Substack's content-moderation problem
Substack's content-moderation problem
Please forgive me for taking a day away from talking about music production, but I want to talk about something that’s on a lot of our minds — Substack’s content- moderation problem.
This problem has been exhaustively documented, and I won’t bother rehashing the details; you can get up to speed independently if you’re not already.
But suffice to say that Substack’s willingness to tolerate hate speech on their platform — and make money from it — and recommend it algorithmically to strangers — are outside the bounds of what a lot of people find acceptable. Me included!
TL;DR: I plan to move away from Substack, but I can’t do it immediately. This is for the most prosaic of reasons: migrating and reconfiguring a new platform will take time, probably the better part of a day, and Shannon and I have been incredibly busy with time-sensitive work, and I simply haven’t had the time to do it. It’s very easy for a reader to move away from Substack — you just click unsubscribe, and you’re gone. It’s not that quick or simple from the publisher side of things; migrations take time.
(And then of course there is the question of how the migration works. Ghost, for example, has a service where they help you migrate all the posts. That’s great! But does all of the formatting translate perfectly? I use a lot of quoting and formatting and images with captions, in what are sometimes nuanced and technical posts, where a change in formatting could obscure the meaning completely. One of the main points of Jamie's list is to create a living library of ideas on music production — so do I go back through and reformat 150+ posts? I would at very least have to check through all of them. You see the issue.)
Bottom line: my reality is that I’m going to need to be on Substack for a little while longer, until I have a couple of days to devote to migrating. It’s not ideal, but it is what it is, and I want to confront it straightforwardly.
As a reader, you essentially have four options at this juncture:
Stick around; we’ll get this off Substack asap.
Unsubscribe. Bye, Jamie! Some people have done this recently, in light of Substack’s issues. It sucks, but I get it.
Stay, but as a free subscriber. This way you’re not financially supporting Substack’s bullshit.
Stay on as a free subscriber, and support my work in a way that doesn’t give Substack money. Some people have done this, and it’s a lovely gesture of support! You can do that here.
Personally, I hope you stick with me through this transition period. Also, I will understand if you can’t. But I hope you do! I’ll get to this transition as soon as I can. But it may take me a moment yet to get clear of the time-sensitive work that I have in front of me.
I’ll keep you posted — jamie