Substack Notes, Chris Best, and now I'm really concerned
extra issue, breaking news
In the last fifteen years I have put online more than one million words about digital and media literacy, all free of charge and without any tracking, on a self-hosted blog called "Stop! at Zona-M".
Then I gave up (partially). About two months ago, I was FORCED to set up a newsletter as a front-end to that blog, which is still online and, as far as I am concerned, will surely outlast the newsletter, for one and only one reason. THIS reason:
(for more of the same idiocy, even among people who should be full supporters of an open Web, go weep over "I don't click on unfamiliar URLS"???)
That is, as I thoroughly explained in "I just started a newsletter, and it's all your fault!" I was forced to start a newsletter because in 2023 there is no least worst way left to be sure that someone will "open" and actually read something I took the time to research and clean up, and possibly contribute to keep such an effort sustainable.
And I am doing it, as you can see here, and read in the same article, without any paywall.
Back in February, after a lot of homework, googling and asking around, I chose Substack over other alternatives mainly for two reasons (besides lack of fixed costs, because I already do too much for free to afford them):
the ToS put no restrictions on moving everything out of Substack, from subscribers list to actual content, and also allow asking for donations for other work an author does outside the newsletter
Substack seemed, and still seems to me, much more optimized than the others for both "newslettering" and user comments, that is the two main features missing from my blog
This was two months ago.
Yesterday, I tried Substack Notes for the first time, out of curiosity and nothing else.
Today, less than thirty minutes ago, I discovered that that very feature may "make of Substack the Nazi Bar".
OK, so... (like surely many others before and after me, on Substack or somewhere else):
first, I spent the last few years almost ignored NOT because my writings suck (which I am NOT excluding, OK?), but because, due to the hellish, suicidal mix of:
social media that won't show anything I share unless I pay, or it's so deliberately close to illegal to guarantee that trolls will come
people groomed to demand that I save them one click, and won't look at anything I don't physically slap onto their corneas...
I can't ever get any damned feedback at all, including "you suck" to begin with!
eventually, I refused to be ignored not by people, but by platforms. I would accept "we couldn't care less of your writing" if "we" were human peers, not algorithms always looking for addictive trollbait
I spent a lot of effort to find and set up yet another way to just be seen,
only to have this "Nazi Bar s**tstorm, that may cancel others just being in the wrong place at the wrong moment, come exactly when I had just started to get the hang of this thing and it was starting to seem a good idea
One hour ago, I had not the faintest idea of who this Best guy was
Now, I am scrolling the comments below that article, duly counting how many are some well-reasoned variation of "cancel Nazi Substack and every surely equally Nazi bastard who surely came there EXACTLY because Substack is Nazi".
I am thinking "surely that won't happen, people are rational". Sure, go me!
I am thinking "I all but left Twitter because a whole sequence of tech bros CEOs, not just Musk, were canceling me, only to get this?"
And yes, I am also thinking "why on Earth Best or whoever it was had to clutter Substack with a Twitter clone? What the f**k is wrong with doing one thing, and doing it well?"
What next? What do you mean, "What Next"? YOU must tell me
Right now, I hope that this thing will not give people a reason to ignore everything and everybody who touched Substack, whatever happens to it or its executives. I'd just settle for that, thank you very much. And if Substack Notes has to burn to ashes to make this happen, the sooner it happens the better. If it ain't broken, don't attach notes on it, I say.
The general problem is still there though, and won't disappear soon. It is a problem we cannot delegate to CEOs, or regulators for that matter.
The general problem is that:
any platform may expel independent voices in any moment, just because they can
being associated with the wrong platform, even for reasons totally outside one's control, or prior knowledge like this Nazi Bar issue, can be enough to ghost independent voices, long enough to make them disappear
crucial corollary: besides taking a lot of time that one may not have, changing platform wouldn't solve anything! How could it guarantee that the same thing doesn't happen there too, two bare months after one migrated?
all of the above is true whatever "side" those voices may be on: left, right, center, up, down, behind, forward... it doesn't make any difference
right now, those voices have nowhere
f***ingelse left to go, and it's not only the CEOs' fault
I know the first four parts very well, because they are exactly the reasons why I've tried for fifteen years to stick to a self-hosted blog, and still keep it running. They are the same reasons why I have been making the case for personal, permanent clouds since 2013.
