _think_ that substack is funding problematic people but have absolutely no way of proving it so they make some other argument instead. Of course, their other argument is almost equally incoherent. No one has a problem with "Hollywood" for tricking young people into thinking they can move to LA and become a famous movie star, even though it's essentially the exact same dynamic: A few people will make it big/be succesful and the vast majority will toil in mediocrity making little or nothing.
If they really want to get a torch-bearing, pitchfork-wielding mob on the go against Substack, they should forget conspiracy theories about secret elite cabals and instead rally us around GIVE US AN EDIT FUNCTION OR GIVE US DEATH!
At the end of the day substack is another bourgeois media source, and it has all the same inherent problems as any other bourgeois outlet. This has already been well-covered by people like Michael Parenti and Noam Chomsky.
That's fine, although I have to say I don't think you're doing your side any favors with your performances here. Out of curiosity, though, what are some non-bourgeois media sources that don't have the inherent problems of Substack?
This sounds like investing 101: pick stocks (or bloggers) which you think are undervalued, and if your picks are good then you beat the market and make money.
In the blogger case, that might mean picking people who are not just saying the same thing as everyone else or repeating back the current crowd's attitudes. Call that "problematic" if you will.
> It’s true that I have, in a very limited way, achieved the new American dream: getting a little bit of VC cash. I’m sorry. But it’s much much less than one half of what Felix Salmon was making in 2017 and again, it’s only for one year.
>they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys
This seems like a bold claim from Freddie. There are a lot of things they pretty obviously do hate for being filled with anti-woke white guys, why wouldn't Substack be one of them?
Whiteness is a social construct and has more to do with whether marxists hate you than your actual skin color. The same for gender. Bari Weiss is a white male because she says things that marxists disapprove of.
Huh, when a devoted socialist is telling you that the market is going to kick your ass, you know that you have some very serious problems in your industry.
I'm not talking about the advances received or how much money individual writers make on subscriptions, I'm talking about how much money Substack makes as compared to other media services. That's where the "kick ass" part is decided, capitalist profits (i.e. surplus value generated).
In a market, surplus value accrues to producers (Substack) and consumers (readers of Substack) which is why we can already tell that Substack is in fact kicking ass. You have to read actual economists to understand this, Bourgeois parasites like Marx don't understand this because they've never produced anything of value.
I'm not sure whether personal wealth as a company founder was ever really tied to whether the company earned a profit or generated any surplus value, but that is definitely not the case now. It's not even really the business model is. A VC firm knows that most of what they fund is going to go under, but be offset by the few that succeed tremendously. To the founders getting wads of cash thrown at them, it makes no difference. You don't become as wealthy as the actual successes when you fail, but you still get wealthy by any reasonable measure.
All you need to do is get a room full of people with more cash than they know what to do with excited at least once. You don't need to generate any value at all, let alone surplus value, just so long as you can sufficiently mimic someone else who once did.
The surplus vale generated is still the ultimate arbiter when it comes to a companies' longevity and ability to "kick ass". Like I said, I've seen no actual evidence of substack's superior ability to generate profits.
This also has a lot to do with the purity spirals and arbitrary "cancellations" that have consumed so many media outlets. Every person you can get fired for being problematic today makes it that much less likely that you'll get laid off when management inevitably cuts some percentage of the newsroom next month. (As long as it's not 100%...)
As far as I can tell, the (non-political) problems people have with Substack are twofold:
1) Substack (presumably) suffers from the same unequal remuneration problem as traditional media: a tiny handful of writers make a lot of money, and everyone else makes almost nothing. The tiny handful are essentially living advertisements for Substack, baiting other, less well-known writers into working for Substack for a pittance.
2) Substack's funding sources are opaque, and there's some suspicion that the company is being used to promote certain positions without the normal motivational transparency you'd get from a media company with more traditional ownership structures. Scott's decision to signal-boost investment opportunities for that one company that was studying DNP reinforces this belief, IMO.
I don't know about the ownership structure thing. Suprisingly many newspapers, commercial radio stations, and local TV affilliates used to be owned by individuals, families, or closely held companies.
The internet is not subject to a bandwidth problem, so that rationale goes out the window for Substack. Anyone can buy all the blogs or blog publishers they want.
It actually does, believe it or not. Y Combinator is an investor in Substack as well as Equator Therapeutics, the DNP-investigating company mentioned in Shilling for Big Mitochondria.
Isn't this theory of connection missing a link where Substack tells Scott to write about DNP?
I'm a bit confused why it so frequently happens that people theorize that 2 companies aligning who are both in Y Combinator are secretly working together. It seems like a coincidence and this is a much smaller version with no proposed mechanism for control from Y Combinator to post about DNP.
I'm not actually saying that Substack told Scott to write about DNP. I'm saying that there's serious ethical issues with a company that owns both a journalism arm and other companies that are promoted by that journalism arm.
