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Congratulations on all of your successes!
You have held firm so far on not acquiescing to cancel culture. But I imagine Apple will start demanding you censor content available through the Substack app, like they have with Parler and others. What will you do in response?
You have held firm so far on not acquiescing to cancel culture. But I imagine Apple will start demanding you censor content available through the Substack app, like they have with Parler and others. What will you do in response?
I think the Substack model gives us a bunch of advantages here: readers are choosing to subscribe to writers they trust, and who they then have a direct relationship with. I don't think that Apple is likely to try to police that too heavily, and if they do there is always web and email that exists as a fallback.
This probably isn't the venue for it, but your refusal to engage in the sort of content moderation the entire rest of the industry has determined "necessary" cannot be commended enough Societal pressure on this has been intense, and your team's tweets in support of individual expression have been absolutely landmark tweets, and I am a paying customer because of it Sincerely, thank you
Isn't this post abusing Show HN? Since it's essentially just a marketing post and is void of all technical detail? I understand there's an essence of Show HN posts that are marketing but at least most are technically oriented in some way...
You have held firm so far on not acquiescing to cancel culture. But I imagine Apple will start demanding you censor content available through the Substack app, like they have with Parler and others. What will you do in response?
We don’t allow content that promotes harmful or illegal activities, including material that advocates, threatens, or shows you causing harm to yourself, other people, or animals.
...
Nudity, porn, erotica
We don’t allow porn or sexually exploitative content on Substack. We do allow depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature. However, we may hide this content from Substack’s discovery features, including search and on Substack.com.
Plenty of censorship in those paragraphs to any free speech absolutist who strives for ideological consistency. They're "cancelling" enormous amounts of what many consider free expression.
You have held firm so far on not acquiescing to cancel culture. But I imagine Apple will start demanding you censor content available through the Substack app, like they have with Parler and others. What will you do in response?
We definitely care a lot about about freedom of the press, and have written a bunch about it at e.g. https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more I think the Substack model gives us a bunch of advantages here: readers are choosing to subscribe to writers they trust, and who they then have a direct relationship with. I don't think that Apple is likely to try to police that too heavily, and if they do the…
To what extent did you expect to see the magnitude of recent defections from major media outlets, which have proven to be a boon for your business? If substack hadn’t existed, do you think people would have defected in similar numbers, but just gone elsewhere? Congratulations on all of your successes!
One of the good things Substack can do is put competitive pressure on traditional outlets. If people want to go independent, having a good way to do so helps them. But also that possibility creates pressure on existing institutions to give writers more freedom, pay them better, etc. etc. I don't think it's a coincidence that you see more legacy publishers starting "newsletter" divisions that give writers more leeway. All of this is good for writers in our minds and we're happy for it.
I'm a huge fan of your platform, and love that its empowered some of my favorite journalists and other others to write freely while continuing to be able to provide for themselves.
One question I have is as a small time blogger, I currently use Medium as my platform. The reason I do so is because it has an audience baked in, so I'm easily(-ish) able to attract new readers to my blog and grow the list of people who follow what I write.
What does Substack have or is planning to have product feature-wise that might allow for smaller writers to get the word out and have a social network-like following to help grow their own readership?
I would love to switch to support your product, this is the one thing holding me back.