Substack’s Nonsense
Yet again, a platform’s stumbles prove rolling-your-own is superior
2024 is upon us and I’m excited to get a new year of TimeMachiner underway. One thing that I’ve been quite happy about are some key past decisions I’ve made about how I’ve set up this newsletter. Mainly, I decided at the beginning that I would not use Substack. That single choice has saved me a lot of work if I’d have to migrate away. Why? Let’s dive in.
Substack is a newsletter publishing platform that’s been around since 2017. The goal is to make it easy to write and publish newsletters. It promised zero setup and fuss. Simply write and publish. But over the years they’ve changed things around. There’s a recommendation engine. There’s a Twitter-style clone called “Notes”. There’s an entire payment system wherein you can ask people to pay to support your work (akin to Memberships here). Money is pooled in some fashion and shared among other paid newsletter writers.
Near the end of last year though, something changed. In November there was an article in The Atlantic putting a focus on the fact that Substack has a “Nazi problem”. The TL;DR of the situation is Substack has near-zero moderation and people who hold… certain extremist views have been allowed to not only freely publish their thoughts but profit from it too using Substack’s payment…
