"... 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.
I think many people will not agree, the linkages go:
Scottpost - Scott - Substack - Y Combinator - Equator Therapeutics - DNP
There are too many jumps between the ends with very low obvious linkages (this isn't like investing in Evil Corp., there is a generic prolific investor in the middle! You could tie Scott to anything with that) in the middle.
I do not. In fact I find that suggestion hilarious.
The connection you're insinuating is much more distant than anything I've seen journalists bother to disclose before. YC isn't Substack's owner, or parent company. They're one of at least 10 investors, many of whom are investing on behalf of a fleet of others.
What are you proposing as the concern, here? Do you believe Scott went and looked for companies to boost which might (somehow?!) help Substack? Or that he was directly told to do so?
I don't think any of that happened. I think that Scott (and other Substack writers) should be very careful about promoting companies as investments, for both ethical and legal reasons, and that it isn't unreasonable for people to have concerns about the possibility of this happening with Substack in the future.
Er, no. Do you have any idea how many companies Y Combinator invests in? Or A16Z? I doubt there's anyone alive who can name them all. At the scale these firms operate at you're going to get random coincidences all the time involving their ventures, it doesn't mean anything.
Sure, and it's the whole "Caesar's wife" thing which is part of why I voted against Scott doing more recommendations of that type. I trust Scott enough that I don't think there was anything shady going on and that it really was "my pal is involved with this thing he told me about and I want to tell you about", nothing more, but as you demonstrated: it can be made to look bad, and without a rigorous procedure of "are you sure nobody connected with this platform however distantly is connected with your thing however distantly?" in place to make sure such connections aren't in place, something which would be tedious and inconvenient, the most self-protective thing is merely to say "WITHOUT RECOMMENDING ANYTHING GOOD BAD OR INDIFFERENT ABOUT THIS, here is something someone told me about".
I also trust Scott; I just think that this is a potential problem for Substack and a valid reason for people to be wary of the platform. I agree that the answer is to be more cautious in promoting any kind of commercial service or investment.
I understand why people have a problem with this; I don't consider it reasonable. There is no really plausible mechanism for nefarious collusion, and coincidence is not reasonably considered problematic.
I also think that the set of conflicts of interests that *aren't* about making more money, are more interesting and more dangerous than the mere money-making conflicts. Pointing out that X and Y are making money in some vaguely-related way and so might be Up to No Good, if that's all you've got, is a distraction from more important concerns.
It is always plausible that [rich person with corporation] could approach [writer with audience] and say "I will give you a bunch of money if you tell your readers to buy stock in my company". You don't need Substack or anything like it for that, you just need the existence of rich people, writers, joint stock corporations, and money.
I don't think there is a plausible mechanism by which Substack adds anything to this process, for either party. A traditional newsroom, where the owner ('s agent) exercises direct ongoing control over the payroll and content, is useful to someone who wants to engage in such shenanigans and/or conceal the fact that they are doing so. Substack, isn't.
Although we don’t know the actual numbers in most cases, getting funding from subscriptions seems like a straightforward business model compared to, say, advertising.
I suppose, thinking like a scammer, they could be faking subscription numbers in either direction, increasing them for a few people and decreasing them for others. But haven’t newspapers sometimes faked subscriber numbers to justify prices charged to advertisers? And what assurances do book authors or musicians have that the numbers aren’t fake?
Eventually Substack might go public and then they would be subject to audits, though that’s not always sufficient either.
In the end, authors should probably go by how much money they actually get.
Or we could do subscriptions on the blockchain :) It doesn’t prevent someone from buying subscriptions in bulk though, much like book sales have sometimes been inflated.
It's just simple power law. The creators of any platform under the sun will have a skewed distribution of success. Also, they're not working "for" substack. They're just blogging for substack. Substack owes them nothing.
It sounds like you have a problem with capitalism and not necessarily Substack.
>a tiny handful of writers make a lot of money, and everyone else makes almost nothing
A small number of authors sell the most books. A small number of musicians sell the most music. This applies to almost everything in a free market. I cant imagine a system by which all authors, all musicians, and all writers have the same income even being a desirable outcome.
The "unequal remuneration problem" you're discussing seems to be something inherent to every career field in which some people are much better at doing the job than others.
The problem is that "better" in this instance are the writers who are "better" at forwarding the opinions of the company owners and serving their propaganda function.
I don't follow this at all. Substack doesn't preferentially give writers different levels of exposure. Substack is almost incapable of doing so, in fact. The writers who are making big money on Substack - Yglesias, Siskind, Taibbi, etc. - were all major names before coming to Substack, and they made those names attracting a loyal audience with quality writing.
That's most obvious with Scott himself, who gained all of his word of mouth starting from absolute scratch.
I think there's often a misconception outside the writing field that there's a vast reservoir of AAA writing talent just waiting to be published if not for those nasty ol' gatekeepers. Just not true. Most writers fall into the category of "suck" or "forgettably mediocre".
"I don't follow this at all. Substack doesn't preferentially give writers different levels of exposure."
Again, those writers only get to the position they're in by following bourgeois expectations and forwarding certain ideas. This has already been covered in books like "Inventing Reality" by Parenti and "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky & Herman.
They don't need to be much better though. A key feature of winner-takes-all–type dynamics is that being marginally better is sufficient for domination.
1. So? Does the fact that some baseball superstar gets paid millions just for playing a game bait fathers into making their sons play in Little League?
2. Assuming that Substack in fact has an agenda, is that a crime? Lord knows that Slate or the Boston Globe or Feral House or whatever have an agenda as well.
For that matter, the ownership of a publisher or a newspaper isn't necessarily a matter of public record, either. Jeff Bezos could hand over a controlling interest in the WaPo to a trust organized for the benefit of Julian Assange, and he doesn't have to tell the public.
The fact that the arguments why Substack is bad are so weak as to show that the real beef with Substack is purely political.
I have a substack. I don't expect to earn any money from it, and Substack have never told me or implied that I will. The idea that Substack is a scam because it promises people riches and then doesn't deliver, is false.
Thanks for the link, that and his Freddie Nitro Edition post were a delightful example of how to be maximally brutal while telling the truth. Just phenomenal.
I think the DeBoer piece is overall pretty good, but statements like "Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly?" make me wonder how honest and serious he is, because that's a hilariously uncharitable, and probably flat out wrong, framing of why Greenwald has recently come under fire.
For quite a while now Greenwald has been dissing, and pissing off... well, the kind of people who write for US media.
I honestly don't know what it is they're being pissed off at recently, but I consider it a reasonable assumption that i) it's a proxy for the ongoing larger disagreement, and ii) the charge is made up or overblown. I fully realize this is uncharitable, but repeated experience overrides the default charity.
Now, I don't want to argue the merits of this heuristic. I just want to point out it's a heuristic that lots of people are going to have, after a vast majority of SM outrage panics turn out to be unworthy of attention and outright misleading if taken at face value. Someone like Freddie tuning them out is precisely what you should expect.
From the deBoer article: "I’ve been given opportunities because I’ve proved profitable to media businesses and like all businesses media businesses only care about profit." I find this interesting. If someone raises organic eggs and sells them, do we think "all he cares about is profit"? People create value and cheerfully accept payment for it, for a number of reasons. Some just need to pay the rent and are indifferent to their product or its impact on customers, but that's not by any means the universal rule. A pleasure of a free market is that people can enjoy offering valuable products to others, while also enjoying receiving valuable payment, which they can then offer to other people who sell products of value. Many of us get off on the idea of this kind of voluntary cooperation and assistance.
It would be one thing if people like Annalee Newitz and Jude Doyle were bringing in tons of money for Substack, and Substack was then turning around and using that money to subsidize Jesse Singal and others they find objectionable. Maybe then I could understand why they'd be mad. But that doesn't seem to be the case, and instead, it appears everyone is making money.
"But that doesn't seem to be the case, and instead, it appears everyone is making money."
Ah, but it's the wrong kind of everyone! Personally I'd be happy if Graham Linehan fell down a flight of stairs, but nobody is forcing me to read his Substack, I had no idea he even had one, and now I know he does, I will be doing my best to avoid it.
If people want to pay him money to read his writing, okay for them. It's not punching me in the nose or picking my pocket if they do so.
"The wrong kind of everyone" is exactly at the heart of this. Doyle - who was quoted in Newitz's piece - has themself made the following remarks about their own dramatical exit:
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There was one other communication I did want to address publicly: Hamish McKenzie of Substack. Hamish wrote me a long, conciliatory and kindly worded letter defending their business model - my criticism of it stands - and ultimately saying there was a Pro deal on the table if I would consider staying on the platform.
I declined. Yes, there was a moment when I really, really wanted the money - even the minor Pro deals are reportedly very generous, and most writers live in the kind of financial precarity that makes it stupid to say "no" to any steady gig - but if Substack is willing to pay me for this newsletter, then it’s only because they see that as the smallest possible amount of money they could lose. They can stop the bleeding by paying me off, or they can lose even more money when trans and queer users and subscribers desert their platform and they lose credibility as anything but an outlet for professional bigots.
The pressure is working, in other words, and I’m not going to take a payout to make sure a massively successful media company gets to continue promoting and profiting from hate speech. (...) I cannot take the money if I know that, by doing so, I’m condoning or being used to whitewash the funding of TERFs. I’m not saying we can never have the conversation. I am saying that until content moderation policies are in place to restrict the funding of extremists who target marginalized groups, that conversation ends with "no".
Doyle is therefore willingly turning down a payment that's evidently higher than whatever were the grassroots subscriptions Doyle managed to drum up since Oct/2018 on the Substack platform - and thus higher than wherever else they take the existing subscribers (via Patreon or otherwise) - because that payment/handout is simply not worth it to Doyle unless it is *additionally* accompanied by Substack purging haters, bigots and extremists such as... well, Jesse Singal, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias.
So it's not just about the money; the power to enact purges has an even greater lure. Doyle's attempt at getting "the wrong kind of everyone" cancelled, via a gambit hinged on Doyle's self-cancellation, went down about as well as someone reasonably anchored in reality might expect. Oh well. At least I can thank Doyle for pointing me to Greenwald's excellent "Criticizing Public Figures" piece, a piece I would have missed If I hadn't followed the chain from Scott's post to Newitz's citation of Doyle.
(English is not my first language, so I don't know whether "themself" is the appropriate reflexive form of "them" in singular?)
"They can lose even more money when trans and queer users and subscribers desert their platform and they lose credibility as anything but an outlet for professional bigots"
I'm sorry, exactly how pie-in-the-sky is this person? Since there is no reputable figure for how many trans people there are in the population, let's go with the wider category of "queer". Figures from a couple of years ago put it at 4.5% of the population of the USA https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/visualization/lgbt-stats/?topic=LGBT#density
Now, taking what Doyle says there, and going really generously on "okay, bump that up to 10% of the potential audience are trans/queer", then 10% of the Substack user/subscriber base will betake themselves off this hellhole of bigots.
That still leaves 90% of non-queer trans users and subscribers. Welp, that'll sure show Substack when they are down to their last pennies because they only have 90% of a paying audience left!
What Doyle seems to be hoping for is a boycott effect, that it won't be only the 10% trans/queer users and subscribers who leave, but that allies in the cishet population will also leave and/or boycott Substack. That's why they need the smear campaign for "an outlet for professional bigots" in order to gin up outrage and get cancel culture at work.
Doyle and the others have to be pretty darn ignorant of the numbers, or else they really do imagine that everywhere is like their own particular neighbourhood bubble of 'everybody here is queer'. Even the maximum LGBT area in the US is, apparently, the District of Columbia with 9.8%.
If they're going to take on "the bigots on Substack", by the numbers the 'bigots' are going to win.
I wouldn't be able to guesstimate how much revenue it is within Doyle's powers to steer away from Substack. The LGBT "supergroup" is around 5% of the population, but they are not *nearly* all of the same mind. (Greenwald, apparently the 2nd on Doyle's "purge list" after Singal, is himself gay)
The "activist subset" of the LGBT population frequently is of the same mind, though, at least when it comes to wholehearted embracing of cancel culture. This is a quite common activist trait nowadays, which they share with many other activists outside of LGBT. But only a tiny fraction of LGBT people *are* activists; it is not "being an activist" that makes you LGBT, it is about having an atypical sexuality (LGB) or profoundly longing to inhabit a different type of body to the one that you do inhabit (T). In other words, were Doyle able to assemble the full combined armies of LGBT activists behind this cause, they still wouldn't be able to convince even a third of the "5% LGBTers" to leave. Probably not even a tenth, given that the group of LGBT Substack subscribers is already preselected by having subscribed to certain Substacks rather than to the Guardian or to Washington Post or whatever. And yes, we can add some "cishet sympathizers" into that mix, but a similar preselection clause applies.
Why I find the whole episode interesting, is how open and deadpan Doyle is in negotiating the "bargain" with Substack. Doyle is *not* asking for a larger handout, the amount of money seems fine. Rather, Doyle - calculating how that amount is still lesser than the damage Doyle is presumably able to inflict on Substack - is therefore asking for adding certain cancellations on top of that deal. "An offer you cannot refuse".
I think Substack can refuse it, and I do hope they will. But I'm only 90% certain they will, so I'm curious as to what will happen in the end. I don't think it realistic Substack would ever agree to cancel Singal or Greenwald, but I hope they won't come to offer some "minor sacrifices" in return either - like a few random low-subscriber guys who write pieces from a traditional religious perspective, or whatever else might make Doyle happy. Because it is in the *successful branding* of such common people as "haters, bigots and extremists" that Doyle's real victory is won.
Actually, quite a few of the cancellation targets are gay or lesbian--Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Katie Herzog, etc. I'm guessing this reflects the fact that gays and lesbians are actually a lot more diverse in terms of political and social views than you'd guess from the prestige media's narrative.
As far as I can tell, the narrative about most identifiable groups that you see in prestige media coverage mostly comes from activists--either from those groups or those opposed to those groups, depending on the desired spin of the writer. (Think of this as the "latinx effect.")
The problem with this kind of description is that it gives you a broken model of the world. Thus leading you to make predictions like "no gays or lesbians will write for or subscribe to Substack because they allow hateful evil fascists like Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald to write there."
Wait. "Substack is bad because they deliberately choose bad people for 'pro'", but also "Substack offered me 'pro', but I won't take it because Substack is bad"? That seems circular (unless she counts herself as bad).
Have I misattributed an argument here, or is this real?
No, not because of Father Ted. Yes, there was the usual church-bashing in it, but it was a comedy, elements did need criticism, and things such as Father Noel Furlong and the Youth Group were painfully accurate (anyone else who was pushed into an 80s Irish youth group was wincing in recognition), as well as the kind of brutal but not wrong descriptions of rural Irish life (e.g. the bickering couple who are all sweetness and light as soon as outsiders come along).
It was more to do with his general attitude - like a lot of Irish ex-Catholics turned social liberals, he couldn't see anything good at all with the Church and what it had done in Ireland in its entire history, and he wanted Irish society to hurry up and copy English and American mores on sex'n'drugs'n'rock-and-roll. Is there a phrase "tits and beer liberals"? I'm nearly certain I read it somewhere online, and this account sounds about right - it's the same general notion as when you could present Howard Stern as a hero sticking it to The Man for all his FCA fines for indecency (to veer off at a tangent here, Trump's infamous "grab 'em by the pussy" was vulgar and demeaning and all the rest of it that the complaints alleged, but in the context of the times, this was the kind of vulgar, indecent, etc. attitude of Howard Stern and others that were being praised for standing up to the squares and prudes - think of Larry Flynt getting a movie holding him up as a defender of liberty over that parody having Jerry Falwell describing how he had sex with his mother - Falwell being the bete noire of the time).
"The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.
Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, '60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.
And it’s not like oooo, this was acceptable once upon a time, it’s that when I was growing up, this was the official line of media social liberalism."
And 90s media social liberalism in the Irish context is what Graham Linehan came out of - he was a journalist for "Hot Press", an Irish music magazine. This Wikipedia article doesn't really go into depth on it - Hot Press really was very much pro-sex, drugs and rock'n'roll (e.g. they had a journalist describing going to Amsterdam to one of the legal drug cafés and writing about being publicly stoned in front of cops) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Press
So yeah, it was more Linehan's brand of trendy Dublin social liberalism, involving hefty doses of sneering at anyone who wasn't that into sex'n'drugs (I don't mind rock'n'roll) and/or from down the country who are only rubes and rednecks, and then the natural ending to that which is fecking off to England to make a living mocking the country you left behind you, is what annoyed and annoys me about him.
That 90s media social liberal tag is very appropriate; from being one of the right-on heroes fighting repression, his views (tits and beer liberalism) haven't changed that much, but society has moved on and now the "earnest, censorious social issue activists" are the ones in ascendance, Stern and Flynt would not be considered heroes of the people today, and Linehan's attitudes and views being fossilised in the heyday of his times, he's run afoul of being "transphobic" and the rest of it.
As a dyed-in-the-wool stick in the mud and social conservative, yes, I am getting some amusement from it. My attitudes may not have changed very much either, but while I am still being mocked by the same people who were always mocking those views, in past days Linehan was one of the mockers, now he's one of the targets himself. How does it feel, Graham?
To clarify a bit: I disliked Trump's reported remarks, I would have disliked them at the time he made them, and I would dislike any such remarks today by anyone. However, *at the time*, not finding Stern etc. brand of vulgar sexual innuendo funny and cool would have been every bit as offensive as the backlash today, where that vulgar sexual innuendo is now demeaning and sexist, not funny and cool.
I was out of step with the "tits and beer" liberalism of the time, as I am out of step with the cancel culture and SJW culture of today. One of the benefits of being socially conservative! At least it's consistent when I get mocked for wrong thinking and not the switch between "hey I used to be admired, why am I now being criticised for the same views I always held?" 😁
I perfectly understand you. I'm in favor of sex and against drugs and rock'n'roll myself, not to mention cancel culture and SJWs, so our views and experiences of being mudsticks are largely analogous. I do dearly love Father Ted, though.
Agreed. And both pieces seem to imply this (or something much more sinister) is happening but talk in circles around it, because it doesn't seem to be happening at all
The primary reason for Substack receiving the negative press that it does is that of political disagreement and intolerance, with the secondary reasons being those of envy and jealously. I'm not sure it warrants much discussion beyond that, at least until I see a legitimately good argument for why the platform may be anywhere close to as bad as some groups claim it is.
It’s so refreshing to hear of a business model with which is really economically sound. I usually pay too much attention to politics, where (at least in headlines) boring economic solutions are often ignored.
Huh. This is good to know. I'd been assuming until this point that Substack was doing an Uber and channelling money to popular writers as a way to build brand or userbase or something. It sounds like that's not true and in fact, they are simply exploiting the fact that there's huge untapped commercial demand for certain kinds of writing, demand which until now had been invisible because media groupthink had determined it to be wrongthink and more subtly, determined that writing was inherently a low paid profession. When in reality it was maybe more like, there are tons of people willing to write certain types of "consensus-quo" articles for nearly nothing so the vast supply drives prices to the floor.
This somewhat reminds me of the Fox News situation. There was huge demand for news by conservatives, but nobody supplying it. And when eventually one network did it immediately obtained massive market share.
Part of what Substack are doing is attracting "star" writers to their platform, in the hope that readers who read them will stay and read other writers. This is a network effect that loads of other SV companies have tried to achieve, and is nothing particularly remarkable.
I didn't even realize you could find other Substack authors through Substack's interface. 100% of my roads to a particular 'stack have been from outside sources, meaning its own network effect is now that I've seen enough 'stacks if I were to start one I might choose Substack as the host.
Substackers informally link to other Substackers. That's it.
And one of the things I like is that Substack isn't gagging me with "see more you might like" shit. There's problems with the interface, but they aren't obsessed with keeping me doom-scrolling their site. I figure that deserves me giving them some of my business.
I think this is right but there's a smaller network effect: when you read popular people on substack, it'll be the first thing that you think of if you ever decide to write your own newsletter. An ad to potential authors rather than just subscribers.
I'm skeptical of the network effects here once others copy Substack's business model. That said, they've spent more time figuring out why that would be harder than I'd think than I have.
Are they? I've yet to see any cross-promotion and it sounds like these deals are extremely good for Substack purely on their own terms. I agree that what you're describing sounds like the usual tech startup playbook, but ... where is it?
I think it also represents an unbundling of products that were previously bundled, though, like say, ala carte cable channels. E.G., I like Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle, but there's no way I'm subscribing to the NYT and the WashPost just to read those two fine scribes, because there's too much extraneous stuff bundled with it. However, now that Mr. Douthat has a substack, I can satiate my appetite for Douthatian commentary without having to subscribe to a whole 'nother newspaper, so in that sense, Substack represents a real value proposition, not just a poaching of writers from other platforms/
I did subscribe to the Post primarily to read Megan McArdle. Via Amazon Prime, it's $5.99/month, which compares favorably to the cost of a Substack subscription, and turns out to include other content I'm interested in.
I'd rather send more directly Megan's way, but on the other hand there's a limit to how many individual subscriptions at $5-$10/each I'm likely to spring for. If some bundling doesn't emerge I'm not sure what my Substack ceiling is, but it isn't that high.
Supporting Substackers is a good way to tell media that something is wrong, but this isn't going to fix media. Media's problems go deeper than that.
And this is important. News reporting is a necessary part for a functioning society. Just supporting the columnists we like, while immediately useful, leaves us having a lot of opinions but no facts. Local media is already a wasteland. Who is covering the local board meeting where they are voting to put melamine in the water? Anyone?
I get being angry at the media. But it just dying isn't really a way forward.
I think it's much more this. I doubt there is any huge untapped market in the sense that consumers in aggregate are willing to pay any more money than they presently do to consume media. Substack is just making a bet that a sufficient number of people who are currently subscribed to large bundles of barely related services really only care about a few topics or a few writers and are willing to give the same money to a much smaller number of people.
That isn't quite a network effect. A network effect is where additional value is gained by existing users by adding new users to the network. The telephone network is an example: your phone line has greater value the more people you can call with it. The same applies to fax machines. Facebook et al. are in a similar boat: people choose Facebook because it has the greater number of users new prospective users want to talk to. Likewise, competators to Facebook face the problem that all potential users are already on Facebook so you'd have to have a compelling benefit to get them to join, let alone pull them away.
Substack has nothing like that. Some random person joining Substack as an author doesn't improve anything for Substack's existing authors or readers. At-best, it provides a trivial amount of name recognition for Substack. But that's no different than having the authors list what brand of pen, paper, or computer they use.
I've been thinking the same thing. Anyone have thoughts on ways to get some skin in the game with entities providing these kinds of apparently high-demand/low-supply media products?
Become an angel investor. But of course, you have to find the opportunities, that's the hard part. It's why VC is a profession and a competitive one at that.
I get that. And maybe my question was stupid. But I was thinking about small, creative, probably indirect ways to make *small* bets on these sorts of things since becoming an angel investor is not in the cards for me.
My first though was that maybe a group of people could pool money to be a sort of meta-angel investor, but then I realized that the voting you'd need to do would ensure you never invested in an "interesting" company until your stake was worthless.
Try googling "equity crowfunding". There are a few sites that allow for this. It's only since 2016 or 2017 that this has been available to everyone instead of just accredited investors, so it's still pretty new.
OK, fine. Technically from what I can see, there's no particular reason the type of Substack BD that Scott talks about here can only be done by them. The core of the deal was "we know that you can make money but you don't realise it, so we'll take the risk out for you in return for (we believe) a sure profit".
You could find writers that you believe are offering something to under-served but rich markets and make them a similar deal, fronted by your own cash. If you do a good job, then your new writer has to cut you in on the subscriber revenue stream for a while.
The article was mostly talking about suckers who get lured into putting out content for free but in fact there exists an elite cabal who substack pays to write for them. The majority of their "big" names comes from people who were *already semi-famous to begin with* (you/matt)
From the conclusion
"
Substack’s business is a scam. They claim to offer writers a level playing field for making a living, and instead they pay an elite, secret group of writers to be on the platform and make newsletter writing appear to be more lucrative than it is"
So you are a member of said "elite secret group" (I think "secret" is a bit of a misnomer but still the theory still is that they pay people that are medium-famous to enter the platform and those people are wildly successful, meanwhile a nobody like the author has no real chance)
If Scott and Matt Y are representative of these elite writers, they are not getting paid, but insured by Substack, at a loss for themselves.
I never interpreted that Substack advertised itself as a level playing field in the sense that people consume articles regardless of the writer. Writers have their followers. They just arent filtered or paid more or less due to editorial choice, and theres no barrier to entry.
If there were many deals with fix high payments to writers that end up on average not generating such income, and they extended more than the first year where the insurance helps overcome skepticism and changes in lifestyle, then I would see the point of complaining. But even then, probably its not in Substacks financial interest to have such a scheme. Or if it is, I see no reason to think that for now.
I see - it sounds like your interpretation is that Substack's "deception" is luring big names to its site (who then make money organically and without any further deception) because that makes ordinary people think they could also make lots of money. That isn't how I interpreted the article, but it seems more defensible than my interpretation.
It's still weird, though. Is Disney a scam because it pays famous actors millions of dollars to be in its movies, but the average actor who works for them will only get a small salary? Is YouTube a scam because top YouTubers make lots of money but most YouTubers make none?
I think in order to be upset over this, you would have to think that Substack was deliberately trying to trick people by spending lots of money recruiting eg Yglesias as a "loss leader", and hoping that the rubes his success attracted would make up the difference. But number one, they didn't spend lots of money, they gained money on net. Number two, the rubes will never make money meaning Substack will never gain money off of them. Number three, it seems like you would have to be very confused to think "one of the most famous journalists in the world, who's been doing this for 20 years, makes $380K on Substack, that means I will also make $380K on Substack".
So here's the thing, people like you have about a 1/1 chance (because you were prepaid by substack) of being successful. This lures in a lot of people with strange and interesting ideas, who have each a 1/100 or so chance of making it big on the platform. (where big is $50k/year or more in subscriber revenue)
The real thing is that if there's 1000 Brians each one generates $4000/year in revenue, so $400 a year for substack, they worked 1000 hours for $3600, or about $3.6 an hour. Substack made $400k from these 1000 Brians, who weren't able to succeed but they (substack) didn't have to put in much work to get those 1000 cheap writers who had small followings. Maybe 1 of those guy's hits it big and has some unique thing like say my sweet dumb brain. https://mysweetdumbbrain.substack.com/?utm_source=discover who hit it big.
I remember doing a similar project on youtube where I got 30 people to make minecraft content and found that at the end 28 of them had 100-1000 subscribers and 1 had 50k and 1 had 140k subs. I figure substack works much the same way, you put in 100s of hours of work for the chance of hitting it big and being a big name, but if you fail and only hit it small the platform still profits but you personally fail.
Yeah the post they made had a vaild point and some invalid ones, I tried to focus only on the "you're making content chasing a lottery that's stacked against you, you aren't Scott Alexander or Glenn Greenwald, your chance of becoming the next my sweet dumb brain is not very high"
> So here's the thing, people like you have about a 1/1 chance (because you were prepaid by substack) of being successful. This lures in a lot of people with strange and interesting ideas, who have each a 1/100 or so chance of making it big on the platform. (where big is $50k/year or more in subscriber revenue)
This is absurd. Your argument boils down to, "Don't do anything economically worthwhile, because people might misinterpret the reason for your success and waste their own time/money." Now, if Substack was advertising the success of big writers and obscuring the fact that they were already widely read and well-established, *that* would be something. But that doesn't appear to be what's happened here or even what's being alleged.
>So here's the thing, people like you have about a 1/1 chance (because you were prepaid by substack)
Either Substack is paying their writers secretly, in which case the public assessment is that Scott wasn't prepaid and had much less than a 1/1 chance of being successful, or writers tell people that they got prepaid and no one forms unrealistic expectations about Substack because they can see that Substack is not offering them any prepaid deals. No one gets deceived here!
Right, for some reason I thought that other than matt/scott most of the prepaid authors were secret.
If that's not the case then most people should realize that the odds of success are extremely low and you can do actually 1000 hours of labor and get paid $0-$4000 for it, not only that, it is the most probable result.
Keep in mind, though, that alternative blogging locations are places like Blogger, Wordpress, Ghost, or Medium that don’t pay anything, and might charge you. Or Twitter, for that matter.
Writing for money is crossing a line between amateur and professional. But it reminds me of talk about “unpaid labor” which would seem to imply that paid is better.
Exactly. If I publish something on my own web page, I am also "working for less than minimum wage". Should perhaps all non-professional blogging be banned?
Switching from my own web page to Substack would mean, in short term, that I wouldn't have to worry about setting up and updating the software; someone else does it for me, for free. Is that a bad thing?
In long term, it would mean that if I accidentally become a popular blogger, I could try to get some income, again with almost no extra work from my side. (I imagine I would go somewhere in the settings, activate some checkbox, provide my IBAN, and confirm that I have read and understood thousand pages of legalese.) Then I need to write an extra paid article once in a while, see if it works, and either keep doing this or give up. That sounds like a very cheap and convenient way to make the experiment.
Many years ago, it was also possible to get paid using Google AdSense, but these days the number of people generating tons of viral text is so large that if you don't do clickbait and SEO semi-professionally, your income will probably be something like $1 a year. With Substack, you can make more if you get one(!) paying subscriber. But that still won't be enough to quit your job, obviously.
