Substack’s Apocalypse and Another Medium Pivot
At a pivotal moment, Substack risks being defined by its worst actors
Welcome to Video Loss, a newsletter about progressive politics, technology and the media. If you’re reading this online, please consider subscribing below.
Substack’s Apocalypse
You’re reading this article on Substack, a platform that distributes paid and unpaid newsletters. You may know it from the fact that everyone online has been yelling about it for about a month now.
I use Substack over something like WordPress or Mailchimp for a couple of reasons: one, it is a relatively easy way to distribute content simultaneously on a website and newsletter, two, it has an integrated payment processing solution if I ever want to experiment with premium content, and three, all of Substack’s subscriber and subscription data are easily exportable should I ever want to switch platforms.
There’s a fourth reason, too: Substack is in right now. People seem to be doing a good job building real and lasting audiences over the last year of the platform’s existence. As someone who doesn’t have one of those audiences currently, I want to explore every new avenue available. Writers I respect—and notable writers who I formerly respected—are using Substack. The mediaworldistalkingaboutitendlessly. It’s a big deal.
I think that last point, while being relatively silly, is also key to Substack’s continued existence. Substack’s current control of the newsletter market is incredibly fragile. Every Substack producer can easily leave the platform, meaning competition could easily peel off its users. Twitter and Facebook are already moving into the newsletter space, integrating their publishing tools with their already vast social graphs while charing less commission than Substack. (Substack takes about 10% of each subscription charge, while Twitter charges 5% and Facebook will possibly charge nothing.)
That fragility is why I think the last weeks of debate over Substack’s editorial decisions are existential issues to the company. To survive and beat off competition from the social giants, Substack needs to differentiate itself from a product perspective and conceptually. It needs to continue offering writers more freedom and transparency than the social giants, yes, but it also needs to be perceived culturally as a more positive force than the competitors. On some level, that mediatization begins on Media Twitter, which then bleeds into magazine and newspaper articles and into a broader cultural consciousness. Rightly or wrongly, Facebook is already synonymous with ruining online journalism and it’s difficult to find a single user of Twitter that won’t begrudenly admit that Twitter is terrible. Starting from that reputational advantage, Substack needs to position itself as a home for independent journalism, a place that both writers and readers can feel good about using.
And, well, right now it doesn’t feel like that for a growing number of people.
Briefly: people are mad at Substack right now because Substack is platforming writers who are either incredibly annoying or deeply hateful. Until very recently, Substack’s main homepage had a ranking of the top writers. These writers, by and large, had a lot in common: they were often white men, many were pointedly formerly employed by traditional media outfits, and most were on the spectrum between the contrarian center and reactionary right. People like Friend of the Blog Andrew Sullivan or the Twitter-poisoned Glenn Greenwald. The painfully provocative Matthew Yglesias or the transphobic Jesse Signal. There were also a good number of Silicon Valley anti-press weirdos like Scott Alexander. It’s easy to see the complaints and be like, whatever, every social platform has people who are annoying and suck. The difference here is that Substack is in many cases actively promoting and paying these writers on the platform and that Substack broadly lacks strong moderation policies to counter bad actors.
These are far from the only writers on Substack. There are a ton of really cool people doing work on the platform on niche topics that don’t receive a lot of coverage in the mainstream media. You can follow some really excellent newsletters on topics like immigration, incarceration, the depravity of war, media gossip, climate change, and foreign affairs on Substack. And there are plenty of non-shitty Big Names on the platform too, like Casey Newton, Richard Rushfield, Hunter Harris, Luke O’Neil, and Lyz Lenz, among many others.
Substack, to their credit, has done a good job building out discovery tools that prioritise the niche writers that are worth subscribing to rather than the contrarian old guys. (Last time I looked, I also found a featured newsletter that was launching a targeted harassment campaign against a Times reporter, so bad stuff still there too!) However, writers like Yglesias, Sullivan, and Signal do seem to make up a good amount of Substack’s biggest newsletters (Yglesias’ newsletter alone is pulling in close to a million dollars annually), and in some cases it appears that Substack was offering upfront payments to these writers through a program called Substack Pro.
As the company has explained over the last weeks in increasingly dire blog posts, Substack Pro essentially offers established writers upfront compensation for the first year of publishing on the platform in exchange for a higher cut of subscription revenue. The company also reportedly helps with getting writers contract editors and health insurance. Substack says this program has been offered to around 30 writers, but it won’t disclose who. A few writers, like Yglasias and Newton, have openly said they received deals from Substack, but few others have been willing to publicly.
In that vacuum of accountability, there’s been a growing assumption that the more detestable writers on Substack have received these deals. Recently, the obnoxiously aggressive commentator Michael Tracey joined Substack, and Greenwald insinuated this was a result of a Substack Pro deal. Was it? Probably not, I can’t imagine why Substack would pay a guy who’s greatest achievement is whining on Twitter about being pushed by Maxine Waters. But all we have to go off is Greenwald’s hints that he got a deal, so....
Reporting around Substack Pro suggests that the actual rosters of writers is more diverse ideologically and demographically than most people are assuming. I’d imagine that’s probably true. But the issue is still the same: right now, Substack is increasingly defined by authors like Greenwald, Signal, and Sullivan. And I think that’s potentially disastrous for Substack in the long term, especially as it starts facing strong competition.
