On Substack

And the endless recapitulation of ScienceBlogs drama

Apr 14, 2022

I had a lengthy conversation about physics for a YouTube interview series recently (I’ll link it when it goes live) that touched on a lot of philosophical kinds of questions. There was also a recent recurrance of a quantum-physics-education thing that has a lot to do with the language we use to talk about the theory. The combination of the two had me thinking that I would write something in that general vein today.

However, we’re leaving town at an ungodly hour tomorrow for a week of family vacation, so I’ve got a lot of prep and packing to do. And the thoughts I have on the subject(s) in question could probably stand to “cook” for a bit longer. So instead, I’m going to go for something relatively light and meta and just talk about Substack.

The proximate cause of this is this post from Noah Smith that I’ll do the fancy embed thing with:

Noahpinion

Is Substack good for the world? Is Substack worth it for writers?

Tiffany Hsu of the New York Times recently wrote an article about Substack. People love to argue about everything the New York Times says, so naturally it generated a fair share of controversy. The cynical take, of course, would be that the NYT is choosing to highlight criticisms of a competitor because it doesn’t want the competition (and especially doesn’t want its best writers leaving to strike out on their own). It’s certainly plausible, I suppose — the online media space has certainly become a more cutthroat space as new entrants have flooded the market, and the proliferation of independent newsletters just adds to the pressure. It was certainly a bit shady that the NYT article talked of an “exodus” from Substack, while quietly noting lower down in the article that the platform is…

3 years ago · 18 likes · 16 comments · Noah Smith

He’s writing in response to some recent pieces from people who don’t approve of Substack’s maximalist approach to free speech, because it gives a platform to people with views they feel are beyond the pale. This pivots somewhat into an economic discussion, with some attempts to claim that the whole operation is either a scam on the verge of collapse, or ripping writers off.

To sort of reverse the order of Smith’s questions, I’ll say up front that I started using this site mostly because they provide a really convenient and user-friendly platform for blogging and distribution. I like the back end tools at Substack a little better than what Forbes (my blog-for-pay platform since about 2015) uses, and the integration of the pay option is way easier here than setting up something on my own site. (I’ve been a bit dissatisfied with the evolution of Forbes in the last few years, which pushed me to explore my options. There have been some recent changes that may make it somewhat more worthwhile to continue that relationship, but I haven’t had time to give them a fair test yet.)

On the economic side, I’m not really doing much with the for-pay aspect of Substack at the moment— everything I’ve posted has been open to everyone, so it’s basically just a tip jar. If I decide to wind things down at Forbes more definitively, I might change that a bit and start to paywall some stuff, but I don’t really need the extra income all that badly. (It is appreciated, though— if you subscribe, I’ll raise a glass in your honor every other month when the payments come to the price of a beer…)

Regarding the larger question of whether Substack is “good for the world,” I basically agree with Smith’s analysis of the economics of the whole deal— the free-speech maximalist stance makes sense for a startup, because they’re trying to dominate a space whose underlying tech isn’t that hard to copy. And my own inclination regarding free-speech issues shades toward the maximalist side, for pragmatism if nothing else— I just don’t believe there’s any way to set up a system that will reliably remove only the Bad People and never provide tools to be used against those whose views I find more congenial.

I also largely agree with his point of view on the question of siloing— that Substack being set up as a bunch of largely self-contained individual sites makes it less troubling to me that they also host Bad People. They’re not run like a magazine that’s attempting to have or suggest a coherent editorial voice, so it’s not like someone running a newsletter full of incoherent ranting about how quantum physics is a hoax directly reflects on me.

This particular branch of the argument— whether having Bad People use the same distribution service taints the credibility of otherwise good people— struck me as yet another example of the way social media keeps endlessly recapitulating dumb shit that happened on ScienceBlogs back in the day. In this case, I’m thinking of the “PepsiGate” incident, where the owners’ endless quest for a revenue stream led them to agree to a sponsorship deal where they’d host some blogs that were explicitly commercial. This led to an enormous blow-up, with a lot of people quitting the site in protest, and really marked the beginning of the end for that whole operation.

My point of view at that time was largely similar to my take (and Smith’s) on the current Substack question. That is, since I had nearly complete editorial independence at ScienceBlogs, I viewed my blog largely as a stand-alone thing, whose credibility ultimately depended on my own background and writing, not where it was hosted. To my mind, some stand-alone blog paid for by a major corporation wasn’t any more of a drag on me than sharing a platform with some of the militant atheist blogs whose behavior I found distasteful.

Thinking back on that, it probably makes sense thatSmith and I end up in similar places— with Substack as with Pepsigate, I suspect the major dividing line is between people who came primarily from academia (Smith is a former econ professor) and those who came primarily from journalism. The professional journalists were much more inclined to see ScienceBlogs as being like a magazine, where the association with Bad People was direct and immediate, where the scientists running blogs on the side were more likely to see it as a collection of independent operators. I think the same thing may be at work with the Substack argument; most of the people denouncing the platform as a whole seem to come out of journalism, while the people who shrug off the Bad newsletters are coming more from the worlds of academia and tech/business (at least in the pieces of it that I see).

Anyway, that’s a little meta and self-indulgent, but as noted above, it’s the night before vacation, so I don’t want to think much deeper than that. From a user standpoint, I’m pretty happy with Substack, and I’m not especially bothered by their corporate-level policies at this time. Both of those are subject to change, but not until after we get back from our trip.

Here’s a button if you want more of this (though likely not for a week or so, unless I get really bored in a hotel room waiting for the rest of the family to get up):

As noted above, the pay option doesn’t really get you anything extra at this time, but tips are always appreciated… And if you want to tell me I’m wrong, or reminisce about the heyday of ScienceBlogs, the comments will be open:

Counting Atoms

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