News & Notes
Nine Lives exits the Nazi bar
First, a recap of recent events, for anyone who’s not following the relevant internet drama (no shame!):
On November 28, The Atlantic published an article titled Substack Has a Nazi Problem, which exposed that Substack, despite having Terms of Service prohibiting hate speech, nevertheless has a growing cohort of white nationalist writers, some of which use actual Nazi symbols in their logos and images.[1]
Subsequently, well over 200 current Substack writers signed a public letter to Substack founders pointing at this hypocrisy and asking explicitly whether “platforming Nazis is part of your vision of success.”[2]
On December 21, one of the founders replied; he led off with “of course we don’t like Nazis” but quickly reiterated that Nazi content would not ever be banned from or even demonetized on Substack.
This wasn’t completely unexpected; a different founder had already strongly hinted last April that no amount of racism would ever be sufficient to trigger moderation from Substack.
I find it hard to imagine anything that more squarely fits the definition of “hate speech” than Nazi propaganda. An ideology whose core aim is genocide falls pretty clearly under “incitement to violence”. And yet somehow Substack is choosing not to enforce their Terms of Service in that direction.
Meanwhile, they’ve always been happy enough to uphold their Terms of Service where sex work and porn is concerned. So to recap Substack’s de facto position:
- sex and nudity, bad;
- actual Nazis, two thumbs up.
From day one, Substack has positioned itself in the grey area between private and public, between service provider and social network.
Personally, I’ve never used Substack — as a reader or a writer — like a social network. I’ve never installed the app, and I don’t browse Substack for content. (I tried once, and found it fruitless; Substack’s algorithm completely failed to surface a single thing I wanted to read.) The Substack newsletters I subscribe to are ones I found exclusively through ‘word of mouth’, never through Substack’s own recommendations.
For me, it’s been a service provider: Substack sends my emails out like any email service; it hosts my content like any web host. Service providers offer their services to terrible people all the time, with no repercussions. I mean, Nazis are using electricity and have an internet connection just like everyone else. They can buy domains and put up web sites and no one is going after their ISPs or their web hosts and calling for them not to consort with Nazis.
Obviously, Substack would prefer to play by private service provider rules. I think it’s equally obvious by now that that ship has not just sailed but sunk. And it’s Substack’s own fault, because they’ve visibly inserted their own brand into the equation at every turn.
In the past year since I started Nine Lives, Substack has made deliberate choices that tilt them even farther toward the social network space. (I don’t think they’ve been very successful, mind you — as far as I can tell, Substack Notes is a desert — but their hope and intention was clear.) One of their founders even announced in September that Substack will be “leaning into politics” for 2024.
By selectively enforcing their own moderation policies, as well as by incentivizing certain kinds of content by directly paying for it, they’ve given up all credible claim to neutrality. Who is allowed on the platform and who is banned now has political meaning in the minds of the greater public.
Substack’s choices in this area, particularly around transphobia, have served to attract certain kinds of people and repel others for a couple of years now, but this last move, in my opinion, has just straight up made them the Nazi bar.
Which put me in a bit of an unhappy spot, two days before Christmas, ten days before the anniversary of this newsletter — and pertinently, my first recurring Substack subscription.
Before starting Nine Lives last year, I looked hard at all the alternatives, especially Ghost and Buttondown. Substack offered two important things that the others did not: a well-designed, intuitive, easy user experience for both readers and writers, which allowed me to focus on writing instead of coding, and a percentage pricing model that guaranteed I would never be in the red.[3]
I never expected to make more than pocket change from Nine Lives, if that; Substack would continue to be the most economical option until my paying subscriptions grossed around US$1k. Turns out people were more generous than I imagined; I grossed a few hundred dollars from Nine Lives in 2023 — not pocket change, but not nearly a thousand bucks.[4]
I was pretty sure even when I chose Substack that I would be moving on in a year or three. Substack is burning VC money now, which is nice in the short term but will predictably end in enshittification.[5] I kept a close eye on Buttondown, the cheaper of my two top alternatives, and I was ardently hoping that by the end of next year, they would have successfully solved most of the design and interface problems that had been dealbreakers for me a year ago.
And then.
I don’t want to hang out, even peripherally, at the Nazi bar. I don’t want to buy even one single drink at the Nazi bar. I left Twitter for good over a year ago, long before almost everyone I know, simply because I could not stand to contribute content or traffic that in some infinitesimal way would legitimize the cesspool Musk was turning it into.
And now I’ve reached that point with Substack. This is my personal choice, you understand, and there are reasons for other people to make different choices. I didn’t shame people for staying on Twitter, and I’m not going to shame anyone for staying on Substack. At this point I’m not even cancelling my free subscriptions to newsletters on Substack (I don’t have any paid ones).
Frankly, the whole process has been a pain in the ass, and not how I wanted to spend three weeks of my life. I took two days off over the “holidays”; the rest I worked between four and ten hours on the migration from Substack to Buttondown … and I’m not finished yet. The auto-migration of my archives only got me halfway to where I needed to be; I’ve still had to go through and fix a lot of things by hand. I’m having to roll my own code to handle a lot of stuff that Substack did gracefully out of the box. I’ve been wading deep into the guts of the credit card processor, Stripe, exchanging long email threads with Buttondown support, trying to sort out one issue after another.
I’m not actually unhappy with Buttondown, even though I find their product woefully lacking in some areas and frustrating in others. Justin, the founder, gave the rest of his team two weeks off over the holidays but kept answering emails himself for much of that time. Both parts of that decision earned my immediate respect, and my correspondence with him has left me feeling like he’s a really good guy.
I think Buttondown will be a good long-term home; I just really would have preferred to wait a year, giving them time to implement some of the upgrades they’ve announced, but … Nazi bar. So here we are.
There will undoubtedly be further hiccups, going forward. If something looks or acts broken (or even just plain bad), please let me know. You can reply to this email or message me on Mastodon.
Once I get this more or less squared-away, I’ll go back to actual Nine Lives essays, guaranteed Nazi-free.
I mostly know about this second-hand; I canceled my Atlantic subscription when Ed Yong left, so I haven’t read the full article. ↩︎
I would have signed the letter also had I known about it at the time, but like I said: I don’t use Substack as a social network, so I was clueless. ↩︎
I also liked the fact that Substack enabled comments, something that fired up my LiveJournal nostalgia. But in practice, the comments did not — at least for me — function anything like LJ in terms of building community, and so I won’t especially miss them. ↩︎
Roughly a third of which routed through Ko-fi and not Substack, incidentally. ↩︎
Unless branding themselves as the Nazi bar turns out to have such profound financial repercussions that they never achieve the required market dominance for beginning the enshittification cycle, I guess. ↩︎