Atlantic, Substack, Algorithms, and Curation

An overly long article about how cheap it is for me to publish overly long articles — and how we are all paying for that.

Atlantic and Substack are sure having a messy moment. The writers, publishers, and editors of Atlantic seem to be targeting Substack’s business model while the writers and business owners of Substack are writing in a variety of directions in response. Some think they are watching hate and populism being rooted out, some think liberty is being poked full of holes.

I think we are watching another iteration of curation in our lives.

Presuming neither destroys the other (which, despite the rhetoric, is unlikely) I am hopeful of what writing and sharing-of-writing can become out of this.

In November 2023, a writer named Jonathan M. Katz who had (perhaps still has) a Substack account and following was published by the Atlantic accusing the Substack business of coddling Nazis. It was followed six weeks later with another article by a different author that pointedly referred to Substack in the past tense, the platform that had “seeded its own content moderation crisis.”

This has set off a huge barrage of open letters and investigative-looking articles from Substack writers trying to get to the bottom of important questions.

• Are there Nazis on Substack in a significant number?
• Is Substack the Business happy about this because they are making money from it?
• What should they do about it? Should they kick every Nazi off?
• What is the definition of a Nazi? Put more pointedly — who defines what is acceptable?

This is not the first time that Substack was covered by grand old curated publications. In 2021 The New York Times covered Substack offering huge advances to writers to leave “mainstream” publications and start newsletters on Substack. In fact, the Atlantic published a curiously catty piece about how some of those writers were quite catty one month after the NYT article. They experimented, it seems, with also publishing that on Medium, another long-form online publishing platform.

It makes sense that the major outlet news and culture editors would cover Substack in some way, but I have difficulty finding any articles about it that are positive. It seems that the ability of the Substack business to channel that big fat venture capital cash at writers and threaten traditional mastheads hit home. It does for me.

Katz’s article about Nazis on Substack is a compelling piece. He no doubt could have found mentions of violence or socially inappropriate sex, but he chose to look for Nazis. Nazis are an aggravating combination of dumb and dangerous. The vast vast vast majority of humans don’t want them anywhere, but completely extirpating them from the globe has never succeeded.

Like an open source community, the Substack writers have crowd sourced the response. They have launched their own articles, some with research and interviews and even conversations with Katz, the original writer. They are in no way united, one could not say “Substack writers feel this way” about the issue.

Nazi punks, we still want you to fuck off

To be clear, Substack is not measurably drenched in Nazism. And those who are using Substack for, say a newsletter about cats or their local food scene or knitting will not have seen any Nazis (just knots, no Nazis, please). This is similar to the famous Black Twitter that was on Twitter, often considered a noble community, but used the same platform as the crud that made the news. There are fascists in my town, but I would rather you did not slander my whole town. I go to church and buy local here, sometimes complain about the condition of the sidewalks. I don’t run around Nazi-ing all the time. It is not what I see when I think about my town. Wish you would not either.

But we don’t really know how many Nazis are Substacking and if they are benefiting from their Substack sign on. Like any free platform, there are a lot of sleeper users who created a user then moved on to something else. The definition of Nazi, white nationalist, or any of these idolatries, is quite vague.

One Nazi hunter spent a ton of time looking and found six Substack newsletters that he believed violated the terms of service (ToS). Although that is not a very impressive haul considering there are 500,000 folks making newsletters on Substack, it also does not mean this is all the Nazis. The terms of service does not say “no Nazis.” These folks advocated violence or did some other written act that is abhorrent and also pre-mentioned by the ToS. The CEO kicked five of the six off of Substack. I can’t find the article about the Nazi hunting, because I believe the writer closed their Substack in protest, even after those five were shut down. Substack allows one to take one’s content and email lists with you, considering those your property.

Fascists and racists are on Reddit, on Twitter, on Facebook, now on another internet content delivery application. It sucks. I wish they would go away, but they won’t.

Some The Atlantic takedown or analysis articles on Substack

• Anatomy of a Hatchet Job by Sam Kahn
• Substack has a Nazi Opportunity by Ken White (Popehat)
• The Atlantic’s Phantom Nazi Problem by Jesse Singal

As well, you will find “Goodbye Substack, I am leaving to protest” and “I am staying but I am pissed.” I apologize to all those writers for unfairly summing up their thinking.

