Substack Is Setting Writers Up For A Twitter-Style Implosion

I suggested that Substack’s day of reckoning may still lie ahead. The bigger Substack gets, the more ideologically diverse its author pool becomes, the greater the chances for highly inflammatory, potentially harmful content.

In general, will Substack replicate the patterns of marginalization found across the media industry, or will it help people locked out of the dominant media sphere to flourish? To a large extent, the answer depends on whether or not Substack’s founders believe they’re in the publishing business. When we spoke, they were adamant that Substack is a p... See more

In its early days, Substack primarily catered to a certain set of internet-savvy writers and journalists, lured by the promise of monetizing a direct relationship with their readers. But as it morphs from a niche publishing concern into a heavyweight start-up mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook, its user base is proliferating accor... See more

Substack wasn’t just about an economic trend of power flowing to individual writers thanks to the leverage technology gives them—it was about creating a morally superior playing field that could help heal our minds from the damage done by social networks. The Substack model wasn’t just a business strategy, it was a political philosophy.

But until Substack makes it clear that it will take proactive steps to remove hate speech and extremism, the current size of the problem isn’t relevant. The company’s edgelord branding ensures that the fringes will continue to arrive and set up shop, and its infrastructure creates the possibility that those publications will grow quickly. That’s wh... See more

The possible letdown, however, is that there is nothing in Substack’s technical or legal design that guarantees that it will remain a tolerant home for heterodox writers.

What Substack is doing is taking the power away from readers and themselves, and giving it to authors. What does that mean? They are betting that in the market of long-form articles, the player with the most power is the author, not the reader. It’s the supply that matters, not the demand.

A more pessimistic prediction is that the current True Fan revolution will eventually go the way of the original Web 2.0 revolution, with creators increasingly ground in the gears of monetization. The Substack of today makes it easy for a writer to charge fans for a newsletter. The Substack of tomorrow might move toward a flat-fee subscription mode... See more