If the Washington Post says something good about Amazon is that an immediate ethical violation?
Even beyond ownership, there's usually other financial considerations: who the advertisers are or who the donors are. Creating the firewall between accounting and writing is something every paper needs to do. They usually call it something like "editorial independence".
Pretty much every time the Washington Post mentions Amazon, no matter how glancingly, they have a parenthetical that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. I'm half expecting it to turn up in stories about the Amazon rain forest.
In the standard YC deal, YC owns 7% of the company. That's not exactly anywhere near a controlling interest? Though I guess it's still enough that YC has the incentive to tilt the field towards any company they do have that 7% stake in. How much of a company is one allowed to own before these sorts of ethical considerations are valid? Like if spend a thousand dollars on Disney stock, should I have to disclose that the next time I talk to anyone about a Disney movie?
The entire point of media propaganda isn't that you explicitly tell writers what to write about (although I'm sure there are plenty of nudges and suggestions in that direction) - the point is that you hire and promote people who you know already agree with you.
Thats why the Substack model is so subversive to bourgeois propaganda organs like the NYT, anyone can sign up and use Substack to address their audience. Bourgeois propagandists are just upset that the masses are able to support their preferred writers directly without bourgeois institutions gatekeeping them and forcing propaganda on them.
ycombinator has invested in three thousand companies, of which maybe a thousand are still running, and they have maybe thirty people on staff. They barely have time to keep their "this is how rich we are this week" spreadsheet updated, let alone engage in complicated cross-promotions.
somewhat relatedly, i remember sam altman and paul graham being among the people who voiced support for Scott during the fight w/ the NYT recently. So they are clearly fans of SSC. I wonder whether they suggested to Substack that bringing Scott onboard might be a good idea. in any case glad it all worked out.
Is it really "working FOR Substack" (emphasis mine)? If we had superstar sellers on Ebay and you decided to skip the street-side garage sale and instead list your stuff online, would you be working for Ebay? If you decided to quit your day job to become an Ebay thrift store, would you be working for Ebay?
Also, is this morally different than the fiction publishing world where we have superstar authors bringing in big publishing money while aspiring authors put in hard labor writing groups / classes / zines / pay-per-word magazines with the hope that they make it big some day? Are those minor-leaguers/amateurs working for big publishing because they're putting in labor with the hopes that big publishing will pay them one day?
I understand you might not hold this position yourself but 1 seems pretty clearly wrong.
You are correct - I am still undecided on both of these questions. There are several people I consider fundamentally untrustworthy on the pro- and anti-Substack sides, so I'm taking my time.
Point 1) isn't Substack's fault -- as you agree, other media have the same problem. It is the nature of digital content that once created, it can be made available to an unlimited number of consumers at virtually no extra cost. Hence, there's no reason why any consumer should settle for the second-best content in a given genre, when the best content in that genre is just a mouse-click away. Those second-best content creators may then be "baited" into chasing a hopeless dream, but it's not like anybody else was going to offer them a much better deal.
Point 2) seems rather conspiracy-theory-ish. If you want to know the political positions that the most popular Substack writers are promoting, you can just read their articles. Likewise, if you want to know the political slant of the New York Times or the Washington Post, read their articles -- that is going to tell you a lot more than finding out who technically owns those companies. Maybe Substack is some Machiavellian scheme to promote certain viewpoints, but more likely they just identified a space in the market where there was a lot of demand but not a lot of big established publishing platforms yet.
It isn't necessarily political positions. Y Combinator is an investor in Substack as well as Equator Therapeutics, the DNP-investigating company mentioned in Shilling for Big Mitochondria.
- Scott is the kind of person who would promote products we're invested in so let's get him a big audience.
- We got Scott a big audience, so let's make sure to invest in things he likes in case he promotes it.
- We got Scott a big audience, so let's introduce him to some people he might promote and we're invested in.
And how does this plan move from the investor through Substack? Are they getting introduced to Scott through Substack or are the "editors" just looking at their investor list and taking independent action to benefit their financiers?
Please note that I'm not saying that this is what happened, but the possibility of it happening is a serious issue for Substack and the writers who publish through it.
Of course, there aren't any facts in this particular situation. But if this were to occur, how do you see it happening? What are the actual proposed mechanics?
The ones I can think of (and listed) feel absurd / conspiracy theoryish. But maybe someone else can think of one that's more likely to happen (or propose how these absurd ideas I came up with are more likely to happen than I think).
Hypothetically? Someone Scott knows and trusts from Substack introduces him to Equator Therapeutics, who talks about the history of DNP and the possibilities of using it as a therapeutic drug. Maybe that trusted person implies that they think it would be a worthwhile use of Scott's time to write about DNP, as well.