> I remember doing a similar project on youtube where I got 30 people to make minecraft content and found that at the end 28 of them had 100-1000 subscribers and 1 had 50k and 1 had 140k subs.
Nearly every human endeavour exhibits power laws like this [1]. It's naturally emergent, and there's nothing intentionally nefarious about it.
Maybe you think top earners should be partially capped and redistributed to the bottom, as with progressive taxation? Then again, that might partially destroy the value behind the platform. What alternatives do you have in mind?
Nah, I'm more saying that *person X* should strongly consider that the probability of hitting it big are really low, I agree power laws are what is going on here, but people should look carefully at power laws before deciding if they made the correct decision
I like substack, but I understand how it can blow up in your face
1. I'm not really sure how going with substack can "blow up in your face" in a way that going with your own blog would not. Maybe you mean people who otherwise would not have written anything just wasted their time? I can maybe see that, but I think writing has plenty of cognitive benefits that make the investment worth it even if no monetary reward follows.
2. Your exact argument is why Scott almost didn't go with Substack. The point being, you can't always know upfront where you will end up on the power law spectrum.
> Nearly every human endeavour exhibits power laws like this
I don't think so. The activities that exhibit power laws are primarily the ones where the whole world (or everyone with particular interests) follows the few most successful/famous/best individuals, and the individuals are not fungible: athletes, musicians (since the recording era), writers etc. Other professions have skill-based salary differences, but usually smaller, and not following a power law.
> Other professions have skill-based salary differences, but usually smaller, and not following a power law.
Can you be more specific? What professions don't exhibit power laws? How are writers not fungible? How are athletes not fungible? I'm an engineer, and I still see the power law trends.
How would your issues with substack change or not if noone was paid upfront (yet some fraction of the Scotts and Matt Ys had predicted their success better and were making the same sums of money)?
"Luring people in with a hope of making big money" sounds an awful lot like "giving people a shot at the brass ring they otherwise wouldn't have had." How is it wrong again?
I think it's wrong to call it a scam but it is a definitely an issue people are concerned about in lots of places (Hollywood, VC startups vs established companies, Uber employees). The issue is that people are not good at calculating expected return (also the difference with mean and median expected return). Keep in mind that if Substack gets a lot writers who make $10K per year Substack will do well (collecting 1K per writer for ~$0 marginal cost) but those writers may not (depending on whether they are treating Substack as supplemental or primary income). I don't think Substack is actually doing anything wrong but this is an inescapable issue with human nature (See Adam Smith (jump to point 5 https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/smith-an-inquiry-into-the-nature-and-causes-of-the-wealth-of-nations-cannan-ed-vol-1#lf0206-01_label_391).
So what is your take then, on Annalee Newitz who claims that they never started writing on Substack for the money, they wanted a way to let their thousands of fans know what was going on?
"And so finally, last year, I started to consider Substack. Many writers I admire had started using it, and I thought: “Here’s a good way to send bulk email without getting caught in a spam filter.” That’s all I wanted -- a decent platform that wasn’t complicated like MailChimp, and didn’t charge high monthly rates to send more than 1,000 e-mails.
I didn’t pay much attention to Substack’s subscriber model because I wasn’t going to use this newsletter as a revenue stream. I already have plenty of paying gigs. All I wanted was a way to let you folks know what I’m up to, and occasionally tell you a story for free that I personally wanted to tell."
So if I believe that, they were not suckered in by a scam that fooled them they could make $$$$$ now. Their bone of contention is twofold:
(1) "What I’m saying is that Substack suckered me in with the promise of growing my readership, and the bait was that they had so many great writers with huge followings."
(2) "It got worse when some of the Pro writers started to reveal themselves, because Substack’s secret paid elite all seemed to be cut from the same cloth. ...o people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry."
(Shout-out to Freddie de Boer, one of the names in the list of deplorables; hi Freddie, hope this finds you well!)
So the complaint is (a) they didn't 'grow their readership' as expected and (b) wrongthinkers were permitted and indeed paid to write. The implication *seems* to be that Substack were paying the wrongthinkers to write wrongthink, but I don't think that is tenable.
If you didn't grow your readership, consider this might be on you? Product not engaging, product not distinctive enough, product only of appeal to your like-minded bubble of pals?
I can't really comment on anyone else's state of mind, but I do think that wanting to be famous (have lots of readers) is not that different from wanting to be rich and people are subject to the same irrational expectations. How much Substack is at fault depends a lot on the nature of their advertisements. If Substack implied that they are responsible for people's audience (or would engage in cross selling on behalf of new people) then it did scam them on the other hand if it's just their irrational belief that they would immediately get the audience it's their fault. To be clear I don't find Annalee's specific claims compelling but I want to steel man this argument.
I think this is conflating two things. The recent from the last week or whatever is happening on Twitter where someone apparently discovered a few people getting paid advances left their last jobs in part because of uneasy relations with trans coworkers or whatever, which seems to be what Annalee Newitz is on about. And that is what Scott linked to, so fine.
But criticism of Substack in general has been ongoing and for much broader reasons than that. Part of it is the contention that they're luring people into believing they can make it big, which I don't find convincing at all because, first, I think most writers know they aren't going to make it big, but also because the basic exploitation of people willing to work for passion or possibly deluded into hoping for a shot at stardom is already how traditional media companies work anyway.
However, the other part has to do with splintering of aggregated media, which is good for consumers in the shortest of economic runs, but arguably bad socially if you believe loss leaders have value even if they can't be monetized. Huge companies can have loss leaders because they can subsidize losses with wins. Individual writers can't do that. Which is to say, people believe a company like the Washington Post can turn out a bunch of drivel to grab eyeballs, and then use that to fund investigative long form work that can potentially alter the course of history like uncovering Watergate or something. Direct to consumer independent contractors probably can't replicate that.
I'm not sure people are always right about this, though. Substack hasn't been around long, and it remains to be seen whether they have any interest in eventually trying to fund undiscovered talent if they can become and stay profitable on the backs of their superstars. Arguably, "non-traditional" media has been able to do this in pure art. Amazon Studios seems to operate solely as a prestige and passion project of Jeff Bezos that doesn't have to make money because of the aggregation with Amazon Prime, and this has resulted in quite a lot of high quality material that wouldn't have been made elsewhere, even explicitly saving very good material that had been canceled by other sponsors that couldn't afford the loss. Netflix is arguably trying to do this with all the documentaries and true crime stuff they fund for a certain value of long form investigative reporting. Will Substack ever try to do this for written long form investigative? Will anyone? I guess we'll see.
There are several things that are all mixed-in together in one of the complaints, and that's the one I'll parse, the one by Annalee Newitz.
(Respecting their pronouns, I will be referring to them as "they" from here on in, just in case anyone is confused).
They started off with how they didn't go on Substack to make money, they just wanted a cheap and convenient way to send out a newsletter to their number of fans and followers.
Then they started in with "but Substack is a scam and here's why":
(1) It deceives people into thinking they can have a huge audience (and make money off of paid subscriptions) by claiming "Look, here's Huey Dooey and his Huge Audience what follow him, he started off here with only three men and a dog reading him"
(2) They are paying certain people money, which is probably what is underwriting the "huge audiences" for Huey Dooey and not organic growth, which is deception (see point 1 above)
(3) But also! They are paying the *wrong kind* of people the big advances! Here we get the quote from Jude Doyle about the laundry list of deplorables (hey again, Freddie! *waves*)
(4) A plaint about how this wrings their withers with regards to the high journalist standards they are accustomed to operating under (coming from someone who worked in the Gawker stable, I find that very feffin' ironic)
(5) Substack is a scam and bad actors and propping up witches, so they are going to someplace purer and finer
Now, I imagine Substack *is* trying to entice people in with the "avail of a huge audience" pitch, because they are a business and no business on earth is going to tell you "sign up with us and be mediocre unknown". Is that a scam? Well, if it is, modern media including journalism is also a scam, because what about all the unpaid interns and, for instance, Buzzfeed's spring cleaning? So mote and beam there, Annalee.
As for the wrongthinking deplorables, well hold my hand while I sink down onto the fainting couch 🙄
If anyone is dubious about Scott's superpower being the Aura Of Niceness, I really wanted to be a pissy little bitch about Annalee and go full-on ad hominem but couldn't do it, not on Scott's page 😀
From what I can tell, advances are only being offered to those Substack is pretty certain will pull in a huge amount of money, but the advances ultimately make Substack even more money.
For those who Substack isn't certain about, authors are able to use the platform for free. Substack takes a small cut of subscriptions, but ultimately makes more money as the authors make more money. So Substack at least has incentives aligned to have new authors also make more money. Unlike physical publishing, there's no huge up-front cost for review/editing/formatting a new book.
"Number three, it seems like you would have to be very confused to think "one of the most famous journalists in the world, who's been doing this for 20 years, makes $380K on Substack, that means I will also make $380K on Substack".
But that *is* what is going on, at least to my eyes. These people really do think that they are on the same, or even a more exalted, level and should be getting the same treatment and getting the same money. And it looks like it's not even about the money, it's pure envy: "I didn't come on Substack to make money, I do this for free/I have better paying gigs elsewhere, but they gave TERRIBAD PERSON a wheelbarrow of cash? How dare they!"
They are big fish in their very tiny, carefully curated ponds, and when they get into the bigger lake they think they should retain that status and are very offended to find out that is not so, and hence it has to be down to secret cabals and paid elites and transphobia and all the rest of it.
I was subbing to a lot of newspapers up to 2020. The Boston Globe, the Tampa Bay Times, the NY Times, the WaPo, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the LA Times. That was a lot of $$ spent on news. The feeds would come in and they were more and more a blur of sameness (except the sports). The people on the mastheads had been on Slate, the Atlantic, NYRB, NYer, a whirligig of the same people. I now use the $$ I spent on the big papers to support Substack writers who write longer, better documented, more objective and more thoughtful articles. Also the comment sections make the Substack writers less horatory.
This means you've swapped news and opinion for just news, right? I certainly find opinion stuff much more fun to read, but I suspect actual news is of more epistemic value, and so it's bad if we all do this.
I get News Nation (WGN from Chicago) for straight news since CNN became insufferable. No opinion writer at the above mentioned outlets interests me as they say the same things and so many are on the vanity circuit (Friedman/Aspen).
Sounds like baseball to me. The average frustrated semi-pro ball player hoping to catch on with a AA team and move up from there will probably never make anywhere near what the average player for the Yankees will make. The average frustrated journeyman MLB player in turn is a but pauper when compared with the stars.
Some "can't miss" prospects get the big bucks before they've ever stepped onto an MLB ball yard. Others aren't so lucky.
Now we can argue later whether that system (or capitalism in general) is fair or not, but I don't think that's what the PMC critics of Substack are really meowing over.
I agreed that this was what the author was going for, but it makes zero sense to me? Maybe if substack was structured like an MLM, where you had to 'buy in' for some amount with the promise of getting some big payoff down the line?
The whole idea that substack somehow benefits from tricking a bunch of unprofitable writers into posting doesn't make any sense to me at all... They literally only make money if the writer makes money?
It seems identical to Twitch streaming or youtube or whatever other platform. A few stars will make lots of money, and many many many more people will essentially use a free service and generate free art (writing in this case) that no one will ever see. Calling that a 'scam' stretches the word pretty far.
"meanwhile a nobody like the author has no real chance"
I think that's what is grigging them. In actuality, they *are* a nobody. In their own estimation, they are a somebody that should have been part of the elite secret cabal and the only reason Substack did not offer them a sack full of dollars was transphobia or something.
"I used to work for a company called Gawker Media, where I spent seven years running a blog called io9. It was fun! But for a whole variety of reasons -- the death of Google Reader, Facebook’s fraudulent “pivot to video” -- the media world moved away from blogs as a genre and so did I. ...I didn’t pay much attention to Substack’s subscriber model because I wasn’t going to use this newsletter as a revenue stream. I already have plenty of paying gigs. All I wanted was a way to let you folks know what I’m up to, and occasionally tell you a story for free that I personally wanted to tell. What clinched it for me was that Substack had attracted such a big, engaged readership with high-profile writers like Daniel M. Lavery, Emily Atkin, and Heather Cox Richardson."
I had to look up who those "high-profile" writers were so, um, estimations of fame may vary. But when you are claiming, on the one hand, "I don't need Substack for money, I have paying jobs!" and on the other hand claiming "this is a scam because they are secretly paying people and that is why the paid writers have big readerships" (uh? not established unless Substack are paying readers to read certain writers and if so, how do I get in on that sweet gig?)
Throw around phrases like "secret paid elite" and you are starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, not a journalist wringing your hands over how the high and austere standards of your profession are being traduced.
This Jude Doyle (another name I had to look up, the amount of "Who?" that I am uttering reading that particular article has me sounding like an owl) claimed that Substack did offer them money just like the "secret cabal", that they turned it down since they thought it wasn't enough, that they thought Substack was their kind of place, and then they got very offended when they found out wrong-thinkers were not alone being permitted on Substack but were getting offers of big money! bigger than Substack offered them!
Why you are offended that someone else took up the offer you refused because you felt you would make more money doing paid writing elsewhere, I don't know, and the real cause of offence from both these persons does seem to be much less to do with money being offered, and more with "money being offered
"TO THE WRONG PEOPLE!" (Substack, while you're paying your secret elite cabal, could you please pay someone to code you an edit button for comment? thanks!)
So the offensiveness is that the assumption, based on early names, was that Substack was going to be a safe space for queer trans progressive all the rest of it politics and writing, and then that turned out not to be the case, and even worse Substack was happy to let disgusting warty-faced witches write and publish, and even more worser than that pay them BIG MONEY (because it turns out the warty witches were a bigger draw for a paying audience than right-on queer non-binary transgender persons).
That's what is really driving all this fury, so far as I can make out.
If you don't know who Doyle is, you can start reading Jesse Singal to catch up. Doyle had earlier accused Elizabeth Bruenig of using a sock-puppet account to sent threats about Doyle's kids, based on Doyle's own amateur linguistic analysis.
Bluntly, if someone decides they're an undiscovered genius of the same order as Scott and Matt, and plans and acts accordingly, they deserve what they get. "Work your fingers to the bone. What d'you get? Bony fingers." as the song goes. I learned at the age of 12 that hanging out where the Cool Kids were would not make me Cool.
"Substack’s business is a scam. They claim to offer writers a level playing field for making a living, and instead they pay an elite, secret group of writers to be on the platform and make newsletter writing appear to be more lucrative than it is"
If this is a scam, then it's a scam that runs on the underpants-gnome business model. How does Substack *profit* from "making newsletter writing appear more lucrative than it is"? If Bob's career as a Substack writer is not lucrative, it's because very few people are subscribing to Bob's feed, which in turn means that Substack isn't making very much money from Bob. Unlike e.g. a newspaper, Substack can't use low-grade content as filler to space out the paid advertisements once they've hooked the reader with a shiny headline; they don't sell advertising and their customers pay a la carte.
Substack profits most from having a stable full of Scotts and Freddies and Yglesiass; if they also have "nobodies" on the platform, that makes sense if the goal is that by cultivating a field of nobodies they can get a few more Scotts and Freddies, not so much if the goal is to make the nobodies suffer by working for peanuts, bwuahahaha, because somehow profit.
It is absolutely in Substack's interest to make newsletter writing appear to be lucrative. That presumably gets them more writers, and while most of those writers will get very few subscribers, it's essentially pure profit to substack. But this is mostly me being pedantic. You're completely right that the idea that they'd actually subsidize the big writers to try to draw people to the platform is underpants gnome levels of loony. There's no way they'd make enough on the people they'd draw in, and we know they're doing fine out of the deals they've done with Scott and Matt Y, which removes any need to be nefarious.
One concern I have though is that there is kind of a fixed pool of money people are willing to spend on newsletter subscriptions. So if Substack wants to continue to grow, it will have to start lowering subscription prices which will impact their early adopters.
I think the fixed pool of time is an even bigger factor. Assuming a typical Substacker posts twice a week, how much time are you going to spend reading essays? Especially if they're all echoing the same content? It's the same problems blogs had, except with more money involved: either you have to make exceptional content or very niche content. This will be very, very successful for those who can do that. But due to the low barrier of entry, lots of people are going to try and fail because either they just aren't that great at writing/marketing their writing, or they can't find a niche to write about.
I'm running into this limit already with 4 subscriptions. And it's all high quality stuff so I'm not complaining! But there's sometimes 3 good posts a day and I just can't find the time to read them all.
Could be like gacha and ultimately rely on a smaller number of whales. With my reading habits, I could easily follow twenty or thirty blogs and not be satiated.
This isn't any different from any other subscription service, so I don't really see the problem. People are unlikely to subscribe to a ton of different services, it makes more sense to subscribe to a limited number because you have limited time.
All Substack is doing is creating a new set of things to subscribe to. As there is a market for that, they will see more money until they exhaust the audience, at which point their growth will slow and eventually stop.
Isn't this the same problem in all non-ephemeral consumer entertainment? Once you get away from live performances being a primary revenue stream, you can just duplicate the best / the most popular pieces for everyone to consume instead of people having to go to community theater because they can't afford Broadway.
The author picks the price. Substack seems to encourage authors to ask for a bit more than they think is reasonable (which seems like logical advice, from a revenue-maximizing perspective).
" (which seems like logical advice, from a revenue-maximizing perspective)."
I agree with this, but I think the important corollary is that most people writing on substack want to maximise some weighted combination of audience/influence, not juts revenue, whereas substack probably values revenue comparatively more and readership comparatively less.
Or it could be that Substack's experience is that authors have a tendency to undervalue both themselves and the product - or at least overestimate the elasticity of demand - by setting prices too low.
The pool is assuredly not fixed. I don't pay for any forms of journalism except for ACX. If Matt Levine moved to Substack I would pay for that. So Substack has increased the pool of dollars for journalism by at least as much as I pay for ACX. Substack mostly increases the supply by moving people from free platforms to Substack which has both free and paid content.
if i'm doing business development for substack, i'm looking for people that can generate traffic and subscriptions. it's very possible that it could incentive me to choose more controversial/problematic/inflammatory people to set up deals with, because of the value prop of such writers. that is perhaps the more salient issue - and indeed, it goes the most against substack's purported mission of "fixing" media
To be clear, they're trying to fix the business model into something where readers directly pay writers, rather than paying editors and press owners who employ many writers. They make no claim whatsoever that the actual quality of material will improve.
On the other hand, I'm willing to invest significant consumer dollars in a platform where I can continue to read material that interests me without having to worry that someone whose politics I deplore will get the author(s) fired for wrongthink. That's "fixing" at least a small corner of the dysfunctional media.
The only thing missing in this is the implication from Jude et al that Substack was offering these upfront deals to ONLY the "bro science" or "semi-anti-woke" white/male writers like you, Yglesias, Taibbi etc. (Jesse Singal, who's in the middle of this war, claims he was NOT offered a large amount of money.)
I'm generally team Jesse, Taibbi, Yglesias & you in this debate, but is there any credence at all to their "bro's only" getting offers argument?
(PS - Jude claimed that despite being offered money to stay they were leaving Substack. But the fact that they're offering money to people with opposite views from the "bros" implies that
Substack are not ideological and actually want diverse voices, right? Maybe that's a separate issue, right from wether or not they're running a "scam".)
Also the deals offer utility (security) but in both places mentioned here it was actually a financial loss from the author's perspective. If you're against these authors why aren't you cheering Substack "scamming" their money away?
The deals may lose the authors money, but they are often what got them to write on Substack in the first place. Those who hate them would prefer them not to write, even more than they prefer them to have less money.
Although this depends on what the alternative would be. If the alternative would be that they don't write at all, those who hate them have a reason to dislike Substack. On the other hand, if some of them now write on Substack for paying subscribers only, while otherwise they would be writing on free platforms, their views now reach much fewer people, and mostly people who already agree with them anyway.
Substack claims that they have offered the deal to many other people, but that people with different politics or without an established platform don't want to get themselves in trouble by revealing it, whereas Taibbi et al are professional in-trouble-getters and less concerned.
But presumably not everyone they offered the deal to took it, right? They could say "we offered Ezra Klein a deal and he turned us down" and it wouldn't make either side look bad.
Surely they paid their #1 writer Heather Cox Richardson, who seems far from a bro science anti-woke male. Or was she the only top writer smart advance to decline the advance and actually pocket her earnings?
No offense to you, Scott, as I can guess you made virtually no money at all from slatestarcodex and probably didn't expect this, but seemingly Yglesias and others who were extremely high profile public figures and knew it should have known better.
Damn. One of these days, I might could get famous for the writing I've been doing for the past 17 years. But I'm starting to think maybe I'm simply not that good. Nevertheless I have encountered people who told me I was better than Matthew Yglesias. Is there any standard? Perhaps I should consider the proper kind of stunts.
The only sympathy this argument will get from me will be when a) substack itself becomes the platform for discovery and recommendation, b) when the selection process then involves some version of implicit or explicit filter on views they like/ don't like. So far neither is true. Even if they do some selection for wokeness or whatever, if it includes Glen and Scott and Matt, there's enough viewpoint diversity of a kind anyway. And even in that scenario, more or less federated quasi magazine options will hopefully pop up so we have reading options and a blogging renaissance.
SA, I'm curious: why were those figures so hard to believe? You knew the size of your readership. You also knew that it was a somewhat tightly-knit community (you won't find a group of people in Barcelona meeting up to discuss NYT articles, but there's one for SSC). So wouldn't it have been as simple as (SSC readership)*(5-20% conversion rate)*(Avg substack fee)=X?
Intuitively, I'd think that SSC survey responders would represent the more dedicated readership and thus would overstate their allegiance. But if it was the opposite, then perhaps surveys on hypothetical spending choices are unreliable in general (and there is also the inherent incentive to vote against any price increase). Or perhaps the goodwill from the NYT fiasco changed the calculus for a lot of people (but this is less likely, because Substack would not have used that as an input in their calculation). And also, there could be some smaller but not insignificant effects from the pandemic-driven online media spend increases. Regardless, I'd say that the high multiplier is the cumulative appreciation for a decade of you working for us gratis, in other words: the Love Factor.
I signed up as a paying subscriber partially as an FU to the NYT, and partly because I'd like to see the results of Scott's discount psychiatry experiment. I *really* want to see it be easier/cheaper to get psychiatric care in this country; far too many of my patients also have mental health needs which are hard to meet.
Given my Substack experience, I'm not certain I'll renew next year. But we'll see. There's a long time until then.
I think it's pretty standard advice when pricing products etc. that surveys are a really bad way to approach it, and they're bad in the direction of underestimating the price that people would pay. While this isn't pricing per se, I wouldn't be surprised to see the same factors at play.
No kidding. That's what brought me here, thought I'd been thinking about it as a result of Greenwald's own appalling experience. Lots more FU's need to be delivered to those people.
Remuneration/elitism aside, the biggest question for me is the definition of Substack as an app/platform. If Scott would publish a twice-weekly column in a newspaper (say WSJ or The Economist), there would be remuneration but also some legal obligations for the publishers: fact checking, insurance for libel, etc.
Substack is essentially paying individuals to publish their newsletters in their platforms within their paywall. What is the legal responsibility of Substack if they are asking someone to write and publish content and pay them a fixed sum? Can they really claim they are just a platform? And if Substack is offering these "star writers" legal protections and fact-checking, etc... Are those extended to any paid substack writer that is not being given a fixed compensation at least initially?
One thing is to say this is a marketing ploy to generate traffic to the platform, but we are talking about content and the legal and moral issues around publishing.
For me the legal issues are hard because this is so pointless.
Like - what's the difference between what I'm doing on Substack, vs. me staying on my independent platform of SSC and paying someone to make me a really good subscription feature? (or switching to Ghost, or...)
As far as I can tell, the service Substack is providing is something like ambition - nobody thought this would work before Substack, Substack proved that it did, and now everyone can go off and do it without them. Sort of "common knowledge that you can make lots and lots of money from this particular blogging model".
That's fine and I'm willing to stay with them to compensate them for providing me this knowledge. But since Substack isn't providing me with any real good beyond what I would have just blogging on my own, it's hard to pinpoint what their responsibilities are.
Similarly, they're not really doing much beyond Tumblr or LiveJournal aside from paying people (or more accurately helping connect people to a payment system that their users can use). I don't think anyone thought Tumblr or LiveJournal had very much responsibility. So that would be another point in favor of them not having any.
Okay, but did Tumblr or LiveJournal crossed the line and paid individuals to publish in their platforms? Did any other app select who to give a paycheque and who would fend off for themselves? The novelty as I understand it is that Substack is giving people they choose a paycheque, even if it is a 1-year contract, and therefore it is saying implicitly or explicitly that they trust/back the writer. That is what a publication does.
They can't just say "oh, we are simply eliminating the risk for people we think will do well" because of the nature of the service they provide and what payment by them means. They are curating content, they expect those being paid to produce content continuously, and I think those are factual observations. Unfortunately I do not have a winning argument one way or the other, I just see it as a fairly intractable problem.
Anyway, truly an honour to receive a comment from you, take care.
Given that Tumblr has been sold over and over again, as Yahoo on down tried to monetise it (the past Female-Presenting Nipple Ban Controversy was over this very point, that they were trying to make it family-friendly in order to make it more attractive to potential purchasers), and that Youtube constantly badgers me about taking out a subscription, I don't think there is as much clear blue water between them and Substack as you might wish.
From what I can see, Substack said "You [Author] have already got a built-in audience who will very likely follow you over here, and there's also a good chance you will attract new people. You can charge subscriptions to make money if you want, and we'll take a slice of that. But we are willing to gamble that you can make a lot of money, so we will pay you to write on here - we don't ask you to write any particular topic or any particular view, just keep on producing content which we are confident people will be willing to pay for".
Now, we can argue over curating content by whom they choose, but let's face it - if 999 people are already writing Hottest Woke Takes content for free as well as in every other media outlet, there's not going to be much market for Number 1,000 so they're less attractive *as money-making creators* for Substack, and I don't think there is any political or other intention lurking in the snipe grass other than "how can we make a shed-load of money off this?"
Thank you for taking the time to add to the discussion here. I am not sure we are addressing the point, tough. YouTube makes money through advertising, and channel owners take a tiny slice. But there is no expectation of n videos per week, their algorithms keep feeding people stuff (and that is very problematic for a whole set of different reasons), but there is no "Hey, if you publish 3 videos per week we will pay you x regardless of viewers or clicks on ads".
Substack is ad free. Their revenue model relies on content publication accessed through a voluntary paywall/subscription service. However in the case of Scott and others the choice is not voluntary, it is an engagement to produce content. Those strings are what makes the definition of Substack as just another neutral publishing platform problematic. They are curating content -and the strategy is brilliant if you ask me-, so you can make a persuasive case to label them a media company and not a neutral app.
And yes, nothing is neutral online, so everything is neutral, but I just see a lawsuit coming their way for, say, libel, and I am not sure where and how those chips may fall. Example: You pay someone to write on a set schedule. The writer writes a piece that could be construed as hate speech. A lawsuit follows against the writer and Substack because they hired that person. Can the "neutral platform" argument hold? Or are we looking at a publisher?
I think the "curating content" part is where the crux of the dispute lies. If it can be demonstrated that Substack is deliberately paying large sums to right-wing/right-leaning/the Bad Side in the Culture Wars writers, to produce Bad Side content, and supporting them in order to lure in hapless innocents who will then fall into their wicked clutches and have their pure minds corrupted by wrongthink, then yeah it's a publisher not a platform.
But one at least of the people complaining says they were offered such a deal by Substack which they refused, and two of the complainants mention names on the woke/progressive/queer trans nonbinary everything else side that were already on Substack and which convinced them to join up too.
So I think it's hard to say that Substack is curating particular content for a particular political/social point of view, rather than "offering mo' money to people who will generate a shit-ton of revenue for them because they already have an established audience, are controversial and attract readers who want to argue with them as well as readers who support them, or both".
I'm - well, I can't honestly say I'm sorry because I'm not, but I'm definitely not gloating (honestly not doing so) that Annalee Newitz couldn't convert their Hugo-award winning podcast audience into enough paid subscriptions and/or grow an audience off the back of it to make it worth their while to stick around on Substack, but I don't think that is the fault of Substack.
Unfortunately I do not think it is so straightforward. Take for example the Lou Dobbs situation, Fox canned the (very profitable) show because they have liability in a libel suit. What a potential litigation would explore is the very claim that Substack, by offering certain individuals a guaranteed pay in exchange for a steady stream of work, can indeed take umbrage under Section 230. I do not see it as a slam dunk.
Paycheque is the wrong term. It's really just an insurance policy, much the same way as you make a bet every year with the insurance company of the likelihood of your house burning down.
The "trust" Substack has for a writer they offer a Pro deal has nothing to do with the virtue or politics of their content, and everything to do with objective markers of that writer's popularity. I have 400 Twitter followers; Matt Yglesias has 500,000. It's pretty clear which one of us is a safe commercial bet to hand $250,000 to in exchange for 85% of his Year 1 revenue on Substack.
I guess we have different definitions of insurance. If Substack would have told Scott or Yglesias "hey, you start charging and if you do not make at least $X by month 2 we will cover the difference until you reach X", that is insurance. But what they did is to say "Do not worry about income, we will pay you a set amount and anything extra we will keep as profit". That to me is not insurance, that is an employment relationship (employers keep the profits and they have every right to do so), or at the very least a contract for services.
