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I don't see how a corporate service can scale up the way substack wants to. If they editorialize , then they become the thing from which their users ran away in

I don't see how a corporate service can scale up the way substack wants to. If they editorialize , then they become the thing from which their users ran away in the first place. And they have to editorialize to survive, so really, there's no way to have the freedom they claim to offer in a corporate context. Only a public system (which is solely bounded by the legal limits on free speech) is able to offer that.

throwawaysea 6y ago
> And they have to editorialize to survive I don't understand this part of your argument. Why do they need to editorialize to survive? They can make money off readers subscribing to authors. If someone doesn't want to read a certain author's content, they don't have to click it or subscribe to it. That's it. I'm not sure why the thinking these days is that some platform can't survive unless it editorializes. Amazon operated for years without censoring books for instance, rebuffing calls for censorship and committing to a free speech stance. Now they've changed direction (example 1 https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/02/when-amazon-erased-my-book https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/02/when-amaz... example 2 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/technology/amazon-hitler-mein-kampf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/technology/amazon-hitler-...) and I am not sure why. They would have no impact to their bottom line if they just stuck to their neutral stance, and I imagine the same is true for Substack.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
  They already are editorializing to some degree with their program of paying writers large advances. They needed to choose who they would recruit to the platform and then pay them and that's an editorial decision. The fact that it's _also_ an open platform for anyone to write on doesn't change that.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  > Why do they need to editorialize to survive? Can you name any company that did not editorialize and was not shut down / forced to close etc? Amazon is books, substack is media, and it wants to potentially replace newspapers, all of them
Zababa 6y ago
I don't think editorializing is a simple on/off switch, and I think substack is trying to do "editorialize less" rather than "don't editorialize at all".

throwawaysea 6y ago

> And they have to editorialize to survive I don't understand this part of your argument. Why do they need to editorialize to survive? They can make money off readers subscribing to authors. If someone doesn't want to read a certain author's content, they don't have to click it or subscribe to it. That's it. I'm not sure why the thinking these days is that some platform can't survive unless it editorializes. Amazon operated for years without censoring books for instance, rebuffing calls for censorship and committing to a free speech stance. Now they've changed direction (example 1 https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/02/when-amazon-erased-my-book https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/02/when-amaz... example 2 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/technology/amazon-hitler-mein-kampf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/technology/amazon-hitler-...) and I am not sure why. They would have no impact to their bottom line if they just stuck to their neutral stance, and I imagine the same is true for Substack.

8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
They already are editorializing to some degree with their program of paying writers large advances. They needed to choose who they would recruit to the platform and then pay them and that's an editorial decision. The fact that it's _also_ an open platform for anyone to write on doesn't change that.
cblconfederate 6y ago
> Why do they need to editorialize to survive? Can you name any company that did not editorialize and was not shut down / forced to close etc? Amazon is books, substack is media, and it wants to potentially replace newspapers, all of them

Zababa 6y ago

I don't think editorializing is a simple on/off switch, and I think substack is trying to do "editorialize less" rather than "don't editorialize at all".