Across that last couple months, people noticed that Nazis were using Substack to distribute and monetize Nazi ideology. A bunch of writers who publish on Substack got upset, and asked the company leadership to do something. Substack said it would not ban the Nazis, then said it would, then it did some tokenized hand waving and didn’t really do much in the end. This was followed by a few high profile writers announcing their departure from the platform (most notably, Casey Newton’s newsletter, Platformer).
Substack doesn’t have a Nazi problem. They have a platform problem.
This has been a long time coming, since over the last three years Substack has taken their simple services business, and pivoted to being a social platform business. But with the promises and rewards of a social network, comes all the headaches. Nazis put this in stark reveal, because most of us agree that Nazis = bad. But the core challenge is not the Nazis, it’s content moderation.
Initially, Substack was a service provider. They solved for two needs that most web2 platforms don’t provide: The ability own your network/audience (you can’t take your Instagram followers with you to another platform), and the ability to have a direct market relationship with your network (charge them $ for your native content).
Substack bundled two existing protocols — the SMTP based email newsletter, and Stripe’s payment rails — to create a tidy, easy to use, low friction way for writers to distribute their work to an owned network, and charge those people directly for the content. The company took a 10% fee on monetization. Simple.
Substack enabled writers to unbundle themselves from traditional publishers, and re-bundle as micro-media companies with a direct subscriber and financial relationship with their readers.
The trade offs between building your business on top of a service provider’s protocols VS building on top of a platform, is self sovereignty and freedom of speech VS network effect, amplification, and being subject to centrally controlled content moderation.
Originally, Substack was a way to monetize your existing social graph (mostly Twitter followers). You had to bring your network with you. In their attempt to create organic in-network growth, they built and shipped features to the product that pivoted them from being a service provider, to a platform, including cross network promotion, discovery, and social network elements.
As they’ve remade themselves into a social platform, they have ignored the central tenet of platform operation: If you run a platform, your core product is content curation and moderation.
Nilay Patel perfectly articulated this tension this back in October 2022, writing about Twitter, “The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.”
Service providers don’t give recommendations, they doesn’t promise their customers they will get them new followers or subscribers, and they are not trying to build a social network that can generate network effect for its users. Substack is doing all of those things. Substack is a platform.
The life cycle of every internet platform to date, is they build and scale ignoring the role of content moderation, get in trouble for bad content moderation, and then either start moderating, or die. The Substack founders have spent the last couple years righteously telling us that none of these issues would ever apply to them, because all the problems on the internet were caused by ‘algorithms’ and advertising, which they assured us they would never have.
But platform fate is inexorable, and if you build and scale a social platform, sooner or later you have to curate and moderate it.
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The platform problem is best solved by turning it completely upside down.
First is scale: Substack undermined its core value proposition of allowing each creator to stand on their own in the market, by trying to connect them all together on a central monolithic platform.
Second, is by making curation a core value proposition of your community. Curation is a deeply creative act. It removes noise, to bring focus. Curation creates shared identity — it fosters community.
Most of the time when we reach for the short hand of “community” we are trying to define a group of people who think they are working towards a common vision for the future, but who don’t actually agree on the protocols or values that will enable them to be there together. If we want to build a community with enduring value, we have to be specific. We have to create edges. Curation, and moderation, are edges.
When you lead with curation, you create shared value and safety. And by allowing micro-social networks to be independent, you give people agency to leave individual spaces, without feeling like they are walking away from their entire social network.
Don’t like the Nazis? Don’t subscribe to the Nazi newsletter. But when the Nazis can grow and monetize their newsletter by getting exposed to everyone on the platform of newsletters, then the platform operator has a stake, and a responsibility. Casey Newton felt like he had to leave the Substack Platform, because he was in the same cross promoted interconnected social space as the Nazis. Casey doesn’t feel like he has to quit the internet because there are Nazis on the internet. By taking his network off of the Substack platform, and creating a container (website) for them on the open internet, he has created a boundaried space where there are no Nazis, because his team curates what is allowed on that node of the internet.
Substack designed themselves into this corner. Their muddled approach is trying to straddling the structures of a monolithic web2 social platform, and possibility that is exist for connection within internet based self-sovereign micro-social networks.
Social fulfillment is found in relationships, in the joy of being with your people. What we crave is connection. The internet’s core feature, is creating connections that were previously unimaginable. Let’s curate micro-social spaces, that bridge on-line and in-person, where we feel deeply seen and connected to each other, through a shared vision for what is possible.
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