Reputation. Substack brand guarantees nothing about the type or quality of content. I can write whatever nonsense I want right now. Wikipedia e.g. allows some news outlets as sources, no matter the author.
As to your second paragraph, what are the obvious benefit you see him getting?
A part of the fact-checking and other editorial services is to protect the brand. Also I believe there is some protection newspapers have when the authors are freelancers that they don't have when they are staff writers. I think Volokh said something on this recently but after a 5-minute search, can't find it.
"much more than I conceivably deserve for writing online articles"
How do you figure? I feel I'm getting more value from you than you are getting from me. Having interesting things to read makes my life better in a meaningful way. And I'm happy to pay for the privilege.
I'd like to add that when I saw Astral Codex Ten I immediately reached out for my wallet; after subscribing, I realized I wasn't doing it for the future content. It felt more like repaying a debt, for "Unsong", "Meditations on Moloch", "Sort by controversial", etc, etc. that I enjoyed for free for the last two years. I don't feel like a paying subscriber, more like accumulating new debt. :-)
Since there's no "heart" button anymore, let me just spell it out: yes, this is exactly how I felt too, only you put it into words a lot better than I could.
Same here! My immediate reaction was “of course I’ll pay it, already given the historical content” and “hopefully me paying signal that people are appreciating his time”
I was willing to pay for it for the same reasons I'm willing to pay for an apple. If I lived next to someone who didn't mind my picking his apples for free, I wouldn't pay a nickel for an apple. If I'm on a lunch break in town and am hungry for an apple that costs a nickel, I'll cheerfully pay the nickel. What's complicated about it? Nobody owes me an apple, but I like paying for one and encouraging him to keep growing them and bringing them to me under convenient circumstances. He'll probably use my nickel to pay someone else to do the same for him. That's an economy. I like economies.
This is why I started a subscription to Razib Khan's content, back when there were just exclusive posts on GNXP and before he started a Substack. It was because I'd been reading him since basically 2002. Hard for Scott to compete with that :)
Yup. Every cent is well deserved. The world would be a worse place without SSC and ACT. Scott should consider our subscription fees an act of effective altruism: keeping a valuable source of sanity and insight flowing.
Scott has mentioned in previous blogs that blogging comes naturally to him - it's something thing he does for fun in his free time - which I imagine makes it hard to believe that he's doing something as valuable as, say, psychiatry.
Does substack offer a kind of spotify-esque subscription where I can just pay once for access to everyone and let the algorithm worry about figuring out who gets how much of my subscription?
I realize that this is a failure mode in how I handle financial transactions, but I absolutely despise reoccurring payments and try to keep as few of them going as possible. If I like, say, Singal/Weiss/Sullivan/Yglesias/Taibbi/Scott equally - odds are I'm going to end up spending money on none of them because I'd find having that many reoccurring transactions too stressful to manage and I'd feel undue pressure to divide my time equally amongst all of them.
If, on the other hand, I could just buy the "substack Plus" or whatever package, I could know that I'm spending money that would eventually get to the writers I like without having to specifically commit to signing up with them. I would likely pay a couple % premium on top for the convenience of not having to manage multiple individual reoccurring payments.
I think this just recreates the problem Substack is trying to solve, you’re not willing to pay enough to support Singal AND Weiss AND Sullivan etc. Substack plus would end up looking like Spotify, which doesn’t pay out enough to support most artists.
I probably wouldn't pay $5 x number of writers I read. But I currently pay $0. Adding this option would increase the amount I'd pay per month probably to somewhere in the $10-$30 range depending on good the deal was.
I think you're right that there's some kind of bundle that could work here, maybe bulk discounts? Pick 5 writers at $10 a month and get them all for $40? I'm just not sure that paying one price for *everything* on Substack could work out for the writers.
A problem is that they don't charge the same rates. Scott charges more than Matt who charges more than Freddie who charges more than Jesse. (I just checked. None of them are the same.)
Either the person charging more gets screwed in this deal, or you assign the money pro-rata, so Scott gets twice as much as Jesse, and that system is subject to abuse. (I don't think any of those specific people are cut-throat enough to abuse the system by charging more just to grab a bigger part of a fixed pie, but you'd need to craft a policy around it and things get sticky.)
You could probably still make it work if authors were allowed to charge a differential bundle price. Scott could say I want $10 for single subscriber $8 as part of a 5 sub bundle, $5 as part of at 10 sub bundle etc etc. The author could still set those prices.
Why would Scott do that? Maybe because as a form of price discrimination it allows him to maximize revenue by picking off subscribers who have lower marginal benefit of ACX.
Did you actually address any of the points made by Substack's critics introduced in the first paragraph?
Your story about potential compensation doesn't seem relevant to the concern that non-pro authors were laboring with imperfect financial understanding, information that (per Substack's critics) was maliciously concealed in order to drive growth. You instead addressed a different argument, that Substack was being manipulative in regards to potential pay during their Pro offering. This fundamentally...isn't the criticism. It feels almost like you're trying to bait-and-switch the arguments, writing a counter to the argument that the pro offering itself was sleazy instead of the (actual) argument that the concealed nature of the pro offering misled non-pro writers.
Nor do you seem to address the editorial criticism, that Substack is using the section 230 liability shield while covering up their editorial decisions that disqualify them from being eligible for that shield. Maybe that's just too inside baseball, but you did bring it up, so I feel like it's fair to point out that you didn't address that argument.
For what it's worth, I don't think the problematic argument holds much merit.
> Did you actually address any of the points made by Substack's critics introduced in the first paragraph?
So, I think the critics are getting something confused, and trying to straighten out the confusion looks like 'missing the point' from the critic's perspective.
From the critic's perspective, Scott-as-wealthy-winner was "picked by" Substack. The sense in which that's true is that Substack looked at Scott, thought he would be a winner, and offered him a bet that put their money where their mouth is (i.e. buying most of the upside of Scott moving to Substack by taking on all of the downside). The sense in which it's false is that Substack didn't *turn* Scott into a winner, in the way that a movie producer might turn someone into a movie star by giving a role to one of a dozen equally beautiful actresses (and that role now means they can get other roles, and so on).
If Substack's Pro deals mostly make money for Substack (which I imagine they do; Substack is the party with more info in this scenario!), then it's really hard to believe that Substack is doing anything nefarious. If the deals are more even, or losing money, then this argument starts to make sense--imagine a company that offered Pro deals at a loss to people critical of Erdogan. But, like, nothing was stopping people like Scott or the critics from just signing up for Substack.
So here's where I'm wondering... where is the deception? Substack *didn't* mislead Scott, or anyone else, about how much money they would make on the site. If the existence of pro writers is misleading, it's mostly *underselling* how much money is available for top writers. "Matt Yglesias pays Substack $400k to avoid downside risk" is a very different story from "Substack pays Matt Yglesias $250k to try joining the site", but the first is the real story!
>If the deals are more even, or losing money, then this argument starts to make sense
Hypothetically, if Substack had made a bunch of losing deals, how would you know? Imagine Substack pays a writer an advance, and that writer turns out a dozen low-effort posts which drive little traffic, but fulfill the contract. They leave after a year, taking the advance. You wouldn't hear about them - neither Substack nor the writer has an incentive to say anything about it.
>If Substack's Pro deals mostly make money for Substack (which I imagine they do; Substack is the party with more info in this scenario!)
Does Substack have more information than the writer? The writer has inside information about future stories and how motivated they are about writing about them.
Agreed that there could be lots of silent losing deals, but I doubt it, and think the possibility doesn't line up with my models of markets.
> Does Substack have more information than the writer? The writer has inside information about future stories and how motivated they are about writing about them.
Substack has subscription stats for all of the other writers already on Substack. Scott can run surveys of people who answer surveys linked in SSC, but that's very different from how many people silently pull out their wallets.
Based on what substack has said, there are requirements for content frequency in the contract. I think it's something like 2/week, which puts a limit on how much someone can do with "take the advance and run". As for the idea of just posting filler, I suspect that's not going to happen because of the reputational damage it would do to the writer. Ultimately, that's what is going to draw people to their substack and get them good deals in other outlets, and it's not something to be thrown away lightly.
And I'm pretty dang sure Substack picked Scott because of the publicity from the NYT story, which luckily has turned out okay for Scott, but it's rather in the same sense that "I was mangled in an accident but the court case I took awarded me several million". Yes it's nice to get it, but you'd rather not be horribly mangled in the first place, and I am willing to bet that Scott would have preferred not to be tagged as some kind of witch-loving supporter of witches by Cade Metz in the service of publicising his new book on AI.
I think that this reflects a difference in perspective, which is probably because many of the critics are very institutional-minded. In their world, papers like the NYT decide which journalists are being read, the Hugo's decide what scifi/fantasy books are getting read, etc.
This may have a substantial impact on how they interact with substack, for example, where:
- these people fail at their substacks because they write primarily to please a small elite of decision makers and/or put their best writing outside substack in places that get credit from those decision makers, even though this results in very few paying subscribers.
- these people's politics being shaped greatly by this feeling of being dependent on and part of the system, which makes them feel that the system should have power & then should use that power to benefit them. Substack might then feel like an insult and upending of their entire worldview, because you've suddenly got people who don't need to pay their dues, get approval from above, etc.
"information that (per Substack's critics) was maliciously concealed in order to drive growth"
Information that Substack's critics are *claiming* was maliciously concealed. Given that one of them seems to be labouring under the delusion "how is it that I, a noted queer trans author of queer trans SF stories and a podcast that won a Hugo! who worked for Gizmodo and io9! am not being offered largesse to write for them by Substack like these other names are? plainly it must be a sinister cabal of transphobes at work!" and not, you know, that there really isn't a huge paying audience for queer trans SF despite winning a Hugo (now that you've run off the horrible types like the Sad and Rabid Puppies) so you're not really a draw for bringing in lots of subscribers, I'm going to stick with "unless and until they can show real evidence that shenanigans are taking place, and not just hurt feelings over people they politically disagree with doing better than them, I'm not going to believe it's all a scam".
Not that I think Substack is shining virtuousness, but that's the point: it's a *business*. Businesses exist to make money. It's not in business to be pro- or anti- anyone's point of view, it's here to make money out of bloggers in a new iteration of the old ways.
That the two were so seemingly intertwined made me conclude that even the 'scam' claim was almost certainly bullshit. The 'all of the Subtack paid authors are transphobes' – not just that they're unsavory, but all transphobes too, broke my 'interpret charitably' module.
"Nor do you seem to address the editorial criticism, that Substack is using the section 230 liability shield while covering up their editorial decisions that disqualify them from being eligible for that shield."
All 230 says is that only the actual writer of something may be held civilly liable for it (with a couple exceptions for e.g. copyright violation). If a Substack writer posts something defamatory, that writer can be held liable, but not Substack themselves. Without that protection, Substack would have to manually review every single thing posted to the platform for anything that might be legally actionable, and prevent the writers from posting that. This is not reconcilable with being a major newsletter site. Heck, they'd probably have to review every comment on every newsletter too, and that probably makes the task an order of magnitude harder. This also opens them up to malicious attacks where someone anonymously posts illegal material and sues the company for having allowed it up.
Now, what about the fact that Substack has selected a few people to get the Pro treatment? This doesn't really change the equation. The author is "another information content provider," just one with a different remunerative model than most authors on Substack. (Remember, everyone is getting paid by Substack! The folks on Substack Pro just agreed to a primarily advance-based model instead of a subscription-only one, but even in the latter case the readers are paying Substack who then pays the author.) That the authors are specially selected doesn't actually make Substack the speaker, any more you subscribing to ACX makes you responsible for Scott's speech.
Note that Substack themselves can be held liable. If Substack the company posts something defamatory, go right ahead and sue them.
Right, that's the argument that I expected Scott to touch on. From his quoted article:
"By doing this, Substack is creating a de facto editorial policy. Their leadership -- let’s call them editors -- are deciding what kinds of writing and writers are worthy of financial compensation. And you don’t know who those people are. That’s right -- Substack is taking an editorial stance, paying writers who fit that stance, and refusing to be transparent about who those people are."
I think that there's a lot of nuance as to whether Substack's selection of authors constitutes editorial control. In the same way that the NYT is not the speaker when their journalists write defamatory articles, but NTY is liable all the same, you could argue that Substack is not the speaker, but is liable.
Is "whomever will bring in more subscriptions so as to maximize revenue" really an editorial policy? Is there any evidence that it's not just this, which is the typical modus operandi of essentially every modern corporation?
In effect, the group of authors that got paid are *self-selected*: they are popular enough for Substack to bring value to Substack, but skeptical that they will earn as much as Substack claims. So Substack proves they have better data than the writers themselves, and the writers who are still willing to entertain it get paid.
So Substack didn't make the writers already popular, didn't make the writers skeptical, and didn't make them take the deal. At which step does the alleged editorial policy suddenly appear?
Having editorial policy doesn't mean they don't get Section 230 protection. They can editorialize whatever they want. They
> you could argue that Substack is not the speaker, but is liable.
You could, pre-Section 230. There is no requirement to be "hands off" or be fair or anything. It's why Twitter can nuke conservative accounts all day and maintain Section 230 protection.
Hypothetically, if Substack wanted to do a fraud, they could inflate subscriber numbers for writers under contract in order to make their platform look better than it is. I doubt this is actually happening, though; it's just a thing that jumped to mind when reading that the real subscriber numbers turned out to be very close to the predicted ones. (It's the sort of thing that would be more likely to happen in a scenario where traffic was starting to fall, and someone was desperate to pump up the numbers to hide the decline.)
(I think this is a lot less likely than similar reference-class types of fraud that do happen, because there are actual cash payments to the writers involved. Since writers are still getting paid per subscriber, just less than face value, someone would have to be ponying up the money for the fake subscribers. Whereas in ad-fraud cases, usually the fake clicks are removed enough from the actual money flows that it's hard to prove where they're actually coming from. And in bitcoin exchange fake-volume cases, it doesn't cost the exchanges anything to make fake transactions by trading with themselves.)
Hypothetically, Substack could collude with a writer to inflate subscriber counts. But since no metrics are public, this would amount to the writer just lying about what they make.
I guess, having no public metrics leaves them up to the imagination, so we are talking about imaginary subscriber count fraud?
I have a very hard time seeing what they are complaining about - you can build a nice audience and get paid without an advance - lots of writers do - isn't the model we should be comparing it to the publishing industry rather than the media industry - some authors get nice advances, some don't - several writers on substack are serializing books - I'm paying to sub for 2 authors I would have read for free or jsut not read - substack is paying writers - again, what is the problem? Also Greenwald and Jesse aren't anti- trans, that ridiculous...
I suspect that the main reason for most of the Substack critics to dislike it is that they're orthodox progressives and they don't want people they perceive as enemies of orthodox progressivism (which ranges from someone like Matt Yglesias, who is mostly progressive but disagrees with treating ideas as traumatic to the extent that many modern journalists do, to people whose opinions are actually strongly opposed to large parts of progressivism, like Moldbug or Graham Linehan) having a platform they can use to make money from their writing. The accusations of scamming are at least partly an excuse for this.
The whole 'scam' angle on this thing seems to basically boil down to whether you think capitalism is a scam or not. People who can effectively sell writing get money, people who cannot effectively sell writing do not get money. Substack provides a service in exchange for some share of that money, and has an interest in spending money (recruiting writers) to acquire more money. If this all sounds like a scam that's because you believe something along the lines of "profit calculations should not drive decisions" or "it's unfair that some people are given opportunities that others are not". Which are totally fair things to believe! I just don't get how that has anything to do with substack.
Because these people do (apparently) think capitalism is bad and Substack is the capitalist that is out-competing them by offering a better value proposition than legacy media. That's why there is no coherent argument, they are just upset.
I've read plenty of Marx and I've yet to see a coherent argument. Perhaps this escaped you and other marxists because of false consciousness. There are coherent arguments against capitalism but the marxists have yet to discover them, likely because they don't justify expropriation which is the entire point of marxism.
For example, your link, Section 1, paragraph 4, Marx makes a catastrophic error for a would-be economist: "Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value."
Here Marx has revealed that he lacks understanding of savings, potential, and contingent circumstances, indicating that he fails to understand the need for the working class to plan for the future by considering possibilities and accumulating commodities that may not be used. In this (extraordinarily common) circumstance, value is in the holding, not the use or consumption.
Every page of Marx is riddled with such fallacies, hundreds of lifetimes are not sufficient opportunity to repair Marx.
The main value of Marx' body of work is as an existence proof for negative utility or negative value.
Hoarding something for future consumption by the owner of said commodity would still count as a use-value. I think this is your own error in comprehending Marx.
No, Marx clearly states that he refers to consumption, not savings ("hoarding" is a pejorative employed by bourgeois parasites who are dismayed at the fact that capitalism creates such vast surpluses of commodities that working class individuals are able to accumulate surpluses and thereby are no longer dependent on constancy of wage-labor). Demonization of savings is an attempt to keep the working class in a constant state of precarity so they are vulnerable to bourgeois extortion.
The error is in Marx' own writings and Marxists are apparently so accustomed to redefining words in order to repair Marx' obvious fallacies that it is no longer deliberate deception, but habitual false consciousness.
If that is beyond your comprehension, no need to give up. Marx has enough fallacies that we can play this game until the heat death of the universe. In the very next section, Marx makes an extremely amateur error: "It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third."
Here Marx fails to consider the interests of the parties to the exchange, and fallaciously asserts that exchange value refers to some thing that is equivalent between the two commodities. This is ludicrous and idiotic, and symptomatic of Marx own failure to understand the nature of value. The person who exchanges corn for iron prefers the iron to the corn, just as the other party to the exchange prefers the corn to the iron. This is a Pareto improvement, because both parties have become better without anyone becoming worse. The total amount of value has increased, revealing the wonder of voluntary exchange: positive sum interaction! This is an incredible insight into human relations, society, economics, and materialism. Characteristically, all of this is invisible to Marx, who stumbles along blundering into fallacy after fallacy.
You're creating a false dichotomy that isn't present in Marx. It doesn't matter to Marx if a commodity is consumed immediately or if it's saved for a portion of time. Its use-value is the subjective use we get out of actually consuming/using the product.
The preferences of the party don't matter regarding exchange value, that's correct.
Aw come on. It's more fun to be part of a sinister cabal. The main moral objection should be about the dress code. No more authoring in pajamas - it's all white cats and suspicious umbrellas now.
The whole point of being part of a sinister cabal is that you get to take part in shadowy video calls where the other people see only your silhouette, thereby hiding that you are in fact just sitting there in your pyjamas.
Hey - working from home has transformed me into a member of a sinister cartel. Which might explain why I had a video call earlier with the top of a (very pleasant) man's hat...
Nobody claims that youtubers are really working for Youtube. It's hard for me to see how the situation of writers who publish on Substack is really any different.
Youtube doesn't give creators advances to be on their platform (as far as I know). However, I wonder if they'd have the same criticisms about say Twitch or Mixer, which do.
I imagine there's quite a bit of "Advance Envy" going on here. As in, (stylized internal dialogue) "no no, those guys aren't more marketable and successful writers than I am, they just fell for Substack's scam. They're gonna take it on the chin in a couple years when [something vague but negative sounding happens]. Me and my fellow Twitter jabberers scratching out a living writing freelance articles for six different publications at a time and not being offered a full time gig at any of them, ever...that's just how it is these days."
I never understood one thing. Does the Substack agreement involve some kind of obligation to churn out N nr of posts per month or something, so that conceivably early-career writers could be fooled into "working for Substack", so to say. On the other hand, even if the Substack career failed to take off, wouldn't it be quite easy to just quickly pump out N half-assed school essays on the English middle class during the 17th century or something? Also, Substack doesn't seem to demand exclusivity since I've seen some who blog in multiple places.
My (outsider) understanding of it is that Substack just provides a publishing platform and a subscription interface, in exchange for 10% of the revenue that gets made via said subscription interface, and does not have any sort of editorial control over the writers.
"I'm making much more than I thought possible, much more than I conceivably deserve for writing online articles"
I don't see how you can possibly know that. If your articles nudge beliefs a little in the direction of truth, they could easily make the world better off by a billion dollars. If they nudge beliefs in the wrong direction, they could make it worse off by a billion dollars. The range of possible desert is enormous.
Considered merely as a consumption good for your readers, your blog is worth a good deal more to me than the subscription price. I suspect that's true for most subscribers, and obviously it is an additional net benefit to those who read it for free.
It's unsympathetic of me, but my default assumption is that this is 99% driven by anger that the wrong people are being platformed and indeed seem to be prospering. Any mechanism that allowed Jesse Singal to make a good living writing for a large audience was going to be offensive to this bunch, and all the complaints about how it's all straight white men (you know--like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan) or it's an exploitative business model (because a proper business model would involve more unpaid interns) or whatever is just after-the-fact justification.
If Substack wanted to set up a little side-business producing vinegar from all the sour grapes being harvested, they could give Sarson's a run for their money! https://www.sarsons.co.uk/how-vinegar-is-made
The complaining posts I've read about "scam" and worse really are sour grapes productions. The person hopped onto Substack because they heard it was the new shiny thing, or they heard So-and-So got really popular and is now widely known because of Substack, so they wanted the same thing.
And then they heard that some people were getting Big Money for being on Substack, and not alone that, but Substack was courting those people! Enticing them with people to peel grapes and fan them! And then they got very huffy about "but why isn't Substack courting *me*? I am Big Name!" and hence all the "It is a scam and a sinister plot and other bad things".
I have to admit, I'm enjoying the huffing and puffing and foot-stamping by people I have never heard of, who seem to assume that everyone should have heard of them because they worked for, or had something published in, some online magazine.
Cringing my way through the linked article (side note, you can't just say "I'm going to call this, oh say X, so now it should be subjected to all the requirements I think X should be"), it seems that their real concern is giving a platform to People They Disagree With.
It must be a sign of something that skimming through the supposedly problematic stuff most of it seemed pretty reasonable, but a sign of what I'm not sure.
It's worse than merely giving a platform to the wrong people.
The traditional way to attack wrong people is to try getting them fired. Make enough publicity, and the employer's HR department will choose the easy way out. It is an asymmetric weapon, because you can't complain to the woke journalist's employer "hey, your writer is controversial" if that's literally what they are paid for.
Then, Peterson happened. A guy who had a product to sell... and not only they failed to get him fired, but all the publicity translated into increased sales. More importantly, the product was not political, so the sales will continue for some time even when the controversy is over. Because, for his fans, he is not fungible with yet another controversial person of the week.
Having a Substack blog with interesting non-political content and a few paying subscribers can give you "Peterson insurance". A massive online attack can translate to permanently increased income from your side job... maybe not enough to pay your bills, but it may reduce your worst fears.
Personally I’m super happy to be able to pay for this content. Makes me sleep better at night.
Secondly, this just looks like good business and a win-win scenario. Kudos to sub stack for putting their skin in the game instead of just empty promises. They get the additional upside (which is perfectly fine because they put their skin in the game) and you got to eliminate your downside.
If you can say, would you have been in breach of contract to take Substack's advance and just post nothing for this whole first year? How about to take the advance and just resume posting things on SSC?
Actually that linked article calling Substack a "scam" is itself a scam. The guy starts out with what is already a pretty dumb thesis -- i.e., that Substack is somehow falsely "promising" people that they will get rich quick by bloviating on the internet. The "bait" in this plot is having successful authors on the site. None of that makes any sense because Substack charges nothing for the platform itself and just takes a slice of whatever you generate in fees. Totally transparent and you can take-it-or-leave it.
But that irrational complaint was itself mere "bait," the "switch" is that . . . wait for it . . . the real problem is there's not enough SJW censorship on Substack:
"Substack has become famous for giving massive advances — the kind that were never once offered to me or my colleagues, not up front and not after the platform took off — to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry."
Yep. Notorious Nazis like Matt Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald are being allowed to reach their followers, while SJW bloggers are not getting the same exposure because their Party Line talking points about why everything is racist and transphobic just aren't getting traction with paid subscribers for some reason.
Bottom Line: Letting people publish and read what they want is a "scam" because it results in the free exchange of unapproved thoughts. Everything always circles back to this same point for the Woke.
His colleague Emily Van Der Werf complained to Vox HR that this made her feel unsafe because this letter has anti-trans dog whistles in it (I can't tell what they are). I'm looking at the list of names and it doesn't exactly seem like a bunch of deplorables and least from who I can recognize. Gloria Steinem? Margaret Atwood?
But anyway, this is why he left Vox. He wanted to be able to hold publicly stated positions that run afoul of woke orthodoxy without it being an HR issue. There is no reasonable interpretation of any of this that makes him anti-trans, but I think it's pretty obvious Annalee Newitz's position here is more reactive than thought out.
Yeah, I knew about the letter. But I wondered if I had missed something where him actually saying anything about trans issues. But sadly, it doesn't surprise that he could end up as 'a notorious transphobe' to some people without actually ever saying anything on trans issues. Someone somewhere probably thinks that Scott is a "notorious transphobe" even though as far as I remember, his position on trans rights is indistinguishable from trans activists, because some people think that if you hold one non-woke position, you must hold them all (especially if your a straight white man who engages in "just asking questions").
I think there is only one answer to the following questions: If tomorrow, 100 far left-wing writers, each with a significant existing audience showed interest in Substack, would Substack give them all a deal at similar terms as they have to other writers? The answer is YES. It's YES for right-wing. It's YES for no-wing. It's YES. They're just trying to make a buck. It's really that simple.
> They call this group of writers the “Substack Pro” group, and they are rewarded with “advances” that Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie calls “an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform [that’s] more attractive to a writer than a salary, so they don’t have to stay in a job (or take one) that’s less interesting to them than being independent.” In other words, it’s enough money to quit their day jobs. They also get exposure through Substack’s now-considerable online reach.
> By doing this, Substack is creating a de facto editorial policy. Their leadership -- let’s call them editors -- are deciding what kinds of writing and writers are worthy of financial compensation. And you don’t know who those people are. That’s right -- Substack is taking an editorial stance, paying writers who fit that stance, and refusing to be transparent about who those people are.
How can Substack both simultaneously provide these people exposure and also not be transparent about who they are?
They're saying that substack is subsidizing non-savories to write while everyone else has to compete on their own merits. Which is in effect to argue that substack isn't *that* ruthlessly profit-focused.
For as far as it goes, my estimate of substack's costs in building a semi-clunky website/email service plus off the shelf payment processing is almost nothing. If they have the seed money to buy our host here and a handful of others - well, good. I like this service and I am spending about 120 bucks a year on it.
My advice to the people who own this thing is complete stonewalling of any press on any topic. It never pays to talk to the press. Allow them to make a submission to an email you never check.
I remember mentioning something like this a couple of times. I think I even did a back of the napkin calculation on how much you could make with some very non-aggressive monetization. What I really find curious is that I thought this was incredibly, incredibly obvious. But everyone's reaction seemed to be along your lines.
I feel a bit like I've discovered something vastly atypical about my mind. What did you find strange about the idea you could make money doing this? That Substack was getting the better end of that deal? What was unbelievable about it?
Freddie DeBoer just posted screenshots of the entirety of his advance an hour ago. It's not bad but roughly half what I'm going to earn this year as an anonymous nobody working for the federal subsidiary of a well-known but certainly not giant player in the software world loaned out to try and modernize the Air Force's developer platform. It's a decent living, but I'm nowhere near even the median of the people in the major hubs, located as I am in Texas.
Is writing at all just a scam? There are 20 or so George Martins/JK Rowlings in the world while everyone else is fighting for table scraps and the chance to make it big earning a quarter of an average person at Facebook? My best friend from college is an Emmy winner and lives in an apartment the size of my bedroom. It seems worse trying to be a writer than even trying to be a pro athlete or a rock star. At least, even though you're probably going to fail, you'll be popular in the process and people will want to fuck you.
I'm guessing you're doing better than Freddie, but probably not Matt Yglesias level. I believe he's #2 on the entire platform? I know I'd read that somewhere and that Heather Cox Richardson was #1, but now I can't find where substack publishes that information.
Had two friend-of-the-family who wrote scripts for Hollywood professionally. One would draw ire whenever he gave a class on screenwriting because he said very clearly that your primary revenue stream was not from produced works, but instead from works that will be optioned perpetually. A produced work is nice for a paycheck and to ensure your other works get optioned, but you will turn out a lot of scripts that will never be produced and yet continue to earn you a check for years.
The other quit to become a real estate agent.
Jobs pay you in a lot of different ways. Some pay you in cash. Some pay you in the feeling you get when you teach a kid to read. Others pay you in the ability to walk around and say you're a writer and hang out in the writer scenes.
Also feel the need to point out: sometimes (often?) the people who can be successful writers are not people who can be successful programmers (where successful means closer-to-median, not superstar).
Programmer probably isn't the best counterfactual. Corporate marketing/PR drone is a closer more pay less meaning alternative. (I wonder how many people overworking themselves trying to get into journalism would be better off earning money from 9-5 and writng meaningful things for free after work)
At a slight tangent, it seems to me that some of the best people in the SCA fit that pattern. They make a living in a not very interesting 9-5 job and put the rest of their time and most of their thought into their hobby — making museum quality early medieval jewelry, or helping run a comedia del arte troupe, or translating a medieval cookbook, or ...
Honestly, at one point long ago, I wanted to be a writer, and I can understand that, if this was still 1960 and that scene was Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady trolling around with Tim Leary getting high riding around the great American countryside in a converted school bus, but whatever fun there once was in that scene seems dead. Now you get to spend all day in your twin size bed smashing the like button on Twitter when the friends you may have met once in the past five years all decide to mob on someone.
