The company’s CEO says the old way of social media is broken—but is his alternative much different? (From 2021)
Best believes that Substack is a new way forward for the world of media, and the herald of a new, democratic world. Social media broke journalism, and Substack is here to save it. When they launched Substack, Best and his cofounders, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi, drew comparisons with newspaper impresarios from 200 years ago, saying their innovation was of equal importance.
It was designed to shunt the media out of what the cofounders saw as a vicious cycle of pursuing clicks through outrage because it goes viral on social media. “The incentive structure that gets created because of that doesn't support and reward great writing. It supports and rewards things that make us crazy,” Best says. “And that’s a failure, both for us as individuals who care about what we read and care about having a good view of the world, and for society at large because it’s deranging us.” Substack has managed to build an impressive business predicated on the idea that people will pay for good journalism—and prefer to support writers directly, rather than mediated through monolithic media organizations. But is what Best proposes all that revolutionary? Or is it just doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past in a zeitgeisty disguise? Best’s argument is well-worn—and valid: The attempt to chase eyeballs has had a negative effect on our increasingly polarized world. But pointing the finger at social media is misguided. “Anyone who advances the argument that ad-supported content has to be more provocative and partisan than reader-revenue or pay content hasn’t been paying a hell of a lot of attention to how the television industry works,” says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. He points to the majority of ad-supported TV networks, Fox News excepted, which are resolutely centrist and play to the lowest common denominator in order to attract the broadest possible range of advertisers. But if Best’s view on the ad-driven model puts him at odds with Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others, then his belief in the sanctity of free speech—and a hands-off approach to moderation—is more in line with the status quo. From Glenn Greenwald to Bari Weiss, its roster of biggest-name writers—a number of whom have been deplatformed from other social platforms—shows the company is willing to promote free speech rather than an overly interventionist content moderation policy. “We think building something that relies on heavy-handed censorship by anyone, including us, is a dystopian solution,” says Best. He points to the “travails of Facebook,” where the company tries to stop societal issues it causes by
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