The fifth problem is the biggest one, because without it the other four would be non-issues, and because it's the one for which you all must propose a solution, at this point.
Writing, or producing any other content that isn't deliberate garbage and has some value for someobody, takes a lot of time. Almost nobody can afford to do it for free more than once in a blue moon, not undefinitely for sure.
As things stand now, if you have the slightest interest in what I and many other independent voices could produce, YOU must provide a solution and adopt it, be it Substack or anything else. As far as I am personally concerned, the first part of that solution MUST consist of NOT ghosting me, now or ever, just because I HAD to come to a platform whose CEO I had no possibility to know earlier (*). The second part would be any combination of your choice of:
just ignore what kind of bar Substack, Twitter etc... become or may become, in order to:
actually read everything I share through those channels or any other social network, and always, actively share the same stuff on all said channels, as much as you possibly can
buy a paid subscription to my newsletter
fund my other projects (email me for details), to avoid funding the Bar
I stop all self-publishing, limiting myself to write on commission what magazines and companies want. You lose a possibly interesting newsletter and blog, I pay my bills just fine
(my personal favourite, how things should be) YOU save me from evil Substack and all its possible successors, by telling me "go back to your blog, I'll follow it via good old RSS AND donate you enough money to keep going"
Your choice. While you ponder it, consider that there are only two things sure in this mess:
if, jumping off the Titanic, I grabbed the same lifesaver as some perfect stranger, who also is the person you hate the most in the world, you would still have no reason to hate me
something that takes you 5 minutes to read may have taken hours or days to write. If that time doesn't pay any bill, the money must come from spending the same time on work that pays the same bills, even if it le, but hardly doing the world a better place
Yes, I know that there is nothing special or new here. I know that most of this post could have been written with little or no changes 10 or 15 years ago, and probably someone did write it. But if independent voices are more needed now than ten years ago, these days there are less alternatives and much more hysteria. Hence I am concerned, because I see no sure solution. You? Seriously: what should independent authors do in 2023 and beyond, and where? Sustainably, I mean?
(*) no, of course I couldn't. When I did my homework, I did find complaints about lack of transparency in how Substack pays some writers, but nothing more. Days only have 24 hours and as I said I HAD to try some newsletter soon, so after a couple of weeks I went for the least worst for my particular needs
I read this a couple of times! Thanks for writing this.
I think this "cancelling you if you're on platform X" is a very Mastodon/far left position. A casual look at Substack Notes shows me that most people are delighted to be there and are having fun. I would say, pay these folks no mind. Most of us would be delighted to subscribe and follow you.
I feel your pain about getting heard and having feedback. I more or less set up my Substack for the very same reasons.
I also find the pursuit of the "purest" platform that is ideologically good a hopeless pursuit. We might as well give up using the Internet. I notice that this particular crowd is very reaction. Today it's Substack, tomorrow it's something else. It's like their hobby is to be mad at some topic/platform any given week.
It can be tiring to be part of this.
So I say we just rise about this and use these platforms while we still can to reach our readers - dispassionately and without bias.
Just posted this on Mastodon, and am really sad I didn't think of THIS when I originally wrote the post, because it makes the point much clearer:
The "bar" part of all this discourse is flawed, and can badly backfire on independent authors though.
Think housing, not bars.
Think renting a studio in a building whose other tenants and landlords you know nothing bad about,
because it's the only affordable place you can get,
only to discover 2 months later, when you had just finished unpacking your stuff,
that the landlord may be a nazi (ADDED 2023/04/20: and/or may be renting, or be willing to rent, other flats in the same building to nazis)
and, again, there is no other place you can afford. Should YOU judged badly because you cannot leave? Especially considering that there is NO guarantee at all that the same thing could happen in the next place you find?