17h ago

Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost

micahflee.com Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost

A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem. It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them. And it's funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen — the same type of people who are, right now, raiding the US governm...

Still, a lot of talented writers — including some that I subscribe to — publish on Substack. But others have moved to Ghost, an open source and non-shitty-tech-bro newsletter service. These include Casey Newton's publication Platformer, Molly White's newsletter Citation Needed, and plenty of others. From the beginning, 404 Media decided to publish on Ghost because, as I understand it, Substack sucks.

. . .

If you already have a Substack, Ghost has written documentation explaining how to migrate your subscribers (including paid ones) to a new Ghost newsletter. Since both Substack and Ghost use Stripe as a payment processor, your paid subscribers don't have to do anything to continue paying you.

34 comments

Suppose it makes sense to use a cybertruck as the hero photo then

A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem.
What on Earth? They hosted like three Nazis, which is part of the overall commitment to letting people talk which leads them to host a ton of really good people. And then, when everyone on the internet yelled at them for it, raising a pretty reasonable counterpoint, they kicked the Nazis off. That all happened over a year ago.
It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them
I read the citation for this statement. What it says is very different from actively promoting the work of fascists and recruiting them. There is a whole fascinating conversation to be had about why some high-profile lefty journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald all of a sudden became Nazis, but it's very misleading to assign 100% of the blame in this way to Substack, purely because they were working with those people before it really became completely clear to everyone that they for whatever bizarre reason had become Nazis. It's a lot more complex situation that is being summarized in this extremely glib spin-soaked fashion.
And it's funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen
Okay, fair enough. This is pretty interesting and I hadn't known it.
On the other hand, Substack also hosts Sy Hersh, Tim Snyder, Salman Rushdie, and God knows who else. If they were planning to slant their coverage based on the fact that Andreesen's company gave them $15 million in 2019 (which they then quickly turned around and gave big chunks of to working journalists), you'd think they would be making some kind of effort to downplay the leftist voices which they are currently hosting, outnumbering the "problematic" voices which might be there but which I have literally never run across there.
Elon Musk also, apparently, tried to buy Substack in 2023, and they told him to fuck off.
This whole article reads like a bad-faith hit piece aimed at one of the organizations that actually is trying to provide a space for good journalism including left-wing authors, and making sure that it's sustainable and they can get paid. By trumping up some various things into much bigger deals than they need to be.
I wonder who would be interested in ginning up big bad-faith hit jobs against good news outlets, encouraging people on the left to savage and abandon them for various little misdemeanors until the only news outlets left are either bought and purchased by open fascists, or too small and scattered to make a difference?
- Thank you for the additional context, I've heard peoples criticisms of substack but hadn't heard any of this additional info
  Ghost still seems cool though :)
  
  Yeah, Ghost is great. I'm not trying to say any bad thing about it. I think they're slightly different: Substack went to bat in a big way to foster a community where real journalists could do their journalism there, and get paid for it, and to a large extent it worked. That's why there are so many high-profile lefties writing there. Ghost is trying to set up a FOSS-style platform that anyone can use. Ghost has monetization too, but they didn't prime the pump with it nearly as much as Substack did.
  They're both great. I think it's pretty likely that anyone who's screaming about Nazis on Substack is just looking for reasons to scream, and the Nazis have very little to do with it except as an excuse.
- I wonder who would be interested in ginning up big bad-faith hit jobs against good news outlets
  The author of the article. It doesn't take long to uncover their politics and they are absolutely not involved in any right wing conspiracy.
  There's nothing really wrong with substack. People just like to shit on anything that doesn't pass whatever purity test they happen to use.
  
  absolutely not involved in any right wing conspiracy.
  How do you know that? Do you know them personally, or audited them or something?
  I don't know that they are, and looking over their resume it does seem unlikely. But, also, I would have said that same thing looking at Taibbi's or Greenwald's resume in 2017. I just know that in this story, they are presenting things in this absolutely wildly inaccurate fashion that would be right at home in a right-wing conspiracy. Certainly, working at The Intercept for a long time isn't some kind of bulwark against being infected with right-wing-propaganda-ism, with Greenwald himself as one absolutely interesting counterexample clearly on offer.

Can a reader user on Ghost follow multiple Ghost accounts? I haven't used Substack but my understanding is that it is similar to Patreon and OF in that I can subscribe to multiple accounts and have them show up in a central feed. Can I do this as a subscriber on Ghost? And do multiple servers federate to allow for that?

The attraction of substack for at least some writers is that substack actually pays their more popular or prestigious writers. I don't know how many or whether there is a published list of them, but at least a few of them are getting paid rather well (6 figures/year or maybe more). If Substack is recruiting and paying Nazis, then that is of interest and concern. Most writers there aren't getting paid by substack, though they may have readers who buy subscriptions. That is open to pretty much everyone and the fanfiction saying "don't like, don't read" works for me here. Saying Ghost is a more attractive platform because it has more censorship is kind of a head scratcher. And calling Taibbi and Greenwald Nazis is ridiculous. Disliking the Democrats doesn't make someone into a Nazi.
That said, I don't personally like substack very much and am always glad to hear about alternatives.

Substack has had a Nazi problem since its inception. At first, there was a liberal backlash, but they all eventually went there anyway.
- Still remember the decoder podcast where the CEO was asked, would you remove an article that says "we should deport all brown people", and he danced around how he wouldn't get into specifics of moderation.
  Just your standard 'Free speech absoluteism'

Has Ghost refused to host "Nazi" publications?
- Yes:
  One, its terms of service ban content that “is violent or threatening or promotes violence or actions that are threatening to any other person.” Ghost founder and CEO John O’Nolan committed to us that Ghost’s hosted service will remove pro-Nazi content, full stop. If nothing else, that’s further than Substack will go, and makes Ghost a better intermediate home for Platformer than our current one.
  
  That sounds like they'd ban content promoting the eating of the rich, too.
  I'm all for banning fascist content, but I don't wanna lose the French revolution vibes.

How do readers access Ghost? I got sucked into a trial membership but I don't intend to publish, just read, like I can do on substack. I don't want to be on the problematic platform but can't figure out how to gradually use Ghost instead, especially since hardly anyone's over there yet.

I think i only follow Robert Evans. Have any ghost recs?
- What, no Jason Pargin?

Someone needs to tell Carole Cadwallader to move her resistance headquarters out of the Nazi bar. There are a lot of people who’d subscribe to her journalism if it didn’t also involve funding the enemy.

Newsletters? Google killed RSS so we could have newsletters?
- Google weirdly gets a lot of credit for killing things that are very much alive and well.
  
  aren't podcasts still RSS. I'm like 90% sure they are.
  
  Yes and ironically there are services like kill the newsletter that will re-RSS your tired ass newsletter.
  But anyone cool that uses fulltext RSS gets an auto subscribe from me.
- Substack and Ghost both support RSS. Problem is no one uses it anymore. They either don't know or don't care. It also doesn't provide an option for paid subscriptions.

Is there no FOSS alternative we can promote?
- Ghost is FOSS, that's part of the whole point.
  
  Ah my bad, I saw $9 on the site and figured it was a paid service things
- I don't think the software matters much tbh. It's about payment aggregation, search hit aggregation, and for some "prestige" substack writers, actually getting paid by the platform.

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