I'm not suggesting that this happened; I trust Scott enough to believe that Scott's decision to promote a company associated with Y Combinator is coincidental. Frankly, given the number of startups associated with Y Combinator and Substack's other backers, it would be hard for Scott to promote a startup without having some kind of ethical conflict.
The possibility that you are being paid to post these critical comments by some nefarious cabal of anti-substackers is a serious issue for anyone reading your comments.
See how dumb that sounds without providing any actual evidence?
It seems like this is only a problem if Substack is exerting some kind of editorial control over its writers' writing. Like, if Substack tells Scott "we'll give you an extra $10K every time you work in a nice mention of another Y combinator company," or if Scott knows that if he doesn't keep his Substack editor happy with him he may be out of a job, we'd need to worry about this kind of conflict of interest.
But as far as I know, Substack's only editorial control over its writers is some minimal set of rules that amount to not breaking the law or getting them sued. If there's no editorial control and no mechanism for influencing the writers, then where's the conflict of interest?
I mean, what seems to be happening here is that Scott, Matt, Glenn, Bari, etc., write what they like, attract subscribers, and get to keep a nice cut of that money, with little influence by Substack's management. It's hard to see how that setup leads to a conflict of interest.
Yep. I think there is a misconception that Substack is a publisher when it's really just a simple blog platform that makes it easy to charge for writing.
Sounds like they didn't do a very good job of keeping things opaque, then.
(I do not actually believe that Scott took additional money, or was pressured in any other way by Substack or any of its investors, to shill for Equator. And if he did, then I bet they wanted their money back afterwards, since his description of the pros and cons of DNP was "damning with faint praise" at best. It seems much more likely that what happens is exactly what he says happened: he learned about DNP via a friend of his who works there; he thought it was an interesting topic within his area of interests, so he blogged about it; he openly mentioned that connection which clearly indicates that he didn't think he was doing anything wrong; he underestimated how many people would have a problem with it anyway.)
Y Combinator is also an investor in Equator Therapeutics, the company Scott promoted in the DNP post, without disclosing that they were also investors in Substack. I hope you can understand why people would have a reasonable problem with this.
"... usually coupled with the theory that the people they choose are problematic"--Isn't that pretty much the controversy? The rest is window dressing.
Yes, the idea that people have a deep-seated problem with Substack's payment model rather than the views of the highest-profile people on the platform strains credulity. I mean, assume good faith and all that, but I think it's blatantly clear that criticism of the payments is a stalking horse for the belief that many people writing via Substack should not prohibited from presenting their views to the public at all.
I think the essay Freddie deBoer put out today also touches on a factor: journalism as a business is in really, really rough shape. If you're a journalist who's been laid off twice and is struggling financially because the rates for pieces are a pittance, it's gotta be infuriating to see the Freddie deBoers (and the Scott Alexanders) raking in good money. People are now fighting over what appears to be an ever-shrinking pie.
Even more than that. The Substack model making clear there is a lot of cross-subsidization going on in regular media. I'd guess that in a publication like the NYT, 20% of the writers generate 80% of the traffic (even within areas).
Substack allows top professional journalist, and talented essayist like Scott and Matt Y., bypass publishers, reach readers directly, and make the big bucks, while not-so-good writers and not-top journalists are left behind.
It's also yet another nail in the coffin of hard news, which thought it was the main point of newspapers until Craigslist revealed they were actually advertising circulars with a sideline.
Which is nothing against Substack, which strikes me as a good thing. But I kind of hope someone figures out a workable model for shoe leather reporting before all the sides of journalism that turn out to have been propping it up are fully pulled out.
Yeah, this is a big problem. I'd love to see a good way to fund day-to-day factual reporting, as well as long-form investigative reporting.
I'd actually take out a subscription to such a service. It seems though that isn't really possible currently without subsidising bloated opinion sections I don't give two hoots about.
There's no shortcuts. People need to actually pay for shoe leather. The de-bunding we've seen across the board in recent decades means you can't bury the cost in a different income stream like you used to - it needs to self-fund.
In a world where nobody is willing to buy news, nobody will sell news.
We can add this as another example of the winner-take-all economy driving increased income inequality...
That's an interesting way of framing the efforts of people to pay for things of value while attempting to avoid paying for crap they don't need.
Both viewpoints are fundamentally correct. The basic change that created the modern winner-take-all economy is that better communications, a more interconnected world economy and general unbundling of services lets people pay for the high-quality goods and services they want and ignore the lower-quality stuff they don't want. This is great for consumers.
The problem this creates is that most people probably are not capable of meaningfully contributing to those high-quality goods and services. This includes most of those consumers. The proportion of the economy where this is true is rapidly growing, and even if it's not true for you already, it will probably arrive in industries near you before too soon.
One approach to take is that the now-sidelined people should just crawl under a bridge and die. I feel rather strongly that this is not an acceptable solution. The only reasonable solution I can think of is UBI.
I agree enthusiastically.
