Housekeeping Note

You may notice something’s a little different about this email. That’s because I’ve moved from Substack to a different newsletter platform, Beehiiv. If you want to keep receiving these emails, no action is needed on your end.

I first considered getting off Substack a few months ago, when this letter made the rounds. The gist of the letter is as follows: Substack permits white supremacists to run paid newsletters on their platform and collects a cut of the revenue. The signatories/reposters to the “Substackers Against Nazis” letter asked that the company remove white supremacist newsletters from its site.

I should note that this wasn’t just a matter of Substack hosting white supremacists and passively collecting their share of subscription fees. There was active promotion going on as well, most notably when co-founder Hamish McKenzie hosted the unambiguously racist writer Richard Hanania on his podcast.

After initially resisting the “Substackers Against Nazis” demands, Substack eventually made some lukewarm, placatory motions, including banning a few of the most obvious offenders (Hanania is still on the site). They hemorrhaged a few major publications, but things generally quieted down.

I stayed on Substack. Most large online platforms are overrun with amateur race scientists these days, and Substack did not look to me like an especially dramatic outlier. Plus, I was already transitioning off Twitter — a far, far worse offender than Substack these days — and I had a little bit of fatigue from all the shuffling around looking for a morally unimpeachable place to post. Lastly, I didn’t feel especially complicit in whatever Substack management was up to: I run a free newsletter with a modest subscriber base, so Hamish McKenzie’s cut of my $0 in annual subscription revenue was $0.

What finally prompted my decision to leave was Substack’s evolution from a newsletter platform into a social network. First came Notes, Substack’s photocopy of a photocopy of Twitter. Then Substack started encouraging users to “follow” writers through their Substack account instead of subscribing to their actual newsletters.

In effect, the “follow” feature turns Substack from an open newsletter platform into something more like a walled garden. When last I checked, about 1/7th of the people who read my newsletter were followers instead of subscribers, meaning they could only access my writing through their Substack accounts; none of my posts were going directly to their inbox.

That rankled me. The benefit of writing a newsletter instead of, say, a Facebook post is that your writing goes directly to people’s emails accounts, no matter which platform hosts those accounts. So if you want to move your writing somewhere else, you can take all your readers with you. Sending your writing straight to email also means that your writing doesn’t show up in some sort of social feed right alongside white supremacist content.

So after procrastinating for a little bit, I decided it was time to move. I wasn’t thrilled about having to find a new host, design a new page, etc., but that was just laziness on my part. The truth is, I have relatively few subscribers — 722 at the time of the move — and none of you are giving me money (which is fine, I love you all anyway). This is my hobby, not my job. Insofar as there’s a cost to moving, it’s just a couple hours of my time.

I don’t begrudge anyone’s decision to keep their newsletter on Substack. I was on the fence until I noticed a significant uptick in the number of non-subscribing followers; I should leave, I figured, before I got truly mired in the walled garden. My decision isn’t part of any sort of organized boycott. And a lot of writers I respect do this for a living and made a different decision, in part because the cost of leaving Substack would now be considerably higher for them.

So anyway, here we are. Thanks for bearing with me; I acknowledge that the “Why I Left [Social Platform]” genre is incredibly tedious, and I solemnly vow never to write another entry in it again.