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Firstly - love love love Substack. It's so simple but it's so rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few questions (mostly not about the ap

Firstly - love love love Substack. It's so simple but it's so rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few questions (mostly not about the app though, I'll have to wait for Android support to try that). 1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. That doesn't feel particularly hard to put together, though maybe I totally underestimate that. So what's powering Substack's growth is that you were able to get guys like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander etc on board. How much of your growth do you think is product vs business/dealmaking? 2. You've been strong defenders of free speech, especially in the last two years where there's been a ton of censorship. Really, it's helped a lot, I've felt like Substack was one of the few places I could find rational and logical takes on things like lockdowns at a time when everyone else was losing their minds. Do you have some sort of strong philosophical take on this, or is it a sort of default because censorship takes specific effort and you're busy with growth? 3. Related to that, the pattern of tech firms being open access and supporters of free speech for some years and then later losing that as they hire more and more people (especially, new grads) seems to be a recurring one. Given you're based in San Francisco, do you have a plan to actually keep Substack the way it is, in the face of hiring employees who might demand you constantly cancel the witch-du-jour? 4. There's IMO a ton of potential for innovation with group discussions. To me, Slashdot was actually the peak of innovation in large scale anonymous forum discussions with many clever features, crowdsourced moderation, friends/foes, meta-mods etc. Do you plan to try new things with discussions, or stick to a conventional approach? Right now it's pretty basic.