Agreed--people often overlook the inherent pleasures of some jobs. Free-market wages reflect not only how much other people value the work, and how rare the ability is, but the excess of those two factors over the value of the work to the worker himself.
I work as a writers' assistant on a big network TV show. The lowest level writer in the room makes about $2,400/week, and then $73,000 for every script that they write (usually 1 for lower level, 2-4 for higher) including another payment every time it airs. It's incredibly hard to get the job, and even if it get it that doesn't mean you'll keep getting work, but if you are a working television writer you are generally making a good living.
As far as I can tell, the big issue is the "doesn't mean you'll keep getting work" part. Making a very high weekly rate is great, but it's not so great when you're only getting paid anything at all for as long as the studio decides to keep airing your show, which is one season for most shows.
> Is writing at all just a scam? There are 20 or so George Martins/JK Rowlings in the world while everyone else is fighting for table scraps and the chance to make it big earning a quarter of an average person at Facebook?
At least for fiction, being a writer is a dream for a lot of people. As with every job that is someone else's dream job, you shouldn't try to get into it if you don't share that dream and are willing to get paid way below what you could make elsewhere (and risk not getting there at all)
It was many of these people's beliefs that traditional publications actually selected for what people wanted to read and that the gate keeping was quality control. They are now smacked with the choice between realizing this was not the case or believing that there is a shadowy organization propping up the people their previous institutions would have gate kept.
My take on this as a complete nobody is that I was thinking of starting a substack, not because I have any pretentions of it ever making a cent, but because it seems like the best free option available to me. I've seen a few people on ACXD start substacks recently for what I assume is the same reason.
Some people have been saying Substack can't 'fix the media' because there's still a need for news, but maybe it can (at least help) indirectly fix the media. If substack (or similar platforms) effectively outcompete newspapers in the oped business (even poaching away the most read opinion writers), it may also poach away the people who read newspapers for the opeds, leaving the 'news-oriented' readers behind, forcing newspapers to focus more on delivering straight news. Many newspapers would of course not survive, but the ones that do may be come more reliable news sources because of the unbundling of opinion writing from news.
Why couldn't the Substack model work for news, provided there was a writer who was good at reading publicly available information and summarizing what he found?
Among other things, most "publicly available information" can't be read. If you want pictures of Biden's immigrant-kid-containment-facilities so you can see if they are more or less cage-like than Trump's or Obama's, or if you want to hear whether your city councilmen are trying to sell the neighborhood park to a condominium developer, that's not a priori googleable. Someone has to do serious legwork, e.g. sitting through hours of boring city council meetings, and the person who does that may not be the best person for the write-up-a-summary part of the job.
And neither one of them is likely to be the best person for the manage-a-collaborative-team job. The raw data gathering part of the news business is a team effort; Substack's policy of giving all the money to the one public-facing member of the team seems less than optimal for incentivizing this.
Jonah Goldberg has set up The Dispatch, which is a team substack that looks like a pretty good smallish news-and-commentary magazine from a conservative-but-not-Trump editorial point of view. That might be a reasonable model for supporting some level of reporting, though you're still at the national/international level and not at the "figure out what the county school board is doing with all that money that seems to disappear into their maintenance budget while no schools are getting repaired" level.
Talent like life finds a way. Not everyone is capable of being a hard pressing journalist without an editor and lawyers, but some can handle it just fine while being newsworthy. You are a market maker, but possibly the tip not the spear...
Substack’s business model is giving maximum freedom to writers (no censor, no editing) while ensuring the contents are aligned with Substack’s values (political tastes, truthfulness...) by cherry-picking which writers are invited/incentivized to Substack platform.
This is nothing new. The “incentivized” part is not an evidence of malice.
At the minimum, Substack should exclude popular writers who attact high views only because he/she write about weird contents, i.e: Conspiracy, extremist, sex/violence-provoking ect...
Why should they do that? I mean, if someone wants to write a substack about his UFO / celebrity gossip conspiracy theories (Elvis and JFK are partying in space with Michael Jackson and Jimmy Hoffa), why would Substack not take their readers’ money?
So anyone predicting the Chinese would loose control of a virus transmitted from bats, crashing the world economy in the first nine months of 2019 would be excluded? Anyone in early 2015 who confidently talked of how the US was receptive to Donald Trump likewise I guess.
Just because its wierd doesn't make it wrong. And there are those who would try to exclude rationalist writers on these grounds.
Also what's wrong with promoting sex? I tend to think of it as a net benefit (which is a great pick-up line...).
1) My observation with other forum/websites is: At early stage, admin don't care what members post, then some crazy weird posts happens causing shit storm, then the admin add more and more censors.
2) If not filter by content, then how can Substack differ itself from other platform? If the business model is merely "pay high to attact star writers", then it's not anything breakthrough at all.
I think the business model here is that substack offers walled gardens.
There are some substacks written by some deeply religious folks, with a focus on the implications of their faith and how to live it in daily life. There are probably also substacks where the default assumption is that religion is delusional. How can they possibly coexist?
Easily: The religious substack readers just read the posts and participate in the comment threads (if they exist) of the stuff they want to read. They can discuss fine details of Catholic theology or the challenges of living by their faith in a secular world, without needing to read anything by the writers who want to tell them they're fools for believing in an invisible sky-friend. The religious skeptics, similarly, get to read what they want to read without being subjected to sermons or demands to turn from their sins before they're eternally damned.
Scott may have discussions that are deeply offensive and infuriating to the readers of some opther substacks. They may have discussions that are deeply offensive and infuriating to the readers of Scott's substack. But who cares? We don't have to read each others' stuff.
This is harder to do for someone like Twitter or Facebook or Youtube, because their whole business model is based on selling ads, and maxing out engagement by mixing all the streams and discussions together. Content that offends advertisers has to go (or at least has to be demonetized); content that threatens to drive many users away has to be deplatformed. I don't see why any of that applies to Substack.
You can imagine a successful campaign to push some writer off Substack. That would either be based on getting the management of Substack to decide to get rid of him on their own (maybe because of an internal revolt of their employees), or based on getting many other Substack writers to threaten to leave, or subscribers to threaten to cancel their subscriptions to other substacks they're not offended by, in order to force Substack to cancel the unpopular writer.
That could work, but I think it's much harder to get to work. I'm sure there's plenty written on Substack I'd find offensive and infuriating and wrongheaded, but why would that make me stop reading/supporting the people whose writing I find valuable? Further, since so many of the top writers here came in response to cancellation campaigns in the past, I expect this to be hard to organize, and hard for Substack to give into. (And if they give in once, they'll find it increasingly hard to refuse additional cancellations, until the outrage mobs roll up the whole flank of their opponents.)
Everyone is doing “walled gardens” right now. You can subscribe to specific Youtube channels and don't have to view offensive stuffs. Even if you don’t subscribe, Youtube’s homepage still select videos catering to each viewer. Same for Facebook Page and Homepage. Instead of maxing out engagement by mixing all the streams and discussions together, they maximize conversion rate (value extract from each user/view time) by only showing what user like/more likely to buy. Fox News has its own garden, NYT cater to its own garden etc... Readers only subscribe and pay for whatever they like.
Substack can be successful by either discovering a niche garden, or having star writers on the same old gardens. There is no need for Substack to police its own writers, just make sure there are enough sub-Substacks to host every types of writers/opinions. I still don’t see anything new in this business model/approach.
Each “garden” will get its users into echo chamber problem, but it’s quite another story on readers’s side.
The echo chamber problem will eventually fall on Substack’s head like this: At early stage, religious substack only have religious-friendly posts, then some defensive against skepticism from other news sources, then hostility toward extremist disbelivers, then some aggression toward non-religious substack, then there are flame everywhere, then people call for the admin/police.
Conflicting sub-substacks may coexist, but not easy at all.
I think you're mixing up two problems: substacks and comment threads within a substack.
Suppose we have two substacks: a Trad Catholic substack that often discusses how easy divorce, abortion, and gay marriage are destroying society, and a secular liberal substack that often discusses how opposing divorce, abortion, and gay marriage is barbaric and evil. The writers of those substacks may speak ill of one another. But what's the problem there? Nobody who's supporting the Trad Catholic substack has to read what the secular liberal says about them, nobody who supports the secular liberal substack has to read what the Trad Catholics say about *them*. Nobody could possibly read all the substacks. Further, there's no mechanism trying to force you to read the maximally-offensive substacks to keep you engaged. So coexistence seems not so hard.
Each substack can also have comment threads (they're not mandatory), and the moderation in those can become a problem in a couple ways: First, it can piss off subscribers to the point that they drop their subscriptions. Second, it can incorporate messages that require some kind of action to avoid legal jeopardy (stuff like sticking credible death threats in comment threads, or libeling someone in comment threads). But in the worst case, the substacks in question just cancel their comments; long before that, they can restrict posting to their subscribers and ban people who misbehave. And again, you only see the comment threads if you go looking.
So basically Substack made a bet with Scott that Scott would gain a certain number of subscribers. Substack won the bet, i.e. Scott organically attracted that many subscribers through his own writing talent and popularity (with a little help from the NYT).
Substack predicted they wouldn't win the same bet with this Annalee person, so they didn't make that bet. Either they were correct in this prediction, in which case all's well with the world and Annalee has no grounds for complaining about people choosing not to make unwise bets, or they were incorrect, in which case Annalee gets to cash in (by getting that many subscribers and keeping the full author percentage rather than the lower hedged amount they offered Scott).
So for me the interesting question is why they don't do this with people more like Annalee.
Even if they predict that Annalee will not be very successful, that just means a lower advance, right? If she can only earn them $5000/year, offering her a $4000 advance would still be good business for them.
I think the real answer is "Substack doesn't have enough time to evaluate everyone and decide what advance to give them", but the fun econ textbook answer is adverse selection and winner's curse - if they make the offer to everyone, the people who accept are most likely the ones who have special knowledge that the offer was too high.
Eh, from the point of view of Substack that's a similar problem. The goal is to find subservient writers, and if someone's always asking for a raise then that means less surplus value for the bosses over at substack.
It's a challenge to find writers who (crucially) oppose capitalism and could actually draw in large numbers of subscribers. Anti-capitalism is a minority interest, so probably isn't regarded as a sensible bet.
Note during the mid-twentieth century that many capitalist newspaper owners happily employed anti-capitalist commentators because they had an audience. So exclusion of anti-capitalist voices is not a feature of capitalism; exclusion of unprofitably marginal voices is.
They didn't need to. Annalee said they joined for the email distribution platform, which wasn't a selling point for you. Your goal isn't to keep people informed of what you're doing but to make money as a loss leader to fund your attempt at alternative business model medicine.
Of course, the question generalizes if by "people like Annalee" you mean people who will draw some subscribers but not enough to match a normal salary and not people who are fundamentally motivated by something other than money (or at least who claim they are).
"So for me the interesting question is why they don't do this with people more like Annalee."
Because they say they refused it:
"I didn’t pay much attention to Substack’s subscriber model because I wasn’t going to use this newsletter as a revenue stream."
And part of the complaint is that Substack *did* offer advances to other people they knew, except the advances weren't as big. Their solution to the conundrum of "why do some people get paid more than others?" is not "based on estimated audience size, Bill will attract more revenue for us than Ben", that it's a scam conspiracy to bump up wrongthinkers:
"Before Substack came clean about its Pro program, I had already started to hear things from journalist friends about how certain people were getting massive amounts of money to write for the platform. Sure, they could call their newsletter by any name they wanted, but Substack was paying them to do it. And yet Substack was pretending that its successful newsletters were all bootstrapped. That sounded like shenanigans to me.
It got worse when some of the Pro writers started to reveal themselves, because Substack’s secret paid elite all seemed to be cut from the same cloth.
As Jude Doyle explained in their newsletter:
Substack has become famous for giving massive advances — the kind that were never once offered to me or my colleagues, not up front and not after the platform took off — to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.
...Doyle notes that Substack also seems to have a secret list of writers who are allowed to violate the company’s terms of service. These people dish out hate speech, but remain on the platform with paid subscribers."
Conclusion?
"Substack’s business is a scam. They claim to offer writers a level playing field for making a living, and instead they pay an elite, secret group of writers to be on the platform and make newsletter writing appear to be more lucrative than it is. They claim to be an app when they are a publication with an editorial policy. They claim in their terms of service that they will protect writers from abuse, but they don’t."
"People more like Annalee" think they are Big Fish and should be treated as such, and offering them $X when you are offering Guy Everyone I Know Says Is Bad $Y is not down to market forces, it's down to sinister conspiracies to defraud and sucker innocent hopefuls with stars in their eyes about writing (because they're Big Fish! They're worth $Y as well! There can be no other reason Substack is only offering them $X!)
Well, I guess we now know what those blue icons by certain names really mean: MEMBER OF SECRET ELITE CABAL 😁
Jude Doyle claims to have been just about making the rent on Substack. So the 'correct' amount they should have offered Doyle is 90% of that, whatever it is.
Wouldn't adverse selection and winner's curse apply even if they only make the offer to some people? Sure, it's statistically more likely to have an impact if there are lots of offers, but people with special knowledge can still decline no matter how few such people there are.
My guess is that substack accounts for this by reducing the amount of offers slightly and/or increasing their cut from subscriptions. (The 85% figure seems very high.)
Something frustrating about posting comments here is, yes, you can in fact hide long threads by clicking on the vertical lines descending from the root, but when you post a comment, the thread expands again, and the page refreshes to the place you were in proportion to total length of the page instead of refreshing back to where you actually were, so you get jumped up instead of landing back where you actually made the comment, and need to search to resume where you were reading.
It's weird to get commenting so wrong when real-time in-browser interactivity was a solved problem in the phpBB days over 20 years ago.
Not sure if you're aware, but almost all programming is, in a very real sense, 'reinventing the wheel'. (There are very good practical reasons why this is the case though!)
Offering the same comment we made on the (also excellent) Noahpinion substack on this topic:
Substack is not about trying to make it as a writer as opposed to working as a writer elsewhere. It’s about people who are not writers creating quality content, on a regular basis (the newsletter is a trick to commit to artificial deadlines), who otherwise wouldn’t even try. Not every YouTuber wants to have a Hollywood TV show. There’s a lot of great stuff on Substack that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
Maybe. People like Noah and Scott already had blogs for a long time before Substack ever existed, but providing a simple interface for monetizing it possibly means they'll remain bloggers for much longer than they would have once their day jobs became sufficiently time-consuming and lucrative to quit writing purely as a hobby.
Is not teaching people about the Pareto distribution at every available opportunity a scam? Then I suppose YouTube is a scam, Facebook friends are a scam, Tennis is a scam, the mass of planetary bodies in our solar system is a scam...
If Substack is a scam because they’re sniping already-proven writers with advances, then the state of our statistical education is a national emergency.
With those surplusses they get to keep they then fund many more advances, some of which fall flat while still making money. Isn't this kind of a huge deal and kinda scary: a publisher finds a way to be ridiculously profitable from year one while publishing the very best the world has to offer with barely any/no moderation. That's the holy grail and it's a monopoly in some vague, strange way. Noone who is making money on Substack right now will leave to a competitor, ever, if nothing changes: Operation Paperclip for top 1000 journalists in the world.
"Isn't this kind of a huge deal and kinda scary: a publisher finds a way to be ridiculously profitable from year one while publishing the very best the world has to offer with barely any/no moderation."
Is there evidence that substack is "ridiculously profitable"? Is there a financial statement anywhere that I can read?
I think the biggest moat is that so much of the media and tech industry is caught up in woke purity spirals, but the audiences are mostly not so caught up in those spirals. If writers like Singal or Weiss or Sullivan are too out-of-step with the current ideology in most media companies to be able to write professionally for them, but there are still thousands of people who'd pay to read their writing, then that's the moat--most media companies can't compete for those readers because of the ideological commitments of their employees and management. Most (or at least many) tech companies can't compete in offering this kind of idea-neutral platform because of the ideological commitments of *their* employees and management.
The best thing for Substack's business model would be for traditional media and most tech companies to massively double down on their commitment to never, ever offer those terrible wrongthinkers like Scott Alexander or Matt Taibbi a platform, while readers continue thinking "hey, I sure am glad this kind of writing is available again!"
The moat will mostly go away if and when Substack's competitors decide they'd rather recapture the audience they've driven away than win the woke purity battle. At that point, Substack will probably have established enough name recognition that lots of writers and readers default to looking there first.
"Is there evidence that substack is "ridiculously profitable"? Is there a financial statement anywhere that I can read?"
I'd second that. Also, who defines ridiculously: the standard of the state of the press (so making a profit at all is ridiculously unlikely) or the standard of notable internet companies (where Substack is unlikely to be very profitable).
I was led by intuition on that claim, or rather misled. Hundreds of thousands of dollars multiplied by at least hundreds of writers sounds impressive before you factor in programmer salaries.
They may possibly be barely breaking even now. However, both the numbers per writer and number of writers will increase, which is very much exponential money, further monopolises the field (and, as mentioned above by Edward, protects every individual within from trivial cancelling using infrastructure like credit card companies).
Now, is the accumulation of the very best writers alive, while only breaking even still a scary and landscape-altering process? I continue to think so.
(For the same reason all direct competition on the internet fails miserably: economy of scale, lock in, loyalty, technological and legal headstart due to having solved all real problems arising in year 1 already, name recognition for investors and potential customers alike.
Also, a "Twitter vs Facebook"-type competition is unlikely, since there's little innovation to be found in "write between 100 and 10'000 words; possibly diagrams". Granted, Bret Victors Tangle is radical, but far from usable due to lack of open data and being rarely applicable.)
Indeed, absent ideological commitments against doing so, this just looks like setting up a blogging/newsletter platform + a subscription and payment management service, both stuff that should not require anything more than competence to do at this point.
This suggests that it's in Substack's interests to max out the outrage and ideological commitments by media and tech companies to never, *never* offer such far-right extremists as Matt Yglesias or Matt Taibbi or Freddie DeBoer a platform. Truly, the only morally acceptable option for those companies must be to leave all that subscriber money on the table, lest they be tainted by these writers' ideological cooties.
Described that way, you'd think Substack would be swamped with competitors. And yet....
but... Scott just stated he finds substack to be zero value added. He is staying out of goodwill and leaving lots of momey on the table. Do we think all the top 1000 journalists would do the same?
Substack's initial estimate of how much he might make on their platform sounded incredibly high to Scott, which is why he took the fixed rate offer for the first year. And the real figure ended up being higher still. That implies a very large value add, doesn't it?
not sure how to link to comments, but earlier in the comments he said:
"what's the difference between what I'm doing on Substack, vs. me staying on my independent platform of SSC and paying someone to make me a really good subscription feature? (or switching to Ghost, or...)
As far as I can tell, the service Substack is providing is something like ambition - nobody thought this would work before Substack, Substack proved that it did, and now everyone can go off and do it without them. Sort of "common knowledge that you can make lots and lots of money from this particular blogging model".
That's fine and I'm willing to stay with them to compensate them for providing me this knowledge. But since Substack isn't providing me with any real good beyond what I would have just blogging on my own, it's hard to pinpoint what their responsibilities are."
This post, combined with some outrage about some of the people that Substack had offered advances to, provoked a thought the other day which I wrote up on Quora; I thought it would fit in with one of your "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, Because I Just Made Them Up" style posts:
>>
What if I set up a blogging site like medium or substack, make some noises in favour of free speech, but promise that we will remove articles that offend people if the number of downvotes exceeds the number of upvotes by 10% for two consecutive days…
…and then charge people to vote.
We wouldn’t even need to encourage arseholes to show up and start spouting their “unpopular opinions”. They’d do that by themselves, and then people would try to vote them off, and then we’d be rich! Monetize the very things that the internet has an inexhaustible supply of - arseholes and outrage!
<<
Apologies if you've already done "Website monetization systems very different from ours" and I missed it.
Because Substack allows for the Pareto Distribution to take full effect unhindered by any kind of editor, party line, or fire-able offense in writing - in subcription money, but more importantly in quality journalism and essays. If your journalist salary is anywhere above the market value of your current work you should feel scared.
The world is about to notice what good writing looks like and where you need to be in terms of skill to make it.
And because, if they're doing it for the censorship, as appears more and more the case, it undermines the control without which attempted censorship becomes futile. So they lost both politically and financially.
I don't think the "fire-able offense" stuff has been truly tested yet.
In any case, I've not seen any evidence that they're an existential threat to journalism, i.e. I've not seen any evidence that they're producing a profit that is wildly above any other media outlet.
Also people are saying "unhindered" by an editor, but lets be honest, editors are often needed. People need to proof read articles, and the feedback process is often positive. Someone like Scott Alexander very clearly needs an editor to cut out his most egregious mistakes.
There's a difference between proofreading and spiking stories with the wrong ideological flavor. Lots of substacks would benefit from the first, but none would (IMO) be improved by the second. And as best I can tell, quite a few writers are on Substack to avoid the spiking stories kind of editors.
Yeah, this seems pretty obvious to me. It's no different than Amazon offering some audiobooks as Audible exclusives - you know they paid for that. And while Substack's predictions won't be perfect, they'll have a good sense of these things, and give better estimates than most. They'll lose money on a few advances, just like any other publisher, but not a ton.
Also, your edit at the end seems relatively obvious, at least to me. Yes, the only reason they offered you an advance was your large pre-existing audience. They're not going to offer an advance above the level of "We'll host your blog for free" to my hypothetical Substack blog, nor should they. But I suppose it doesn't hurt to re-state the obvious sometimes.
Scott, consider outsourcing the technical parts of running the comment section by hiring a trusted moderator. Surely you have better things to do in life than mucking around with it.
It's funny that everyone is touting the supposedly 'unmoderated' aspects of substack, yet the desire for moderation of comments seems to be naturally creeping in. How long before people are calling for moderation of the writers too?
Scott, you had a blog with tens of thousands of readers, built up over a ten year period, before you joined substack 🤣🤣. In all seriousness of course there’s a power law distribution, where most people make next to nothing, and a few people make a ton. The haters want to paint that like it’s unethical. But anybody is free to bring their own audience! I’m a nobody, and I built up a following for drums on YouTube over the years which now provides me a living. If they started Sub Drum I’m sure I’d get a decent, if modest, deal.
I know capitalism is out of fashion these days (full disclosure; I’m no fan of unregulated capitalism with mispriced externalities), but if we’re going to set the bar so high that any platform that doesn’t guarantee everybody, regardless of audience or aptitude, an “average” sized slice of the pie, you could do a lot worse than substack. Like...many to most college degree programs. (Music? Try 1 hundredth of one percent with the type of success people dream about when they enroll in music school.) At least substack isn’t charging its writers 100 grand just to roll the dice...
I am just a feral cat, but what is so sinister about Substack paying writers as they see fit? Does Substack have some mind-control ray that makes people write for them if they don't want to, or is the NYT having a hissy fit that PMC types aren't permitted to "curate" the content and writers?
Technically, the bet wasn't completely fair. There was a way for Substack to profit even if they hypothetically overestimated Scott's future income.
That's because the very act of making the bet was changing the future: making Scott more likely to start blogging on Substack, and thus making Substack more popular among Scott's fans. So it was part bet, part marketing expense. The marketing expense could have made it worth even in the hypothetical case the bet would be wrong.
Like, imagine they told Scott "we believe you will make $100K, and therefore we offer to pay you $30K for 50% of your future income", and it would turn out that Scott only made $20K, therefore they lost $20K. Well, from the marketing point of view, for $20K they just bought special place in hearts of many Scott's fans; some of them will also start blogging on Substack and making money for them. So even an unsuccessful bet could bring profit.
It's unsurprising that you would lose money taking Substack's advance. If Substack wasn't likely to make a substantial return on their investment, why would they invest?
If Substack makes you an offer like that, then unless you actively desire a safety net or you suspect that they will not put sufficient time into supporting you, then braving it alone is worth it. As far as I know, Twitch streamers who take very similar offers have very similar experiences.
This is a major goal of Substack: "disrupt" the concept of a journalist as a "job" with "colleagues" and a "union" and a "pension" and "healthcare," and to be replaced by the Avon/Uber/Cutco model of everyone going it alone, w/o the burden of "editors" or "health insurance"
(2) He's a professor of journalism and not alone of journalism, but of medicine too!
"Dr. Steven W. Thrasher, is a professor in the schools of journalism and medicine at Northwestern University, where he holds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus upon LGBTQ research. His journalism has been widely published by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Slate, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, and Esquire. Named Journalist of the Year by the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association in 2012, Dr. Thrasher was recently named one of the 100 most influential and impactful LGBTQ+ people of 2019 for his research on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS by Out magazine."
(3) And tell me, Dr Prof PhD, what "job", "healthcare", "union" and "pension" are current media/journalism jobs providing, as even the traditional dead-tree press is shifting more and more to this model of interns, freelancers, and gig economy writers? Especially in light of BuzzFeed's recent 'springcleaning' when it took over HuffPost UK, are you so eager to boast of working for them with your writing when you are also complaining about this very model?
Centralized (though this is kind of a tautology) Platforms are anti-Web and therefore bad.
Substack is worse than Wordpress : the comment section is a critical part of SSC/ACT and you can't even read it without JavaScript enabled. (And it's working worse too, which is not unrelated.)
(A website is supposed to have its core features working with HTML and CSS only, if you can't do that, you should be making a native program, rather than trying to cram it into a virtual machine inside a browser - you'll end up with a better user interface and performance.)
"... 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.
I think many people will not agree, the linkages go:
Scottpost - Scott - Substack - Y Combinator - Equator Therapeutics - DNP
There are too many jumps between the ends with very low obvious linkages (this isn't like investing in Evil Corp., there is a generic prolific investor in the middle! You could tie Scott to anything with that) in the middle.
I do not. In fact I find that suggestion hilarious.
The connection you're insinuating is much more distant than anything I've seen journalists bother to disclose before. YC isn't Substack's owner, or parent company. They're one of at least 10 investors, many of whom are investing on behalf of a fleet of others.
What are you proposing as the concern, here? Do you believe Scott went and looked for companies to boost which might (somehow?!) help Substack? Or that he was directly told to do so?
I don't think any of that happened. I think that Scott (and other Substack writers) should be very careful about promoting companies as investments, for both ethical and legal reasons, and that it isn't unreasonable for people to have concerns about the possibility of this happening with Substack in the future.
Er, no. Do you have any idea how many companies Y Combinator invests in? Or A16Z? I doubt there's anyone alive who can name them all. At the scale these firms operate at you're going to get random coincidences all the time involving their ventures, it doesn't mean anything.
Y combinator invests tiny (sub-100k AFAIK) in piles and piles of early-stage companies every year. It's not much of a connection.
Sure, and it's the whole "Caesar's wife" thing which is part of why I voted against Scott doing more recommendations of that type. I trust Scott enough that I don't think there was anything shady going on and that it really was "my pal is involved with this thing he told me about and I want to tell you about", nothing more, but as you demonstrated: it can be made to look bad, and without a rigorous procedure of "are you sure nobody connected with this platform however distantly is connected with your thing however distantly?" in place to make sure such connections aren't in place, something which would be tedious and inconvenient, the most self-protective thing is merely to say "WITHOUT RECOMMENDING ANYTHING GOOD BAD OR INDIFFERENT ABOUT THIS, here is something someone told me about".
I also trust Scott; I just think that this is a potential problem for Substack and a valid reason for people to be wary of the platform. I agree that the answer is to be more cautious in promoting any kind of commercial service or investment.
This level of corruption is a bulwark of liberty.
I understand why people have a problem with this; I don't consider it reasonable. There is no really plausible mechanism for nefarious collusion, and coincidence is not reasonably considered problematic.
I also think that the set of conflicts of interests that *aren't* about making more money, are more interesting and more dangerous than the mere money-making conflicts. Pointing out that X and Y are making money in some vaguely-related way and so might be Up to No Good, if that's all you've got, is a distraction from more important concerns.
Do you *really* think there's no plausible mechanism for collusion to occur?
It is always plausible that [rich person with corporation] could approach [writer with audience] and say "I will give you a bunch of money if you tell your readers to buy stock in my company". You don't need Substack or anything like it for that, you just need the existence of rich people, writers, joint stock corporations, and money.
I don't think there is a plausible mechanism by which Substack adds anything to this process, for either party. A traditional newsroom, where the owner ('s agent) exercises direct ongoing control over the payroll and content, is useful to someone who wants to engage in such shenanigans and/or conceal the fact that they are doing so. Substack, isn't.
Although we don’t know the actual numbers in most cases, getting funding from subscriptions seems like a straightforward business model compared to, say, advertising.
I suppose, thinking like a scammer, they could be faking subscription numbers in either direction, increasing them for a few people and decreasing them for others. But haven’t newspapers sometimes faked subscriber numbers to justify prices charged to advertisers? And what assurances do book authors or musicians have that the numbers aren’t fake?
Eventually Substack might go public and then they would be subject to audits, though that’s not always sufficient either.
In the end, authors should probably go by how much money they actually get.
Or we could do subscriptions on the blockchain :) It doesn’t prevent someone from buying subscriptions in bulk though, much like book sales have sometimes been inflated.
Or is it more about trusting Stripe? (Based on what I’ve seen elsewhere.)
