Merry everything, friends. I hope your holiday season is going as well as it can during these strange times, and that you and yours are staying safe and healthy. I am enjoying a pierogi-and-Christmas-cookie-induced haze and trying to take it easy before the dawn of 2022.
Over the past few months, as I thought about goals for the new year, I kept coming back to the idea of resuscitating my newsletter. Those of you who have been here for a while know that for the past several years this has been an unfulfilled promise to myself and my subscribers. Life—the pandemic, two manuscripts, teaching, blah blah blah—got in the way. Moreover, every time I thought about the wiczipedia weekly's renaissance, I was hesitant. The weekly format clearly didn't work for my life anymore. Neither did the regular news roundups on which the newsletter was built, back in 2015. I had since abandoned them for the longer-form writing I grew to prefer. But I also felt increasingly uneasy about the platform on which I had been publishing since 2019, Substack.
For those who signed up to my newsletter years ago and never thought about the middleman since, Substack was the service that—until today—got my newsletter to you. It was the leader in the newsletter trend, encouraging consumers to ditch microblogging on platforms like Twitter and instead engage in what its creators argued would be more thoughtful, more reasoned discourse sent to inboxes at regular intervals. Substack also was one of the first to offer writers a chance to monetize their newsletters, encouraging them to offer subscribers exclusive posts and interactive content, such as open discussion threads, in exchange for a fee. Bloggers could now not only become journalists; they could effectively be magazine publishers, too.
I have many friends and colleagues whose income is built on Substack. Some have amassed a subscription base substantial enough to cover their mortgage or rent. Substack has also courted writers with large followings, offering them stipends, editorial support, health insurance, and beyond, to bring their content and supporters to the platform. I never really found that success—my own fault, due to my sporadic posting schedule, extremely niche choice of subject matter, and publication title that no one can pronounce!—though I'm happy for my friends that did.
But in thinking about reinvigorating my newsletter, there was another, more existential question for me: did I want to give part of my meager newsletter income, and more importantly, implicit support from me and my audience, to a platform that I believed was actively contributing to the degradation of online discourse?
Over the past few years, I was harassed because of a Substack post from an influential writer who maligned me and my views. Popular Substackers have deadnamed trans friends of mine (using their pretransition names, a tactic that is hateful and transphobic) with no recourse. Substack posts containing disinformation travel far and wide. Substack does little to nothing about this. And for this conduct, Substack writers and Substack itself make money.
This was the real crux of the moral quandary I faced when considering my newsletter's future. Much of my 2021 focused on raising awareness about and advocating for the mitigation of online violence against women and other marginalized communities (my new book, How to Be A Woman Online, comes out in late April: preorder here), and my continued presence on Substack felt incongruent with the work I was doing. As I wrestled with the pros and cons of staying on the platform, the world was absorbing the Facebook Papers, and Substack made my decision for me.
In a post entitled, "The internet needs better rules, not stricter referees," Substack founders Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie attempt to argue that the way to solve the internet's problems "is to flip the power dynamic: give the people themselves the power to choose what they pay attention to." Substack, they believe, does this. "People will hate-read and doom-scroll, but they won’t hate-pay or doom-subscribe," they write, evidently having learned nothing from both the grift of the Trump era and the pandemic. "While people pay attention to content that makes them agitated, they’ll only pay money for content they trust and value." Unfortunately, a not insignificant number of people pay money for content on OAN and Newsmax and—coming soon!—the Trump media network headed up by Devin Nunes. They pay for garbage on Substack, too. And especially where money is changing hands, I firmly believe that platforms have a duty to their users to not only have adequate rules that protect people from real-world harm, but to enforce them. As free expression scholar evelyn douek is fond of saying, on today's internet, "everything is a content moderation problem."
So, here I am, on Revue. I am certain this platform has at least a few folks on the naughty list, too—every platform does—but there is a key difference in how it is governed. Revue, now owned by Twitter, abides by Twitter's Terms of Service, which have been rapidly evolving to better protect those affected by online hate speech and targeted harassment. They are not perfect—for instance, Twitter is now removing pictures of people posted without the subject's permission, great for victims of revenge porn and other targeted harassment, not so great for public interest reporting about, for example, the far-right—but they are probably the best in the industry. They prevent deadnaming, for example, and are becoming more active against online misogyny. When I imported my Substack contacts to Revue, the Revue team asked me for extra information to see if my subscriber base was legit. Yes, this was a little annoying while I waited to press send, but I'm glad to see that Revue is, well, reviewing new accounts to make sure real humans are behind them. Finally, if I see malign content on Revue, I'm confident I can get it escalated to a pair of human eyes that will interpret it according to Twitter's policies.
(This speaks to another problem Twitter has, though: my research has put me in touch with some of Twitter's staff, and I have had success in reporting violative content to them when their automated detection misses it or makes the wrong decision. Not everyone has this access. In response Twitter is beginning to reform the reporting process, a move I am hopeful about.)
I won't be creating subscription options for this Revue-based newsletter, given how topsy-turvy my schedule has been and may continue to be. I do plan to publish more frequently; if you want to support my work, or really like a particular piece I've written, you can now buy me a coffee (or several)!
I truly appreciate your support, and hope you have a happy and healthy 2022. See you in the new year.