Debating Substack Notes

I have concerns.

Reading time: approximately 13 minutes

Hello again, my darlings. I have had some thoughts about Substack’s new Notes feature, released last week.

{For those who get my emails but do not have accounts on Substack: Notes is like Twitter for Substack. It’s a separate interface from the newsletter + website part of Substack, but it lets everyone on Substack interact with each other in short-form Twitter-like feeds & posts.}

I was getting ready to sit down and write you an update about the next steps in my learning more about story craft. (Which, after 17 panels attended at Norwescon and the reading and digesting of the book Writing For Emotional Impact, I can say my understanding of story has grown by leaps and bounds.)

But before I began my update, there were all these emails in my inbox about the launch of Notes, so I figured I should check out this new feature. Within the first page of posts to Notes, two people were bragging about how they had made their first blocks on the platform. I.e., how they had used the block feature on Notes so that they would never see that person’s posts, and blocked that person from commenting on their posts.

But everyone keeps saying how civilized Notes is compared to Twitter…

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Ever since Notes began, I haven’t wanted to post on Substack. At first I thought it was because I feel over-engaged in general; I’ve got all these new story writing tools that I want to play with! I have entered a season where I want to be absorbed by my craft.

But that’s not really it.

I read the Substack CEO’s interview with Nilay Patel at The Verge, and I could feel something starting to take shape.

No, I really want you to answer that question. Is that allowed on Substack Notes? “We should not allow brown people in the country.”

I’m not going to get into gotcha content moderation.

This is not a gotcha... I’m a brown person. Do you think people on Substack should say I should get kicked out of the country?

I’m not going to engage in content moderation, “Would you or won’t you this or that?”

That one is black and white, and I just want to be clear: I’ve talked to a lot of social network CEOs, and they would have no hesitation telling me that that was against their moderation rules.

Yeah. We’re not going to get into specific “would you or won’t you” content moderation questions.

But it’s the thing that you have to do. I mean, you have to make these decisions, don’t you?

The way that we think about this is, yes, there is going to be a terms of service. We have content policies that are deliberately tuned to allow lots of things that we disagree with, that we strongly disagree with. We think we have a strong commitment to freedom of speech, freedom of the press. We think these are essential ingredients in a free society. We think that it would be a failure for us to build a new kind of network that can’t support those ideals. And we want to design the network in a way where people are in control of their experience, where they’re able to do that stuff. We’re at the very early innings of that. We don’t have all the answers for how those things will work. We are making a new thing. And literally, we launched this thing one day ago. We’re going to have to figure a lot of this stuff out. I don’t think…

You have to figure out, “Should we allow overt racism on Substack Notes?” You have to figure that out.

No, I’m not going to engage in speculation or specific “would you allow this or that” content.

You know this is a very bad response to this question, right? You’re aware that you’ve blundered into this. You should just say no. And I’m wondering what’s keeping you from just saying no.

I have a blanket [policy that] I don’t think it’s useful to get into “would you allow this or that thing on Substack.”

If I read you your own terms of service, will you agree that this prohibition is in that terms of service?

I don’t think that’s a useful exercise.

Okay. I’m granting you the out that when you’re the email service provider, you should have a looser moderation rule. There are a lot of my listeners and a lot of people out there who do not agree with me on that. I’ll give you the out that, as the email service provider, you can have looser moderation rules because that is sort of a market-driven thing, but when you make the consumer product, my belief is that you should have higher moderation rules. And so, I’m just wondering, applying the blanket, I understand why that was your answer in the past. It’s just there’s a piece here that I’m missing. Now that it’s the consumer product, do you not think that it should have a different set of moderation standards?

You are free to have that belief. And I do think it’s possible that there will be different moderation standards. I do think it’s an interesting thing. I think the place that we maybe differ is you’re coming at this from a point where you think that because something is bad… let’s grant that this thing is a terrible, bad thing...

Yeah, I think you should grant that this idea is bad.

That therefore censorship of it is the most effective tool to prevent that. And I think we’ve run, in my estimation over the past five years, however long it’s been, a grand experiment in the idea that pervasive censorship successfully combats ideas that the owners of the platforms don’t like. And my read is that that hasn’t actually worked. That hasn’t been a success. It hasn’t caused those ideas not to exist. It hasn’t built trust. It hasn’t ended polarization. It hasn’t done any of those things. And I don’t think that taking the approach that the legacy platforms have taken and expecting it to have different outcomes is obviously the right answer the way that you seem to be presenting it to be. I don’t think that that’s a question of whether some particular objection or belief is right or wrong.

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Substack hosts many writers with a very diverse range of opinions—some radical, some mainstream, some harmful—and from a very diverse range of groups: some marginalized, some not. And while Substack writers can turn on comments and allow anyone to comment on their longform pieces, each Substack is rather like its own garden. You go to one garden to read one person’s content. You leave that garden and go to another to read someone else’s content. And like fences make good neighbors, each garden has its specific carved space and does not spill into someone else’s garden.

Notes is a very different model of interaction. Now each single garden has an opening into a community garden. Within the community garden, Substack can more fully realize their stated dream of building trust:

Declining trust is both a cause and an effect of polarization, reflecting and giving rise to conditions that further compromise our confidence in each other and in institutions. These effects are especially apparent in our digital gathering places. To remain in favor with your in-group, you must defend your side, even if that means being selectively honest or hyperbolic, and even if it means favoring conspiratorial narratives over the pursuit of truth. In the online Thunderdome, it is imperative that you are not seen to engage with ideas from the wrong group; on the contrary, you are expected to marshall whatever power is at your disposal – be it cultural, political, or technological – to silence their arguments.