Nazie are abhorrent, particularly today when my nation is at direct risk of falling into a fascist totalitarianism. I think a lot about how to staunch it.

While the past few years, the approach of de-platforming has been notable, FIRE has an opinion that censorship is not useful, as it was deployed in pre-Fascist Germany and seemed to aid the rise of Nazis. Of course, others feel differently. It is a very difficult topic. Idiotic fascist tracts are difficult to read and I hate to have to think about how to oppose them properly. I would much prefer that, like hiring an exterminator, I just know they are gone I don’t know what happened to them.

In the back of our heads, we all know that the fact we are talking about them is a positive for the Nazis themselves. Perhaps strategically as a recruitment tool, but definitely for their injured little brains that are doing everything for attention.

Quick important note: Should Substack remove writing, this is not government censorship, but a private entity developing its own standard that will most benefit its business interests.

In the complex business models of the Internet when one person may feel like a customer but they are actually the product, this gets even more confusing.

If 200 customer/products out of 500,000 sign a letter saying they will stop being products if the owner does not do SOMETHING about other customer/products, will it motivate the owner to do the thing that those 200 asked for? Does their populist wisdom prove that it is the best thing to do?

This is difficult, and interesting, and really uncomfortable. It is hard for me to step back into a calm place about it. It is not something We the People can step in and say much about, so consumer-esque revolt is a natural approach. Trying to terrorize the CEO into capitulating. Trying to turn board members to your side.

That reinforces to me that the authoritarian structure of the most powerful organizations in our lives — corporations — decides so many outcomes. For me, this means the greater public good would be if these platforms were organized as utilities where there would be incentive to provide social good, not just profit.

Perhaps there will be shift soon. Maybe we will realize that the innovation of social media has stopped making anything useful. I post something, you find it, you respond. That’s it. That’s the app. We don’t need private industries wealth-incentivized innovation to do that anymore.

It is such an epic literary moment when The Atlantic, a hallowed American publication who has published from Twain to Franzen, is who brings flames to this conversation. I feel we are in a didactic novel. I just can’t tell if the author is George Orwell, Ayn Rand or Hermann Hesse.

Curation is the conversation

Curation was an economic necessity not long ago, as the cost or delivering content to others by printing it and shipping physical objects around was direct and significant. We used market forces in the form of subscriptions to vote and empower curators for us as there was no possible way for each person to have access to everything being written. Throughout history, the cost of putting words on paper has been a logical point for curation. We didn’t want to spend our treasure on publishing every damn thing ever, just the stuff worth saving and sharing.

A recent invention seems to have changed that, causing some disruption

The Atlantic is still providing great writing in traditional, curated publications. With a new publisher and a smartly built digital presence, it has become the home of tantalizing reads just past a paywall. I was recently gifted an Atlantic subscription. I read something in there every day and will certainly use up all of my gift links to share interesting articles around. I devour articles on politics, weird bits of history, the business of dentistry, time management, and roach control. I am so glad for them and their business model; everyone gets limited online reading but a subscription opens up a wealth of new and archival articles. That money funds future neat stuff to put into my brain.

As a writer, I dream of being published in The Atlantic. That their publishers and editors would want my article in their font, in their table of contents — imagine.

Meanwhile, I have joined Substack. I want to publish and I am intrigued by the way it is arranged. Sadly, I don’t get the stamp of approval from a known smart editor to publish there. I just click a button and my content is visible to the world. No curation at all on the production side. All you readers have to curate for yourselves.

As an application, Substack seems to build features informed by the chaos of recent social media history — and it seems to me also by learning from the missteps of the existing long form publishing platform Medium.

No adverts on the substacks yet

Substack is not monetized by advertising, which I hope remains true but I will be unsurprised if the business (and the typically-over invested capital which is looking for non-sustainable returns that will make them all feel really smart) does not go for the inevitable cash cow that is advertising. That is the cash that has pushed video streaming to turn themselves into a cross between ABC in 1986 and a NASCAR driver’s ad-ridden outfit.

I hope Substack stays away from advertising revenue. I really enjoy the Substack writers I read without my mind being pulled to a Target ad. But, seeing the huge amount you have to pay to get Disney without being a product sold to marketing campaigns, I can infer how much my attention is worth to advertisers. How could a board of directors refuse that wealth?