I take a slightly different tack than Tuna, but he's right that your phrasing and "winner-take-all economy" are basically Russel Conjugations.
The fundamental force here is the reduction of friction offered by the internet. It's the exact same reason why there's a natural monopoly on search engines and near-monopoly on social media networks. As Andrew Yang says, nobody wants to use the second-best search engine. As Scott Galloway points out, brands are far less important when everybody can just google "best wireless speaker 2021" and read some reviews. Products don't need to be transported to your proximity before you decide to buy them. Writers don't need to be aggregated and redistributed via highly-opinionated middle-men in the form of newspapers and magazines. Even Substack, within 2 years, will significantly reduce their 10% cut.
Everybody wants the best possible version of any given good (why wouldn't you?), and since digital goods can have effectively infinite supply and zero marginal costs, this naturally leads to "the winners taking all."
I'd like a world where low-quality journalists still get food, housing, and fulfilling lives, without the public having to pretend they're offering a useful service. So UBI or something like that.
It also turns journalism into even more of a lottery profession than it already is.
With the old model, pre-Craigslist, there were entry-level journalism jobs that paid an adequate wage. But the tightening that has happened means that it's increasingly the case that you don't get offered a staff job (or a long-term freelance contract - many opinion columnists are freelancers on long-term contracts) until you've proven that you can do the job by having done it for a period of time. The only way that you can do that is through a series of unpaid internships, or by writing as a freelancer and just not getting enough work to get by.
If substack-type disaggregation is where we are going, then the top writers will make even more money, but the only way to get that sort of money is to build up an audience by writing well over a long period of time. Which means that the only ways to break in will be either to be rich enough to just keep writing without pay until you build an audience, or to start writing while doing another job (or while being a student). Eventually you build an audience.
But this means that people who have the potential to be great writers but would need training or interactions with other writers, or who have other jobs so demanding that they don't have time to write enough to get good - those people never get the chance to break through.
It also means that someone could write excellently for years and build an audience of a few hundred who really like them, but never break out of that into enough readers to be able to make a living - they just don't get the break they need. The number of times I've been looking something up from 2010 or 2006 and found a blog that was really well-written and insightful and lasted three or four years and then gave up because they never got into five figures of readers for anything they ever wrote is probably approaching triple digits. Those writers just gave up on blogging.
You're argument is, basically, that someone who wants to earn a living as a reporter/essayist deserves to be well paid to do so even though he or she does not have the proper skills or only appeals to a handful of readers.
An author may appeal to many readers if they got the chance, and in the past they had the institutional backing to get that chance. And as Richard said, during this time they were ADEQUATELY paid, not well-paid.
I think someone who wants to express opinions and have people pay attention to them should start by offering them for free. If they're popular enough, he can try to sell them--in internet terms, put them behind a paywall. No one owes him a living for exposing his deathless wisdom to an indifferent public eye. All in all, I don't see a big difference between guaranteeing op-ed writers a paycheck and guaranteeing novelists sales. Or, for that matter, guaranteeing half-baked lecturers tuition proceeds.
If that's what you think my argument was then I expressed it badly.
My point was that there's a real danger that what we end up with is not the best essayists from amongst those people who want to be and what we're getting is the best essayists from among a combination of some people who had family wealth to be able to devote time to it and some people who wrote as a hobby and got lucky.
That means that a lot of people who would be good miss out, either because they can't write themselves into being good writers without help and training, or because they can't spend the time on it because they have a demanding job (or because they aren't as committed to writing as, say, Scott Alexander, who does have a demanding job and also writes a lot). I'd like to have a system where there are some people whose job it is to read lots of writing (more than someone who isn't doing it full-time can read), identify writers with potential and then offer them careers at a lower level to build up. In sports, you'd call them "scouts". Ideally, you'd still have the superstars bringing in a lot of money, but some fraction of this being directed to building up lower-level writers to provide the next generation.
There are similar problems with other "lottery professions" like acting; if there's a barrier to entry you can easily end up with the only people succeeding being those from a narrow background who can afford to spend the money and time needed to break through. The traditional "actors waiting tables in Los Angeles trying to get a break" is fine. The problem arises when your system expects them to work unpaid as junior actors while trying to get a break, because then they can't earn enough waiting tables to survive, and only a few that get lucky early on, a few that find non-traditional paths get in; the majority becoming people whose parents have enough money to support them while they have no income for a few years. This is exactly what is happening with both traditional journalism (internships) and this sort of internet journalism.
Reporting - and I should have started with "opinion journalism" rather than just "journalism" - is a completely different question that I didn't really address and don't intend to; I know a lot less about it.
One could be snarky and tell those laid off "journalists" to "learn to code." But more appropriate advice would be "learn to say something useful and interesting." The cookie-cutter propaganda pieces in the MSM explaining why "X is racist" are basically commodity work that could be better written by an AI at this point.
