Rumination and griping

Thoughts about Substack

I’ve been thinking about the ongoing debate around content moderation on Substack, and wanted to organize my thoughts.

First, a caveat, I never really used Facebook or Twitter. Most of my online life has been spent in various online forums and blog comment sections. So my sense of online debates is more or less frozen in amber from the mid-2000s. It’s entirely possible that what strikes me as odd is simply a reflection of the fact that everyone else has seen these debates play out repeatedly before.

Second caveat is that I wouldn’t be reading and writing here if I didn’t find a lot to like about Substack as a platform and notes as forum in which I’ve discovered a number of interesting people that I hadn’t followed previously (and I think the previous paragraph demonstrates that I am not quick to jump to a new platform).

The thing that has struck me most is that the quality of discussion on Notes, in particular has been mostly quite bad. I’ve seen careful and well-written posts, and I’ve found notes useful for tracking what’s being argued, but most of the discussion on notes has either looked like people just insulting each other of people maneuvering to take the high ground without actually engaging very much (and, to be fair it frequently doesn’t look like there’d be much to fain gain from engaging). I’ve also had a couple of pleasent, civil exchanges with selected people that I disagree with and that’s been helpful in clarifying my own thinking, but I don’t know that, in either case, we took much away from what the other person was writing.

It seems like a sign that people do not have much of a sense of a broader substack community that’s worthy of persuasion, and that’s disapointing. _Particularly_ considering that I have otherwise had a number of positive interactions on Notes.

With that preamble out of the way, I don’t have a specific plan for what substack should do, but I do offer a series of propositions which seem mostly self-evident to me, but which represent my orientation in the discussion.

First, and most importantly, I’m strongly opposed to starting the discussion with a premise of, “in general what one person writes doesn’t affect other people (with occasionally narrow exceptions.” Of course any writing and any social media site worth spending time on affect people! I am aware of at least two married couples who first met each other in a blog comment section! Online life is, in important ways, real life.

That said, it doesn’t mean that it’s possible to craft a set of rules to guarantee good experiences. In offline life people frequently have interactions that leave them feeling insulted, angry, belittled, heartbroken, incredulous, or deceived and in most cases there wouldn’t be any way to create rules against it.

Also, people’s behavior is going to be affected by both formal rules and informal norms, and in most cases the latter is much more important (this links to a good discussion of the importance of a given online space having some framework that gives people a sense of what to expect and what is expected from them —

). But I still believe that _some_ formal structure of oversite and decision-making is important and that we should all be pushing for more transparency. The current debate has illustrated how little clear process exists at the moment, and there is clear room for improvement.

As my blog title suggests I am strongly in favor of norms that recognize and reward people who make an effort to engage and explain and attempt to persuade rather than seeking combat (I also know that’s often tiring and no fun, which is why it’s important to recognize people when the do so).

I like the phrasing here — https://ben.balter.com/2020/01/17/ten-lessons-learned-fostering-a-community-of-communities-on-github/

There will always be users who exhibit disruptive behavior, intentionally or otherwise, and it’s never going to be possible to push users to exhibit constructive behavior 100% of the time, meaning the balance would fall closer to disruptive than constructive, making it a losing fight.

…

If through friction and product interventions we could get some disruptive users to exhibit constructive behavior, and other generally constructive users to exhibit inclusive behavior then we had a fighting chance at creating a community where the peak of the apex of the contribution bell curve hovered above constructive with a long tail on each side.

In that vein, I sincerely appreciate people who see themselves as interested in the long-term project of making Substack better. I wouldn’t argue with anyone who’s considering leaving; I don’t think writers should feel an obligation to substack, but I do think it’s still early and there’s a lot of constructive work available to try to build a good space.

That will inevitable mean sharing Substack with people who are deeplly offputing (and sometimes making a lot of money from their substack), and trying to avoid rooting for substack to be weaker just because it makes it more likely that the people you object to will fail.

One of my long-term concerns about substack is that I think the more it is built on the “walled garden” approach the less reason it gives successful writers to change and grow; there’s significant pressures for people to be captured by their audiences. That’s inherent in the model to some degree and, again, one way to work against that is to encourage a culture in which people are rewarded for broad engagement (I may be showing my online-age here; I write this thinking about the mid-2000s blogosphere).

Finally, I have been distinctly unimpressed with the way that Substack leadership has responded to the debate — I think they have added very little in terms of engaging substantively and in good faith but, hopefully there is more to come.