Saying good riddance to Substack and moving to Ghost
I know where my conscience is at
I’ve been planning this for a while now, but this will be my last post on Substack as I move on to Ghost.
Before we go any further from there, I want to assure existing customers of the newsletter that you have all been automatically moved to the new newsletter with your previous settings. Little will change. Everyone who is comped via the Kawaiikochans Patreon is also comped for a full year on the new newsletter, because I said so. If you are a Kawaiikochans $5 donor and you are not comped for the new newsletter, please let me know so that I may fix the issue; Substack screwed up in October and dropped a whole bunch of you.
I’ve been blogging in a lot of places for a long time, so this is just one of many moves… but it’s the first time I’ve decided to leave a platform that was actively paying me. It’s not some kneejerk decision: I’ve learned as much as I can about the situation from both sides, and thought long and hard about it before making my choice.
My choice, simply, is that as far as I can help it, I don’t want to use my work and my talent to make money— however little— for a business that welcomes, boosts, and makes money from the worst kinds of hate.
Substack profits from hate
Fast-forward version: Substack is passionate about absolute freedom of speech, up to and including medical misinformation (a cottage industry of anti-vax pages) and hate communities, notably TERFs and white nationalist Nazis. When pressed on any of these, Substack continues to take the stance that they will continue to host and profit from these fringes in the name of free speech.
To not take their money and offer them a friendly home base to do business from would simply push them further out to the fringes, you see. As someone who lived through the wild west Internet of the 2000s, I know very well and have seen with my own eyes that the “free speech absolutist” position is naïve and empty.
As more people become more aware of Substack’s embrace of the intolerant, the company has stuck to its ideals through protests and mass exodus by left-leaning writers, to cheers from its hard-right core userbase.
Well, I’m one of the people who’s leaving. What sealed the deal? Probably a lot of incidents, one after the other. Substack’s management has always left a bad impression— the CEO e-mails you a couple times a year to remind you that nobody wants to listen to him talk unless forced— but their actions during this recent controversy made it pretty apparent I wasn’t on their side.1
For example, they put forth the claim that the problem of “Nazis” was actually too small to care about, based on the small sample of extremist sites the Platformer sent them. But six small banned blogs does not even constitute the tip of the iceberg for hate on Substack.
This became easier to notice as Substack added more social features to their site: you’d be recommended some angry conservative’s blog that was suspiciously close to a hate blog, and they’d link in their recommendations to more… extreme thinkers.2
It is extremely easy to find active, successful, profitable hate newsletters on Substack if you know the kind of key words that hate movements use. (If you have the stomach for it, go ahead and search “race realism” or “white nationalism”: keep in mind that just seeing the shit and confirming it was what I knew it was made my day a lot worse.) There is clearly an active community of Substack hatemongers with thousands of paying subscribers. Substack takes ten percent on that, just like they do with everybody else.
This is the reason Chris Best would not say whether he would enforce against the statement “All brown people should be kicked out of America” in that Verge interview, for example: he knows damn well that his company makes sizable chunks of change off newsletters that deliver messages like that and a hell of a lot worse. He couldn’t say what management at any other tech company would easily say— okay, maybe not at Twitter— because he was completely aware that people who say things like that butter his bread, and that he helps give them a livelihood.
It is Substack’s right to give service to whoever they want, and they’ve chosen to specifically allow Nazis and other hate groups, which is a step too far for even the most permissive social media. Substack management’s actions have also not convinced me that they aren’t personally sympathetic to these causes. It is one thing being on a website with a lot of right-leaning users; that’s just sharing the space I exist in with people who don’t agree with me. We don’t all have to agree with each other to function as a community.
But I don’t extend that good faith to people who want me dead. I don’t extend it to people who want people I love dead. I don’t want to be near them if I can help it, and I don’t want to do work for an organization that pays and boosts them. Any way, any how.
I’m not a big writer. I don’t take a big following with me and I don’t put a big dent in Substack’s finances. And that’s not the point.
So that’s it. I’m outta here.
That got kinda heavy! It’s not the thing I wanna write, to be honest: just talking about this subject, and exposing myself to the kind of hate that’s out there, makes me sad and afraid for the future. Writing is my happy place, and you guys know the subjects of this blog are rarely so serious as the resurgence of fascism.
I want to say: if the Substack hadn’t been a financial success after these two years, *and* this had happened, I probably would have stopped the paid newsletter experiment altogether. I’m not going to act like I’d have stopped writing, but I certainly wouldn’t be doing it with this frequency.
At final count on the Substack, 28 paid sponsors have paid for 151 posts— most of which are full-length pieces running 1000 words or more, the kind of quality work that takes time— in the last two years. And I should say, my last two years have been really rough! This project has been a healing thing.
Of course, when you do the math on the income, it’s not anywhere near an amount one could live on. But it helps a lot, and it means a lot to me that that so many people care enough to give me five bucks a month in a world where I know that amount of money could get you a lot more *stuff* than I could ever produce. I’m really very proud of the fact that you chose me, and I’m humbled by the degree to which people have supported me over the years.
(I’m still actively looking for work, probably outside of freelance writing, for the very similar reason that it’s a collapsing field that doesn’t pay enough to live.)
Life continues on Ghost
All this is to say that very little’s going to actually change for you as a subscriber. I have already moved every subscriber over to Ghost, including your subscription access for the exact amount of time you already signed up for. You’re just going to get new newsletters. I just won’t be on Substack anymore. If you read on web, the new URL is gamesoftrobo.ghost.io.
If you go to that site you’ll notice that all the previous content has also been moved over to Ghost. It’s automatic, so I can’t guarantee everything is perfect— noticeably, all the “second titles” are permanently and unfixably broken— but I’ll try and go through some of them and do some fixes when I have the time.
I’m looking forward to doing more of what I’ve always been doing for you, and from now on, not on the “bigots welcome!” website. That’s a load off my conscience, truly.
One of the reasons I didn’t repost “Substackers against Nazis” was that I had literally zero expectation that Hamish McKenzie was going to be convinced of anything.
And then there’s the “crossover” case, like how the creator of The IT Crowd has dedicated his entire life to hating trans people.