It's just simple power law. The creators of any platform under the sun will have a skewed distribution of success. Also, they're not working "for" substack. They're just blogging for substack. Substack owes them nothing.
It sounds like you have a problem with capitalism and not necessarily Substack.
>a tiny handful of writers make a lot of money, and everyone else makes almost nothing
A small number of authors sell the most books. A small number of musicians sell the most music. This applies to almost everything in a free market. I cant imagine a system by which all authors, all musicians, and all writers have the same income even being a desirable outcome.
The "unequal remuneration problem" you're discussing seems to be something inherent to every career field in which some people are much better at doing the job than others.
The problem is that "better" in this instance are the writers who are "better" at forwarding the opinions of the company owners and serving their propaganda function.
I don't follow this at all. Substack doesn't preferentially give writers different levels of exposure. Substack is almost incapable of doing so, in fact. The writers who are making big money on Substack - Yglesias, Siskind, Taibbi, etc. - were all major names before coming to Substack, and they made those names attracting a loyal audience with quality writing.
That's most obvious with Scott himself, who gained all of his word of mouth starting from absolute scratch.
I think there's often a misconception outside the writing field that there's a vast reservoir of AAA writing talent just waiting to be published if not for those nasty ol' gatekeepers. Just not true. Most writers fall into the category of "suck" or "forgettably mediocre".
"I don't follow this at all. Substack doesn't preferentially give writers different levels of exposure."
Again, those writers only get to the position they're in by following bourgeois expectations and forwarding certain ideas. This has already been covered in books like "Inventing Reality" by Parenti and "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky & Herman.
Please apply this thesis to Scott's actual journey from "total nobody" to influential media figure.
Scott says exactly what capitalists want to hear, therefore he gets promoted in their circles.
They don't need to be much better though. A key feature of winner-takes-all–type dynamics is that being marginally better is sufficient for domination.
Pretty difficult to make both of those complaints at the same time.
1. So? Does the fact that some baseball superstar gets paid millions just for playing a game bait fathers into making their sons play in Little League?
2. Assuming that Substack in fact has an agenda, is that a crime? Lord knows that Slate or the Boston Globe or Feral House or whatever have an agenda as well.
For that matter, the ownership of a publisher or a newspaper isn't necessarily a matter of public record, either. Jeff Bezos could hand over a controlling interest in the WaPo to a trust organized for the benefit of Julian Assange, and he doesn't have to tell the public.
The fact that the arguments why Substack is bad are so weak as to show that the real beef with Substack is purely political.
I like Freddie deBoer's take on this ( https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displacement ), which is that the real reason people are upset is the newpaper / digital media industry is broken and haemorraging jobs.
I have a substack. I don't expect to earn any money from it, and Substack have never told me or implied that I will. The idea that Substack is a scam because it promises people riches and then doesn't deliver, is false.
Thanks for the link, that and his Freddie Nitro Edition post were a delightful example of how to be maximally brutal while telling the truth. Just phenomenal.
I think the DeBoer piece is overall pretty good, but statements like "Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly?" make me wonder how honest and serious he is, because that's a hilariously uncharitable, and probably flat out wrong, framing of why Greenwald has recently come under fire.
For quite a while now Greenwald has been dissing, and pissing off... well, the kind of people who write for US media.
I honestly don't know what it is they're being pissed off at recently, but I consider it a reasonable assumption that i) it's a proxy for the ongoing larger disagreement, and ii) the charge is made up or overblown. I fully realize this is uncharitable, but repeated experience overrides the default charity.
Now, I don't want to argue the merits of this heuristic. I just want to point out it's a heuristic that lots of people are going to have, after a vast majority of SM outrage panics turn out to be unworthy of attention and outright misleading if taken at face value. Someone like Freddie tuning them out is precisely what you should expect.
From the deBoer article: "I’ve been given opportunities because I’ve proved profitable to media businesses and like all businesses media businesses only care about profit." I find this interesting. If someone raises organic eggs and sells them, do we think "all he cares about is profit"? People create value and cheerfully accept payment for it, for a number of reasons. Some just need to pay the rent and are indifferent to their product or its impact on customers, but that's not by any means the universal rule. A pleasure of a free market is that people can enjoy offering valuable products to others, while also enjoying receiving valuable payment, which they can then offer to other people who sell products of value. Many of us get off on the idea of this kind of voluntary cooperation and assistance.
It would be one thing if people like Annalee Newitz and Jude Doyle were bringing in tons of money for Substack, and Substack was then turning around and using that money to subsidize Jesse Singal and others they find objectionable. Maybe then I could understand why they'd be mad. But that doesn't seem to be the case, and instead, it appears everyone is making money.
"But that doesn't seem to be the case, and instead, it appears everyone is making money."
Ah, but it's the wrong kind of everyone! Personally I'd be happy if Graham Linehan fell down a flight of stairs, but nobody is forcing me to read his Substack, I had no idea he even had one, and now I know he does, I will be doing my best to avoid it.
If people want to pay him money to read his writing, okay for them. It's not punching me in the nose or picking my pocket if they do so.
"The wrong kind of everyone" is exactly at the heart of this. Doyle - who was quoted in Newitz's piece - has themself made the following remarks about their own dramatical exit:
---
There was one other communication I did want to address publicly: Hamish McKenzie of Substack. Hamish wrote me a long, conciliatory and kindly worded letter defending their business model - my criticism of it stands - and ultimately saying there was a Pro deal on the table if I would consider staying on the platform.
I declined. Yes, there was a moment when I really, really wanted the money - even the minor Pro deals are reportedly very generous, and most writers live in the kind of financial precarity that makes it stupid to say "no" to any steady gig - but if Substack is willing to pay me for this newsletter, then it’s only because they see that as the smallest possible amount of money they could lose. They can stop the bleeding by paying me off, or they can lose even more money when trans and queer users and subscribers desert their platform and they lose credibility as anything but an outlet for professional bigots.
The pressure is working, in other words, and I’m not going to take a payout to make sure a massively successful media company gets to continue promoting and profiting from hate speech. (...) I cannot take the money if I know that, by doing so, I’m condoning or being used to whitewash the funding of TERFs. I’m not saying we can never have the conversation. I am saying that until content moderation policies are in place to restrict the funding of extremists who target marginalized groups, that conversation ends with "no".
---
https://doyles.substack.com/p/necessary-losses
Doyle is therefore willingly turning down a payment that's evidently higher than whatever were the grassroots subscriptions Doyle managed to drum up since Oct/2018 on the Substack platform - and thus higher than wherever else they take the existing subscribers (via Patreon or otherwise) - because that payment/handout is simply not worth it to Doyle unless it is *additionally* accompanied by Substack purging haters, bigots and extremists such as... well, Jesse Singal, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias.
So it's not just about the money; the power to enact purges has an even greater lure. Doyle's attempt at getting "the wrong kind of everyone" cancelled, via a gambit hinged on Doyle's self-cancellation, went down about as well as someone reasonably anchored in reality might expect. Oh well. At least I can thank Doyle for pointing me to Greenwald's excellent "Criticizing Public Figures" piece, a piece I would have missed If I hadn't followed the chain from Scott's post to Newitz's citation of Doyle.
(English is not my first language, so I don't know whether "themself" is the appropriate reflexive form of "them" in singular?)
"They can lose even more money when trans and queer users and subscribers desert their platform and they lose credibility as anything but an outlet for professional bigots"
I'm sorry, exactly how pie-in-the-sky is this person? Since there is no reputable figure for how many trans people there are in the population, let's go with the wider category of "queer". Figures from a couple of years ago put it at 4.5% of the population of the USA https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/visualization/lgbt-stats/?topic=LGBT#density
Now, taking what Doyle says there, and going really generously on "okay, bump that up to 10% of the potential audience are trans/queer", then 10% of the Substack user/subscriber base will betake themselves off this hellhole of bigots.
That still leaves 90% of non-queer trans users and subscribers. Welp, that'll sure show Substack when they are down to their last pennies because they only have 90% of a paying audience left!
What Doyle seems to be hoping for is a boycott effect, that it won't be only the 10% trans/queer users and subscribers who leave, but that allies in the cishet population will also leave and/or boycott Substack. That's why they need the smear campaign for "an outlet for professional bigots" in order to gin up outrage and get cancel culture at work.
Doyle and the others have to be pretty darn ignorant of the numbers, or else they really do imagine that everywhere is like their own particular neighbourhood bubble of 'everybody here is queer'. Even the maximum LGBT area in the US is, apparently, the District of Columbia with 9.8%.
If they're going to take on "the bigots on Substack", by the numbers the 'bigots' are going to win.
I wouldn't be able to guesstimate how much revenue it is within Doyle's powers to steer away from Substack. The LGBT "supergroup" is around 5% of the population, but they are not *nearly* all of the same mind. (Greenwald, apparently the 2nd on Doyle's "purge list" after Singal, is himself gay)
The "activist subset" of the LGBT population frequently is of the same mind, though, at least when it comes to wholehearted embracing of cancel culture. This is a quite common activist trait nowadays, which they share with many other activists outside of LGBT. But only a tiny fraction of LGBT people *are* activists; it is not "being an activist" that makes you LGBT, it is about having an atypical sexuality (LGB) or profoundly longing to inhabit a different type of body to the one that you do inhabit (T). In other words, were Doyle able to assemble the full combined armies of LGBT activists behind this cause, they still wouldn't be able to convince even a third of the "5% LGBTers" to leave. Probably not even a tenth, given that the group of LGBT Substack subscribers is already preselected by having subscribed to certain Substacks rather than to the Guardian or to Washington Post or whatever. And yes, we can add some "cishet sympathizers" into that mix, but a similar preselection clause applies.
Why I find the whole episode interesting, is how open and deadpan Doyle is in negotiating the "bargain" with Substack. Doyle is *not* asking for a larger handout, the amount of money seems fine. Rather, Doyle - calculating how that amount is still lesser than the damage Doyle is presumably able to inflict on Substack - is therefore asking for adding certain cancellations on top of that deal. "An offer you cannot refuse".
I think Substack can refuse it, and I do hope they will. But I'm only 90% certain they will, so I'm curious as to what will happen in the end. I don't think it realistic Substack would ever agree to cancel Singal or Greenwald, but I hope they won't come to offer some "minor sacrifices" in return either - like a few random low-subscriber guys who write pieces from a traditional religious perspective, or whatever else might make Doyle happy. Because it is in the *successful branding* of such common people as "haters, bigots and extremists" that Doyle's real victory is won.
Actually, quite a few of the cancellation targets are gay or lesbian--Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Katie Herzog, etc. I'm guessing this reflects the fact that gays and lesbians are actually a lot more diverse in terms of political and social views than you'd guess from the prestige media's narrative.
As far as I can tell, the narrative about most identifiable groups that you see in prestige media coverage mostly comes from activists--either from those groups or those opposed to those groups, depending on the desired spin of the writer. (Think of this as the "latinx effect.")
The problem with this kind of description is that it gives you a broken model of the world. Thus leading you to make predictions like "no gays or lesbians will write for or subscribe to Substack because they allow hateful evil fascists like Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald to write there."
Wait. "Substack is bad because they deliberately choose bad people for 'pro'", but also "Substack offered me 'pro', but I won't take it because Substack is bad"? That seems circular (unless she counts herself as bad).
Have I misattributed an argument here, or is this real?
I have to ask: are you mad at Linehan because of Father Ted?
No, not because of Father Ted. Yes, there was the usual church-bashing in it, but it was a comedy, elements did need criticism, and things such as Father Noel Furlong and the Youth Group were painfully accurate (anyone else who was pushed into an 80s Irish youth group was wincing in recognition), as well as the kind of brutal but not wrong descriptions of rural Irish life (e.g. the bickering couple who are all sweetness and light as soon as outsiders come along).
It was more to do with his general attitude - like a lot of Irish ex-Catholics turned social liberals, he couldn't see anything good at all with the Church and what it had done in Ireland in its entire history, and he wanted Irish society to hurry up and copy English and American mores on sex'n'drugs'n'rock-and-roll. Is there a phrase "tits and beer liberals"? I'm nearly certain I read it somewhere online, and this account sounds about right - it's the same general notion as when you could present Howard Stern as a hero sticking it to The Man for all his FCA fines for indecency (to veer off at a tangent here, Trump's infamous "grab 'em by the pussy" was vulgar and demeaning and all the rest of it that the complaints alleged, but in the context of the times, this was the kind of vulgar, indecent, etc. attitude of Howard Stern and others that were being praised for standing up to the squares and prudes - think of Larry Flynt getting a movie holding him up as a defender of liberty over that parody having Jerry Falwell describing how he had sex with his mother - Falwell being the bete noire of the time).
So, that piece I mentioned: https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/123330745893/kontextmaschine-i-wonder-exactly-which-day-it
"The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.
Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, '60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.
And it’s not like oooo, this was acceptable once upon a time, it’s that when I was growing up, this was the official line of media social liberalism."
And 90s media social liberalism in the Irish context is what Graham Linehan came out of - he was a journalist for "Hot Press", an Irish music magazine. This Wikipedia article doesn't really go into depth on it - Hot Press really was very much pro-sex, drugs and rock'n'roll (e.g. they had a journalist describing going to Amsterdam to one of the legal drug cafés and writing about being publicly stoned in front of cops) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Press
So yeah, it was more Linehan's brand of trendy Dublin social liberalism, involving hefty doses of sneering at anyone who wasn't that into sex'n'drugs (I don't mind rock'n'roll) and/or from down the country who are only rubes and rednecks, and then the natural ending to that which is fecking off to England to make a living mocking the country you left behind you, is what annoyed and annoys me about him.
That 90s media social liberal tag is very appropriate; from being one of the right-on heroes fighting repression, his views (tits and beer liberalism) haven't changed that much, but society has moved on and now the "earnest, censorious social issue activists" are the ones in ascendance, Stern and Flynt would not be considered heroes of the people today, and Linehan's attitudes and views being fossilised in the heyday of his times, he's run afoul of being "transphobic" and the rest of it.
As a dyed-in-the-wool stick in the mud and social conservative, yes, I am getting some amusement from it. My attitudes may not have changed very much either, but while I am still being mocked by the same people who were always mocking those views, in past days Linehan was one of the mockers, now he's one of the targets himself. How does it feel, Graham?
To clarify a bit: I disliked Trump's reported remarks, I would have disliked them at the time he made them, and I would dislike any such remarks today by anyone. However, *at the time*, not finding Stern etc. brand of vulgar sexual innuendo funny and cool would have been every bit as offensive as the backlash today, where that vulgar sexual innuendo is now demeaning and sexist, not funny and cool.
I was out of step with the "tits and beer" liberalism of the time, as I am out of step with the cancel culture and SJW culture of today. One of the benefits of being socially conservative! At least it's consistent when I get mocked for wrong thinking and not the switch between "hey I used to be admired, why am I now being criticised for the same views I always held?" 😁
I perfectly understand you. I'm in favor of sex and against drugs and rock'n'roll myself, not to mention cancel culture and SJWs, so our views and experiences of being mudsticks are largely analogous. I do dearly love Father Ted, though.
Oh yeah, when Father Noel showed up with the kids in the holiday caravan, that was when it became a documentary 😁
Agreed. And both pieces seem to imply this (or something much more sinister) is happening but talk in circles around it, because it doesn't seem to be happening at all
The primary reason for Substack receiving the negative press that it does is that of political disagreement and intolerance, with the secondary reasons being those of envy and jealously. I'm not sure it warrants much discussion beyond that, at least until I see a legitimately good argument for why the platform may be anywhere close to as bad as some groups claim it is.
Exactly.
See also "Respectability Cascades" nervous-face-emoji. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/04/respectability-cascades/
It’s so refreshing to hear of a business model with which is really economically sound. I usually pay too much attention to politics, where (at least in headlines) boring economic solutions are often ignored.
Huh. This is good to know. I'd been assuming until this point that Substack was doing an Uber and channelling money to popular writers as a way to build brand or userbase or something. It sounds like that's not true and in fact, they are simply exploiting the fact that there's huge untapped commercial demand for certain kinds of writing, demand which until now had been invisible because media groupthink had determined it to be wrongthink and more subtly, determined that writing was inherently a low paid profession. When in reality it was maybe more like, there are tons of people willing to write certain types of "consensus-quo" articles for nearly nothing so the vast supply drives prices to the floor.
This somewhat reminds me of the Fox News situation. There was huge demand for news by conservatives, but nobody supplying it. And when eventually one network did it immediately obtained massive market share.
Part of what Substack are doing is attracting "star" writers to their platform, in the hope that readers who read them will stay and read other writers. This is a network effect that loads of other SV companies have tried to achieve, and is nothing particularly remarkable.
I didn't even realize you could find other Substack authors through Substack's interface. 100% of my roads to a particular 'stack have been from outside sources, meaning its own network effect is now that I've seen enough 'stacks if I were to start one I might choose Substack as the host.
Second on this, I am pretty sure my substack login for this account doesn't allow me to interact as a non-outsider on other substacks.
If they are shooting to keep me on the platform, which they may be, they are not doing a good job yet at having a closed ecosystem.
Substackers informally link to other Substackers. That's it.
And one of the things I like is that Substack isn't gagging me with "see more you might like" shit. There's problems with the interface, but they aren't obsessed with keeping me doom-scrolling their site. I figure that deserves me giving them some of my business.
I think this is right but there's a smaller network effect: when you read popular people on substack, it'll be the first thing that you think of if you ever decide to write your own newsletter. An ad to potential authors rather than just subscribers.
I'm skeptical of the network effects here once others copy Substack's business model. That said, they've spent more time figuring out why that would be harder than I'd think than I have.
Are they? I've yet to see any cross-promotion and it sounds like these deals are extremely good for Substack purely on their own terms. I agree that what you're describing sounds like the usual tech startup playbook, but ... where is it?
I think it also represents an unbundling of products that were previously bundled, though, like say, ala carte cable channels. E.G., I like Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle, but there's no way I'm subscribing to the NYT and the WashPost just to read those two fine scribes, because there's too much extraneous stuff bundled with it. However, now that Mr. Douthat has a substack, I can satiate my appetite for Douthatian commentary without having to subscribe to a whole 'nother newspaper, so in that sense, Substack represents a real value proposition, not just a poaching of writers from other platforms/
I did subscribe to the Post primarily to read Megan McArdle. Via Amazon Prime, it's $5.99/month, which compares favorably to the cost of a Substack subscription, and turns out to include other content I'm interested in.
I'd rather send more directly Megan's way, but on the other hand there's a limit to how many individual subscriptions at $5-$10/each I'm likely to spring for. If some bundling doesn't emerge I'm not sure what my Substack ceiling is, but it isn't that high.
Clearly, bundling works in some situations. Maybe most. I'm just sayin' for certain people (ie me), the unbundling is preferable.
Supporting Substackers is a good way to tell media that something is wrong, but this isn't going to fix media. Media's problems go deeper than that.
And this is important. News reporting is a necessary part for a functioning society. Just supporting the columnists we like, while immediately useful, leaves us having a lot of opinions but no facts. Local media is already a wasteland. Who is covering the local board meeting where they are voting to put melamine in the water? Anyone?
I get being angry at the media. But it just dying isn't really a way forward.
I'm spending about half as much on my city's local paper (a city of fewer than 100k) as on Substack. Maybe I should spend more locally.
I think it's much more this. I doubt there is any huge untapped market in the sense that consumers in aggregate are willing to pay any more money than they presently do to consume media. Substack is just making a bet that a sufficient number of people who are currently subscribed to large bundles of barely related services really only care about a few topics or a few writers and are willing to give the same money to a much smaller number of people.
That isn't quite a network effect. A network effect is where additional value is gained by existing users by adding new users to the network. The telephone network is an example: your phone line has greater value the more people you can call with it. The same applies to fax machines. Facebook et al. are in a similar boat: people choose Facebook because it has the greater number of users new prospective users want to talk to. Likewise, competators to Facebook face the problem that all potential users are already on Facebook so you'd have to have a compelling benefit to get them to join, let alone pull them away.
Substack has nothing like that. Some random person joining Substack as an author doesn't improve anything for Substack's existing authors or readers. At-best, it provides a trivial amount of name recognition for Substack. But that's no different than having the authors list what brand of pen, paper, or computer they use.
I've been thinking the same thing. Anyone have thoughts on ways to get some skin in the game with entities providing these kinds of apparently high-demand/low-supply media products?
Become an angel investor. But of course, you have to find the opportunities, that's the hard part. It's why VC is a profession and a competitive one at that.
I get that. And maybe my question was stupid. But I was thinking about small, creative, probably indirect ways to make *small* bets on these sorts of things since becoming an angel investor is not in the cards for me.
My first though was that maybe a group of people could pool money to be a sort of meta-angel investor, but then I realized that the voting you'd need to do would ensure you never invested in an "interesting" company until your stake was worthless.
Try googling "equity crowfunding". There are a few sites that allow for this. It's only since 2016 or 2017 that this has been available to everyone instead of just accredited investors, so it's still pretty new.
OK, fine. Technically from what I can see, there's no particular reason the type of Substack BD that Scott talks about here can only be done by them. The core of the deal was "we know that you can make money but you don't realise it, so we'll take the risk out for you in return for (we believe) a sure profit".
You could find writers that you believe are offering something to under-served but rich markets and make them a similar deal, fronted by your own cash. If you do a good job, then your new writer has to cut you in on the subscriber revenue stream for a while.
It's a standard joke in my household that the oh-so-clever Murdoch identified an underserved "niche" market consisting of nearly half the country.
Ok but you're one of the "pro" substack people.
The article was mostly talking about suckers who get lured into putting out content for free but in fact there exists an elite cabal who substack pays to write for them. The majority of their "big" names comes from people who were *already semi-famous to begin with* (you/matt)
From the conclusion
"
Substack’s business is a scam. They claim to offer writers a level playing field for making a living, and instead they pay an elite, secret group of writers to be on the platform and make newsletter writing appear to be more lucrative than it is"
So you are a member of said "elite secret group" (I think "secret" is a bit of a misnomer but still the theory still is that they pay people that are medium-famous to enter the platform and those people are wildly successful, meanwhile a nobody like the author has no real chance)
But Substack ended up taking money from Scott and Yglesias, not giving them money.
Does the existence of superstar authors make fiction writing a scam? Musicians? If there were superstar Ebayers, would that make Ebay a scam?
If Scott and Matt Y are representative of these elite writers, they are not getting paid, but insured by Substack, at a loss for themselves.
I never interpreted that Substack advertised itself as a level playing field in the sense that people consume articles regardless of the writer. Writers have their followers. They just arent filtered or paid more or less due to editorial choice, and theres no barrier to entry.
If there were many deals with fix high payments to writers that end up on average not generating such income, and they extended more than the first year where the insurance helps overcome skepticism and changes in lifestyle, then I would see the point of complaining. But even then, probably its not in Substacks financial interest to have such a scheme. Or if it is, I see no reason to think that for now.
I see - it sounds like your interpretation is that Substack's "deception" is luring big names to its site (who then make money organically and without any further deception) because that makes ordinary people think they could also make lots of money. That isn't how I interpreted the article, but it seems more defensible than my interpretation.
It's still weird, though. Is Disney a scam because it pays famous actors millions of dollars to be in its movies, but the average actor who works for them will only get a small salary? Is YouTube a scam because top YouTubers make lots of money but most YouTubers make none?
I think in order to be upset over this, you would have to think that Substack was deliberately trying to trick people by spending lots of money recruiting eg Yglesias as a "loss leader", and hoping that the rubes his success attracted would make up the difference. But number one, they didn't spend lots of money, they gained money on net. Number two, the rubes will never make money meaning Substack will never gain money off of them. Number three, it seems like you would have to be very confused to think "one of the most famous journalists in the world, who's been doing this for 20 years, makes $380K on Substack, that means I will also make $380K on Substack".
So here's the thing, people like you have about a 1/1 chance (because you were prepaid by substack) of being successful. This lures in a lot of people with strange and interesting ideas, who have each a 1/100 or so chance of making it big on the platform. (where big is $50k/year or more in subscriber revenue)
The real thing is that if there's 1000 Brians each one generates $4000/year in revenue, so $400 a year for substack, they worked 1000 hours for $3600, or about $3.6 an hour. Substack made $400k from these 1000 Brians, who weren't able to succeed but they (substack) didn't have to put in much work to get those 1000 cheap writers who had small followings. Maybe 1 of those guy's hits it big and has some unique thing like say my sweet dumb brain. https://mysweetdumbbrain.substack.com/?utm_source=discover who hit it big.
I remember doing a similar project on youtube where I got 30 people to make minecraft content and found that at the end 28 of them had 100-1000 subscribers and 1 had 50k and 1 had 140k subs. I figure substack works much the same way, you put in 100s of hours of work for the chance of hitting it big and being a big name, but if you fail and only hit it small the platform still profits but you personally fail.
Yeah the post they made had a vaild point and some invalid ones, I tried to focus only on the "you're making content chasing a lottery that's stacked against you, you aren't Scott Alexander or Glenn Greenwald, your chance of becoming the next my sweet dumb brain is not very high"
> So here's the thing, people like you have about a 1/1 chance (because you were prepaid by substack) of being successful. This lures in a lot of people with strange and interesting ideas, who have each a 1/100 or so chance of making it big on the platform. (where big is $50k/year or more in subscriber revenue)
This is absurd. Your argument boils down to, "Don't do anything economically worthwhile, because people might misinterpret the reason for your success and waste their own time/money." Now, if Substack was advertising the success of big writers and obscuring the fact that they were already widely read and well-established, *that* would be something. But that doesn't appear to be what's happened here or even what's being alleged.
Nah I think that most people should at the individual level understand the risk involved.
Substack is doing a great service.
I failed the tone badly and substack doesn't have an edit function
>So here's the thing, people like you have about a 1/1 chance (because you were prepaid by substack)
Either Substack is paying their writers secretly, in which case the public assessment is that Scott wasn't prepaid and had much less than a 1/1 chance of being successful, or writers tell people that they got prepaid and no one forms unrealistic expectations about Substack because they can see that Substack is not offering them any prepaid deals. No one gets deceived here!
Right, for some reason I thought that other than matt/scott most of the prepaid authors were secret.
If that's not the case then most people should realize that the odds of success are extremely low and you can do actually 1000 hours of labor and get paid $0-$4000 for it, not only that, it is the most probable result.
Keep in mind, though, that alternative blogging locations are places like Blogger, Wordpress, Ghost, or Medium that don’t pay anything, and might charge you. Or Twitter, for that matter.
Writing for money is crossing a line between amateur and professional. But it reminds me of talk about “unpaid labor” which would seem to imply that paid is better.
Exactly. If I publish something on my own web page, I am also "working for less than minimum wage". Should perhaps all non-professional blogging be banned?
Switching from my own web page to Substack would mean, in short term, that I wouldn't have to worry about setting up and updating the software; someone else does it for me, for free. Is that a bad thing?
In long term, it would mean that if I accidentally become a popular blogger, I could try to get some income, again with almost no extra work from my side. (I imagine I would go somewhere in the settings, activate some checkbox, provide my IBAN, and confirm that I have read and understood thousand pages of legalese.) Then I need to write an extra paid article once in a while, see if it works, and either keep doing this or give up. That sounds like a very cheap and convenient way to make the experiment.
Many years ago, it was also possible to get paid using Google AdSense, but these days the number of people generating tons of viral text is so large that if you don't do clickbait and SEO semi-professionally, your income will probably be something like $1 a year. With Substack, you can make more if you get one(!) paying subscriber. But that still won't be enough to quit your job, obviously.
> I remember doing a similar project on youtube where I got 30 people to make minecraft content and found that at the end 28 of them had 100-1000 subscribers and 1 had 50k and 1 had 140k subs.
Nearly every human endeavour exhibits power laws like this [1]. It's naturally emergent, and there's nothing intentionally nefarious about it.
Maybe you think top earners should be partially capped and redistributed to the bottom, as with progressive taxation? Then again, that might partially destroy the value behind the platform. What alternatives do you have in mind?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
Nah, I'm more saying that *person X* should strongly consider that the probability of hitting it big are really low, I agree power laws are what is going on here, but people should look carefully at power laws before deciding if they made the correct decision
I like substack, but I understand how it can blow up in your face
1. I'm not really sure how going with substack can "blow up in your face" in a way that going with your own blog would not. Maybe you mean people who otherwise would not have written anything just wasted their time? I can maybe see that, but I think writing has plenty of cognitive benefits that make the investment worth it even if no monetary reward follows.
2. Your exact argument is why Scott almost didn't go with Substack. The point being, you can't always know upfront where you will end up on the power law spectrum.
> Nearly every human endeavour exhibits power laws like this
I don't think so. The activities that exhibit power laws are primarily the ones where the whole world (or everyone with particular interests) follows the few most successful/famous/best individuals, and the individuals are not fungible: athletes, musicians (since the recording era), writers etc. Other professions have skill-based salary differences, but usually smaller, and not following a power law.
> Other professions have skill-based salary differences, but usually smaller, and not following a power law.
Can you be more specific? What professions don't exhibit power laws? How are writers not fungible? How are athletes not fungible? I'm an engineer, and I still see the power law trends.
http://advancedfootballanalytics.com/index.php/home/research/draft/146-bricklayers-vs-gladiators
Does this count as studying the humanities???
How would your issues with substack change or not if noone was paid upfront (yet some fraction of the Scotts and Matt Ys had predicted their success better and were making the same sums of money)?