If Substack just wants to be the home for displaced white guys who get mad on Twitter, that’s fine. I’m not saying Substack should ban a writer like Matt Yglesias for his crimes of bad and/or lazy takes. But Substack ostensibly doesn’t want to be the place for reheated Slate Pitches, it wants to save journalism by providing writers of all stripes a platform to make a living.
And the train seems to be leaving the station. Already, several writers are leaving Substack for other, less well-known platforms like Ghost and Tinyletter. Many of them are the kind of diverse writers that Substack desperately needs to counter notions that it is catering to a specific ideological lane.
In six months, Twitter and Facebook will have established tools for publishing independent journalism. Because of the sheer scale of these companies, they will likely have better tools 1 and more generous revenue sharing than Substack. Most promotion of Substacks occurs on Twitter; at this point, Twitter will have its own direct newsletter product.
Meanwhile, by this point, Substack will have done one or two things. It could significantly diversify and publicly its Plus program, create better tools for midlevel publishers, and generally work to undo its current perception issue. Or it could embrace its present status as the place for exiled magazine and blog writers, growing the sizeable anti-woke-and-anti-Trump audience while alienating everyone else. Maybe there’s a sustainable future in that, but it isn’t one that matches Substack’s lofty aims.
Catch me in Jacobin
Like any good fake-alternative wanna misfit teen, I spent many of my younger years reading Jacobin, one of the socialist left’s preeminent publications. That’s why I was super excited to have the opportunity write for them last week. I think I make a pretty coherent argument on why the filibuster is bad and why this particular moment is the perfect time to do anyway with it. Check it out here:
With the pressing crisis of ensuring pandemic relief out of the way, Senate Democrats now have an agenda that is relatively progressive — certainly in comparison to the party’s agenda in recent years. That agenda will not gain any Republican support. Emerging only slightly bruised from a difficult fight to pass the relief bill, Senate Democrats will now turn their attention to other popular reforms Biden campaigned on, putting them on a collision course with an entrenched Republican opposition unwilling to concede to public or moral sentiment. In other words, Democrats are nearing a confrontation with the filibuster.
A real bummer at Medium
Ev William’s Medium is undergoing yet another pivot. This time, the publishing platform is abandoning its model of financing high-end publications like OneZero and GEN in favor of partnering with specific writers. (Sound familiar?) The stable of writers that those publications employed are being offered buyouts. Those who stay will take on radically different jobs. Most are leaving.
Lot of shitty things in this story, especially around the company’s recent failed unionisation drive. There’s good reporting on this from Casey Newton, Justice Namaste at Jezebel (linked above), Sara Fisher at Axios and Edward Ongweso Jr at Vice.
What I’m more interested in is how this story obviously parallels what’s going on at Substack: Medium sees a future in supporting independent writers and their “brands”. In a blog post announcing these changes, Williams outlined a future where supporting individual writers, not publications, is the opportunity:
I think a significant factor is that the role of publications — in the world, not just on Medium — has decreased in the modern era. I don’t mean the role of professional editorial, but the idea of an imprimatur that establishes credibility or trust. Trust is more important than ever and well-established editorial brands still have meaning. But today, credibility and affinity are primarily built by people — individual voices — rather than brands. In fact, that describes the vast majority of what people read on Medium and is in line with our Relational strategy.
It’s hard to read this paragraph without immediately thinking about the idealised promise of Substack and the so-called Sovereign Writers, which Ben Thompson recently outlined over at Startechery:
Just because Andrew Sullivan was forced to be a sovereign writer, though, doesn’t change the fact that writers who can command a paying audience have heretofore been significantly underpaid. That points to the real reason why the media has reason to fear Substack: it’s not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their best writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the best writers to discover their actual market value.
The promise of independent publishing, both for platforms and writers, is building a model of economic opportunity in a world where journalistic credibility is tied increasingly to an individual rather than an outlet. You see this being reflected in traditional publication; Axios is referring to reporters as multiplatform “talent” in internal job postings, while the New York Times is attempting to exert more control over its reporter’s book deals, television appearances, and personal newsletters.
The issue is that prestige doesn’t inherently equal being one of the “best writers”. Many have bemoaned the lack of a middle class in the creator economy, and this issue is only becoming more glaring as publishers and platforms look towards individual writer brands to invest in. We don’t yet know how Medium will scope out their individual writers, but we do know Substack uses an author’s Twitter engagement to gauge whether they’d be a good fit for their Pro program. While this leads you to writers like Ashley Feinberg and Roxane Gay getting deals, it also leads to recruits like Signal and Sullivan. And some of the best writers currently working at Medium lack the kind of social following to be recruited in the first place.
Where does this leave us? An online media increasingly defined by engagement and notoriety, rather than quality. Let’s get investing.
If you liked this newsletter, please consider telling a friend about it or sharing it online. Have a good day!
1 Substack’s publishing tools are still surprisingly barebones: there’s very little web design customization, few marketing options, and a very limited CMS. It wouldn’t be hard to build something better.