Substack vs. Who?
The Information Wars Part 27
Find out more about the Information Wars here.
Apparently, yesterday, Substack announced a note system. Even prior to my noticing that, Elon Musk took notice, then immediately moved to censor Substack. That's quite a knee-jerk move for a man who claims to be a champion ("champion"?) of free speech (it went from "absolutist" to "something something free speech" over time).
Let's see if things changed in the last few minutes…
https://twitter.com/TheLiamSturgess/status/1644564345681227776?s=20
Nope.
I'm not here to poop on Elon for jollies. I'd choose Jeffrey Epstein or Oprah, first. But I haven't been impressed with Elon's Twitter, which ejected some Intelligence riff-raff while somehow seeming as artificially sculpted an experience as ever before.
Or maybe I'm just not on Elon's friend list?
What I really want to talk about is how I see the platform competition breaking down online.
I really like Substack. From the bit I've paid attention to, I like the team. To say that I have "no complaints" is…a bit rare. I'm usually the negative curmudgeon when it comes to corporate enterprises and all things media.
But I'm not here to get personal with the participants. I have some specific observations about the competing domains. I'll start with my very first Substack note:
I'd like to break down several options for reading platforms that don't involve wasting [most of the] time spent reading standard news sources. In my mind, each of these is distinctly different:
Substack: A platform for articles, with tools that allow for video/podcast content. Disguised as a "newsletter" platform, which simply means that they email our articles around. It feels…thoughtful here. I appreciate it, and I self-canceled my career for longer than I would have expected due to the ability to engage on my own terms, and thoughtfully with most commenters (though I'm not afraid to tell a troll that they stink, or a frazzled angry "You didn't write what you're supposed to" rando that they're being weird…in a snarky way.)
Facebook: Balanced video and text/images, without commitment. Trying to be all things to all people, and I suspect beginning to fail as a result. Censorsaurus Rex is a strange world in which you're supposed to post pictures of your kids for friends to like and the A.I. to track for the rest of their lives, but a handful of us wrote articles there. I mean…I wrote some there…until I was banned for around 150 days in 2021 in total.
Locals: Dual post-orientation and livestreaming defines Locals. This is actually the true competition to Substack (and also Twitter, in fact). Since I prefer articles, and I think that Substack is the better tool for that, I spend more time on Substack. Also, the Locals interface isn't as…smooth for jumping between communities as I'd like. But it's a great platform, too, and with a great team. Needs to make dropping in images easier.
Twitter: Post-oriented and chaotic race to the bottom that seems to encourage the worst form of communication that often leads to unnecessary conflict. Such unnecessary conflict is a good tool in the hands of people with influence who can afford the bots and $5/hour people helpers who will attack your enemies for you, and in ways that screw up the information stream (probably trial-and-error on the algorithm). It's weird to me how little the hiring of attackers gets discussed. I've seen some trolls on Substack who struck me as that (or as better paid propagandists, most likely), but it likely costs less to manipulate on Twitter.
Telegram: A cacophony of chat, but with bots, manipulation, and crypto scams. I generally can't stand it. I'm only there because Operation Uplift chose to be there. I hold my breath every time I open that window.
Crypto-Options: Mastodon, Nostr, and others will catch on in time, but are still in their infancy. These will open the door to the next generation and will likely be major improvements. Cryptocurrency micropayments will naturally regulate the way people spend their time because people won't want to pay for what isn't valuable to type out or read.
Having described these platforms, there is an interplay that matters. Some play better and worse than others.
https://twitter.com/EduEngineer/status/1644647203783204864?s=20
We've seen this story play out before in the tech world. One company remains open while a competitor stays closed. Who wins?
Please don't say, "The company that writes policy at the World Health Organization." That's just so inappropriate.
Would it be too cheeky to say "the house wins"?
I would argue many of the large platforms you listed all have potential to be the post-television iteration of cable news. The system desperately needs a mechanism to "get everyone on board" with narratives and the "fragmentation" of the digital space really hurts that end. As long as people are willing to compromise with digital infrastructure run by the system, I'm sure there really is a wide latitude for what options are allowed to exist.
As an aside, I'd be really curious to see polling on what % of the adult/young adult population uses Twitter or Substack. I'd bet that combined they're outdone by Tiktok, especially in terms of hours of attention captured. What makes Tiktok special is that it is a foreign information control system.
Many mastodon/fediverse users (especially mastodon) would be upset at you for putting them in the same bin as "crypto options" because many of the instances are openly hostile to cryptocurrency.
I'd argue the fediverse is ready for primetime we just aren't going to have big tech spin up servers for us!
Good assessment Matthew!
Your comments about facebook posts both here and in your prior post are interesting. I started posting in facebook against pandemic measures before they arrived in early March 2020 and I posted daily there for most of 2020. I did so because that was where my trial audience was -- my friend and professional group -- and I was trying to understand why I was standing alone in a sea of intelligent people.
There were only a handful of supporters who would quietly PM me and literally one or two who were vocal with me.
I stopped posting there a year later because I had lost or alienated a lot of my friends, and the experiment had yielded results long before. It is not a platform for honest discussion and it is not a platform for curating good long form information.
It is still a good platform for sharing personal life with friends and family. Innocuous and harmless pictures of the weather and maybe the odd life event. That's it.
As for twitter, I think perhaps it serves a purpose much like the sport arenas do.