I have no issues with substack I made a tonal blunder.
"Luring people in with a hope of making big money" sounds an awful lot like "giving people a shot at the brass ring they otherwise wouldn't have had." How is it wrong again?
I think it's wrong to call it a scam but it is a definitely an issue people are concerned about in lots of places (Hollywood, VC startups vs established companies, Uber employees). The issue is that people are not good at calculating expected return (also the difference with mean and median expected return). Keep in mind that if Substack gets a lot writers who make $10K per year Substack will do well (collecting 1K per writer for ~$0 marginal cost) but those writers may not (depending on whether they are treating Substack as supplemental or primary income). I don't think Substack is actually doing anything wrong but this is an inescapable issue with human nature (See Adam Smith (jump to point 5 https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/smith-an-inquiry-into-the-nature-and-causes-of-the-wealth-of-nations-cannan-ed-vol-1#lf0206-01_label_391).
So what is your take then, on Annalee Newitz who claims that they never started writing on Substack for the money, they wanted a way to let their thousands of fans know what was going on?
"And so finally, last year, I started to consider Substack. Many writers I admire had started using it, and I thought: “Here’s a good way to send bulk email without getting caught in a spam filter.” That’s all I wanted -- a decent platform that wasn’t complicated like MailChimp, and didn’t charge high monthly rates to send more than 1,000 e-mails.
I didn’t pay much attention to Substack’s subscriber model because I wasn’t going to use this newsletter as a revenue stream. I already have plenty of paying gigs. All I wanted was a way to let you folks know what I’m up to, and occasionally tell you a story for free that I personally wanted to tell."
So if I believe that, they were not suckered in by a scam that fooled them they could make $$$$$ now. Their bone of contention is twofold:
(1) "What I’m saying is that Substack suckered me in with the promise of growing my readership, and the bait was that they had so many great writers with huge followings."
(2) "It got worse when some of the Pro writers started to reveal themselves, because Substack’s secret paid elite all seemed to be cut from the same cloth. ...o people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry."
(Shout-out to Freddie de Boer, one of the names in the list of deplorables; hi Freddie, hope this finds you well!)
So the complaint is (a) they didn't 'grow their readership' as expected and (b) wrongthinkers were permitted and indeed paid to write. The implication *seems* to be that Substack were paying the wrongthinkers to write wrongthink, but I don't think that is tenable.
If you didn't grow your readership, consider this might be on you? Product not engaging, product not distinctive enough, product only of appeal to your like-minded bubble of pals?
I can't really comment on anyone else's state of mind, but I do think that wanting to be famous (have lots of readers) is not that different from wanting to be rich and people are subject to the same irrational expectations. How much Substack is at fault depends a lot on the nature of their advertisements. If Substack implied that they are responsible for people's audience (or would engage in cross selling on behalf of new people) then it did scam them on the other hand if it's just their irrational belief that they would immediately get the audience it's their fault. To be clear I don't find Annalee's specific claims compelling but I want to steel man this argument.
I think this is conflating two things. The recent from the last week or whatever is happening on Twitter where someone apparently discovered a few people getting paid advances left their last jobs in part because of uneasy relations with trans coworkers or whatever, which seems to be what Annalee Newitz is on about. And that is what Scott linked to, so fine.
But criticism of Substack in general has been ongoing and for much broader reasons than that. Part of it is the contention that they're luring people into believing they can make it big, which I don't find convincing at all because, first, I think most writers know they aren't going to make it big, but also because the basic exploitation of people willing to work for passion or possibly deluded into hoping for a shot at stardom is already how traditional media companies work anyway.
However, the other part has to do with splintering of aggregated media, which is good for consumers in the shortest of economic runs, but arguably bad socially if you believe loss leaders have value even if they can't be monetized. Huge companies can have loss leaders because they can subsidize losses with wins. Individual writers can't do that. Which is to say, people believe a company like the Washington Post can turn out a bunch of drivel to grab eyeballs, and then use that to fund investigative long form work that can potentially alter the course of history like uncovering Watergate or something. Direct to consumer independent contractors probably can't replicate that.
I'm not sure people are always right about this, though. Substack hasn't been around long, and it remains to be seen whether they have any interest in eventually trying to fund undiscovered talent if they can become and stay profitable on the backs of their superstars. Arguably, "non-traditional" media has been able to do this in pure art. Amazon Studios seems to operate solely as a prestige and passion project of Jeff Bezos that doesn't have to make money because of the aggregation with Amazon Prime, and this has resulted in quite a lot of high quality material that wouldn't have been made elsewhere, even explicitly saving very good material that had been canceled by other sponsors that couldn't afford the loss. Netflix is arguably trying to do this with all the documentaries and true crime stuff they fund for a certain value of long form investigative reporting. Will Substack ever try to do this for written long form investigative? Will anyone? I guess we'll see.
There are several things that are all mixed-in together in one of the complaints, and that's the one I'll parse, the one by Annalee Newitz.
(Respecting their pronouns, I will be referring to them as "they" from here on in, just in case anyone is confused).
They started off with how they didn't go on Substack to make money, they just wanted a cheap and convenient way to send out a newsletter to their number of fans and followers.
Then they started in with "but Substack is a scam and here's why":
(1) It deceives people into thinking they can have a huge audience (and make money off of paid subscriptions) by claiming "Look, here's Huey Dooey and his Huge Audience what follow him, he started off here with only three men and a dog reading him"
(2) They are paying certain people money, which is probably what is underwriting the "huge audiences" for Huey Dooey and not organic growth, which is deception (see point 1 above)
(3) But also! They are paying the *wrong kind* of people the big advances! Here we get the quote from Jude Doyle about the laundry list of deplorables (hey again, Freddie! *waves*)
(4) A plaint about how this wrings their withers with regards to the high journalist standards they are accustomed to operating under (coming from someone who worked in the Gawker stable, I find that very feffin' ironic)
(5) Substack is a scam and bad actors and propping up witches, so they are going to someplace purer and finer
Now, I imagine Substack *is* trying to entice people in with the "avail of a huge audience" pitch, because they are a business and no business on earth is going to tell you "sign up with us and be mediocre unknown". Is that a scam? Well, if it is, modern media including journalism is also a scam, because what about all the unpaid interns and, for instance, Buzzfeed's spring cleaning? So mote and beam there, Annalee.
As for the wrongthinking deplorables, well hold my hand while I sink down onto the fainting couch 🙄
If anyone is dubious about Scott's superpower being the Aura Of Niceness, I really wanted to be a pissy little bitch about Annalee and go full-on ad hominem but couldn't do it, not on Scott's page 😀
From what I can tell, advances are only being offered to those Substack is pretty certain will pull in a huge amount of money, but the advances ultimately make Substack even more money.
For those who Substack isn't certain about, authors are able to use the platform for free. Substack takes a small cut of subscriptions, but ultimately makes more money as the authors make more money. So Substack at least has incentives aligned to have new authors also make more money. Unlike physical publishing, there's no huge up-front cost for review/editing/formatting a new book.
"Number three, it seems like you would have to be very confused to think "one of the most famous journalists in the world, who's been doing this for 20 years, makes $380K on Substack, that means I will also make $380K on Substack".
But that *is* what is going on, at least to my eyes. These people really do think that they are on the same, or even a more exalted, level and should be getting the same treatment and getting the same money. And it looks like it's not even about the money, it's pure envy: "I didn't come on Substack to make money, I do this for free/I have better paying gigs elsewhere, but they gave TERRIBAD PERSON a wheelbarrow of cash? How dare they!"
They are big fish in their very tiny, carefully curated ponds, and when they get into the bigger lake they think they should retain that status and are very offended to find out that is not so, and hence it has to be down to secret cabals and paid elites and transphobia and all the rest of it.
I was subbing to a lot of newspapers up to 2020. The Boston Globe, the Tampa Bay Times, the NY Times, the WaPo, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the LA Times. That was a lot of $$ spent on news. The feeds would come in and they were more and more a blur of sameness (except the sports). The people on the mastheads had been on Slate, the Atlantic, NYRB, NYer, a whirligig of the same people. I now use the $$ I spent on the big papers to support Substack writers who write longer, better documented, more objective and more thoughtful articles. Also the comment sections make the Substack writers less horatory.
This means you've swapped news and opinion for just news, right? I certainly find opinion stuff much more fun to read, but I suspect actual news is of more epistemic value, and so it's bad if we all do this.
The opinion is all built on news. News is the seed corn. We can get away without news for a little while, but it'll eventually catch up with us.
I get News Nation (WGN from Chicago) for straight news since CNN became insufferable. No opinion writer at the above mentioned outlets interests me as they say the same things and so many are on the vanity circuit (Friedman/Aspen).
Sounds like baseball to me. The average frustrated semi-pro ball player hoping to catch on with a AA team and move up from there will probably never make anywhere near what the average player for the Yankees will make. The average frustrated journeyman MLB player in turn is a but pauper when compared with the stars.
Some "can't miss" prospects get the big bucks before they've ever stepped onto an MLB ball yard. Others aren't so lucky.
Now we can argue later whether that system (or capitalism in general) is fair or not, but I don't think that's what the PMC critics of Substack are really meowing over.
I agreed that this was what the author was going for, but it makes zero sense to me? Maybe if substack was structured like an MLM, where you had to 'buy in' for some amount with the promise of getting some big payoff down the line?
The whole idea that substack somehow benefits from tricking a bunch of unprofitable writers into posting doesn't make any sense to me at all... They literally only make money if the writer makes money?
It seems identical to Twitch streaming or youtube or whatever other platform. A few stars will make lots of money, and many many many more people will essentially use a free service and generate free art (writing in this case) that no one will ever see. Calling that a 'scam' stretches the word pretty far.
"meanwhile a nobody like the author has no real chance"
I think that's what is grigging them. In actuality, they *are* a nobody. In their own estimation, they are a somebody that should have been part of the elite secret cabal and the only reason Substack did not offer them a sack full of dollars was transphobia or something.
"I used to work for a company called Gawker Media, where I spent seven years running a blog called io9. It was fun! But for a whole variety of reasons -- the death of Google Reader, Facebook’s fraudulent “pivot to video” -- the media world moved away from blogs as a genre and so did I. ...I didn’t pay much attention to Substack’s subscriber model because I wasn’t going to use this newsletter as a revenue stream. I already have plenty of paying gigs. All I wanted was a way to let you folks know what I’m up to, and occasionally tell you a story for free that I personally wanted to tell. What clinched it for me was that Substack had attracted such a big, engaged readership with high-profile writers like Daniel M. Lavery, Emily Atkin, and Heather Cox Richardson."
I had to look up who those "high-profile" writers were so, um, estimations of fame may vary. But when you are claiming, on the one hand, "I don't need Substack for money, I have paying jobs!" and on the other hand claiming "this is a scam because they are secretly paying people and that is why the paid writers have big readerships" (uh? not established unless Substack are paying readers to read certain writers and if so, how do I get in on that sweet gig?)
Throw around phrases like "secret paid elite" and you are starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, not a journalist wringing your hands over how the high and austere standards of your profession are being traduced.
This Jude Doyle (another name I had to look up, the amount of "Who?" that I am uttering reading that particular article has me sounding like an owl) claimed that Substack did offer them money just like the "secret cabal", that they turned it down since they thought it wasn't enough, that they thought Substack was their kind of place, and then they got very offended when they found out wrong-thinkers were not alone being permitted on Substack but were getting offers of big money! bigger than Substack offered them!
Why you are offended that someone else took up the offer you refused because you felt you would make more money doing paid writing elsewhere, I don't know, and the real cause of offence from both these persons does seem to be much less to do with money being offered, and more with "money being offered
"TO THE WRONG PEOPLE!" (Substack, while you're paying your secret elite cabal, could you please pay someone to code you an edit button for comment? thanks!)
So the offensiveness is that the assumption, based on early names, was that Substack was going to be a safe space for queer trans progressive all the rest of it politics and writing, and then that turned out not to be the case, and even worse Substack was happy to let disgusting warty-faced witches write and publish, and even more worser than that pay them BIG MONEY (because it turns out the warty witches were a bigger draw for a paying audience than right-on queer non-binary transgender persons).
That's what is really driving all this fury, so far as I can make out.
If you don't know who Doyle is, you can start reading Jesse Singal to catch up. Doyle had earlier accused Elizabeth Bruenig of using a sock-puppet account to sent threats about Doyle's kids, based on Doyle's own amateur linguistic analysis.
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/check-out-how-much-effort-it-takes
And yet the author is bitter because Substack alternatives are expensive...
Bluntly, if someone decides they're an undiscovered genius of the same order as Scott and Matt, and plans and acts accordingly, they deserve what they get. "Work your fingers to the bone. What d'you get? Bony fingers." as the song goes. I learned at the age of 12 that hanging out where the Cool Kids were would not make me Cool.
"Substack’s business is a scam. They claim to offer writers a level playing field for making a living, and instead they pay an elite, secret group of writers to be on the platform and make newsletter writing appear to be more lucrative than it is"
If this is a scam, then it's a scam that runs on the underpants-gnome business model. How does Substack *profit* from "making newsletter writing appear more lucrative than it is"? If Bob's career as a Substack writer is not lucrative, it's because very few people are subscribing to Bob's feed, which in turn means that Substack isn't making very much money from Bob. Unlike e.g. a newspaper, Substack can't use low-grade content as filler to space out the paid advertisements once they've hooked the reader with a shiny headline; they don't sell advertising and their customers pay a la carte.
Substack profits most from having a stable full of Scotts and Freddies and Yglesiass; if they also have "nobodies" on the platform, that makes sense if the goal is that by cultivating a field of nobodies they can get a few more Scotts and Freddies, not so much if the goal is to make the nobodies suffer by working for peanuts, bwuahahaha, because somehow profit.
It is absolutely in Substack's interest to make newsletter writing appear to be lucrative. That presumably gets them more writers, and while most of those writers will get very few subscribers, it's essentially pure profit to substack. But this is mostly me being pedantic. You're completely right that the idea that they'd actually subsidize the big writers to try to draw people to the platform is underpants gnome levels of loony. There's no way they'd make enough on the people they'd draw in, and we know they're doing fine out of the deals they've done with Scott and Matt Y, which removes any need to be nefarious.
One concern I have though is that there is kind of a fixed pool of money people are willing to spend on newsletter subscriptions. So if Substack wants to continue to grow, it will have to start lowering subscription prices which will impact their early adopters.
I think the fixed pool of time is an even bigger factor. Assuming a typical Substacker posts twice a week, how much time are you going to spend reading essays? Especially if they're all echoing the same content? It's the same problems blogs had, except with more money involved: either you have to make exceptional content or very niche content. This will be very, very successful for those who can do that. But due to the low barrier of entry, lots of people are going to try and fail because either they just aren't that great at writing/marketing their writing, or they can't find a niche to write about.
I'm running into this limit already with 4 subscriptions. And it's all high quality stuff so I'm not complaining! But there's sometimes 3 good posts a day and I just can't find the time to read them all.
Could be like gacha and ultimately rely on a smaller number of whales. With my reading habits, I could easily follow twenty or thirty blogs and not be satiated.
This isn't any different from any other subscription service, so I don't really see the problem. People are unlikely to subscribe to a ton of different services, it makes more sense to subscribe to a limited number because you have limited time.
All Substack is doing is creating a new set of things to subscribe to. As there is a market for that, they will see more money until they exhaust the audience, at which point their growth will slow and eventually stop.
Does Substack set the prices or does the author?
Isn't this the same problem in all non-ephemeral consumer entertainment? Once you get away from live performances being a primary revenue stream, you can just duplicate the best / the most popular pieces for everyone to consume instead of people having to go to community theater because they can't afford Broadway.
The author picks the price. Substack seems to encourage authors to ask for a bit more than they think is reasonable (which seems like logical advice, from a revenue-maximizing perspective).
Also logical price from the "artists are bad businesspeople and tend to undervalue their labor" perspective.
logical ADVICE. ugh!
" (which seems like logical advice, from a revenue-maximizing perspective)."
I agree with this, but I think the important corollary is that most people writing on substack want to maximise some weighted combination of audience/influence, not juts revenue, whereas substack probably values revenue comparatively more and readership comparatively less.
Or it could be that Substack's experience is that authors have a tendency to undervalue both themselves and the product - or at least overestimate the elasticity of demand - by setting prices too low.
I assume theres a huge huge lot of untapped supply of readers that read elsewhere.
The pool is assuredly not fixed. I don't pay for any forms of journalism except for ACX. If Matt Levine moved to Substack I would pay for that. So Substack has increased the pool of dollars for journalism by at least as much as I pay for ACX. Substack mostly increases the supply by moving people from free platforms to Substack which has both free and paid content.
if i'm doing business development for substack, i'm looking for people that can generate traffic and subscriptions. it's very possible that it could incentive me to choose more controversial/problematic/inflammatory people to set up deals with, because of the value prop of such writers. that is perhaps the more salient issue - and indeed, it goes the most against substack's purported mission of "fixing" media
Anyone who claims they're going to "fix" the media is wrong to begin with.
That doesn't mean they can't make a bunch of money.
To be clear, they're trying to fix the business model into something where readers directly pay writers, rather than paying editors and press owners who employ many writers. They make no claim whatsoever that the actual quality of material will improve.
On the other hand, I'm willing to invest significant consumer dollars in a platform where I can continue to read material that interests me without having to worry that someone whose politics I deplore will get the author(s) fired for wrongthink. That's "fixing" at least a small corner of the dysfunctional media.
The only thing missing in this is the implication from Jude et al that Substack was offering these upfront deals to ONLY the "bro science" or "semi-anti-woke" white/male writers like you, Yglesias, Taibbi etc. (Jesse Singal, who's in the middle of this war, claims he was NOT offered a large amount of money.)
I'm generally team Jesse, Taibbi, Yglesias & you in this debate, but is there any credence at all to their "bro's only" getting offers argument?
(PS - Jude claimed that despite being offered money to stay they were leaving Substack. But the fact that they're offering money to people with opposite views from the "bros" implies that
Substack are not ideological and actually want diverse voices, right? Maybe that's a separate issue, right from wether or not they're running a "scam".)
Also the deals offer utility (security) but in both places mentioned here it was actually a financial loss from the author's perspective. If you're against these authors why aren't you cheering Substack "scamming" their money away?
The deals may lose the authors money, but they are often what got them to write on Substack in the first place. Those who hate them would prefer them not to write, even more than they prefer them to have less money.
Although this depends on what the alternative would be. If the alternative would be that they don't write at all, those who hate them have a reason to dislike Substack. On the other hand, if some of them now write on Substack for paying subscribers only, while otherwise they would be writing on free platforms, their views now reach much fewer people, and mostly people who already agree with them anyway.
Substack claims that they have offered the deal to many other people, but that people with different politics or without an established platform don't want to get themselves in trouble by revealing it, whereas Taibbi et al are professional in-trouble-getters and less concerned.
But presumably not everyone they offered the deal to took it, right? They could say "we offered Ezra Klein a deal and he turned us down" and it wouldn't make either side look bad.
Surely they paid their #1 writer Heather Cox Richardson, who seems far from a bro science anti-woke male. Or was she the only top writer smart advance to decline the advance and actually pocket her earnings?
No offense to you, Scott, as I can guess you made virtually no money at all from slatestarcodex and probably didn't expect this, but seemingly Yglesias and others who were extremely high profile public figures and knew it should have known better.
FYI, Freddie deBoer literally JUST posted (Monday March 22nd) his Substack deal. Seems like it was 6 figures.
Damn. One of these days, I might could get famous for the writing I've been doing for the past 17 years. But I'm starting to think maybe I'm simply not that good. Nevertheless I have encountered people who told me I was better than Matthew Yglesias. Is there any standard? Perhaps I should consider the proper kind of stunts.
The only sympathy this argument will get from me will be when a) substack itself becomes the platform for discovery and recommendation, b) when the selection process then involves some version of implicit or explicit filter on views they like/ don't like. So far neither is true. Even if they do some selection for wokeness or whatever, if it includes Glen and Scott and Matt, there's enough viewpoint diversity of a kind anyway. And even in that scenario, more or less federated quasi magazine options will hopefully pop up so we have reading options and a blogging renaissance.
I believe Matt Taibbi has written on the matter too. Here's a recent tweet: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1372612686803042317.
On Substack and Protestant Reformation: https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/is-substack-the-new-protestant-reformation
SA, I'm curious: why were those figures so hard to believe? You knew the size of your readership. You also knew that it was a somewhat tightly-knit community (you won't find a group of people in Barcelona meeting up to discuss NYT articles, but there's one for SSC). So wouldn't it have been as simple as (SSC readership)*(5-20% conversion rate)*(Avg substack fee)=X?
I think the conversion rate and fee combo is probably pretty hard to predict if you have no previous data on what your readership would accept.
I asked some questions about this in a survey, extrapolated from people's answers, and predicted that I would make about 1/4 what I ended up making.
Intuitively, I'd think that SSC survey responders would represent the more dedicated readership and thus would overstate their allegiance. But if it was the opposite, then perhaps surveys on hypothetical spending choices are unreliable in general (and there is also the inherent incentive to vote against any price increase). Or perhaps the goodwill from the NYT fiasco changed the calculus for a lot of people (but this is less likely, because Substack would not have used that as an input in their calculation). And also, there could be some smaller but not insignificant effects from the pandemic-driven online media spend increases. Regardless, I'd say that the high multiplier is the cumulative appreciation for a decade of you working for us gratis, in other words: the Love Factor.
Let us pray Scott never uses this mighty power for ill! 😁
I signed up as a paying subscriber partially as an FU to the NYT, and partly because I'd like to see the results of Scott's discount psychiatry experiment. I *really* want to see it be easier/cheaper to get psychiatric care in this country; far too many of my patients also have mental health needs which are hard to meet.
Given my Substack experience, I'm not certain I'll renew next year. But we'll see. There's a long time until then.
I think it's pretty standard advice when pricing products etc. that surveys are a really bad way to approach it, and they're bad in the direction of underestimating the price that people would pay. While this isn't pricing per se, I wouldn't be surprised to see the same factors at play.
Presumably, the NYT saga substantially increased people's willingness to contribute and drove new readership to this blog.
Your prediction might actually have been correct without so much free advertising.
No kidding. That's what brought me here, thought I'd been thinking about it as a result of Greenwald's own appalling experience. Lots more FU's need to be delivered to those people.
Remuneration/elitism aside, the biggest question for me is the definition of Substack as an app/platform. If Scott would publish a twice-weekly column in a newspaper (say WSJ or The Economist), there would be remuneration but also some legal obligations for the publishers: fact checking, insurance for libel, etc.
Substack is essentially paying individuals to publish their newsletters in their platforms within their paywall. What is the legal responsibility of Substack if they are asking someone to write and publish content and pay them a fixed sum? Can they really claim they are just a platform? And if Substack is offering these "star writers" legal protections and fact-checking, etc... Are those extended to any paid substack writer that is not being given a fixed compensation at least initially?
One thing is to say this is a marketing ploy to generate traffic to the platform, but we are talking about content and the legal and moral issues around publishing.
To sum up: it is complicated.
For me the legal issues are hard because this is so pointless.
Like - what's the difference between what I'm doing on Substack, vs. me staying on my independent platform of SSC and paying someone to make me a really good subscription feature? (or switching to Ghost, or...)
As far as I can tell, the service Substack is providing is something like ambition - nobody thought this would work before Substack, Substack proved that it did, and now everyone can go off and do it without them. Sort of "common knowledge that you can make lots and lots of money from this particular blogging model".
That's fine and I'm willing to stay with them to compensate them for providing me this knowledge. But since Substack isn't providing me with any real good beyond what I would have just blogging on my own, it's hard to pinpoint what their responsibilities are.
Similarly, they're not really doing much beyond Tumblr or LiveJournal aside from paying people (or more accurately helping connect people to a payment system that their users can use). I don't think anyone thought Tumblr or LiveJournal had very much responsibility. So that would be another point in favor of them not having any.
Okay, but did Tumblr or LiveJournal crossed the line and paid individuals to publish in their platforms? Did any other app select who to give a paycheque and who would fend off for themselves? The novelty as I understand it is that Substack is giving people they choose a paycheque, even if it is a 1-year contract, and therefore it is saying implicitly or explicitly that they trust/back the writer. That is what a publication does.
They can't just say "oh, we are simply eliminating the risk for people we think will do well" because of the nature of the service they provide and what payment by them means. They are curating content, they expect those being paid to produce content continuously, and I think those are factual observations. Unfortunately I do not have a winning argument one way or the other, I just see it as a fairly intractable problem.
Anyway, truly an honour to receive a comment from you, take care.
Given that Tumblr has been sold over and over again, as Yahoo on down tried to monetise it (the past Female-Presenting Nipple Ban Controversy was over this very point, that they were trying to make it family-friendly in order to make it more attractive to potential purchasers), and that Youtube constantly badgers me about taking out a subscription, I don't think there is as much clear blue water between them and Substack as you might wish.
From what I can see, Substack said "You [Author] have already got a built-in audience who will very likely follow you over here, and there's also a good chance you will attract new people. You can charge subscriptions to make money if you want, and we'll take a slice of that. But we are willing to gamble that you can make a lot of money, so we will pay you to write on here - we don't ask you to write any particular topic or any particular view, just keep on producing content which we are confident people will be willing to pay for".
Now, we can argue over curating content by whom they choose, but let's face it - if 999 people are already writing Hottest Woke Takes content for free as well as in every other media outlet, there's not going to be much market for Number 1,000 so they're less attractive *as money-making creators* for Substack, and I don't think there is any political or other intention lurking in the snipe grass other than "how can we make a shed-load of money off this?"
Thank you for taking the time to add to the discussion here. I am not sure we are addressing the point, tough. YouTube makes money through advertising, and channel owners take a tiny slice. But there is no expectation of n videos per week, their algorithms keep feeding people stuff (and that is very problematic for a whole set of different reasons), but there is no "Hey, if you publish 3 videos per week we will pay you x regardless of viewers or clicks on ads".
Substack is ad free. Their revenue model relies on content publication accessed through a voluntary paywall/subscription service. However in the case of Scott and others the choice is not voluntary, it is an engagement to produce content. Those strings are what makes the definition of Substack as just another neutral publishing platform problematic. They are curating content -and the strategy is brilliant if you ask me-, so you can make a persuasive case to label them a media company and not a neutral app.
And yes, nothing is neutral online, so everything is neutral, but I just see a lawsuit coming their way for, say, libel, and I am not sure where and how those chips may fall. Example: You pay someone to write on a set schedule. The writer writes a piece that could be construed as hate speech. A lawsuit follows against the writer and Substack because they hired that person. Can the "neutral platform" argument hold? Or are we looking at a publisher?
Be well!
I think the "curating content" part is where the crux of the dispute lies. If it can be demonstrated that Substack is deliberately paying large sums to right-wing/right-leaning/the Bad Side in the Culture Wars writers, to produce Bad Side content, and supporting them in order to lure in hapless innocents who will then fall into their wicked clutches and have their pure minds corrupted by wrongthink, then yeah it's a publisher not a platform.
But one at least of the people complaining says they were offered such a deal by Substack which they refused, and two of the complainants mention names on the woke/progressive/queer trans nonbinary everything else side that were already on Substack and which convinced them to join up too.
So I think it's hard to say that Substack is curating particular content for a particular political/social point of view, rather than "offering mo' money to people who will generate a shit-ton of revenue for them because they already have an established audience, are controversial and attract readers who want to argue with them as well as readers who support them, or both".
I'm - well, I can't honestly say I'm sorry because I'm not, but I'm definitely not gloating (honestly not doing so) that Annalee Newitz couldn't convert their Hugo-award winning podcast audience into enough paid subscriptions and/or grow an audience off the back of it to make it worth their while to stick around on Substack, but I don't think that is the fault of Substack.
> I just see a lawsuit coming their way for, say, libel, and I am not sure where and how those chips may fall.
If someone uses Substack to commit unambiguous libel, I expect Substack to delete that article, and possibly ban that author, without much controversy: that would pretty clearly violate their content rules' (https://substack.com/content) ban on "anything that violates laws or regulations." Even if they did not (or if the case was ambiguous enough for them to decide it wasn't libel), Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would protect Substack from a lawsuit on that basis (see the explanation of the law at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml).
Unfortunately I do not think it is so straightforward. Take for example the Lou Dobbs situation, Fox canned the (very profitable) show because they have liability in a libel suit. What a potential litigation would explore is the very claim that Substack, by offering certain individuals a guaranteed pay in exchange for a steady stream of work, can indeed take umbrage under Section 230. I do not see it as a slam dunk.
Paycheque is the wrong term. It's really just an insurance policy, much the same way as you make a bet every year with the insurance company of the likelihood of your house burning down.
The "trust" Substack has for a writer they offer a Pro deal has nothing to do with the virtue or politics of their content, and everything to do with objective markers of that writer's popularity. I have 400 Twitter followers; Matt Yglesias has 500,000. It's pretty clear which one of us is a safe commercial bet to hand $250,000 to in exchange for 85% of his Year 1 revenue on Substack.
I guess we have different definitions of insurance. If Substack would have told Scott or Yglesias "hey, you start charging and if you do not make at least $X by month 2 we will cover the difference until you reach X", that is insurance. But what they did is to say "Do not worry about income, we will pay you a set amount and anything extra we will keep as profit". That to me is not insurance, that is an employment relationship (employers keep the profits and they have every right to do so), or at the very least a contract for services.
