"... usually coupled with the theory that the people they choose are problematic"--Isn't that pretty much the controversy? The rest is window dressing.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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".)
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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".)
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If anything, Substack did literally what Scott has been advocating for : "Betting as skin in the game".
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.)