That will be the internal conversation at Substack, but today’s conversation is about the fracas between Substack and traditional media — media models have dominated for a couple hundred years.

This keeps getting couched as an epic battle in which one comes out on top. We are discussion which is a villain, which one is The True Approach. What if we did not approach it as an either this or that outcome? Seems that fired up writers tend to the Hegelian thesis-antithesis they learned in undergrad, and they seem to think it is that we determine superiority by butting heads. I am finding more light by thinking how I see them both. Hegel talked of the result being synthesis.

Is Substack a threat to the Atlantic? As a digital publisher seeking content, yes. They did lure writers away using money in another league from what The Atlantic could possibly offer. But is that existentially threatening The Atlantic? To whatever degree it is, does it warrant attacking Substack on other topics? I am not in a position to answer this question, nor can I say if there was a conscious or unconscious act on the part of the Atlantic staff to denigrate Substack.

Like any curatorial power, editors at The Atlantic use their discernment to decide what to publish and how subjects are treated. Their feelings about Substack will definitely affect what goes out the door.

Follow the dollars

What about the economics? The finances of consumers? In this case, actual consumers who spend money not just attention. I think that I have a finite budget for reading, but I do not. If I see a book I want (and can’t get it at the library or just want to own it forever and ever) I buy it. I expand my reading budget constantly. I don’t think that I would choose between Substack and The Atlantic as a reader (those readers are actual customers, right? I am so confused by your business models, Internet).

As a writer, I can be on Substack despite my complete lack of reputation and credibility, so I am. Eventually, I would like to be asked to write for The Atlantic, hell yeah. The approbations of experienced curators means something. It means something to me who is desperate for praise and acceptance and it means something to culture, which benefits from the evolving thinking — and mistakes — of editors and publishers that arrange content to expand our conversations.

Critiques of curated platforms like The New York Times and The Atlantic

• The editors censor by their bias when they refuse to publish something or alter content to suit their perception of reality.
• They are elitists. Literally. They strive to publish the best content. Their job is to discern that some writing sucks more than others and to not publish stuff that sucks.
• They exploit writers, sometimes. When publishing is scarce and elitist, writers are desperate for its boons and easily exploited.
• The editors are a finite group and have blind spots. Things don’t get covered or else get covered with questionable sympathies. If you go back through old articles in the nigh 200 year history of the Atlantic, you will find casual rascism, sexism, and war prayers that will cause you to blush.
• There is just less to read.

If I trust the reputation of a curator, I believe they are accountable and that they will deliver interesting things for me to read and learn.

Critiques of populist platforms like Medium and Substack

• Most of the crap on there is of low quality because no one is curating.
• There are Nazis.
• Populist (popular) opinion rises, whether they are good or even true.
• The First Amendment. We have to keep talking about the First Amendment, even though these are privately owned.
• When something is not accurate, who do I complain to?
• I have to be m own curator, sift through junk. They may offer a kludgy algorithm that attempts to help me, but let’s all acknowledge that they all really suck at it.

Oh Algorithms what good have you done?

That last bullet above for online, populist platforms, complexity, is a problem that we as a society are trying to solve through computer programming — through the structure of the applications we are using.

The scale and complexity of online content has created quite a mess. It raised its problematic head early in the birth of social media when it became apparent that you could not reasonably read everything allowed to you on your Facebook and Twitter feeds. Then, when they both became monetized with advertising, those maximizing the value of those ads wanted to have confidence that their ads were getting to the right people. Ad buyers are the customers. You have no significance except if your behavior incites ad activity that they pay Meta and Twitter for.

Enter algorithms. the step-through “recipes” that these large apps use to choose what you read. Algorithms are fast and can scale to any number of products (people reading the feed) and customers (advertisers) cheaply — for the cost of the electricity, support people, and floor space for more servers. For a business, it is an enabling replacement for human curation.

Theoretically, they can be not racists (accidental or deliberate) and will serve every product (users like you) the customer’s (ad buyers) content in an equal manner. Theoretically, someone is accountable for them, but we don’t see that.