What's the difference between publishing your own pamphlet or newsletter, vs. writing for the Post?
Is your claim really that you get zero benefit from being on substack, but are doing it out of goodwill?
Reputation. Substack brand guarantees nothing about the type or quality of content. I can write whatever nonsense I want right now. Wikipedia e.g. allows some news outlets as sources, no matter the author.
As to your second paragraph, what are the obvious benefit you see him getting?
so... i would like to calibrate myself to see how abnormal my thinking is. can you say what maybe the top 3 benefits would be?
A part of the fact-checking and other editorial services is to protect the brand. Also I believe there is some protection newspapers have when the authors are freelancers that they don't have when they are staff writers. I think Volokh said something on this recently but after a 5-minute search, can't find it.
"much more than I conceivably deserve for writing online articles"
How do you figure? I feel I'm getting more value from you than you are getting from me. Having interesting things to read makes my life better in a meaningful way. And I'm happy to pay for the privilege.
I'd like to add that when I saw Astral Codex Ten I immediately reached out for my wallet; after subscribing, I realized I wasn't doing it for the future content. It felt more like repaying a debt, for "Unsong", "Meditations on Moloch", "Sort by controversial", etc, etc. that I enjoyed for free for the last two years. I don't feel like a paying subscriber, more like accumulating new debt. :-)
Since there's no "heart" button anymore, let me just spell it out: yes, this is exactly how I felt too, only you put it into words a lot better than I could.
Yup.
That plus the hope that my 'contribution' encourages Scott to continue writing on the margin.
Same here! My immediate reaction was “of course I’ll pay it, already given the historical content” and “hopefully me paying signal that people are appreciating his time”
I was willing to pay for it for the same reasons I'm willing to pay for an apple. If I lived next to someone who didn't mind my picking his apples for free, I wouldn't pay a nickel for an apple. If I'm on a lunch break in town and am hungry for an apple that costs a nickel, I'll cheerfully pay the nickel. What's complicated about it? Nobody owes me an apple, but I like paying for one and encouraging him to keep growing them and bringing them to me under convenient circumstances. He'll probably use my nickel to pay someone else to do the same for him. That's an economy. I like economies.
Yeah, same here. I got all this amazing stuff for free, now I can repay some of that. Plus I also get more amazing stuff!
This is why I started a subscription to Razib Khan's content, back when there were just exclusive posts on GNXP and before he started a Substack. It was because I'd been reading him since basically 2002. Hard for Scott to compete with that :)
Yup. Every cent is well deserved. The world would be a worse place without SSC and ACT. Scott should consider our subscription fees an act of effective altruism: keeping a valuable source of sanity and insight flowing.
Scott has mentioned in previous blogs that blogging comes naturally to him - it's something thing he does for fun in his free time - which I imagine makes it hard to believe that he's doing something as valuable as, say, psychiatry.
Does substack offer a kind of spotify-esque subscription where I can just pay once for access to everyone and let the algorithm worry about figuring out who gets how much of my subscription?
I realize that this is a failure mode in how I handle financial transactions, but I absolutely despise reoccurring payments and try to keep as few of them going as possible. If I like, say, Singal/Weiss/Sullivan/Yglesias/Taibbi/Scott equally - odds are I'm going to end up spending money on none of them because I'd find having that many reoccurring transactions too stressful to manage and I'd feel undue pressure to divide my time equally amongst all of them.
If, on the other hand, I could just buy the "substack Plus" or whatever package, I could know that I'm spending money that would eventually get to the writers I like without having to specifically commit to signing up with them. I would likely pay a couple % premium on top for the convenience of not having to manage multiple individual reoccurring payments.
I think this just recreates the problem Substack is trying to solve, you’re not willing to pay enough to support Singal AND Weiss AND Sullivan etc. Substack plus would end up looking like Spotify, which doesn’t pay out enough to support most artists.
I mean, yes and no.
I probably wouldn't pay $5 x number of writers I read. But I currently pay $0. Adding this option would increase the amount I'd pay per month probably to somewhere in the $10-$30 range depending on good the deal was.
I think you're right that there's some kind of bundle that could work here, maybe bulk discounts? Pick 5 writers at $10 a month and get them all for $40? I'm just not sure that paying one price for *everything* on Substack could work out for the writers.
A problem is that they don't charge the same rates. Scott charges more than Matt who charges more than Freddie who charges more than Jesse. (I just checked. None of them are the same.)
Either the person charging more gets screwed in this deal, or you assign the money pro-rata, so Scott gets twice as much as Jesse, and that system is subject to abuse. (I don't think any of those specific people are cut-throat enough to abuse the system by charging more just to grab a bigger part of a fixed pie, but you'd need to craft a policy around it and things get sticky.)
I didn't know this and it definitely weakens my argument.
You could probably still make it work if authors were allowed to charge a differential bundle price. Scott could say I want $10 for single subscriber $8 as part of a 5 sub bundle, $5 as part of at 10 sub bundle etc etc. The author could still set those prices.
Why would Scott do that? Maybe because as a form of price discrimination it allows him to maximize revenue by picking off subscribers who have lower marginal benefit of ACX.
My only complaint is this article fails to take a perfectly valid opportunity to use "datum" in the title.
Did you actually address any of the points made by Substack's critics introduced in the first paragraph?
Your story about potential compensation doesn't seem relevant to the concern that non-pro authors were laboring with imperfect financial understanding, information that (per Substack's critics) was maliciously concealed in order to drive growth. You instead addressed a different argument, that Substack was being manipulative in regards to potential pay during their Pro offering. This fundamentally...isn't the criticism. It feels almost like you're trying to bait-and-switch the arguments, writing a counter to the argument that the pro offering itself was sleazy instead of the (actual) argument that the concealed nature of the pro offering misled non-pro writers.
Nor do you seem to address the editorial criticism, that Substack is using the section 230 liability shield while covering up their editorial decisions that disqualify them from being eligible for that shield. Maybe that's just too inside baseball, but you did bring it up, so I feel like it's fair to point out that you didn't address that argument.
For what it's worth, I don't think the problematic argument holds much merit.
> Did you actually address any of the points made by Substack's critics introduced in the first paragraph?
So, I think the critics are getting something confused, and trying to straighten out the confusion looks like 'missing the point' from the critic's perspective.
From the critic's perspective, Scott-as-wealthy-winner was "picked by" Substack. The sense in which that's true is that Substack looked at Scott, thought he would be a winner, and offered him a bet that put their money where their mouth is (i.e. buying most of the upside of Scott moving to Substack by taking on all of the downside). The sense in which it's false is that Substack didn't *turn* Scott into a winner, in the way that a movie producer might turn someone into a movie star by giving a role to one of a dozen equally beautiful actresses (and that role now means they can get other roles, and so on).
If Substack's Pro deals mostly make money for Substack (which I imagine they do; Substack is the party with more info in this scenario!), then it's really hard to believe that Substack is doing anything nefarious. If the deals are more even, or losing money, then this argument starts to make sense--imagine a company that offered Pro deals at a loss to people critical of Erdogan. But, like, nothing was stopping people like Scott or the critics from just signing up for Substack.
So here's where I'm wondering... where is the deception? Substack *didn't* mislead Scott, or anyone else, about how much money they would make on the site. If the existence of pro writers is misleading, it's mostly *underselling* how much money is available for top writers. "Matt Yglesias pays Substack $400k to avoid downside risk" is a very different story from "Substack pays Matt Yglesias $250k to try joining the site", but the first is the real story!
>If the deals are more even, or losing money, then this argument starts to make sense
Hypothetically, if Substack had made a bunch of losing deals, how would you know? Imagine Substack pays a writer an advance, and that writer turns out a dozen low-effort posts which drive little traffic, but fulfill the contract. They leave after a year, taking the advance. You wouldn't hear about them - neither Substack nor the writer has an incentive to say anything about it.
>If Substack's Pro deals mostly make money for Substack (which I imagine they do; Substack is the party with more info in this scenario!)
Does Substack have more information than the writer? The writer has inside information about future stories and how motivated they are about writing about them.
Agreed that there could be lots of silent losing deals, but I doubt it, and think the possibility doesn't line up with my models of markets.
> Does Substack have more information than the writer? The writer has inside information about future stories and how motivated they are about writing about them.
Substack has subscription stats for all of the other writers already on Substack. Scott can run surveys of people who answer surveys linked in SSC, but that's very different from how many people silently pull out their wallets.
Based on what substack has said, there are requirements for content frequency in the contract. I think it's something like 2/week, which puts a limit on how much someone can do with "take the advance and run". As for the idea of just posting filler, I suspect that's not going to happen because of the reputational damage it would do to the writer. Ultimately, that's what is going to draw people to their substack and get them good deals in other outlets, and it's not something to be thrown away lightly.
And I'm pretty dang sure Substack picked Scott because of the publicity from the NYT story, which luckily has turned out okay for Scott, but it's rather in the same sense that "I was mangled in an accident but the court case I took awarded me several million". Yes it's nice to get it, but you'd rather not be horribly mangled in the first place, and I am willing to bet that Scott would have preferred not to be tagged as some kind of witch-loving supporter of witches by Cade Metz in the service of publicising his new book on AI.
@Vaniver
Very good observation.
I think that this reflects a difference in perspective, which is probably because many of the critics are very institutional-minded. In their world, papers like the NYT decide which journalists are being read, the Hugo's decide what scifi/fantasy books are getting read, etc.
This may have a substantial impact on how they interact with substack, for example, where:
- these people fail at their substacks because they write primarily to please a small elite of decision makers and/or put their best writing outside substack in places that get credit from those decision makers, even though this results in very few paying subscribers.
- these people's politics being shaped greatly by this feeling of being dependent on and part of the system, which makes them feel that the system should have power & then should use that power to benefit them. Substack might then feel like an insult and upending of their entire worldview, because you've suddenly got people who don't need to pay their dues, get approval from above, etc.
"information that (per Substack's critics) was maliciously concealed in order to drive growth"
Information that Substack's critics are *claiming* was maliciously concealed. Given that one of them seems to be labouring under the delusion "how is it that I, a noted queer trans author of queer trans SF stories and a podcast that won a Hugo! who worked for Gizmodo and io9! am not being offered largesse to write for them by Substack like these other names are? plainly it must be a sinister cabal of transphobes at work!" and not, you know, that there really isn't a huge paying audience for queer trans SF despite winning a Hugo (now that you've run off the horrible types like the Sad and Rabid Puppies) so you're not really a draw for bringing in lots of subscribers, I'm going to stick with "unless and until they can show real evidence that shenanigans are taking place, and not just hurt feelings over people they politically disagree with doing better than them, I'm not going to believe it's all a scam".
Not that I think Substack is shining virtuousness, but that's the point: it's a *business*. Businesses exist to make money. It's not in business to be pro- or anti- anyone's point of view, it's here to make money out of bloggers in a new iteration of the old ways.
I think it would help if they could decide between "it's a scam to make people join" and "they have an agenda to push the views of unsavory people".
That the two were so seemingly intertwined made me conclude that even the 'scam' claim was almost certainly bullshit. The 'all of the Subtack paid authors are transphobes' – not just that they're unsavory, but all transphobes too, broke my 'interpret charitably' module.
"Nor do you seem to address the editorial criticism, that Substack is using the section 230 liability shield while covering up their editorial decisions that disqualify them from being eligible for that shield."
This is not what Section 230 says. You can find the full text of the law here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
All 230 says is that only the actual writer of something may be held civilly liable for it (with a couple exceptions for e.g. copyright violation). If a Substack writer posts something defamatory, that writer can be held liable, but not Substack themselves. Without that protection, Substack would have to manually review every single thing posted to the platform for anything that might be legally actionable, and prevent the writers from posting that. This is not reconcilable with being a major newsletter site. Heck, they'd probably have to review every comment on every newsletter too, and that probably makes the task an order of magnitude harder. This also opens them up to malicious attacks where someone anonymously posts illegal material and sues the company for having allowed it up.
Now, what about the fact that Substack has selected a few people to get the Pro treatment? This doesn't really change the equation. The author is "another information content provider," just one with a different remunerative model than most authors on Substack. (Remember, everyone is getting paid by Substack! The folks on Substack Pro just agreed to a primarily advance-based model instead of a subscription-only one, but even in the latter case the readers are paying Substack who then pays the author.) That the authors are specially selected doesn't actually make Substack the speaker, any more you subscribing to ACX makes you responsible for Scott's speech.
Note that Substack themselves can be held liable. If Substack the company posts something defamatory, go right ahead and sue them.
Right, that's the argument that I expected Scott to touch on. From his quoted article:
"By doing this, Substack is creating a de facto editorial policy. Their leadership -- let’s call them editors -- are deciding what kinds of writing and writers are worthy of financial compensation. And you don’t know who those people are. That’s right -- Substack is taking an editorial stance, paying writers who fit that stance, and refusing to be transparent about who those people are."
I think that there's a lot of nuance as to whether Substack's selection of authors constitutes editorial control. In the same way that the NYT is not the speaker when their journalists write defamatory articles, but NTY is liable all the same, you could argue that Substack is not the speaker, but is liable.
Is "whomever will bring in more subscriptions so as to maximize revenue" really an editorial policy? Is there any evidence that it's not just this, which is the typical modus operandi of essentially every modern corporation?
In effect, the group of authors that got paid are *self-selected*: they are popular enough for Substack to bring value to Substack, but skeptical that they will earn as much as Substack claims. So Substack proves they have better data than the writers themselves, and the writers who are still willing to entertain it get paid.
So Substack didn't make the writers already popular, didn't make the writers skeptical, and didn't make them take the deal. At which step does the alleged editorial policy suddenly appear?
Having editorial policy doesn't mean they don't get Section 230 protection. They can editorialize whatever they want. They
> you could argue that Substack is not the speaker, but is liable.
You could, pre-Section 230. There is no requirement to be "hands off" or be fair or anything. It's why Twitter can nuke conservative accounts all day and maintain Section 230 protection.
Hypothetically, if Substack wanted to do a fraud, they could inflate subscriber numbers for writers under contract in order to make their platform look better than it is. I doubt this is actually happening, though; it's just a thing that jumped to mind when reading that the real subscriber numbers turned out to be very close to the predicted ones. (It's the sort of thing that would be more likely to happen in a scenario where traffic was starting to fall, and someone was desperate to pump up the numbers to hide the decline.)
(I think this is a lot less likely than similar reference-class types of fraud that do happen, because there are actual cash payments to the writers involved. Since writers are still getting paid per subscriber, just less than face value, someone would have to be ponying up the money for the fake subscribers. Whereas in ad-fraud cases, usually the fake clicks are removed enough from the actual money flows that it's hard to prove where they're actually coming from. And in bitcoin exchange fake-volume cases, it doesn't cost the exchanges anything to make fake transactions by trading with themselves.)
Hypothetically, Substack could collude with a writer to inflate subscriber counts. But since no metrics are public, this would amount to the writer just lying about what they make.
I guess, having no public metrics leaves them up to the imagination, so we are talking about imaginary subscriber count fraud?
I have a very hard time seeing what they are complaining about - you can build a nice audience and get paid without an advance - lots of writers do - isn't the model we should be comparing it to the publishing industry rather than the media industry - some authors get nice advances, some don't - several writers on substack are serializing books - I'm paying to sub for 2 authors I would have read for free or jsut not read - substack is paying writers - again, what is the problem? Also Greenwald and Jesse aren't anti- trans, that ridiculous...
I suspect that the main reason for most of the Substack critics to dislike it is that they're orthodox progressives and they don't want people they perceive as enemies of orthodox progressivism (which ranges from someone like Matt Yglesias, who is mostly progressive but disagrees with treating ideas as traumatic to the extent that many modern journalists do, to people whose opinions are actually strongly opposed to large parts of progressivism, like Moldbug or Graham Linehan) having a platform they can use to make money from their writing. The accusations of scamming are at least partly an excuse for this.
The whole 'scam' angle on this thing seems to basically boil down to whether you think capitalism is a scam or not. People who can effectively sell writing get money, people who cannot effectively sell writing do not get money. Substack provides a service in exchange for some share of that money, and has an interest in spending money (recruiting writers) to acquire more money. If this all sounds like a scam that's because you believe something along the lines of "profit calculations should not drive decisions" or "it's unfair that some people are given opportunities that others are not". Which are totally fair things to believe! I just don't get how that has anything to do with substack.
Because these people do (apparently) think capitalism is bad and Substack is the capitalist that is out-competing them by offering a better value proposition than legacy media. That's why there is no coherent argument, they are just upset.
There are plenty of coherent arguments against capitalism. I suggest starting here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
I've read plenty of Marx and I've yet to see a coherent argument. Perhaps this escaped you and other marxists because of false consciousness. There are coherent arguments against capitalism but the marxists have yet to discover them, likely because they don't justify expropriation which is the entire point of marxism.
For example, your link, Section 1, paragraph 4, Marx makes a catastrophic error for a would-be economist: "Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value."
Here Marx has revealed that he lacks understanding of savings, potential, and contingent circumstances, indicating that he fails to understand the need for the working class to plan for the future by considering possibilities and accumulating commodities that may not be used. In this (extraordinarily common) circumstance, value is in the holding, not the use or consumption.
Every page of Marx is riddled with such fallacies, hundreds of lifetimes are not sufficient opportunity to repair Marx.
The main value of Marx' body of work is as an existence proof for negative utility or negative value.
Hoarding something for future consumption by the owner of said commodity would still count as a use-value. I think this is your own error in comprehending Marx.
No, Marx clearly states that he refers to consumption, not savings ("hoarding" is a pejorative employed by bourgeois parasites who are dismayed at the fact that capitalism creates such vast surpluses of commodities that working class individuals are able to accumulate surpluses and thereby are no longer dependent on constancy of wage-labor). Demonization of savings is an attempt to keep the working class in a constant state of precarity so they are vulnerable to bourgeois extortion.
The error is in Marx' own writings and Marxists are apparently so accustomed to redefining words in order to repair Marx' obvious fallacies that it is no longer deliberate deception, but habitual false consciousness.
If that is beyond your comprehension, no need to give up. Marx has enough fallacies that we can play this game until the heat death of the universe. In the very next section, Marx makes an extremely amateur error: "It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third."
Here Marx fails to consider the interests of the parties to the exchange, and fallaciously asserts that exchange value refers to some thing that is equivalent between the two commodities. This is ludicrous and idiotic, and symptomatic of Marx own failure to understand the nature of value. The person who exchanges corn for iron prefers the iron to the corn, just as the other party to the exchange prefers the corn to the iron. This is a Pareto improvement, because both parties have become better without anyone becoming worse. The total amount of value has increased, revealing the wonder of voluntary exchange: positive sum interaction! This is an incredible insight into human relations, society, economics, and materialism. Characteristically, all of this is invisible to Marx, who stumbles along blundering into fallacy after fallacy.
Truly, Marx is an boundless fount of error.
You're creating a false dichotomy that isn't present in Marx. It doesn't matter to Marx if a commodity is consumed immediately or if it's saved for a portion of time. Its use-value is the subjective use we get out of actually consuming/using the product.
The preferences of the party don't matter regarding exchange value, that's correct.
Aw come on. It's more fun to be part of a sinister cabal. The main moral objection should be about the dress code. No more authoring in pajamas - it's all white cats and suspicious umbrellas now.
The whole point of being part of a sinister cabal is that you get to take part in shadowy video calls where the other people see only your silhouette, thereby hiding that you are in fact just sitting there in your pyjamas.
Hey - working from home has transformed me into a member of a sinister cartel. Which might explain why I had a video call earlier with the top of a (very pleasant) man's hat...
Nobody claims that youtubers are really working for Youtube. It's hard for me to see how the situation of writers who publish on Substack is really any different.
Youtube doesn't give creators advances to be on their platform (as far as I know). However, I wonder if they'd have the same criticisms about say Twitch or Mixer, which do.
Yeah as far as I can tell substack is twitch/mixer/Facebook gaming/YouTube Gaming, but for blogging.
Youtube does commission work from creators.
Youtube did poach some Twitch streamers (Valkyrae and Courage, for example), they just weren't quite as high profile as the Mixer deals.
I imagine there's quite a bit of "Advance Envy" going on here. As in, (stylized internal dialogue) "no no, those guys aren't more marketable and successful writers than I am, they just fell for Substack's scam. They're gonna take it on the chin in a couple years when [something vague but negative sounding happens]. Me and my fellow Twitter jabberers scratching out a living writing freelance articles for six different publications at a time and not being offered a full time gig at any of them, ever...that's just how it is these days."
I never understood one thing. Does the Substack agreement involve some kind of obligation to churn out N nr of posts per month or something, so that conceivably early-career writers could be fooled into "working for Substack", so to say. On the other hand, even if the Substack career failed to take off, wouldn't it be quite easy to just quickly pump out N half-assed school essays on the English middle class during the 17th century or something? Also, Substack doesn't seem to demand exclusivity since I've seen some who blog in multiple places.
My (outsider) understanding of it is that Substack just provides a publishing platform and a subscription interface, in exchange for 10% of the revenue that gets made via said subscription interface, and does not have any sort of editorial control over the writers.
Well, then it cannot be a scam. That settles that, I suppose.
The only real way for it to be a scam would be for Substack to buy subscriptions to itself to make it seem like a better business than it actually is.
"I'm making much more than I thought possible, much more than I conceivably deserve for writing online articles"
I don't see how you can possibly know that. If your articles nudge beliefs a little in the direction of truth, they could easily make the world better off by a billion dollars. If they nudge beliefs in the wrong direction, they could make it worse off by a billion dollars. The range of possible desert is enormous.
Considered merely as a consumption good for your readers, your blog is worth a good deal more to me than the subscription price. I suspect that's true for most subscribers, and obviously it is an additional net benefit to those who read it for free.
It's unsympathetic of me, but my default assumption is that this is 99% driven by anger that the wrong people are being platformed and indeed seem to be prospering. Any mechanism that allowed Jesse Singal to make a good living writing for a large audience was going to be offensive to this bunch, and all the complaints about how it's all straight white men (you know--like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan) or it's an exploitative business model (because a proper business model would involve more unpaid interns) or whatever is just after-the-fact justification.
I think that the complaints are largely due to Sour Grapes Syndrome (SGS).
If Substack wanted to set up a little side-business producing vinegar from all the sour grapes being harvested, they could give Sarson's a run for their money! https://www.sarsons.co.uk/how-vinegar-is-made
The complaining posts I've read about "scam" and worse really are sour grapes productions. The person hopped onto Substack because they heard it was the new shiny thing, or they heard So-and-So got really popular and is now widely known because of Substack, so they wanted the same thing.
And then they heard that some people were getting Big Money for being on Substack, and not alone that, but Substack was courting those people! Enticing them with people to peel grapes and fan them! And then they got very huffy about "but why isn't Substack courting *me*? I am Big Name!" and hence all the "It is a scam and a sinister plot and other bad things".
I have to admit, I'm enjoying the huffing and puffing and foot-stamping by people I have never heard of, who seem to assume that everyone should have heard of them because they worked for, or had something published in, some online magazine.
But then, I am a horrible person.
Cringing my way through the linked article (side note, you can't just say "I'm going to call this, oh say X, so now it should be subjected to all the requirements I think X should be"), it seems that their real concern is giving a platform to People They Disagree With.
It must be a sign of something that skimming through the supposedly problematic stuff most of it seemed pretty reasonable, but a sign of what I'm not sure.
It's worse than merely giving a platform to the wrong people.
The traditional way to attack wrong people is to try getting them fired. Make enough publicity, and the employer's HR department will choose the easy way out. It is an asymmetric weapon, because you can't complain to the woke journalist's employer "hey, your writer is controversial" if that's literally what they are paid for.
Then, Peterson happened. A guy who had a product to sell... and not only they failed to get him fired, but all the publicity translated into increased sales. More importantly, the product was not political, so the sales will continue for some time even when the controversy is over. Because, for his fans, he is not fungible with yet another controversial person of the week.
Having a Substack blog with interesting non-political content and a few paying subscribers can give you "Peterson insurance". A massive online attack can translate to permanently increased income from your side job... maybe not enough to pay your bills, but it may reduce your worst fears.
Personally I’m super happy to be able to pay for this content. Makes me sleep better at night.
Secondly, this just looks like good business and a win-win scenario. Kudos to sub stack for putting their skin in the game instead of just empty promises. They get the additional upside (which is perfectly fine because they put their skin in the game) and you got to eliminate your downside.
If you can say, would you have been in breach of contract to take Substack's advance and just post nothing for this whole first year? How about to take the advance and just resume posting things on SSC?
Actually that linked article calling Substack a "scam" is itself a scam. The guy starts out with what is already a pretty dumb thesis -- i.e., that Substack is somehow falsely "promising" people that they will get rich quick by bloviating on the internet. The "bait" in this plot is having successful authors on the site. None of that makes any sense because Substack charges nothing for the platform itself and just takes a slice of whatever you generate in fees. Totally transparent and you can take-it-or-leave it.
But that irrational complaint was itself mere "bait," the "switch" is that . . . wait for it . . . the real problem is there's not enough SJW censorship on Substack:
"Substack has become famous for giving massive advances — the kind that were never once offered to me or my colleagues, not up front and not after the platform took off — to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry."
Yep. Notorious Nazis like Matt Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald are being allowed to reach their followers, while SJW bloggers are not getting the same exposure because their Party Line talking points about why everything is racist and transphobic just aren't getting traction with paid subscribers for some reason.
Bottom Line: Letting people publish and read what they want is a "scam" because it results in the free exchange of unapproved thoughts. Everything always circles back to this same point for the Woke.
Yup.
Has Yglesias ever actually offered an anti-woke take about trans issues in particular?
He signed an anti cancel culture letter published in Harper's: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
His colleague Emily Van Der Werf complained to Vox HR that this made her feel unsafe because this letter has anti-trans dog whistles in it (I can't tell what they are). I'm looking at the list of names and it doesn't exactly seem like a bunch of deplorables and least from who I can recognize. Gloria Steinem? Margaret Atwood?
But anyway, this is why he left Vox. He wanted to be able to hold publicly stated positions that run afoul of woke orthodoxy without it being an HR issue. There is no reasonable interpretation of any of this that makes him anti-trans, but I think it's pretty obvious Annalee Newitz's position here is more reactive than thought out.
Yeah, I knew about the letter. But I wondered if I had missed something where him actually saying anything about trans issues. But sadly, it doesn't surprise that he could end up as 'a notorious transphobe' to some people without actually ever saying anything on trans issues. Someone somewhere probably thinks that Scott is a "notorious transphobe" even though as far as I remember, his position on trans rights is indistinguishable from trans activists, because some people think that if you hold one non-woke position, you must hold them all (especially if your a straight white man who engages in "just asking questions").
How do you know it's why he left?
I think there is only one answer to the following questions: If tomorrow, 100 far left-wing writers, each with a significant existing audience showed interest in Substack, would Substack give them all a deal at similar terms as they have to other writers? The answer is YES. It's YES for right-wing. It's YES for no-wing. It's YES. They're just trying to make a buck. It's really that simple.
> They call this group of writers the “Substack Pro” group, and they are rewarded with “advances” that Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie calls “an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform [that’s] more attractive to a writer than a salary, so they don’t have to stay in a job (or take one) that’s less interesting to them than being independent.” In other words, it’s enough money to quit their day jobs. They also get exposure through Substack’s now-considerable online reach.
> By doing this, Substack is creating a de facto editorial policy. Their leadership -- let’s call them editors -- are deciding what kinds of writing and writers are worthy of financial compensation. And you don’t know who those people are. That’s right -- Substack is taking an editorial stance, paying writers who fit that stance, and refusing to be transparent about who those people are.
How can Substack both simultaneously provide these people exposure and also not be transparent about who they are?
They're saying that substack is subsidizing non-savories to write while everyone else has to compete on their own merits. Which is in effect to argue that substack isn't *that* ruthlessly profit-focused.
For as far as it goes, my estimate of substack's costs in building a semi-clunky website/email service plus off the shelf payment processing is almost nothing. If they have the seed money to buy our host here and a handful of others - well, good. I like this service and I am spending about 120 bucks a year on it.
My advice to the people who own this thing is complete stonewalling of any press on any topic. It never pays to talk to the press. Allow them to make a submission to an email you never check.
"Uh huh," they explained.
I remember mentioning something like this a couple of times. I think I even did a back of the napkin calculation on how much you could make with some very non-aggressive monetization. What I really find curious is that I thought this was incredibly, incredibly obvious. But everyone's reaction seemed to be along your lines.
I feel a bit like I've discovered something vastly atypical about my mind. What did you find strange about the idea you could make money doing this? That Substack was getting the better end of that deal? What was unbelievable about it?
Freddie DeBoer just posted screenshots of the entirety of his advance an hour ago. It's not bad but roughly half what I'm going to earn this year as an anonymous nobody working for the federal subsidiary of a well-known but certainly not giant player in the software world loaned out to try and modernize the Air Force's developer platform. It's a decent living, but I'm nowhere near even the median of the people in the major hubs, located as I am in Texas.
Is writing at all just a scam? There are 20 or so George Martins/JK Rowlings in the world while everyone else is fighting for table scraps and the chance to make it big earning a quarter of an average person at Facebook? My best friend from college is an Emmy winner and lives in an apartment the size of my bedroom. It seems worse trying to be a writer than even trying to be a pro athlete or a rock star. At least, even though you're probably going to fail, you'll be popular in the process and people will want to fuck you.
