Community is not easy, and this shouldn't still be a surprise
On Substack and the monetization of hate
Substack Notes could be cool, but for how long?
Seven years ago I spoke on a panel at SXSW’s first (and only) Online Harassment Summit. The entire context and background for the Summit would be wayyy too long to share, but I will share one thing. My panel was eventually entitled “The Economics of Online Harassment,” and made a neutral reference to the impact online harassment can have on a company’s bottom line. That was not how the description started. The original proposed description made an assumption that content and media companies would default to wanting to prevent trolling and online harassment because it would damage their ability to monetize. I pushed back and said, actually, no, many media and content companies are monetizing, actually profiting, from hateful content because in an impressions-based ad model, the model is agnostic about those impressions, as long as they reflect actual human eyeballs. The organizer of the panel and the other speakers kind of looked at me aghast, but just because it’s an unsavory idea that companies are profiting from hate online, it doesn’t make it any less true.
Fast forward, and companies seem as likely as ever to do little to curb hate and harassment in the supposed name of “free speech,” but given how long this has been going on it’s shocking that they also seem as ill-equipped as ever to discuss the decisions they make and stand by them.
Case in point: This very newsletter is hosted by a company called Substack, and Substack introduced a new feature recently, Notes. Notes is a kind of early-days Twitter…and apparently so much so that the release of said feature prompted Melon Husk (I like having special pet names for horrible people, so I don’t have to say their names and contribute to their online juice) to ask his engineers to refuse to let people like or share any tweets that were sharing Substack links.
Like anything new and shiny, people hopped on Notes and shared all sorts of stuff, and proclaimed that it reminded them of the early days of Twitter. Or that it was going to obviously be the twitter-killer, or other hyperbolic statements for a three-day-old service.
Unfortunately for Substack, though, they sent their CEO to an interview with a reporter from The Verge, and he seemed utterly unprepared to talk about what the introduction of Notes meant for the company as they squarely planted themselves in a space that is occupied by media and social community/platform companies. It is a painful read.
It is painful to hear someone unable and unwilling to answer whether someone being racist or anti-semitic or bigoted in any other way on their platform will experience any consequences or moderation. It is painful to have someone act like that is some hypothetical question, when women and Black people, and Jewish people, and Muslims, and Trans people (and I could go on and on) experience exactly this kind of hate and harassment every single day on many platforms, and none of the platforms seem to care that deeply about NOT being a place that is home to such behavior and language.
It is painful for me, because it’s all too common to have media and content and community companies launch and raise millions and millions of dollars and have no one on their founding team who is an actual community person. No one who both understands and cares about the experience of people different from, frankly, those founders.
I have often said that the very earliest successful Web 2.0 companies (Blogger, Flickr, SixApart) were all founded by a woman-man pair of founders, all couples in those cases. And I firmly believe the tone and outcome of community in those spaces was different. The next round of successful Web 2.0 companies (Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter) were founded by exclusively white men, and they each allowed abusive content to proliferate for years, even as people told them about their horrific experiences using the platforms. How have we watched companies tear at the very fabric of our society, our democracy, and decided that these are the exact same kind of free-speech hucksters to fund this go around?
Because make no mistake: For a media or content or community/social platform/network: Free speech=$$$. Let’s not pretend there’s nobility in being a home for hate. There’s money in it.
So, I’m using Substack Notes, and this is what I talked about in one of my first ones:
Substack is indeed a private, for-profit business, in the content and community business. Maybe at the outset they weren’t so much community-based themselves (although Substack writers were) but with the addition of Notes, I think they squarely place themselves in that category.
They are beholden to a few groups from a values, satisfaction, monetary, and terms of service POV. Since it earns revenue from the subscriptions of content creators, both groups (writers and readers) are ultimately their customers. I think of it as a combo of the subscription media and the hybrid book publishing business models.
In addition, they’ve taken investment, so they have made a commitment to try to earn those investors a return, eventually.
Every decision they make is a business decision, based on aligning their model with their values. These are the decisions EVERY media and content and community company. ***Everything they allow, they monetize***…they directly make money from the content they allow. Everything they disallow, they decline to monetize. This is not to say these are EASY decisions, or that there aren’t frequently gray areas.
But this is the existential reality of any company like this. I know. I co-founded, fundraised for, and ultimately sold one.
