Packing up

Quitting can be awesome

I’m getting ready to migrate this newsletter over to another platform. Stay tuned for news - I don’t think you’ll have to do anything if you’re a subscriber.

Here’s a lil bit about why.

I almost bailed from SubStack during the Nazi controversy last year. But I stayed, just like I stayed with the Meta platforms, because it felt like Everybody Was Here. So two things about that:

• just like on the Meta platforms, the experience here on SubStack has gotten measurably worse. Notes in particular sucks.

• Everybody Might Be someplace, but that doesn’t mean they are engaging. The Music Minus None posts I’ve written since leaving Meta are being opened and read just as often as before. People are linking to Music Minus None through email, and almost not at all through any other platform.

SubStack made a free speech argument about platforming holocaust deniers, and I do get that quasi-religious vibe about speeeeech, it’s very ole school Merkin. It just feels like bringing a knife to a gunfight, or maybe a quill pen to a SpaceX launch. Even if you believe that platforming someone is the same as shining the light of truth and transparency on their actions (not just increasing traffic to your site to line your own pockets), “truth” and “transparency” are pretty damn mutable to folks these days.

We’re in uncharted territory here on the internet, and we’re bad at understanding what’s happening to us. I don’t understand it either. I don’t think there is some pure place on the internet - there also wasn’t and isn’t in print publishing. I have no interest in hiding from views I find repugnant and dangerous. But when SubStack takes the time to highlight their “new media,” all about catering to high-volume publishers and “driving subscriptions,” and then specifically ties this to the Free Press with praise for is “meticulous journalism” - well, many people have done the work to write about this well. This article from The Handbasket is a good place to start. This one here explains more about SubStack’s “de facto editorial policies.”

This all may not interest you, but I encourage you to dig in further. I’m the tiniest of the tiny here, writing very niche content for a small group of people. But that writing is having an impact in my little community. I want to own that writing and that impact - I don’t want ten percent of my lil subscription base to go to the Free Press, which advocates for policies and actions that actively harm people I care about. It’s not significant to SubStack, but it’s significant to me. I’m done with the era of my life in which I shut my studio door and pretend I’m not connected to the abusers down the hall.

Growth is great if it results in more good for everyone, but it so often doesn’t these days. Not everything has to be bigger.

Watch this space. Thank you for reading.