Notes and the Moderation Challenge

Substack has an even bigger Nazi problem than Twitter. Now it's bringing its guns to war--and its baggage

When I first signed up with Substack I had no idea the role it was going to play in the upcoming Twitter War. It was before Elon Musk usurped the blue bird and, to be completely honest, the story is no more interesting than forgetting the password to my Wordpress blog and checking a former colleague’s new haunt to see what platform he was using. Substack, never heard of it but I really liked the fact that it came with analytics tools.

Over the next few weeks I noticed a lot of people were using it, and apparently had been for some time. There was even somewhat of a community, a little like how Tumblr used to be but with far less porn and fewer furries.

Look, it is what it is.

All I cared about was that it was somewhere I could write, it had traffic statistics, and I could use Twitter to promote the blog, or the newsletter as it’s apparently supposed to be called (I’m an aging millennial, I don’t know the difference.) Very gradually, I’ve been building a readership.

Substack isn’t anywhere near as well known a platform as Twitter or Tumblr. But it got all the free advertising it could ever have hoped for last week, when, seemingly out of nowhere, Elon Musk declared war on it. Twitter did a Pearl Harbor on a website that, as far as anyone knew, wasn’t an adversary. Substack needed Twitter considerably more than Twitter needed Substack, but they weren’t fighting over the same slice of pie.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Twitter’s Substack ban was characteristic of one of Elon’s fits of temper—it started with the site banning links to Substack entirely, then allowed the links but disabled comments, likes, or retweets, then allowed all the above but flagged Substack links as malicious and dangerous and disabled the ability to search the word “substack.”

What happened? Ostensibly it was a tantrum driven by Musk suddenly getting wind of the fact that Substack was building a “Twitter clone,” a social network that they were piggybacking onto the structure that already existed. It was a secret project, like a city being built underground. Users of the site wouldn’t even need to sign up to “Substack Notes” – they already had an account, they just didn’t know it.

Those familiar with Elon’s, shall we say, passion, could have predicted what transpired when he heard the news. It’s well established that he’s not a fan of Twitter users linking off-site, and definitely not to other social media. But it actually turns out that the ignition point probably wasn’t really Substack’s announcement at all—it was much pettier and stupider than that. A targeted personal attack against Musk’s pet journalist and Igor to his Frankenstein, Matt Taibbi, who had recently embarrassed himself on the Mehdi Hasan Show by inadvertently discrediting much of Musk’s carefully manicured hit job on his rivals, and who earned most of his income through his subscriptions on the newsletter platform.

“You think you’re winning, Mehdi, but just wait until I put your words in a speech bubble above a soy wojack and depict myself as the beard chad.”

It was Taibbi who did Twitter’s surgical assassinations. Musk can’t do drone strikes, he only knows how to drop nukes, which is how he took out Taibbi in the end.

So Substack Notes is here and yes—it’s a Twitter clone. There’s no way around it. Whether you call it retweeting, retruthing, or restacking, this model of sharing content didn’t just change the game, it redesigned the board and wrote the new rulebook. And Twitter addicts, myself included, who have been searching for a less Musky way to get their fix, and who have been bouncing around and off of not-familiar enough alternatives like Mastodon and Counter Social and Post, have finally found something that has kind of the same feel.

Writers, some of them big names like Joe Hill, John Birmingham, and Margaret Atwood, along with many more Twitter refugees have started wandering in, putting down stumps, and setting up tents. The doors have been open for less than three days and the atmosphere is pretty chill.

But that chill might be a chill in the air. Because something else is coming to Substack Notes. There are Morlocks living in the sewers. They were already here, in the shadows, and now their chains are off and they’re shambling into the light.

Give us braaaains… pleeeeease….

Substack, you see, has a Nazi problem. Like most social networks in their infancy, its founders are bright eyed libertarians who lean hard into freedom of speech as a central load-bearing virtue no matter how noxious or impractical. The only rules, according to its code of conduct, boil down to essentially: No pornography, and no direct and credible threats of physical violence.

What an interesting reflection of what remains the two final and unbreakable taboos of western liberal democracy: Murder, and the female breast.

Any ship, no matter how sparking and virtuous, that sails under that flag is going to have barnacles. The same crusty barnacles that always try to prevent us from having nice clean things. There are Nazis here, and I don’t just mean the way too many people use the term, like red caps firing AR-15s at cans of Bud Light.

I mean jackboots, I mean flat palms at 2 o’clock, I mean that haircut. You know the haircut. The one where they shave a full inch above the top of the ear and then let it go nuts.

The ADL recently uncovered a whole bunch of them. Newsletters that range from potentially harmful misinformation and disinformation all the way up to explicit white supremacy, some of which have hundreds or even thousands of subscribers and make good money off Substack’s platform.

Now, my thoughts on the ethicality of sharing a platform with not just Nazis but QAnon heavyweights, anti-vaccination influencers, and Roger Stone are complicated but can be rounded up with the observation that I’m still here. A subscription blogging platform is different from an algorithm-driven social network in the sense that you don’t necessarily have to see that shit if you don’t want to. You can sort of get away with hosting that stuff on your servers if you do what Elon Musk doesn’t have the restraint to do—that is, refuse to engage, refuse to endorse, and rely on the old canard of sunlight being the best disinfectant.

All that goes out the window when you hitch your subscription newsletter service to… well, an algorithm-driven social network.

In the coming weeks, months, or however long it takes, people are likely to see these gremlins start to appear in their Notes feed, which is exactly what many people are leaving Twitter to get away from, and when that happens, Substack is going to have to make some decisions. A troubling interview with one of the co-founders has already been circulating on the platform and raising some eyebrows, particularly when it came to his refusal to answer tough questions about moderation. Completely dodging the question of how they are going to handle moderation—indeed, whether there will even be any moderation—doesn’t inspire much confidence in either side of the debate.

Your move, Substack. The real test of their mettle is going to be what happens when the whales of the writing world get here after leaving Twitter with the sound of the change jangling in their fans’ pockets, set up shop, and then suddenly that dipshit Nick Fuentes appears and calls them a cuck. Because that’s what this is really about, in the end. You can have your ideals and this is the land of the free – you’re free to transcribe the full text of the First Amendment on the tombstone after you bury your Twitter clone in the backyard.

I want this to succeed, I’m rooting for it, but man, Elon Musk already has like twenty smug, shitty memes lined up he’s going to post ten seconds after this experiment fails, if it fails.

They have a doge on them.

Please don’t fail.