Substack is at it again

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Right now you’re reading The Handbasket via beehiiv. Early readers might recall I started on Substack. If these terms mean nothing to you, put simply there are different platforms for hosting newsletters. I used to use one, and now I use another. I’ll explain why this distinction is important.

I made the decision to leave Substack after helping spearhead the Substackers Against Nazis campaign in late 2023. After the Substack founders’ response to the campaign, it was a no-brainer. And an announcement Tuesday from the founders only confirmed that leaving was not only right, but necessary.

At around 11am ET, subscribers to On Substack—the platform’s in-house media publication—received the latest issue entitled “The new media, powered by Substack.” The newsletter, which was forwarded to me by a friend, announced Substack’s partnership with The Free Press, the right wing reactionary publication founded by Bari Weiss.

If you’re not familiar, Weiss gained notoriety as an opinion editor who quit the New York Times in 2020 but acted like she was fired. Since then, she’s built a lucrative career on grievance. To give you a sense of her publication’s schtick, recent post titles include, “Things Worth Remembering: The Empathy of J.K. Rowling” and “Daniel Penny’s Innocence—and the Shame of Alvin Bragg.” She also started a fake university.

The post on Tuesday from Substack co-founders Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi was to announce the launch of a new “enterprise offering” aimed at people who have “sophisticated needs” for creating a website. The Free Press, they revealed, would be the first to access the bespoke tools. And the founders positively gushed about the money and status Weiss has amassed under their eye. They wrote:

As one commenter put it: “Why on earth would you brag to your users that you've partnered with a bunch of protofascists? You want us all to leave or what?”

Celebrating the “high-integrity” and “meticulous editorial standards” of a site that published unvetted allegations about a transgender youth clinic that became the basis for Missouri to outlaw most gender-affirming care for minors is a curious choice. There are plenty of writers who remain on the platform with actual integrity and journalism chops, so the decision to singularly salute Weiss and co. reads like an intentional statement of values by Substack. Then again, their values were made crystal clear last year.

Nearly 250 Substacks posted an open letter to the founders on their respective sites in mid-December of last year after journalist Jonathan Katz’s piece for The Atlantic revealed an ugly truth: the platform was monetizing Nazis. The open letter campaign resulted in coverage from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, The Verge, Tech Dirt, and others. It was a roar the founders couldn’t ignore, and they responded with a truly baffling post explaining their decision to stay the course.

It started like this (emphasis mine):

(If you’re interested, I created a timeline of all the related events.)

And even still, the campaign was too little, too late. There had already been a large exodus from the platform in 2021 in response to Substack cutting deals with publishers who promoted hate speech—particularly against trans people. 

“Those bylines themselves are not the problem,” former Substacker Jude Ellison wrote at the time. “Self-publishing platforms can’t control who signs up. Substack isn’t a self-publishing platform, though. It curates its writers. It pays them, sometimes massively, and it makes choices as to who gets paid well and who doesn’t.” Writer Annalee Newitz rightfully called Substack a “scam.” 

The signs were there, and yet writers like me ignored them at our own peril. We tried to right that wrong last December, and in the wake of this latest announcement, more Substack publishers have signaled their plans to do the same.

Last year there was talk among some of the Substackers Against Nazis crew that perhaps the best way to fight back against the degradation of the platform was to do it from the inside. But in the year since our campaign—and the years since our predecessors sounded the alarm on Substack—it’s become clear that leaving is the only option.

The current number one History Substack is Martyr Made by Daryl Cooper, a Holocaust revisionist who made headlines in September after he said on Tucker Carlson’s Twitter show of WWII that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.” There is no fixing that.

I hadn’t planned to write about Substack again, but part of me knew there was a rake somewhere just waiting to be stepped on. Despite the United Nations-worth of red flags, respected journalists, historians, creative writers, and others remain on Substack, sharing 10% of every paid subscription with the company—and now with a share for Bari Weiss. Subscribers can be easily exported to another platform, and people who monetize their newsletters will get a larger share of the revenue elsewhere. But Substack has managed to convince some that there is no life for a newsletter beyond them. This is simply untrue.

Since I left Substack for beehiiv in January, I went from making a little bit of money to actually making a living as an independent journalist with my own publication. I didn’t need Substack’s Twitter-esque Notes feature or its recommendation network to grow; I used social networks—mostly Bluesky—to successfully promote my work. That personal engagement created, I believe, deeper relationships with my readers than passive subscriptions via an algorithm. Most importantly, I’ve remained committed to producing work that I’m proud of, and publishing it via a platform that doesn’t force me to compromise my values.

As we wrote in the Substackers Against Nazis letter, “there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale.” And by championing Bari Weiss and her worldview, Substack is once again putting its thumb on the scale.

There is no such thing as a perfect place on the internet. But it’s possible to avoid the ones that aren’t even pretending to try to be better. The best time to leave Substack was a long time ago. The second best time is now.