In a pernicious cycle, these dynamics in turn give each group license to point to the excesses of the other as further justification for mistrust and misbehavior. It’s always the other side who is deranged and dishonest and dangerous. It’s the other side who shuts down criticism because they know they can’t win the argument. It’s they who have no concern for the truth. Them, them, them; not us, us, us. Through this pattern, each group becomes ever more incensed by the misdeeds of the other and blind to their own. The center does not hold.

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Have you heard about The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling?

It bills itself as: “An audio documentary that examines some of the most contentious conflicts of our time through the life and career of the world’s most successful author,” In it, people, including J.K. Rowling, were interviewed. And their interviews were collected and edited into this seven-episode documentary piece. The documentary focuses on the burning and banning of Harry Potter books in the early aughts, and J.K. Rowling’s many transphobic comments and actions, and the blowback she is receiving for having made them.

In one of the Witch Trials episodes, J.K. Rowling says:

“A sense of righteousness is not incompatible with doing terrible things. What I try to show in the Potter books, and what I strongly believe in myself: We should mistrust ourselves most when we are certain. In my worldview, conscience speaks in a very small and inconvenient voice. It’s normally saying to you, Think again, look more deeply, consider this.”

In an article I read recommending the documentary, the same sentiment was expressed in a quote by André Gide: “Believe those who seek truth, doubt those who find it.”

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Here’s a thing: we all culturally agree that murdering nine year old children is wrong. Everyone agrees on that, surely?

When a nine year old is murdered by a gun and a person says, we need stricter gun control, that person is thinking of ways to keep more nine year olds from getting murdered by guns. Because murdering nine year olds is bad and therefore we should take actions to stop it from happening.

When a nine year old is murdered by a gun and a person says, “Criminals are going to be criminals,” that person thinks murdering nine year olds is tragic but inevitable. Murdered nine year olds is bad, but they are an unpreventable fact of the human condition.

Do you see how there is no center to this “debate?” It’s not that there is no center because it’s us versus them, there is no center because only one side of the “debate” has bought into the cultural agreement that murdering nine year old children is wrong. The other side is debating from the center that murdering nine year old children is evil. If it’s morally wrong, we need to stop people from doing it. But if it’s evil, well….how do we deal with the inherent evil in all people? Why don’t you just get back to us when you have figured out the philosophical problem of how to solve evil and then we can do that and no more nine year olds will be murdered at all.

Think again, look more deeply, consider this.

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How about racism? People shouldn’t be treated unequally because of the color of their (or their family’s) skin. In 2023, we can all culturally agree on that.

When Nilay Patel asks Chris Best, Do you think people on Substack should say I should get kicked out of the country? and when the answer is content moderation doesn’t work, there’s no center to this “debate.”

Nilay is asking Chris to take action to uphold the cultural agreement that when people are treated unequally because of the color of their skin, that’s wrong.

Chris replies that censoring bad ideas doesn’t keep them from being thought. He replies that it’s not a question of right or wrong, it’s a question of what’s effective. If content moderation isn’t effective, why don’t you just get back to us when you have figured out how to keep people from thinking racist thoughts entirely, and then we can do that and no one on our platform will be treated unequally because of the color of their skin.

Think again, look more deeply, consider this.

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There are some things, my darlings, we do not need to think again. We don’t need to look more deeply at the Holocaust and wonder out loud if it was really all that bad. We don’t need to consider every economic impact of climate change before we do a single thing to stop it. Our conscience is not a small, inconvenient voice. Forty percent of transgender people have attempted suicide and eighty percent have considered suicide because society has made simply existing as hard and miserable for them as possible, and that is wrong. This isn’t up for debate. And everyone knows it isn’t a debate. Any “debates” on the subject are all tactics to stall taking action. Open debate only is useful when everyone debating agrees on the premise. If one side says trans people need life-saving access to health care, and the other side says, we should first consider how we can make every cis woman feel safe in public bathrooms, what the fuck are we even doing?

Here is a truth: all people deserve human rights, dignity, and compassion. All. People. The immigrant farm workers being treated as less than human. The prisoners being exploited in the prison-industrial complex. The First Nations families whose children are still being taken away. The people of the Marshall Islands who are watching their homes disappear.

Another truth: when someone is punching down, you don’t look more deeply into why the group with less power could possibly be so angry at someone who actively stands in the way of their human rights. You look for an agenda, and a reason why.

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This might all seem like a prelude to a grand announcement that I am leaving Substack, but it’s not. Substack’s take on content moderation and “free speech” has bothered me for a while, but when everyone had their private garden, it felt like less of an issue. With Notes, their take seems even more disingenuous. They’ve built a community garden and claimed they’ve done so out of a spirit of healing division and building trust. But they are ignoring that trust cannot be built with bad faith actors, and that “debate” only works to heal division when everyone agrees on the premise of the argument and everyone is there to learn and not to win. Their content moderation policy basically says weeds happen, and when we pull them out they just grow back, so why bother trying. I guess we’ll just have to hope the weeds don’t choke out everything else.

It’s worth remembering that however nobly Substack paints their purpose, they are still a company that needs to justify their worth to investors. Notes is part of a business plan to generate more revenue. And Substack seems rather desperate for more revenue. Which do they care more about—revenue or a healthy community garden? (Is that even a useful question under today’s capitalism?) I am also so sick to death of political “debating” for the apparent purpose of coming to no conclusion. The point seems to be to skip out on taking any action on fixing what we know is wrong until—when? When we have debated into existence one perfect shining answer that unassailably cures the ill? Or is it simply that endless debate keeps our attention focused on platforms so that they can turn all our attention into money?

I guess we’ll find out?

Thank you for coming on this ride through doubts, misgivings, questions and truths, my friends.

💖 💖 💖,

Elnora