Bourgeois media inherently must propagandise, that's part of the job description. Scott Alexander has been chosen by substack for exactly the same reason.
These are media companies owned by capitalists and run for their benefit.
You mean bourgeois media like the NYT? Substack is for working class writers like Scott.
The writers are the workers either way. I imagine there are plenty of people working at the NYT who receive considerably less on their paycheck compared to Scott. The similarity is that both are owned by capitalists. This is why both are bourgeois media outlets.
Imagine the rage at Thomas Friedman. He has not written a new column since 1995, tells obvious lies (my cabdriver said...) and is married to an heiress. But he does not retire.
And likely even more so because it sounds like the Substack writers have no editorial oversight. Just generate traffic and eyeballs and you too can be well-paid! For a journalist, it's likely salt in the wound because of all the oversight that comes with being part of a front-line media organization.
But similarly, if you're an author who can't sell a lot of books, it must be hard to resist the temptation of envious resentment against best-selling authors. That's nevertheless no excuse for trying to censor one's more successful rivals.
But self publishing on Amazon can get around the gatekeepers. Many SF authors do better selfpublished than they did through traditional publishers...
Yes, there's no reason to suppose that Substack can enforce a monopoly on the workarounds. But that just means censor-centric journalism is even more threatened. They spring a new leak every time someone gets around the gatekeepers. Why did this one drive them particularly nuts? Maybe because they've learned they can count on Amazon to get on board with the censorship program, but they can't figure out a good way to bully Substack.
^^ Agreed, I thought the claims of a scam felt incredibly flimsy. I'd be curious to know what the entirety of Substack's pool of writers looks like and how much of it leans in the direction of those called out in The Hypothesis post. I'm not assuming it's more, less or representative, but just interested to see how their universe looks based on ACT's account of how his own onboarding went.
I don't think anyone is even claiming that. The claim I usually see is "Substack is offering giant sums of money to these awful anti-woke writers, therefore they're funding right-wing bigotry".
That said, Scott's response is still relevant. "They're offering a platform to these awful anti-woke writers, but they're underpaying them" does rather take some wind out of the argument's sails.
I'm curious as to how "assume good faith and all that" consistent with the argument that it's "blatantly obvious" that people are lying and just want to prevent people from having a voice?
The best quote from the Twitter battlefield is by Glenn Greenwald:
> They're claim it's just about “ethics in journalism“ but it seems clear it's nefarious.
Isn't that just a straight Gamergate quote?
Yes. That's a clever but very culture-war quote to throw around. You can tell from reading his Substack that he's pretty upset about the chain of events that led him to Substack, and perhaps even more upset about the anger being thrown at him now for being on it.
<3
In retrospect, maybe we shouldn't have turned "ethics in journalism" into a snarl word where we have a cultural agreement to regard anyone who worries about it as a bad actor.
This reminds me that someone suggested there's an easy way to get the "like" button back, but apparently it's over my head.
I really miss that button!
Well, at least we haven't just done the same thing for raising questions about election integrity...oh, wait.
And do so in a way that somehow managed to miss the actual legitimate voting machine scandal. https://whowhatwhy.org/2021/03/08/election-assistance-commission-investigates-ess-voting-systems/
It has something to do with a president telling an election-related officer to find him the votes he needed to be re-elected?
The thing is, the people who claimed it was a bad thing are the very same people who were targeted for their questionable journalistic practices. There's obvious reasons why they wouldn't want people questioning such things.
Ironically, the people who were actually for reforms actually won that, too; all of the game publications started publishing disclosures of personal/financial links to people/companies they were reporting on after GamerGate.
That's why it became the alt right vs the alt left - because the gamers who were actually interested in journalistic reforms got what they wanted and stopped caring, so it was only the people who were upset over it for political reasons who were left.
You might want to revisit Chomsky and Herman's "Manufacturing Consent" in light of this Scott, your first review of it was very bad and made many mistakes.
"We don't like the people writing on your platform, and we think you should pay them more."
Almost as if nearly every argument they made were a pretext?
the most relevant issue is that being controversial and provocative can be good for traffic. in the end, it's all about the eyeballs
The thing is that the substack model isn't about optimising for eyeballs, though, it's about optimising for subscribers. You don't get money on substack by persuading people to click on your article, you get money by persuading them that you're so interesting and insightful that they actually want to pay ten bucks a month just to see what you write in the future.
The natural winners in this sort of ecosystem seem to be people who are mainstream in their views (since people won't pay people that they disagree with, and most people have mainstream views) but heavily critical of the media (since I'm not going to pay real money unless I feel I'm getting value added compared to what I get for free from cnn.com). And from a quick look at the headlines on the substacks of people like Taibbi, Yglesias and Sullivan, that seems to be the sort of content that's getting produced.
Being "controversial" doesn't get you very far in this game at all.
