IDEA! What If We DIDN'T Purity-Test Left/Liberal Media Out Of Existence Now Of All F*cking Times
The Substack thing a-fucking-GAIN?
You guys, this is so infuriating and I am SO MAD.
You are reading this on Substack right now. Substack is run by some mostly nice libertarianish dudes who have bad taste in a lot of writers. They succor the anti-trans opinionists. They have (and monetize!) Actual Nazis. They just made Bari Weiss a shiny new deluxe website. (They also built Wonkette’s for us last year, for free.) Bari Weiss’s website was always on Substack, but they built her a newer and shinier one (with advances in their tech that they’ll soon start to push out to everyone), and that’s causing a new round of “cancel your subscriptions to sites using Substack so your money doesn’t go to support Substack, which is bad.” Right now, in the Year of Our Trump December 2024, and a week before Christmas, people are convincing other people to stop supporting independent liberal media if it uses a bad tech stack.
I don’t mean bad like it spies on you. I don’t mean bad like it sells your info or shows you ads. It doesn’t do any of those things. It’s actually super fucking ethical, for a tech-stack, if I am even using the term tech stack correctly! I mean bad like it makes money off bad people as well as good people.
The people pounding this campaign think it’s very easy to leave Substack, and so if somebody doesn’t, you can help them understand the gravity of the situation by punishing them for someone else’s actions, a thing I believe we decided is also bad.
At the risk of SO BORING YOU, not everybody on Substack is a newsletter with a year’s worth of posts and a subscriber list, which would be easy to move to the elusive perfectly pure and moral capitalist tech company that definitely exists.
Some people on Substack (ME! I AM TALKING ABOUT ME!) are literally 20-(almost 21!)-year-old websites with millions of posts, hundreds of authors, and it isn’t in fact as easy as “just call Ghost which by the way also has fascists.”
You are being encouraged to encourage me, a literal mom and pop website, to be the first person in history to figure out how to ethically consume under capitalism, and if I can’t, you should “vote with your feet.” Boots! Get walking!
Last time we moved platforms (before Substack), it cost me $40,000 to have our new website built. If I had a spare $40,000 lying around, I would hire half a new writer! (We just finally hired Marcie full-time this month! But there’s another spiffy lady I’ve got my eye on, and I’m hoping to be Mr. Big Spender again soon!) Substack built our website for free in about six months. Again, before that and after the previous forty-thousand-dollar adventure, we hired developers who took a year and still didn’t have a website for us but at least with that one we got our money back.
It’s not just fucking “easy.”
Literally right now, people are encouraging other people to stop supporting left/liberal independent media — NOW! when the regular media is FUCKING BROKEN and we need every left of center voice we can fucking get — because it exists in a society in which bad people with shitty opinions also exist.
And today I’ve got dozens — dozens! — of people cancelling their Wonkette subscriptions so they won’t have to get dirty giving 10 percent of their monthly subscription money of $8 or $10 (or more!) to the bad tech bros who take that 10 percent to host us, keep the site up and secure from hackers and attacks, genially and patiently answer your support questions when you can’t log in, and share our content to new readers — some of whom might before have had shitty opinions about trans people and other living things, and might even begin to rethink them!
Might as well cancel Wonkette because we pay taxes to the US government which also does war and live in American which just elected Donald Trump to put all the liberal media in jail. Oh wait, THAT’S ME TOO. Well fuck!
I am so fucking angry right now I almost can’t breathe. What stupid purity-politics shooting ourselves in the face BULLSHIT.
Wonkette is hosted on Substack. We’re not leaving anytime soon, but more importantly I’m not even conflicted about it. If you want to cancel, you don’t owe us anything, and you are certainly allowed. I won’t even write you a nastygram like I did to people this morning after I got their (well, his; the other people were collateral damage and I already apologized) hectoring and condescending messages about how they just can’t support us but they’ll be happy to when I just do this very simple thing that they know FUCK ALL ABOUT FUCK.
Anyhoo! I think that’s out of my system.
Also, here is an alternate way to pay us, one-time or monthly and in any amount of your choosing, and guess what they’re bad too. But they take a smaller cut anyway.
LOL I feel better now, for real, love you, we’ll all be fine, sorry again to the people I yelled at this morning, bye.
Hi folks!
I feel vaguely responsible for all this b/c I actually sent out a note the other day saying that I'm unsubscribing my free subscription to "On Substack," a stack that's supposed to give out good advice about how to use SubStack effectively but which has never yet turned out a post that I actually needed and for long stretches of time doesn't turn out anything at all.
I did not and do not advocate leaving SubStack because to do that there would have to be a better option. If there's not a better option then any call to leave SubStack is a call to just not write things anymore. Not only do I believe strongly that we need to share information and love and support and the best, most thoughtful thinky-thoughts we can summon in this age of hatred and danger, but I have also been a strong advocate of doing so using a mix of strategies. (Do I need to link you to all the times I've talked about how outsiders create pressure while insiders harness that pressure to force movement of the levers of power.)
What I did for myself and what I advocate for you to do **only if you agree with me** is let "On Substack" send you one fewer e-mail every couple of months because that's all you need to hit zero e-mails from them, and because as far as I can tell from the time I've been subscribed to them, the actual benefit to me as a SubStack writer is zero, so I'm sacrificing nothing when I drop OnSubstack over their partnership with Bari Weiss.
I had no idea people were actually arguing to quit SubStack entirely over this. Rebecca makes a good case for the utility of SubStack as an imperfect but powerful communication tool. But I'll just add this: I've been writing on SubStack for over a year, and writing seriously on SubStack for about 13 months. I never asked for anything and picked up subscribers very slowly. Even so, I have over 1,000 subscribers, over 4k followers, and when I was faced with great uncertainty about where I'm even going to live next month and wrote about that -- not being an asshole, but just laying out the not-a-threat fact that if I don't have a place to live, I'm obviously going to be less able to get writing done. People I knew and people whose names I'd never encountered stepped up and signed up as paying subscribers in large enough numbers that once I find a place I can actually pay for it AND tonight I'm going to eat take-out food for the first time since my birthday 4.5 months ago, sharing it with my BFF as she helps me plan for the move.
No platform is perfect, and I'm a bigger purity pony than most. I've never Facebooked or Twitted ever in my whole life. But when considering what good SubStack does and doesn't do, consider whether you value my voice, my news, my analysis. Through SubStack my housing just became way more stable. Through SubStack I read Stephen Robinson and Auntie Mavis and Radley Balko and Jessica Valenti and, not incidentally, Wonkette, who gave me my first weekly writing gig and my first writing gig of any kind in several years. Wonkette who does a great service in keeping the population of vile, left-wing snark-mobbers sane and has made a lot of others' housing pretty stable, also too. (Or so I imagine, Dok and Evan and Robyn and Gary and last but not least DONNA ROSE.)
Rebecca ain't hearing anything on this topic and I respect that. I haven't had to deal with any of that this week, but given the good SubStack does, if you do want to tell me that good left-wingers should flee SubStack, please make the case that there's somewhere better, that there's a place that could have saved my housing other than SubStack, a place I could transfer all my work without losing income and where all the people who currently get good benefits from my writing will be happy to follow.
SubStack does good. I get not liking parts, and if my example earlier this week sent the wrong message, I'm sorry. But if you want me --or anyone-- to shun SubStack entirely, you have to tell us where's the better platform that drives as much traffic and never makes a wrong call, never takes money from someone you don't like.
I like too many writers here, and owe too much to the readers who have supported me, to abandon this place for the wilderness, Bari Weiss or no.
There will always be vegans who wear leather jackets.