There is the occasional triumphalist statement (see below) from Substack leadership about their establishing of a new model for writers that frees us from the decline and devaluation of freelance work in legacy media, but I hope writers are recognizing that this is premature and remaining thoughtful about what the future holds.

Substack is not profitable. There’s folks who understand more about this than me that believe the model they’ve adopted will never be profitable. (It has similar problems to Uber.) Outside money funds the current operations. They recently pulled back from an attempt to raise more money. They are in the early stages of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” process, where everything seems like a good deal for writers now, but ultimately, if this is going to be a profitable business for the people who run and fund it, more revenue must come and the sources of that revenue are either readers or writers, and it’s reasonable to believe that the cost of doing business for we writers on here will change for the worse over time.

A small monthly fee for free newsletters is entirely possible. Changing the scale of what Substack collects depending on audience and revenue is an option. Look at the ways Uber is now squeezing revenue not just out of riders with algorithmic pricing, but drivers by giving variable fares depending on individual behavior, and you see what can be done to writers on Substack. If legacy media continues to decline, Substack will be able to set whatever terms they want and it will be very difficult to resist whatever changes they impose. For all the high-minded talk about empowering writers, Substack ultimately exists in order to make money for the people who provide the capital to the operation. The laborers (writers) are vulnerable in all the ways any laborer is vulnerable, perhaps more so as we are entirely unbundled.

The owners of the platform also have significant control in which newsletters are surfaced on notes and through their other algorithmic boosts. For example, it’s probably a mistake for me to say that Hamish McKenzie’s note about his rationale for continuing to monetize Nazi content is poorly reasoned and treats his audience of his critics like we’re too dumb to see the nuance these situations demand. Hamish could spike my newsletter in terms of fresh discoverability and I’d never know it because it’s all a black box. That the owners refuse to engage in any actual dialogue over these issues beyond their from the mountaintop announcements suggests that they not particularly interested in an ethos that views the platform as a shared space of multiple categories of stakeholder. Whatever public rationale they release for their actions, it’s important to recognize, there is no principle beyond whatever they want to do. Believing otherwise would be awfully naive.

Substack has been very helpful for me and now pays me similarly to the weekly newspaper column I write, but I’m not kidding myself that this is some sort of permanent new model that will benefit writers. It’s a developing alternative, not an endpoint and there’s lots of reasons to be cautious, the behavior of the owners of the site chief among them.