Does substack offer reduced charges for rookies trying to break in? Say $2 per month for the first x months...
gotta get people to click if you want them to read your interesting and insightful stuff.
Which is an inherently ridiculous argument when they admit _in the very article_ that they do not know who got paid. They have _no idea_ whether or not these people are problematic because they don't know who they are but they _assume_ that they must be problematic. It's one of the most ridiculous things I've heard in a while.
(Dang lack of edit function....)
Which is of course, why they are making it about "unfairness" or "scams" or whatever. They _think_ that substack is funding problematic people but have absolutely no way of proving it so they make some other argument instead. Of course, their other argument is almost equally incoherent. No one has a problem with "Hollywood" for tricking young people into thinking they can move to LA and become a famous movie star, even though it's essentially the exact same dynamic: A few people will make it big/be succesful and the vast majority will toil in mediocrity making little or nothing.
If they really want to get a torch-bearing, pitchfork-wielding mob on the go against Substack, they should forget conspiracy theories about secret elite cabals and instead rally us around GIVE US AN EDIT FUNCTION OR GIVE US DEATH!
Absolutely, and give me back my "like" button so I don't have to keep posting "absolutely."
Absolutely!
Also get rid of the drop header and whatever it is that stops my pointer from recognizing that I'm hovering on text.
That and the fact that other people are earning more money than them, yes.
At the end of the day substack is another bourgeois media source, and it has all the same inherent problems as any other bourgeois outlet. This has already been well-covered by people like Michael Parenti and Noam Chomsky.
And yet, here you are.
I'm here to provide some much-needed ideological diversity.
That's fine, although I have to say I don't think you're doing your side any favors with your performances here. Out of curiosity, though, what are some non-bourgeois media sources that don't have the inherent problems of Substack?
Www.TrotskyWasTooModerate.com
Fake site.... 😉
This sounds like investing 101: pick stocks (or bloggers) which you think are undervalued, and if your picks are good then you beat the market and make money.
In the blogger case, that might mean picking people who are not just saying the same thing as everyone else or repeating back the current crowd's attitudes. Call that "problematic" if you will.
Here is Freddie deBoer on a similar topic today:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displacement
> It’s true that I have, in a very limited way, achieved the new American dream: getting a little bit of VC cash. I’m sorry. But it’s much much less than one half of what Felix Salmon was making in 2017 and again, it’s only for one year.
>they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys
This seems like a bold claim from Freddie. There are a lot of things they pretty obviously do hate for being filled with anti-woke white guys, why wouldn't Substack be one of them?
Bari Weiss is not a guy, but she still gets plenty of hate.
She's probaby white-guy-adjacent.
Whiteness is a social construct and has more to do with whether marxists hate you than your actual skin color. The same for gender. Bari Weiss is a white male because she says things that marxists disapprove of.
Huh, when a devoted socialist is telling you that the market is going to kick your ass, you know that you have some very serious problems in your industry.
Is there any evidence that substack is making significantly more money than any other media outlet?
The idea that substack is going to "kick" anyone's "ass" I find a little bit farfetched.
You evidently haven't read the article linked, and as I recall it's completely inline with your character. So, whatever.
I'm not talking about the advances received or how much money individual writers make on subscriptions, I'm talking about how much money Substack makes as compared to other media services. That's where the "kick ass" part is decided, capitalist profits (i.e. surplus value generated).
In a market, surplus value accrues to producers (Substack) and consumers (readers of Substack) which is why we can already tell that Substack is in fact kicking ass. You have to read actual economists to understand this, Bourgeois parasites like Marx don't understand this because they've never produced anything of value.
"Actual economists" are much like real Scotsmen.
No, readers do not get a "surplus value" from reading Substack, they get a product, just like any other audience.
Do you have any proof that Substack is making considerably more than any other media platform?
I'm not sure whether personal wealth as a company founder was ever really tied to whether the company earned a profit or generated any surplus value, but that is definitely not the case now. It's not even really the business model is. A VC firm knows that most of what they fund is going to go under, but be offset by the few that succeed tremendously. To the founders getting wads of cash thrown at them, it makes no difference. You don't become as wealthy as the actual successes when you fail, but you still get wealthy by any reasonable measure.
All you need to do is get a room full of people with more cash than they know what to do with excited at least once. You don't need to generate any value at all, let alone surplus value, just so long as you can sufficiently mimic someone else who once did.
The surplus vale generated is still the ultimate arbiter when it comes to a companies' longevity and ability to "kick ass". Like I said, I've seen no actual evidence of substack's superior ability to generate profits.
here is that argument in a more pro markety form. https://stratechery.com/2021/sovereign-writers-and-substack/
This also has a lot to do with the purity spirals and arbitrary "cancellations" that have consumed so many media outlets. Every person you can get fired for being problematic today makes it that much less likely that you'll get laid off when management inevitably cuts some percentage of the newsroom next month. (As long as it's not 100%...)