bambax 5y ago
> Firstly - love love love Substack It's fascinating that the top-level comment telling us how they "love" Substack is from someone who apparently thinks the fight against Covid is equivalent to modern-day Stalinism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30637571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30637571 further in this thread). Whoops.
- native_samples 5y ago
  No more fascinating than observing that the person with the biggest problem with Substack in this thread is someone who thinks industries and regulators are all perfect, all the time, and sees conspiracy theories everywhere, even where none are being proposed.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cjbest 5y ago
2: We do have a strong philosophical stance on this. We think taking a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press is both the right thing to do, and critical to the success of our broader mission. We've written about this a few times, e.g. https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderation https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati... and https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind. 4. YES!
- jxramos 5y ago
  Thank you for #2, I never knew these points > Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions. I think I'm going to start subscribing to two writers in particular and see how that goes. This is a great model.
- wpietri 5y ago
  That philosophical stance is very common at the beginnings of a platform. E.g., Twitter being the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party". Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. But over time, tensions develop between the theory and the practice. So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support? From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that category. What about, say, open antisemitism? Will you host and help fund the American Nazi Party or the KKK? How about more borderline actors, like people who promote racist conspiracy theories and ethnic cleansing, but stop short of direct calls for violence?
  - Zababa 5y ago
    > Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. 4chan has never been about free speech, it had rules since the beginning which are constantly enforced.
internet_jockey 5y ago
Hello, I (Hamish) will answer question #1 and leave the rest to my colleagues. I think what has driven our growth is a nice synthesis between the product, the business dev work (i.e. convincing writers to give it a shot), and the business model. The model may be the underestimated part. It's compelling for many writers, partly because of its simplicity and transparency: you own the relationship with your audience, you publish stuff that gets sent to them, and then if you're doing good work some portion of that audience will choose to pay you to keep going. That's a good deal for writers, since: a) It lets them do the work they believe is most important b) No one can mess with their audience c) There's a clear path to making money, which is the major thing absent from most other options for writing on the internet (or, increasingly, anywhere else). These things make Substack a relatively easy "sell". Of course, some writers are better poised to succeed with this model than others, so we have put in a sustained effort to identify those writers and let them know about their opportunity on Substack. In a small number of cases, that has meant we've offered a financial package to derisk the move for them (you can think of it as like startup funding to get them going; many don't have much financial buffer and may be reluctant to leave jobs even if they are unhappy in those jobs). But the vast majority of writers doing well on Substack have come to the platform of their own accord, without any kind of deal.
hihihihi1234 5y ago
I have a follow-up question to #3. Like the parent post I commend your stance on free speech, but recognise you host some controversial figures that other platforms have been happy to ban. The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower, and as Substack gets bigger it's naturally going to attract more attention, both from those who call for increased censorship, and from those who others might want to censor. The particularly controversial writers are naturally going to gravitate to Substack if it's the only place that will let them have an account. So do you ever worry that you might end up like Parler? What happens if AWS, Cloudflare, payment processors etc. decide to kick you off the internet because of whom you publish? Right now it seems unlikely that they'd become that intolerant, but a lot of unlikely things have happened in tech in the last few years. Are you worried about this eventuality, and are you preparing for it?
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  > The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower I'm not affiliated with Substack, but I'm having difficulty with your premise here. There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. What opinions is "Big Tech" "censoring" and why should one think there's any validity to your slippery slope argument?
  - meowface 5y ago
    They're probably using Big Tech as a stand-in for Big Social Media Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).
    - nelsondev 5y ago
      Amazon AWS also deplatformed right leaning services.
      - Mavvie 5y ago
        Yes, but not because they were right leaning. According to them, it was due to the lack of moderation and dangerous content being hosted.
bambax 5y ago
Well, the problem with your second point ("free speech") is that it tends to attract and retain a specific kind of writers: those who aren't accepted anywhere else. Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term. And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that typically bundles many different voices) also attracts readers that are ideological/obsessive. That's a feedback loop that could end not well.
- mst 5y ago
- bambax 5y ago
  I can't edit the above comment anymore, but I would like to add this: my point isn't really about Substack specifically; it's about the fact that it's difficult (impossible?) to be "content neutral", and pretending otherwise is a fallacy. (And how is porn not speech? If you ban porn then you're not defending free speech in any meaningful manner.)
  - native_samples 5y ago
    This can be defended in two ways: 1. Practical. Porn is banned because Stripe doesn't allow payment for porn. In turn Stripe doesn't allow that because the chargeback rate on such payments is very high, supposedly due to the number of people who buy porn because they want it and then get caught by their spouses and claim their card must have been stolen. At any rate, a blogging/newsletter platform is not exactly optimized for porn anyway. The people who want to buy and sell that are better served by other platforms. 2. Theoretical. Porn is not "speech" because speech encodes ideas or viewpoints. The reason freedom of speech is important is because ideas and viewpoints are important, as it's only through the competition of ideas that progress occurs. Defending free speech takes a lot of work, but can be justified by the benefits. Defending porn would take even more work, but wouldn't yield the same social benefits.
- Lascaille 5y ago

bambax 5y ago

> Firstly - love love love Substack It's fascinating that the top-level comment telling us how they "love" Substack is from someone who apparently thinks the fight against Covid is equivalent to modern-day Stalinism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30637571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30637571 further in this thread). Whoops.

native_samples 5y ago
No more fascinating than observing that the person with the biggest problem with Substack in this thread is someone who thinks industries and regulators are all perfect, all the time, and sees conspiracy theories everywhere, even where none are being proposed.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cjbest 5y ago

2: We do have a strong philosophical stance on this. We think taking a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press is both the right thing to do, and critical to the success of our broader mission. We've written about this a few times, e.g. https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderation https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati... and https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind. 4. YES!

jxramos 5y ago
Thank you for #2, I never knew these points > Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions. I think I'm going to start subscribing to two writers in particular and see how that goes. This is a great model.
wpietri 5y ago
That philosophical stance is very common at the beginnings of a platform. E.g., Twitter being the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party". Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. But over time, tensions develop between the theory and the practice. So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support? From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that category. What about, say, open antisemitism? Will you host and help fund the American Nazi Party or the KKK? How about more borderline actors, like people who promote racist conspiracy theories and ethnic cleansing, but stop short of direct calls for violence?
- Zababa 5y ago
  > Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. 4chan has never been about free speech, it had rules since the beginning which are constantly enforced.