That would likely take oversight. Unfortunately, companies view their algorithms as not a part of their social pact but as their proprietary specialness. Algorithms (really, we are talking about their requirement docs as much as the actual code) are not revealed to those it affects nor government oversight. The algorithms that decide what you read on Facebook, Twitter, a Google Search, and on so many other places on the Internet are black boxes. Our lives are determined by black boxes. It tastes pretty sour in my mouth.

Here is a great article on a book about algorithms — in The Atlantic.

Before I encountered Substack, I had been trained to presume that all Internet content platforms would have to be accompanied by an algorithm and that it would be a black box. It was a necessary evil and that, like the editorial staff of a publication, I would defer my epistemology to the owner/creator/maintainer of the algorithms of our digital delving.

Medium: algorithm in, algorithm out

The older, long form publishing platform on the Internet, Medium, uses an algorithm to help one find content. I don’t have any idea the criteria, but they could favor articles that are monetized. That would make sense.

I had been quite excited some years ago when Medium was created. A founder of Twitter wanted there to be a home for long form writing on the Internet. It is very thoughtfully coded, including the writing space and viewing space. I quite enjoyed using it.

Medium uses algorithms to help readers find new articles, so if you search for “Substack” on Medium you will get their formulation of which articles are the best for you to read. That algorithm may have to do with the frequency that the words in your search appear. It may have to do with the amount of other people who have read it. It may look at my past Medium reading and suggest things similar to what I have opened before.

I don’t know, and Medium is not telling, what that algorithm considers.

The Medium business model

If I click on something, it may be a free article or behind the Medium paywall. A customer (the reader in this case) pays Medium a monthly subscription to be able to read all the articles they want behind the paywall.

The writers who put items behind the paywall then get paid some for the articles that you interact with. The method of determining how much the author gets paid is…a complex algorithm which is not to my knowledge viewable by those authors. They get what Medium sends them.

The result with Medium is that authors are very interested in making articles behind the paywall that are alluring and sticky and please the reader. There are articles (in Medium, behind the paywall) on how to make great headlines, on what length of article to write, on what should be in the few paragraphs that are viewable to unpaid readers that might entice them to pay.

To make more than pennies on Medium you need to be read by thousands of people.

I don’t trust Medium articles anymore. They are written as clickbait by authors that the platform has incentivized to try to stimulate my lizard brain. The headlines are screamy or teasy or just obnoxious. They sound like the promise in adverts on YouTube (which sound like the adverts in the back of a comic book from 1970).

I am sure that there are corners of Medium that have valuable content — the equivalent of Black Twitter or Knitting Substack, but I don’t find that the algorithms will bring me there…and even if I do, the recommendations at the bottom of an article are for more screamy, teasy, obnoxion.

Substack, hold the algorithm

But Substack de-emphasizes algorithms. Or at least digitized ones. Here is the process that you take to discover new authors on Substack:

1. You get a link sent to you of an article to like to read.
2. You decide to subscribe to that writer. You are offered other publications recommended by that author .
3. As you interact more with Substack, you create a profile. You are asked what Substack authors you would recommend.
4. If you start using the Twitter-like function, comment on an author’s post, or start publishing yourself, people who interact with you can see what authors you recommend.
5. The cycle continues.

I am so jazzed by this. It does not have the “infinite scroll” effect of a search on any other site, but is a small curated collection of authors from someone who I have an affinity to. If I like what they are offering, I may eventually get a paid subscription to the particular author. Substack gets 10 percent.

There are certainly “how to be successful on Substack” articles, and best practices are starting to appear which may create some styles across the platform. I am curious how that will look. Every time we innovate platforms, we innovate our way of creating, curating, and reading.

Currently the Substack methods and the methods of The Atlantic work great for me.

One friend of mine notified The Atlantic that they are cancelling their subscription because they thought Katz’s piece about Substack was so poorly and irresponsibly done. I get his point, after reading the crowd sourced research from Substack writers to check Katz’s work.

Several Substack writers (the product) signed a letter saying they would leave if Substack did not remove all the Nazis.

I am glad I am not the editor of The Atlantic who has to defend Katz’s piece. I am glad I am not the VC-funded head of Substack who has to chart a way forward that keeps the product and the customer happy there. It is hard to see the best path forward and it is hard to not be afraid of a bad outcome. I am trying. I want to read good writing and trust the curation that brings it to me.