The lack of evolution in thinking about how to balance all those customer, business, and community needs astounds me, really. The lack of preparedness to make your decisions and explain them and stand behind them vs. hem and haw and obfuscate and yammer.
I frequently cite Anil Dash’s maxim: If your site is full of assholes, it’s your fault. And it’s not a monumental blow to the first amendment for a business to decline to be that asshole or decline to leave those assholes unmoderated. As a private business you don’t actually have to be the mouthpiece or megaphone for those assholes. You get the community you moderate for.
In Substack’s case (and many other communities) they’ve decided, for example, that sex workers/writers of explicit content are the assholes. They don’t want to have to assess such content on a case by case basis and make individualized calls. They DON’T want to monetize content from that group. That will make Substack a non-starter for some potential community members. And won’t bother others at all.
But it seems they’ve decided that explicit bigots are not the assholes. They are willing to see all the nuance, to default to yes and make case by case no decisions. Meaning, in their model, they DO want to monetize content from that group. (They’re far from alone on this, just to be clear.)
And again: That will make Substack a non-starter for some potential community members. And won’t bother others at all.
Because you get the community you moderate for.
Sigh. Sometimes I question all my life decisions. And all my platform choices.
Speaking of: I changed podcast hosts!
But not for any of the above reasons, thankfully.
With the help and recommendation of my friend Molly Beck, CEO of my former podcast platform, Messy, I have switched to Libsyn. Messy has really built their business model based on helping companies produce internal comms podcasts for companies, and as such they weren’t really built for public-facing content creators like me. Because some tech founders are user- and community-centric, Molly pushed me off her platform (well, gently guided me is really a better way of putting it). I’m learning a new platform, and new skills with GarageBand, and so far so good.
Last week’s episode of The Op-Ed Page podcast (the first published via Libsyn) features an interview with my longtime friend, colleague, and mutual aid society member Morra Aarons-Mele about her second book, The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Fears Into Your Leadership Superpower. We had a wonderful and vulnerable conversation about her book, and also about what someone (oh, fine, what I) thinks about when reading all of her insights, data, and actionable recommendations. Must-listen, folks!
(I also posted a #3MinuteBookReview of the book, which you can view here.)
My other recent #3MinuteBookReview:
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Wil Wheaton himself shared the above to his Instagram Story and y’all? Influencers are still a thing.
Anyhoo, until next time, please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on any or all of the above. This is basically my blog now! And as always, I appreciate a share of this newsletter or my podcast.
If I can help you break through the things that are keeping you stuck (including how to set up community guidelines that align with your values), set up your first introductory 30-minute consult for free by booking it in my Calendly. And you can always check out my new LinkedIn Learning Course, Telling Stories That Stick, a 57-minute course on crafting your stories for different audiences (media, investors, prospects, hiring managers) and making sure those stories stick…and convey exactly what you hope to convey.
First, congrats on Will Wheaton sharing your work. That must have been exciting!
I understand, I align, and I appreciate everything you spelled out above about the responsibility of community stewardship. I understand the economics of diverse communities, including the "eyeball"-generating mElon-heads that bring those platform-enabling Ad dollars. None of us enjoy being exposed to the underbelly of hate, bigotry, and misogyny... but I also don't want to live in a sanitized world. In drawing the line to avoid the "absolute must-not" behaviors, lately I'm aware that my time is in a bit of a vacuum chamber, spreading love and opportunity to a cast of others who are doing the same. We all speak pretty much the same language and the same stand on issues, and I wonder who we're helping. There's a balance to be had... in curating a responsible community and not just one that looks, speaks, and thinks like the founder. The world is increasingly silo'd -- and those silos sit behind screens. I'm not responsible for a formal community, but if I were... I'd hope to curate it in a way that welcomed and encouraged participation by all those silos... As long as the conversations stay curious and respectful (easier said than done, I realize), I would hope to serve and nurture as much policy / issue / life texture as possible through that channel. Exploring the differences of human thought and priorities is one of the great growth opportunities inside a collection of thoughtful minds, and I think the more diverse they are, the more we all learn to embrace (not just tolerate) our beautiful differences.
Well said. It is an uncomfortable truth that we all know on some level, but it is healthy to see it spelled out so clearly. Profits are too often in bed with bad behavior. They do not have to be. It is good to be reminded that we should not accept that as a reasonable norm.