As far as I can tell, the (non-political) problems people have with Substack are twofold:
1) Substack (presumably) suffers from the same unequal remuneration problem as traditional media: a tiny handful of writers make a lot of money, and everyone else makes almost nothing. The tiny handful are essentially living advertisements for Substack, baiting other, less well-known writers into working for Substack for a pittance.
2) Substack's funding sources are opaque, and there's some suspicion that the company is being used to promote certain positions without the normal motivational transparency you'd get from a media company with more traditional ownership structures. Scott's decision to signal-boost investment opportunities for that one company that was studying DNP reinforces this belief, IMO.
I don't know about the ownership structure thing. Suprisingly many newspapers, commercial radio stations, and local TV affilliates used to be owned by individuals, families, or closely held companies.
Used to be? Rupert Murdoch, Viscount Rothermere...
Radio stations and TV affiliates have to notify the FCC, and in some cases, obtain approval. This is because radio/TV spectrum is limited.
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fccs-review-broadcast-ownership-rules
The internet is not subject to a bandwidth problem, so that rationale goes out the window for Substack. Anyone can buy all the blogs or blog publishers they want.
... You think Substack has financial ties to DNP????
It actually does, believe it or not. Y Combinator is an investor in Substack as well as Equator Therapeutics, the DNP-investigating company mentioned in Shilling for Big Mitochondria.
Isn't this theory of connection missing a link where Substack tells Scott to write about DNP?
I'm a bit confused why it so frequently happens that people theorize that 2 companies aligning who are both in Y Combinator are secretly working together. It seems like a coincidence and this is a much smaller version with no proposed mechanism for control from Y Combinator to post about DNP.
I'm not actually saying that Substack told Scott to write about DNP. I'm saying that there's serious ethical issues with a company that owns both a journalism arm and other companies that are promoted by that journalism arm.
If the Washington Post says something good about Amazon is that an immediate ethical violation?
Even beyond ownership, there's usually other financial considerations: who the advertisers are or who the donors are. Creating the firewall between accounting and writing is something every paper needs to do. They usually call it something like "editorial independence".
I would definitely expect WAPO to have a disclaimer in a story about how we should all go by Amazon Pro.
Pretty much every time the Washington Post mentions Amazon, no matter how glancingly, they have a parenthetical that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. I'm half expecting it to turn up in stories about the Amazon rain forest.
In the standard YC deal, YC owns 7% of the company. That's not exactly anywhere near a controlling interest? Though I guess it's still enough that YC has the incentive to tilt the field towards any company they do have that 7% stake in. How much of a company is one allowed to own before these sorts of ethical considerations are valid? Like if spend a thousand dollars on Disney stock, should I have to disclose that the next time I talk to anyone about a Disney movie?
That kind of issue is why journalists usually just buy index funds.
The entire point of media propaganda isn't that you explicitly tell writers what to write about (although I'm sure there are plenty of nudges and suggestions in that direction) - the point is that you hire and promote people who you know already agree with you.
Thats why the Substack model is so subversive to bourgeois propaganda organs like the NYT, anyone can sign up and use Substack to address their audience. Bourgeois propagandists are just upset that the masses are able to support their preferred writers directly without bourgeois institutions gatekeeping them and forcing propaganda on them.
It's not "subversive" at all. Substack is still owned and operated by capitalists for private gain.
Yup.
ycombinator has invested in three thousand companies, of which maybe a thousand are still running, and they have maybe thirty people on staff. They barely have time to keep their "this is how rich we are this week" spreadsheet updated, let alone engage in complicated cross-promotions.
That's the right answer. Y Combinator is a startup accelerator. They don't "own" anything in a traditional sense, that's not their business model.
somewhat relatedly, i remember sam altman and paul graham being among the people who voiced support for Scott during the fight w/ the NYT recently. So they are clearly fans of SSC. I wonder whether they suggested to Substack that bringing Scott onboard might be a good idea. in any case glad it all worked out.
Is it really "working FOR Substack" (emphasis mine)? If we had superstar sellers on Ebay and you decided to skip the street-side garage sale and instead list your stuff online, would you be working for Ebay? If you decided to quit your day job to become an Ebay thrift store, would you be working for Ebay?
Also, is this morally different than the fiction publishing world where we have superstar authors bringing in big publishing money while aspiring authors put in hard labor writing groups / classes / zines / pay-per-word magazines with the hope that they make it big some day? Are those minor-leaguers/amateurs working for big publishing because they're putting in labor with the hopes that big publishing will pay them one day?
I understand you might not hold this position yourself but 1 seems pretty clearly wrong.
You are correct - I am still undecided on both of these questions. There are several people I consider fundamentally untrustworthy on the pro- and anti-Substack sides, so I'm taking my time.
Who are they?!
Also, wouldn’t it be better to listen to the people you trust? An evil broken clock is still right twice a day.
