The Substack Narrative

A whole lot of major Substack writers seem to be writing articles of the form "Look at this bad thing that's happening, aren't you upset about it?" Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=greenwald.substack.co... , for instance.

So yeah, I don't think that Substack is solving the "rage" problem. It could be, as this article says, that major authors need to cultivate rage to get new subscriptions. But it may simply be the case that people are happy to pay for rage, which would directly undercut the point Substack is trying to make in https://on.substack.com/p/breaking-off-the-engagement , the article that TFA is responding to:

> While platforms that depend on ad sales must harvest attention any way they can, platforms that depend on people’s willingness to pay must foster trust and satisfaction. Writers succeed only if readers are happy, and in turn platforms succeed only if writers are happy. In this world, users are finally at the table rather than on the menu.

"Happy" is a funny word. Regardless of whether you agree with him, it should be pretty clear that most of Greenwald's Substack isn't things he intends the reader to be happy about. What's probably true is that paying readers want to see the information and are happy that they are receiving the information, but that's very different from saying that the readers are paying to be happy.

i think, like somethingawful, the key to keeping propaganda and rage clickbait off a platform is have a trivial payment system for long term subscriptions.

bots and spammers will then naturally select themselves out of the market and with minimal mod efforts, deter the value proposition.

that is to say, ad supported is a symptom. the dieasease is the bad actors, the whales of content creation, have zero barrier to entry.

and socisl platforms are disincentivised to remove users who are generating content, the raw meet, of social media. add even a small entry fee and now theres a benefit to pruning these content creators, as they would need to buyin more.

> It's a deep dive into addressing the spread of bad information from a policy perspective

> to prevent bad information from spreading,

> wherever information spreads easily, rage will be an issue.

I wish this author would express more his real opinions on policing the information superhighway.