I'm guessing you're doing better than Freddie, but probably not Matt Yglesias level. I believe he's #2 on the entire platform? I know I'd read that somewhere and that Heather Cox Richardson was #1, but now I can't find where substack publishes that information.
Had two friend-of-the-family who wrote scripts for Hollywood professionally. One would draw ire whenever he gave a class on screenwriting because he said very clearly that your primary revenue stream was not from produced works, but instead from works that will be optioned perpetually. A produced work is nice for a paycheck and to ensure your other works get optioned, but you will turn out a lot of scripts that will never be produced and yet continue to earn you a check for years.
The other quit to become a real estate agent.
Jobs pay you in a lot of different ways. Some pay you in cash. Some pay you in the feeling you get when you teach a kid to read. Others pay you in the ability to walk around and say you're a writer and hang out in the writer scenes.
Also feel the need to point out: sometimes (often?) the people who can be successful writers are not people who can be successful programmers (where successful means closer-to-median, not superstar).
Programmer probably isn't the best counterfactual. Corporate marketing/PR drone is a closer more pay less meaning alternative. (I wonder how many people overworking themselves trying to get into journalism would be better off earning money from 9-5 and writng meaningful things for free after work)
At a slight tangent, it seems to me that some of the best people in the SCA fit that pattern. They make a living in a not very interesting 9-5 job and put the rest of their time and most of their thought into their hobby — making museum quality early medieval jewelry, or helping run a comedia del arte troupe, or translating a medieval cookbook, or ...
Honestly, at one point long ago, I wanted to be a writer, and I can understand that, if this was still 1960 and that scene was Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady trolling around with Tim Leary getting high riding around the great American countryside in a converted school bus, but whatever fun there once was in that scene seems dead. Now you get to spend all day in your twin size bed smashing the like button on Twitter when the friends you may have met once in the past five years all decide to mob on someone.
Agreed--people often overlook the inherent pleasures of some jobs. Free-market wages reflect not only how much other people value the work, and how rare the ability is, but the excess of those two factors over the value of the work to the worker himself.
I work as a writers' assistant on a big network TV show. The lowest level writer in the room makes about $2,400/week, and then $73,000 for every script that they write (usually 1 for lower level, 2-4 for higher) including another payment every time it airs. It's incredibly hard to get the job, and even if it get it that doesn't mean you'll keep getting work, but if you are a working television writer you are generally making a good living.
As far as I can tell, the big issue is the "doesn't mean you'll keep getting work" part. Making a very high weekly rate is great, but it's not so great when you're only getting paid anything at all for as long as the studio decides to keep airing your show, which is one season for most shows.
Very true. There is lots of luck involved.
> Is writing at all just a scam? There are 20 or so George Martins/JK Rowlings in the world while everyone else is fighting for table scraps and the chance to make it big earning a quarter of an average person at Facebook?
At least for fiction, being a writer is a dream for a lot of people. As with every job that is someone else's dream job, you shouldn't try to get into it if you don't share that dream and are willing to get paid way below what you could make elsewhere (and risk not getting there at all)
It was many of these people's beliefs that traditional publications actually selected for what people wanted to read and that the gate keeping was quality control. They are now smacked with the choice between realizing this was not the case or believing that there is a shadowy organization propping up the people their previous institutions would have gate kept.
My take on this as a complete nobody is that I was thinking of starting a substack, not because I have any pretentions of it ever making a cent, but because it seems like the best free option available to me. I've seen a few people on ACXD start substacks recently for what I assume is the same reason.
Buy house (and take more risk to gain more money) or rent apartment (and lose money to avoid risk).
You, like me, chose to rent.
Some people have been saying Substack can't 'fix the media' because there's still a need for news, but maybe it can (at least help) indirectly fix the media. If substack (or similar platforms) effectively outcompete newspapers in the oped business (even poaching away the most read opinion writers), it may also poach away the people who read newspapers for the opeds, leaving the 'news-oriented' readers behind, forcing newspapers to focus more on delivering straight news. Many newspapers would of course not survive, but the ones that do may be come more reliable news sources because of the unbundling of opinion writing from news.
Why couldn't the Substack model work for news, provided there was a writer who was good at reading publicly available information and summarizing what he found?
Among other things, most "publicly available information" can't be read. If you want pictures of Biden's immigrant-kid-containment-facilities so you can see if they are more or less cage-like than Trump's or Obama's, or if you want to hear whether your city councilmen are trying to sell the neighborhood park to a condominium developer, that's not a priori googleable. Someone has to do serious legwork, e.g. sitting through hours of boring city council meetings, and the person who does that may not be the best person for the write-up-a-summary part of the job.
And neither one of them is likely to be the best person for the manage-a-collaborative-team job. The raw data gathering part of the news business is a team effort; Substack's policy of giving all the money to the one public-facing member of the team seems less than optimal for incentivizing this.
Jonah Goldberg has set up The Dispatch, which is a team substack that looks like a pretty good smallish news-and-commentary magazine from a conservative-but-not-Trump editorial point of view. That might be a reasonable model for supporting some level of reporting, though you're still at the national/international level and not at the "figure out what the county school board is doing with all that money that seems to disappear into their maintenance budget while no schools are getting repaired" level.
Talent like life finds a way. Not everyone is capable of being a hard pressing journalist without an editor and lawyers, but some can handle it just fine while being newsworthy. You are a market maker, but possibly the tip not the spear...
Substack’s business model is giving maximum freedom to writers (no censor, no editing) while ensuring the contents are aligned with Substack’s values (political tastes, truthfulness...) by cherry-picking which writers are invited/incentivized to Substack platform.
This is nothing new. The “incentivized” part is not an evidence of malice.
What is the evidence that they are they selecting for content, rather than what draws subscribers?
At the minimum, Substack should exclude popular writers who attact high views only because he/she write about weird contents, i.e: Conspiracy, extremist, sex/violence-provoking ect...
Why should they do that? I mean, if someone wants to write a substack about his UFO / celebrity gossip conspiracy theories (Elvis and JFK are partying in space with Michael Jackson and Jimmy Hoffa), why would Substack not take their readers’ money?
So anyone predicting the Chinese would loose control of a virus transmitted from bats, crashing the world economy in the first nine months of 2019 would be excluded? Anyone in early 2015 who confidently talked of how the US was receptive to Donald Trump likewise I guess.
Just because its wierd doesn't make it wrong. And there are those who would try to exclude rationalist writers on these grounds.
Also what's wrong with promoting sex? I tend to think of it as a net benefit (which is a great pick-up line...).
1) My observation with other forum/websites is: At early stage, admin don't care what members post, then some crazy weird posts happens causing shit storm, then the admin add more and more censors.
2) If not filter by content, then how can Substack differ itself from other platform? If the business model is merely "pay high to attact star writers", then it's not anything breakthrough at all.
I think the business model here is that substack offers walled gardens.
There are some substacks written by some deeply religious folks, with a focus on the implications of their faith and how to live it in daily life. There are probably also substacks where the default assumption is that religion is delusional. How can they possibly coexist?
Easily: The religious substack readers just read the posts and participate in the comment threads (if they exist) of the stuff they want to read. They can discuss fine details of Catholic theology or the challenges of living by their faith in a secular world, without needing to read anything by the writers who want to tell them they're fools for believing in an invisible sky-friend. The religious skeptics, similarly, get to read what they want to read without being subjected to sermons or demands to turn from their sins before they're eternally damned.
Scott may have discussions that are deeply offensive and infuriating to the readers of some opther substacks. They may have discussions that are deeply offensive and infuriating to the readers of Scott's substack. But who cares? We don't have to read each others' stuff.
This is harder to do for someone like Twitter or Facebook or Youtube, because their whole business model is based on selling ads, and maxing out engagement by mixing all the streams and discussions together. Content that offends advertisers has to go (or at least has to be demonetized); content that threatens to drive many users away has to be deplatformed. I don't see why any of that applies to Substack.
You can imagine a successful campaign to push some writer off Substack. That would either be based on getting the management of Substack to decide to get rid of him on their own (maybe because of an internal revolt of their employees), or based on getting many other Substack writers to threaten to leave, or subscribers to threaten to cancel their subscriptions to other substacks they're not offended by, in order to force Substack to cancel the unpopular writer.
That could work, but I think it's much harder to get to work. I'm sure there's plenty written on Substack I'd find offensive and infuriating and wrongheaded, but why would that make me stop reading/supporting the people whose writing I find valuable? Further, since so many of the top writers here came in response to cancellation campaigns in the past, I expect this to be hard to organize, and hard for Substack to give into. (And if they give in once, they'll find it increasingly hard to refuse additional cancellations, until the outrage mobs roll up the whole flank of their opponents.)
Everyone is doing “walled gardens” right now. You can subscribe to specific Youtube channels and don't have to view offensive stuffs. Even if you don’t subscribe, Youtube’s homepage still select videos catering to each viewer. Same for Facebook Page and Homepage. Instead of maxing out engagement by mixing all the streams and discussions together, they maximize conversion rate (value extract from each user/view time) by only showing what user like/more likely to buy. Fox News has its own garden, NYT cater to its own garden etc... Readers only subscribe and pay for whatever they like.
Substack can be successful by either discovering a niche garden, or having star writers on the same old gardens. There is no need for Substack to police its own writers, just make sure there are enough sub-Substacks to host every types of writers/opinions. I still don’t see anything new in this business model/approach.
Each “garden” will get its users into echo chamber problem, but it’s quite another story on readers’s side.
The echo chamber problem will eventually fall on Substack’s head like this: At early stage, religious substack only have religious-friendly posts, then some defensive against skepticism from other news sources, then hostility toward extremist disbelivers, then some aggression toward non-religious substack, then there are flame everywhere, then people call for the admin/police.
Conflicting sub-substacks may coexist, but not easy at all.
I think you're mixing up two problems: substacks and comment threads within a substack.
Suppose we have two substacks: a Trad Catholic substack that often discusses how easy divorce, abortion, and gay marriage are destroying society, and a secular liberal substack that often discusses how opposing divorce, abortion, and gay marriage is barbaric and evil. The writers of those substacks may speak ill of one another. But what's the problem there? Nobody who's supporting the Trad Catholic substack has to read what the secular liberal says about them, nobody who supports the secular liberal substack has to read what the Trad Catholics say about *them*. Nobody could possibly read all the substacks. Further, there's no mechanism trying to force you to read the maximally-offensive substacks to keep you engaged. So coexistence seems not so hard.
Each substack can also have comment threads (they're not mandatory), and the moderation in those can become a problem in a couple ways: First, it can piss off subscribers to the point that they drop their subscriptions. Second, it can incorporate messages that require some kind of action to avoid legal jeopardy (stuff like sticking credible death threats in comment threads, or libeling someone in comment threads). But in the worst case, the substacks in question just cancel their comments; long before that, they can restrict posting to their subscribers and ban people who misbehave. And again, you only see the comment threads if you go looking.
So basically Substack made a bet with Scott that Scott would gain a certain number of subscribers. Substack won the bet, i.e. Scott organically attracted that many subscribers through his own writing talent and popularity (with a little help from the NYT).
Substack predicted they wouldn't win the same bet with this Annalee person, so they didn't make that bet. Either they were correct in this prediction, in which case all's well with the world and Annalee has no grounds for complaining about people choosing not to make unwise bets, or they were incorrect, in which case Annalee gets to cash in (by getting that many subscribers and keeping the full author percentage rather than the lower hedged amount they offered Scott).
So for me the interesting question is why they don't do this with people more like Annalee.
Even if they predict that Annalee will not be very successful, that just means a lower advance, right? If she can only earn them $5000/year, offering her a $4000 advance would still be good business for them.
I think the real answer is "Substack doesn't have enough time to evaluate everyone and decide what advance to give them", but the fun econ textbook answer is adverse selection and winner's curse - if they make the offer to everyone, the people who accept are most likely the ones who have special knowledge that the offer was too high.
They probably want to attract certain writers who are more deferential to capitalism, something of a founder effect for their platform.
Annalee is plenty deferential to capitalism, their complaint is that capitalism wasn't offering them enough, not "down with capitalism!" 😀
Eh, from the point of view of Substack that's a similar problem. The goal is to find subservient writers, and if someone's always asking for a raise then that means less surplus value for the bosses over at substack.
It's a challenge to find writers who (crucially) oppose capitalism and could actually draw in large numbers of subscribers. Anti-capitalism is a minority interest, so probably isn't regarded as a sensible bet.
Note during the mid-twentieth century that many capitalist newspaper owners happily employed anti-capitalist commentators because they had an audience. So exclusion of anti-capitalist voices is not a feature of capitalism; exclusion of unprofitably marginal voices is.
Freddie really isn't pro-capitalism.
Like Freddie deBoer? Is he even a real communist?
Is he? Most of his output seems to be pretty tepid.
Of course you'd write that
They didn't need to. Annalee said they joined for the email distribution platform, which wasn't a selling point for you. Your goal isn't to keep people informed of what you're doing but to make money as a loss leader to fund your attempt at alternative business model medicine.
Of course, the question generalizes if by "people like Annalee" you mean people who will draw some subscribers but not enough to match a normal salary and not people who are fundamentally motivated by something other than money (or at least who claim they are).
"So for me the interesting question is why they don't do this with people more like Annalee."
Because they say they refused it:
"I didn’t pay much attention to Substack’s subscriber model because I wasn’t going to use this newsletter as a revenue stream."
And part of the complaint is that Substack *did* offer advances to other people they knew, except the advances weren't as big. Their solution to the conundrum of "why do some people get paid more than others?" is not "based on estimated audience size, Bill will attract more revenue for us than Ben", that it's a scam conspiracy to bump up wrongthinkers:
"Before Substack came clean about its Pro program, I had already started to hear things from journalist friends about how certain people were getting massive amounts of money to write for the platform. Sure, they could call their newsletter by any name they wanted, but Substack was paying them to do it. And yet Substack was pretending that its successful newsletters were all bootstrapped. That sounded like shenanigans to me.
It got worse when some of the Pro writers started to reveal themselves, because Substack’s secret paid elite all seemed to be cut from the same cloth.
As Jude Doyle explained in their newsletter:
Substack has become famous for giving massive advances — the kind that were never once offered to me or my colleagues, not up front and not after the platform took off — to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.
...Doyle notes that Substack also seems to have a secret list of writers who are allowed to violate the company’s terms of service. These people dish out hate speech, but remain on the platform with paid subscribers."
Conclusion?
"Substack’s business is a scam. They claim to offer writers a level playing field for making a living, and instead they pay an elite, secret group of writers to be on the platform and make newsletter writing appear to be more lucrative than it is. They claim to be an app when they are a publication with an editorial policy. They claim in their terms of service that they will protect writers from abuse, but they don’t."
"People more like Annalee" think they are Big Fish and should be treated as such, and offering them $X when you are offering Guy Everyone I Know Says Is Bad $Y is not down to market forces, it's down to sinister conspiracies to defraud and sucker innocent hopefuls with stars in their eyes about writing (because they're Big Fish! They're worth $Y as well! There can be no other reason Substack is only offering them $X!)
Well, I guess we now know what those blue icons by certain names really mean: MEMBER OF SECRET ELITE CABAL 😁
Jude Doyle claims to have been just about making the rent on Substack. So the 'correct' amount they should have offered Doyle is 90% of that, whatever it is.
Wouldn't adverse selection and winner's curse apply even if they only make the offer to some people? Sure, it's statistically more likely to have an impact if there are lots of offers, but people with special knowledge can still decline no matter how few such people there are.
My guess is that substack accounts for this by reducing the amount of offers slightly and/or increasing their cut from subscriptions. (The 85% figure seems very high.)
Something frustrating about posting comments here is, yes, you can in fact hide long threads by clicking on the vertical lines descending from the root, but when you post a comment, the thread expands again, and the page refreshes to the place you were in proportion to total length of the page instead of refreshing back to where you actually were, so you get jumped up instead of landing back where you actually made the comment, and need to search to resume where you were reading.
It's weird to get commenting so wrong when real-time in-browser interactivity was a solved problem in the phpBB days over 20 years ago.
Not sure if you're aware, but almost all programming is, in a very real sense, 'reinventing the wheel'. (There are very good practical reasons why this is the case though!)
Offering the same comment we made on the (also excellent) Noahpinion substack on this topic:
Substack is not about trying to make it as a writer as opposed to working as a writer elsewhere. It’s about people who are not writers creating quality content, on a regular basis (the newsletter is a trick to commit to artificial deadlines), who otherwise wouldn’t even try. Not every YouTuber wants to have a Hollywood TV show. There’s a lot of great stuff on Substack that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
Maybe. People like Noah and Scott already had blogs for a long time before Substack ever existed, but providing a simple interface for monetizing it possibly means they'll remain bloggers for much longer than they would have once their day jobs became sufficiently time-consuming and lucrative to quit writing purely as a hobby.
Is not teaching people about the Pareto distribution at every available opportunity a scam? Then I suppose YouTube is a scam, Facebook friends are a scam, Tennis is a scam, the mass of planetary bodies in our solar system is a scam...
If Substack is a scam because they’re sniping already-proven writers with advances, then the state of our statistical education is a national emergency.
With those surplusses they get to keep they then fund many more advances, some of which fall flat while still making money. Isn't this kind of a huge deal and kinda scary: a publisher finds a way to be ridiculously profitable from year one while publishing the very best the world has to offer with barely any/no moderation. That's the holy grail and it's a monopoly in some vague, strange way. Noone who is making money on Substack right now will leave to a competitor, ever, if nothing changes: Operation Paperclip for top 1000 journalists in the world.
"Isn't this kind of a huge deal and kinda scary: a publisher finds a way to be ridiculously profitable from year one while publishing the very best the world has to offer with barely any/no moderation."
Is there evidence that substack is "ridiculously profitable"? Is there a financial statement anywhere that I can read?
What is the moat that protects Substack from competition?
Enough people have tied their boats together that they cannot be individually cut off from the credit card networks.
I think the biggest moat is that so much of the media and tech industry is caught up in woke purity spirals, but the audiences are mostly not so caught up in those spirals. If writers like Singal or Weiss or Sullivan are too out-of-step with the current ideology in most media companies to be able to write professionally for them, but there are still thousands of people who'd pay to read their writing, then that's the moat--most media companies can't compete for those readers because of the ideological commitments of their employees and management. Most (or at least many) tech companies can't compete in offering this kind of idea-neutral platform because of the ideological commitments of *their* employees and management.
The best thing for Substack's business model would be for traditional media and most tech companies to massively double down on their commitment to never, ever offer those terrible wrongthinkers like Scott Alexander or Matt Taibbi a platform, while readers continue thinking "hey, I sure am glad this kind of writing is available again!"
The moat will mostly go away if and when Substack's competitors decide they'd rather recapture the audience they've driven away than win the woke purity battle. At that point, Substack will probably have established enough name recognition that lots of writers and readers default to looking there first.
"Is there evidence that substack is "ridiculously profitable"? Is there a financial statement anywhere that I can read?"
I'd second that. Also, who defines ridiculously: the standard of the state of the press (so making a profit at all is ridiculously unlikely) or the standard of notable internet companies (where Substack is unlikely to be very profitable).
I was led by intuition on that claim, or rather misled. Hundreds of thousands of dollars multiplied by at least hundreds of writers sounds impressive before you factor in programmer salaries.
They may possibly be barely breaking even now. However, both the numbers per writer and number of writers will increase, which is very much exponential money, further monopolises the field (and, as mentioned above by Edward, protects every individual within from trivial cancelling using infrastructure like credit card companies).
Now, is the accumulation of the very best writers alive, while only breaking even still a scary and landscape-altering process? I continue to think so.
(For the same reason all direct competition on the internet fails miserably: economy of scale, lock in, loyalty, technological and legal headstart due to having solved all real problems arising in year 1 already, name recognition for investors and potential customers alike.
Also, a "Twitter vs Facebook"-type competition is unlikely, since there's little innovation to be found in "write between 100 and 10'000 words; possibly diagrams". Granted, Bret Victors Tangle is radical, but far from usable due to lack of open data and being rarely applicable.)
Why a monopoly? Couldn't someone else do the same thing?
Indeed, absent ideological commitments against doing so, this just looks like setting up a blogging/newsletter platform + a subscription and payment management service, both stuff that should not require anything more than competence to do at this point.
This suggests that it's in Substack's interests to max out the outrage and ideological commitments by media and tech companies to never, *never* offer such far-right extremists as Matt Yglesias or Matt Taibbi or Freddie DeBoer a platform. Truly, the only morally acceptable option for those companies must be to leave all that subscriber money on the table, lest they be tainted by these writers' ideological cooties.
Described that way, you'd think Substack would be swamped with competitors. And yet....
but... Scott just stated he finds substack to be zero value added. He is staying out of goodwill and leaving lots of momey on the table. Do we think all the top 1000 journalists would do the same?
From whence did you get the "zero value added?"
Substack's initial estimate of how much he might make on their platform sounded incredibly high to Scott, which is why he took the fixed rate offer for the first year. And the real figure ended up being higher still. That implies a very large value add, doesn't it?
not sure how to link to comments, but earlier in the comments he said:
"what's the difference between what I'm doing on Substack, vs. me staying on my independent platform of SSC and paying someone to make me a really good subscription feature? (or switching to Ghost, or...)
As far as I can tell, the service Substack is providing is something like ambition - nobody thought this would work before Substack, Substack proved that it did, and now everyone can go off and do it without them. Sort of "common knowledge that you can make lots and lots of money from this particular blogging model".
That's fine and I'm willing to stay with them to compensate them for providing me this knowledge. But since Substack isn't providing me with any real good beyond what I would have just blogging on my own, it's hard to pinpoint what their responsibilities are."
This post, combined with some outrage about some of the people that Substack had offered advances to, provoked a thought the other day which I wrote up on Quora; I thought it would fit in with one of your "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, Because I Just Made Them Up" style posts:
>>
What if I set up a blogging site like medium or substack, make some noises in favour of free speech, but promise that we will remove articles that offend people if the number of downvotes exceeds the number of upvotes by 10% for two consecutive days…
…and then charge people to vote.
We wouldn’t even need to encourage arseholes to show up and start spouting their “unpopular opinions”. They’d do that by themselves, and then people would try to vote them off, and then we’d be rich! Monetize the very things that the internet has an inexhaustible supply of - arseholes and outrage!
<<
Apologies if you've already done "Website monetization systems very different from ours" and I missed it.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-your-recent-shower-thoughts/answer/Ben-Curthoys
This just in, industry upset at existential threat to them, even if that solution is superior to everyone else.
How is substack an "existential" threat to bourgeois journalism?
Because Substack allows for the Pareto Distribution to take full effect unhindered by any kind of editor, party line, or fire-able offense in writing - in subcription money, but more importantly in quality journalism and essays. If your journalist salary is anywhere above the market value of your current work you should feel scared.
The world is about to notice what good writing looks like and where you need to be in terms of skill to make it.
If you're doing it for the money, that is.
And because, if they're doing it for the censorship, as appears more and more the case, it undermines the control without which attempted censorship becomes futile. So they lost both politically and financially.
I don't think the "fire-able offense" stuff has been truly tested yet.
In any case, I've not seen any evidence that they're an existential threat to journalism, i.e. I've not seen any evidence that they're producing a profit that is wildly above any other media outlet.
Also people are saying "unhindered" by an editor, but lets be honest, editors are often needed. People need to proof read articles, and the feedback process is often positive. Someone like Scott Alexander very clearly needs an editor to cut out his most egregious mistakes.
There's a difference between proofreading and spiking stories with the wrong ideological flavor. Lots of substacks would benefit from the first, but none would (IMO) be improved by the second. And as best I can tell, quite a few writers are on Substack to avoid the spiking stories kind of editors.
Scott Alexander often spikes comments with the wrong ideological flavor.
Yeah, this seems pretty obvious to me. It's no different than Amazon offering some audiobooks as Audible exclusives - you know they paid for that. And while Substack's predictions won't be perfect, they'll have a good sense of these things, and give better estimates than most. They'll lose money on a few advances, just like any other publisher, but not a ton.
Also, your edit at the end seems relatively obvious, at least to me. Yes, the only reason they offered you an advance was your large pre-existing audience. They're not going to offer an advance above the level of "We'll host your blog for free" to my hypothetical Substack blog, nor should they. But I suppose it doesn't hurt to re-state the obvious sometimes.
Scott, consider outsourcing the technical parts of running the comment section by hiring a trusted moderator. Surely you have better things to do in life than mucking around with it.
It's funny that everyone is touting the supposedly 'unmoderated' aspects of substack, yet the desire for moderation of comments seems to be naturally creeping in. How long before people are calling for moderation of the writers too?
I suspect that a reasonable balance is to get rid of the professional trolls like you.
I'm not a troll, I'm a person with political opinions that differs from yours.
ssc was moderated, and iirc many were asking for more moderation even then
Touting the ability for people to freely make their own (moderated) spaces is not the same as demanding that everything is unmoderated.
Exactly: too many people would like to divide the world into "forcibly moderated on my own terms" or "not moderated at all."
Scott, you had a blog with tens of thousands of readers, built up over a ten year period, before you joined substack 🤣🤣. In all seriousness of course there’s a power law distribution, where most people make next to nothing, and a few people make a ton. The haters want to paint that like it’s unethical. But anybody is free to bring their own audience! I’m a nobody, and I built up a following for drums on YouTube over the years which now provides me a living. If they started Sub Drum I’m sure I’d get a decent, if modest, deal.
I know capitalism is out of fashion these days (full disclosure; I’m no fan of unregulated capitalism with mispriced externalities), but if we’re going to set the bar so high that any platform that doesn’t guarantee everybody, regardless of audience or aptitude, an “average” sized slice of the pie, you could do a lot worse than substack. Like...many to most college degree programs. (Music? Try 1 hundredth of one percent with the type of success people dream about when they enroll in music school.) At least substack isn’t charging its writers 100 grand just to roll the dice...
I am just a feral cat, but what is so sinister about Substack paying writers as they see fit? Does Substack have some mind-control ray that makes people write for them if they don't want to, or is the NYT having a hissy fit that PMC types aren't permitted to "curate" the content and writers?
Are they a hosting platform, or a publisher?
If anything, Substack did literally what Scott has been advocating for : "Betting as skin in the game".
Technically, the bet wasn't completely fair. There was a way for Substack to profit even if they hypothetically overestimated Scott's future income.
That's because the very act of making the bet was changing the future: making Scott more likely to start blogging on Substack, and thus making Substack more popular among Scott's fans. So it was part bet, part marketing expense. The marketing expense could have made it worth even in the hypothetical case the bet would be wrong.
Like, imagine they told Scott "we believe you will make $100K, and therefore we offer to pay you $30K for 50% of your future income", and it would turn out that Scott only made $20K, therefore they lost $20K. Well, from the marketing point of view, for $20K they just bought special place in hearts of many Scott's fans; some of them will also start blogging on Substack and making money for them. So even an unsuccessful bet could bring profit.
That "place in the hearts" won't actually pay the bills, though. They can't afford to routinely make huge money-losing bets like that.
It's unsurprising that you would lose money taking Substack's advance. If Substack wasn't likely to make a substantial return on their investment, why would they invest?
If Substack makes you an offer like that, then unless you actively desire a safety net or you suspect that they will not put sufficient time into supporting you, then braving it alone is worth it. As far as I know, Twitch streamers who take very similar offers have very similar experiences.
Saw this on Twitter and am doing some small amount of eye-rolling at it: https://twitter.com/thrasherxy/status/1374802446757863430 (scare quotes all sic):
This is a major goal of Substack: "disrupt" the concept of a journalist as a "job" with "colleagues" and a "union" and a "pension" and "healthcare," and to be replaced by the Avon/Uber/Cutco model of everyone going it alone, w/o the burden of "editors" or "health insurance"
(1) Guy has a book out that he's publicising (of course), titled "The Viral Underclass: How Racism, Ableism and Capitalism Plague Humans On The Margin" https://celadonbooks.com/news/celadon-books-acquires-new-nonfiction-by-professor-and-journalist-dr-steven-w-thrasher/
(2) He's a professor of journalism and not alone of journalism, but of medicine too!
"Dr. Steven W. Thrasher, is a professor in the schools of journalism and medicine at Northwestern University, where he holds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus upon LGBTQ research. His journalism has been widely published by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Slate, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, and Esquire. Named Journalist of the Year by the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association in 2012, Dr. Thrasher was recently named one of the 100 most influential and impactful LGBTQ+ people of 2019 for his research on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS by Out magazine."
(3) And tell me, Dr Prof PhD, what "job", "healthcare", "union" and "pension" are current media/journalism jobs providing, as even the traditional dead-tree press is shifting more and more to this model of interns, freelancers, and gig economy writers? Especially in light of BuzzFeed's recent 'springcleaning' when it took over HuffPost UK, are you so eager to boast of working for them with your writing when you are also complaining about this very model?
Centralized (though this is kind of a tautology) Platforms are anti-Web and therefore bad.
Substack is worse than Wordpress : the comment section is a critical part of SSC/ACT and you can't even read it without JavaScript enabled. (And it's working worse too, which is not unrelated.)
(A website is supposed to have its core features working with HTML and CSS only, if you can't do that, you should be making a native program, rather than trying to cram it into a virtual machine inside a browser - you'll end up with a better user interface and performance.)