Substack Is Leaning into Politics

Is Substack still a “smart” place? I’m not a frequent reader of the site.

Usually these blogging platforms go through a process where they are unpopular, so the only people using them are the ones that are actually doing interesting things in a space, which makes them popular, and causes a bunch of hangers-on who are “interested” and maybe even well read in topics, but not actually practitioners, to show up. Of course non-practitioners naturally have an advantage when blogging, because they don’t have to waste time actually doing things, and their opinions can be as contrarian and exciting as necessary, since they aren’t based on reality.

Anyway, politics discourse is in a pretty dumb spot nowadays, so it couldn’t really hurt for Substack to take a swing at it. But where’s Substack on that treadmill? If it is still near the beginning, it could be good. If it has been endumbified, eh, ok.

Substack has a secretive “Substack Pro” program where they act as a traditional publisher, paying selected authors to start columns. Unlike other publishers they don’t disclose anything about these relationships. When the program was exposed in 2021, McKenzie committed to expanding it with continued secrecy. Even if there weren’t centuries of publishing norms being ignored here, the last decade of high activity in state-funded political media makes Substack’s public commitment to secret publishing arrangements in politics especially disconcerting.

This is unsurprising. The people in charge at Substack are learning from the mistakes of Medium in a way.

Robert Reich is a counter example but the list of names there really skews right and it is not just the right-learning figures who can be called journalists (Bari Weiss) but also the pure ideologues like Ann Coultier.

I don’t think Substack’s management is really right wing but for whatever reason right wing authors have been really successful there (which doesn’t fit the narrative that all right wing media is entirely bought and paid for by the likes of Koch and Olin.)

I’m pessimistic about Substack though because anybody can hook up something like Amazon SQS to a payment gateway and write a few scripts and then you don’t need Substack anymore. In particular I don’t think Substack is providing as much in the discovery department as YouTube or even medium. Replicating a platform like YouTube or OnlyFans seems a lot tougher to me. As it is, Bari Weiss and some of her associates have already done this.

The thing is that Substack is going to be exposed to so much bullshit over politics and it would be one thing if they had a moat, but if anyone who runs a big newsletter can vote with their feet they are going to be the losers. For instance if left-wing activists push a lot of pressure on Substack enough to inconvenience right-wing authors, he right-wing authors can just leave and take their subscribers and all their revenue with them.

All the more reason to continue avoiding substack.com links at all costs.

So is HN

I think everyone figured that out when Hamish was going around promoting open white supremacist Richard Hanania