Point 1) isn't Substack's fault -- as you agree, other media have the same problem. It is the nature of digital content that once created, it can be made available to an unlimited number of consumers at virtually no extra cost. Hence, there's no reason why any consumer should settle for the second-best content in a given genre, when the best content in that genre is just a mouse-click away. Those second-best content creators may then be "baited" into chasing a hopeless dream, but it's not like anybody else was going to offer them a much better deal.
Point 2) seems rather conspiracy-theory-ish. If you want to know the political positions that the most popular Substack writers are promoting, you can just read their articles. Likewise, if you want to know the political slant of the New York Times or the Washington Post, read their articles -- that is going to tell you a lot more than finding out who technically owns those companies. Maybe Substack is some Machiavellian scheme to promote certain viewpoints, but more likely they just identified a space in the market where there was a lot of demand but not a lot of big established publishing platforms yet.
It isn't necessarily political positions. Y Combinator is an investor in Substack as well as Equator Therapeutics, the DNP-investigating company mentioned in Shilling for Big Mitochondria.
Interesting. What's the chain of connections?
- Scott is the kind of person who would promote products we're invested in so let's get him a big audience.
- We got Scott a big audience, so let's make sure to invest in things he likes in case he promotes it.
- We got Scott a big audience, so let's introduce him to some people he might promote and we're invested in.
And how does this plan move from the investor through Substack? Are they getting introduced to Scott through Substack or are the "editors" just looking at their investor list and taking independent action to benefit their financiers?
Please note that I'm not saying that this is what happened, but the possibility of it happening is a serious issue for Substack and the writers who publish through it.
Of course, there aren't any facts in this particular situation. But if this were to occur, how do you see it happening? What are the actual proposed mechanics?
The ones I can think of (and listed) feel absurd / conspiracy theoryish. But maybe someone else can think of one that's more likely to happen (or propose how these absurd ideas I came up with are more likely to happen than I think).
Hypothetically? Someone Scott knows and trusts from Substack introduces him to Equator Therapeutics, who talks about the history of DNP and the possibilities of using it as a therapeutic drug. Maybe that trusted person implies that they think it would be a worthwhile use of Scott's time to write about DNP, as well.
I'm not suggesting that this happened; I trust Scott enough to believe that Scott's decision to promote a company associated with Y Combinator is coincidental. Frankly, given the number of startups associated with Y Combinator and Substack's other backers, it would be hard for Scott to promote a startup without having some kind of ethical conflict.
The possibility that you are being paid to post these critical comments by some nefarious cabal of anti-substackers is a serious issue for anyone reading your comments.
See how dumb that sounds without providing any actual evidence?
Scott is definitely getting paid by Substack to post here. What makes you think I am?
It seems like this is only a problem if Substack is exerting some kind of editorial control over its writers' writing. Like, if Substack tells Scott "we'll give you an extra $10K every time you work in a nice mention of another Y combinator company," or if Scott knows that if he doesn't keep his Substack editor happy with him he may be out of a job, we'd need to worry about this kind of conflict of interest.
But as far as I know, Substack's only editorial control over its writers is some minimal set of rules that amount to not breaking the law or getting them sued. If there's no editorial control and no mechanism for influencing the writers, then where's the conflict of interest?
I mean, what seems to be happening here is that Scott, Matt, Glenn, Bari, etc., write what they like, attract subscribers, and get to keep a nice cut of that money, with little influence by Substack's management. It's hard to see how that setup leads to a conflict of interest.
Yep. I think there is a misconception that Substack is a publisher when it's really just a simple blog platform that makes it easy to charge for writing.
Sounds like they didn't do a very good job of keeping things opaque, then.
(I do not actually believe that Scott took additional money, or was pressured in any other way by Substack or any of its investors, to shill for Equator. And if he did, then I bet they wanted their money back afterwards, since his description of the pros and cons of DNP was "damning with faint praise" at best. It seems much more likely that what happens is exactly what he says happened: he learned about DNP via a friend of his who works there; he thought it was an interesting topic within his area of interests, so he blogged about it; he openly mentioned that connection which clearly indicates that he didn't think he was doing anything wrong; he underestimated how many people would have a problem with it anyway.)
It's not opaque. You can find out who their funders are in less than 30 seconds:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/substack/company_financials
Y Combinator, A16Z, UpHonest Capital, Kenji Niwa, Fifty Years, FundersClub, Wei Guo, Garage Capital, The Chernin Group, Brad Flora.
Y Combinator is also an investor in Equator Therapeutics, the company Scott promoted in the DNP post, without disclosing that they were also investors in Substack. I hope you can understand why people would have a reasonable problem with this.
Is Scott expected to familiarize himself with the investment portfolio of everyone who funds Substack?
I, for one, hope he does not waste his time with such things.
Surely you can agree that it's a serious ethical concern, at least.