Substack Has Become Middlebrow Twitter (Derogatory)

Hey, Ghost readers! I know a lot of you are here to get away from Substack, which is precisely why I set up this alternative for y’all. Part of my schtick is talking about social media and internet culture, and how it’s pretty much all going to heck, and Substack is a part of that whole system, so just so you know, I’m not going to be harping on about that community all the time. Think of me as a much less popular Casey Newton with more direct insight.

 I suppose I’m going to have to have to spend some time in this one trying to dance around naming someone and thus avoid summoning them to fire up a conflict I have no interest in battling. I’m kind of in a bind, here; If I identify this gentleman and he comes across this piece then he will accuse me of passive aggression, subtweeting, and using his name for clout. If I subvert the passivity accusation and alert him, that will be even worse, as he will take this as an indication that I am interested in engaging in Direct Conflict.

 But this ain’t Black Angus and I don’t have beef on the menu. This is much more about confronting an idea than an individual. It’s a commentary on social media’s evolution and its seemingly inevitable traps.

 I was an original adopter of Substack Notes, the Twitter clone that the newsletter platform launched soon after Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of that website and thus an early exodus location for people who wanted to escape the coming Groypocalypse. Of course, most of the Twitter refugees weren’t interested in writing or reading newsletters, so the migration dried up kind of quickly. For the most part, those who fled Twitter wound up instead on Woke Twitter (Bluesky), Instagram Twitter (Threads), or Insufferable Linux Nerd Twitter (Mastodon).

For those who remained on Substack because we were writers or readers, we got to watch the evolution of an unconventional social media ecosystem in real time from the beginning. As has become a tradition for me around this time of year, I wrote one and then a second sort of “state of the community” essay and I guess it’s time for the third.

 And I guess, for those who might have tried and abandoned Notes in 2022 because it wasn’t Twitter, it might interest you to learn that it’s now, sort of, Twitter. But not in any of the good ways.

 This realization for me was kind of triggered by the unnamed individual’s recent controversial assertions on Notes that social media needs to be more directly confrontational. It has become boring, he believes, because people are holding too much back and aren’t insulting and attacking each other directly and to their faces enough.

 This is not an opinion that’s exclusive to this one guy, but I think he’s the only one saying it directly: That it is your God-given duty, as a participant in social media, to be an Asshole For No Reason (AFNR).

 It’s relevant to point out that this person is famously and even proudly an AFNR and I think it’s a type of projection for assholes to believe everyone else is, similarly, an asshole. Ipso facto, anyone who is not being an AFNR to your face must be instead slinging their insults toward other writers in private conversation, or else publicly but without tagging or notifying the insultee. This, he contends, is passive aggression, which, to the health of a culture, is inferior to old fashioned aggressive aggression.

Here's the thing—social media is already plenty nasty, and for all of Substack’s problems, not being nasty enough isn’t one of them.

 The site’s founders will harp constantly on about how it’s not Twitter, and they will cite the nature of its discourse as the reason. I don’t know if anyone would consider Substack to be a highbrow website but I think it’s safe, at least by what content it pushes algorithmically, to call it middlebrow. That means people will tell you to go fuck yourself in 280 words instead of 280 characters.

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The idea that Substack Notes is a substantially different type of platform to Twitter is based more on vibes and timescale than actual reality. In fact it kind of embodies many of the complaints that people had about the version of Twitter that existed just prior to Musk’s takeover. The most obvious probably being that it ranks and algorithmically boosts a class of elites who are designated by a colored checkmark.

The culture of civility that AFNR despises so much, but which I rather enjoyed while it lasted, is doomed, and it’s doomed for a number of reasons:

 One is the fundamental unsustainability of the “global town square” concept. Over the past few years I’ve become highly critical of that concept as a whole, although I once found it beautiful and thought it would be our next evolution as a civilization. The “global town square” is a social platform that includes everybody, rather than what preceded it, which was siloed social media that catered to people with specific interests or something in common with each other. You know, forums, and to a certain degree, Reddit.

 Twitter was often called a global town square before Musk took over, but critics argued this wasn’t true because it didn’t have white supremacists. And, you know, the critics were right. Even if they didn’t want Nazis, that is still unfortunately a position held by a large number of people. You can’t have a proper town square without them.

 This leads me into the second reason why civility is doomed: Like on Musk’s Twitter, Substack has no content moderation.

