A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem. It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them. And it's funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen — the same type of people who are, right now, raiding the US government to basically cut funding for social services and scientific research, and to steal money for themselves.

Still, a lot of talented writers — including some that I subscribe to — publish on Substack. But others have moved to Ghost, an open source and non-shitty-tech-bro newsletter service. These include Casey Newton's publication Platformer, Molly White's newsletter Citation Needed, and plenty of others. From the beginning, 404 Media decided to publish on Ghost because, as I understand it, Substack sucks.

. . .

If you already have a Substack, Ghost has written documentation explaining how to migrate your subscribers (including paid ones) to a new Ghost newsletter. Since both Substack and Ghost use Stripe as a payment processor, your paid subscribers don't have to do anything to continue paying you.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 46 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (9 children)

A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem.

What on Earth? They hosted like three Nazis, which is part of the overall commitment to letting people talk which leads them to host a ton of really good people. And then, when everyone on the internet yelled at them for it, raising a pretty reasonable counterpoint, they kicked the Nazis off. That all happened over a year ago.

It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them

I read the citation for this statement. What it says is very different from actively promoting the work of fascists and recruiting them. There is a whole fascinating conversation to be had about why some high-profile lefty journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald all of a sudden became Nazis, but it's very misleading to assign 100% of the blame in this way to Substack, purely because they were working with those people before it really became completely clear to everyone that they for whatever bizarre reason had become Nazis. It's a lot more complex situation that is being summarized in this extremely glib spin-soaked fashion.

And it's funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen

Okay, fair enough. This is pretty interesting and I hadn't known it.

On the other hand, Substack also hosts Sy Hersh, Tim Snyder, Salman Rushdie, and God knows who else. If they were planning to slant their coverage based on the fact that Andreesen's company gave them $15 million in 2019 (which they then quickly turned around and gave big chunks of to working journalists), you'd think they would be making some kind of effort to downplay the leftist voices which they are currently hosting, outnumbering the "problematic" voices which might be there but which I have literally never run across there.

Elon Musk also, apparently, tried to buy Substack in 2023, and they told him to fuck off.

This whole article reads like a bad-faith hit piece aimed at one of the organizations that actually is trying to provide a space for good journalism including left-wing authors, and making sure that it's sustainable and they can get paid. By trumping up some various things into much bigger deals than they need to be.

I wonder who would be interested in ginning up big bad-faith hit jobs against good news outlets, encouraging people on the left to savage and abandon them for various little misdemeanors until the only news outlets left are either bought and purchased by open fascists, or too small and scattered to make a difference?

[–] Buelldozer 6 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I wonder who would be interested in ginning up big bad-faith hit jobs against good news outlets

The author of the article. It doesn't take long to uncover their politics and they are absolutely not involved in any right wing conspiracy.

There's nothing really wrong with substack. People just like to shit on anything that doesn't pass whatever purity test they happen to use.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 points 18 hours ago

absolutely not involved in any right wing conspiracy.

How do you know that? Do you know them personally, or audited them or something?

I don't know that they are, and looking over their resume it does seem unlikely. But, also, I would have said that same thing looking at Taibbi's or Greenwald's resume in 2017. I just know that in this story, they are presenting things in this absolutely wildly inaccurate fashion that would be right at home in a right-wing conspiracy. Certainly, working at The Intercept for a long time isn't some kind of bulwark against being infected with right-wing-propaganda-ism, with Greenwald himself as one absolutely interesting counterexample clearly on offer.

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