internet_jockey 5y ago

Hello, I (Hamish) will answer question #1 and leave the rest to my colleagues. I think what has driven our growth is a nice synthesis between the product, the business dev work (i.e. convincing writers to give it a shot), and the business model. The model may be the underestimated part. It's compelling for many writers, partly because of its simplicity and transparency: you own the relationship with your audience, you publish stuff that gets sent to them, and then if you're doing good work some portion of that audience will choose to pay you to keep going. That's a good deal for writers, since: a) It lets them do the work they believe is most important b) No one can mess with their audience c) There's a clear path to making money, which is the major thing absent from most other options for writing on the internet (or, increasingly, anywhere else). These things make Substack a relatively easy "sell". Of course, some writers are better poised to succeed with this model than others, so we have put in a sustained effort to identify those writers and let them know about their opportunity on Substack. In a small number of cases, that has meant we've offered a financial package to derisk the move for them (you can think of it as like startup funding to get them going; many don't have much financial buffer and may be reluctant to leave jobs even if they are unhappy in those jobs). But the vast majority of writers doing well on Substack have come to the platform of their own accord, without any kind of deal.

hihihihi1234 5y ago

I have a follow-up question to #3. Like the parent post I commend your stance on free speech, but recognise you host some controversial figures that other platforms have been happy to ban. The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower, and as Substack gets bigger it's naturally going to attract more attention, both from those who call for increased censorship, and from those who others might want to censor. The particularly controversial writers are naturally going to gravitate to Substack if it's the only place that will let them have an account. So do you ever worry that you might end up like Parler? What happens if AWS, Cloudflare, payment processors etc. decide to kick you off the internet because of whom you publish? Right now it seems unlikely that they'd become that intolerant, but a lot of unlikely things have happened in tech in the last few years. Are you worried about this eventuality, and are you preparing for it?

KerrAvon 5y ago
> The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower I'm not affiliated with Substack, but I'm having difficulty with your premise here. There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. What opinions is "Big Tech" "censoring" and why should one think there's any validity to your slippery slope argument?
- meowface 5y ago
  They're probably using Big Tech as a stand-in for Big Social Media Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).
  - nelsondev 5y ago
    Amazon AWS also deplatformed right leaning services.
    - Mavvie 5y ago
      Yes, but not because they were right leaning. According to them, it was due to the lack of moderation and dangerous content being hosted.

bambax 5y ago

Well, the problem with your second point ("free speech") is that it tends to attract and retain a specific kind of writers: those who aren't accepted anywhere else. Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term. And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that typically bundles many different voices) also attracts readers that are ideological/obsessive. That's a feedback loop that could end not well.

mst 5y ago
bambax 5y ago
I can't edit the above comment anymore, but I would like to add this: my point isn't really about Substack specifically; it's about the fact that it's difficult (impossible?) to be "content neutral", and pretending otherwise is a fallacy. (And how is porn not speech? If you ban porn then you're not defending free speech in any meaningful manner.)
- native_samples 5y ago
  This can be defended in two ways: 1. Practical. Porn is banned because Stripe doesn't allow payment for porn. In turn Stripe doesn't allow that because the chargeback rate on such payments is very high, supposedly due to the number of people who buy porn because they want it and then get caught by their spouses and claim their card must have been stolen. At any rate, a blogging/newsletter platform is not exactly optimized for porn anyway. The people who want to buy and sell that are better served by other platforms. 2. Theoretical. Porn is not "speech" because speech encodes ideas or viewpoints. The reason freedom of speech is important is because ideas and viewpoints are important, as it's only through the competition of ideas that progress occurs. Defending free speech takes a lot of work, but can be justified by the benefits. Defending porn would take even more work, but wouldn't yield the same social benefits.
Lascaille 5y ago