 It’s superior to Twitter in this regard because it does allow you to moderate your own experience to some extent. You can even delete people’s replies to you, which is quite a daring feature for a free speech maximalist platform to introduce. I had to block a consistent AFNR the other day who kept insisting he was a fan between snide insults. And while I don’t think insults should be a bannable offense on a platform like Substack or Twitter or anywhere else really, I have also been the recipient of some truly line-crossing comments that I’ve had to go through the motions of deleting and blocking and knowing that they will say that shit to someone else tomorrow and keep happily doing it with no threat of consequences of any kind. Sure, I can clean it off my own page, but I spent a decade in the trenches as a large forum admin already.

 That kind of human detritus will chip away at a platform.

 I won’t rehash my theory of Liquid Content here, you can read about it in the first and second piece in this series, and it outlines the reactionary reason that civility is doomed. What I haven’t delved much into is the AFNR reason civility is doomed.

 I can take criticism pretty well, I think, and I have been talked out of shitty takes. I’ve been talked out of them by strongly worded rebuttals that make me feel, rightly, bad! Argument does work on me, if it’s sensible! But one thing that just absolutely grinds my gears, one of the few things in this world that gets me truly yell-inducing angry, is people being an Asshole For No Reason.

 The main difference between a legitimate critic—even an angry, insulting critic—and an AFNR is that the AFNR doesn’t tend to properly engage with or even fully read the thing that they’re responding to. “Looking for a fight” is their intellectual resting position. They will be set off the very moment they think they spot a reason to be.

And this attitude seems to travel alongside an idea that this should be the predominant culture of the internet. It’s not a personality trait that’s associated with either the right or the left wing, but similar to reactionary politics in general, it’s a culturally imperial attitude. That makes it liquid content.

 Across three years of Substack Notes being a thing, I have absolutely noticed a general shift away from thoughtful criticism and toward AFNR behavior. A bunch of relatively inoffensive, nice, or soft target accounts that were dominant in the platform’s early days have departed or kind of fallen into the algorithmic background in favor of either AFNRs or the types of personality who, while not AFNR themselves (or even necessarily assholes at all), are nevertheless the types of personality who is willing to put up with it or even revels in the entertainment of it.

 Twitter (three years on, I will still refuse to call it a letter of the alphabet) has been entirely swallowed by AFNR. It’s pretty standard that any reasonable take with any reach will result in a ton of replies that amount to little more than “This is the shittiest take I have ever read, please set fire to yourself and die.” That’s the predominant response to anything on that shithole website now, and even more than any moral case there may be to stop using Twitter due to the evil of its owner, this has contributed to my hardly ever using it anymore.

 Likewise, with Substack Notes, I’ve kind of dropped off using it quite a bit, and even rarely feel compelled to promote my own work on it. For one thing, I don’t think that does anything anymore anyway, but for another, I feel worn down by thinking about the many potential ways that my work might attract AFNRs. Ways that are impossible to even imagine because, again, they don’t tend to directly engage with the work.

 While I would love to grow my readership perpetually, the promotion strikes a balance with how much asshole behavior I have the stamina for. With the singular exception of the one guy I mentioned earlier, the readers who already follow me never come at me with an asshole comment, but they have offered criticism, discussion, even rebuttal. Which I, in fact, love!

 What I don’t think I will ever come around to is the ideal world of these types in which every single moment spent on the social internet is spent engaging in some combative, hostile interaction. The attitude of the AFNR is prescriptive; they think it’s good for all of us because they think it’s good for them. But, the thing is, it’s definitely not good for all of us, and I suspect it’s also not good for them. Every addiction specialist and recovering victim in the world will tell you a story about the difference between enjoying something and being improved by that thing.

 This is where, in the conclusion, I usually run into the wall of what I think should be done about all this and need to admit that none of the ideas I have about what should be done about this will or even can be done. Look, so much of my schtick is descriptive rather than prescriptive. What I think I’d like to see happen with social media, what I think is healthier for all of us, is the one thing that is probably the most unlikely, something that most would regard a type of regression, which is a movement toward a greater number of smaller, more siloed platforms. Yes, ironically, I’m being a conservative about this. I’m embracing nostalgia, I’m putting a Roman statue in the Geocities logo and demanding RETVRN.

Or nothing that severe, but the point remains that the social internet, something that used to feel immense and sprawling and continental, is now essentially five websites that are largely composed of screenshots of the other four. A shift away from that model, I think, is probably going to happen, but it is not happening at Substack.

 I can only conclude with an invitation for comment, criticism, or rebuttal, but in any case, try not to be an asshole, and if you have to be, don’t be one for no reason. If you’ve read this far, it’s unlikely you will be.

I'm writing a book that goes into detail about how a single generation of online culture got us from the liberal democracy of the 90s to whatever the hell this is. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:

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