Ghosting Substack

I am very tired

Platformer is right. Substack’s decision to become more than a neutral publishing platform means that it has greater content moderation responsibilities than it did before. The company appears to want to have its cake and eat it too, however, which is good business logic but not something that I must endorse with my personal custom.

Substack’s choices are its own; it’s a private company and can do what it thinks best for its users, customers, and backers. As a user, I can respond to its actions with my own. This is the market in action. Or more precisely, this is the market in action, and the reaction of the market thereof.

Losing my tiny newsletter will not lead to any issues for Substack. It’s free, and unpopular. (Shockingly, musings about my staid personal life are not smash hits.) But losing Platformer is likely more material in terms of lost revenues, and lost brand equity caused by seeing a well-known Substack success story hit the bricks.

Nazis are bad

You can liken allowing Nazis onto your digital platform as allowing a little bit of rat shit in your cereal.¹ The point is that even a little bit of rat shit in your breakfast is unacceptable, and ruins the entire meal.

It’s a useful mental model. The Nazi bar analogy is also good. If you don’t nip Nazis in the bud, they invite their friends, and soon you are overrun with racist fascists. Not good.

But there’s one other thing that happens when Nazis are allowed to stick around. Non-Nazis leave. Substack is keeping some of their most odious users, and losing some of their best (Platformer). The ratio of non-Nazi material to Nazi material on Substack will change over time as folks who don’t want to hang around Nazis leave. As Platformer is, and like I intend to do with my own little doodlings.

Closing, this is not a free speech issue. Substack has moderation policies in place, as does its payment partner Stripe. Substack makes choices about what it will host, and what it will not. This is all a disagreement concerning where to draw the lines, and whether or not Substack is living up to its own stated rules.

I would in fact be perfectly content to use a non-moderated service that allows each individual user to publish whatever they want, and has no hand in promotion or the like. Something open source perhaps, would be good. Like Ghost. So, I suppose it’s time to learn a new platform.

1. I can’t find the person who made a similar analogy recently, but if you recall let me know so that I can give them credit.