Hello, I (Hamish) will answer question #1 and leave the rest to my colleagues.

I think what has driven our growth is a nice synthesis between the product, the business dev work (i.e. convincing writers to give it a shot), and the business model.

The model may be the underestimated part. It's compelling for many writers, partly because of its simplicity and transparency: you own the relationship with your audience, you publish stuff that gets sent to them, and then if you're doing good work some portion of that audience will choose to pay you to keep going. That's a good deal for writers, since:

a) It lets them do the work they believe is most important b) No one can mess with their audience c) There's a clear path to making money, which is the major thing absent from most other options for writing on the internet (or, increasingly, anywhere else).

These things make Substack a relatively easy "sell".

Of course, some writers are better poised to succeed with this model than others, so we have put in a sustained effort to identify those writers and let them know about their opportunity on Substack. In a small number of cases, that has meant we've offered a financial package to derisk the move for them (you can think of it as like startup funding to get them going; many don't have much financial buffer and may be reluctant to leave jobs even if they are unhappy in those jobs). But the vast majority of writers doing well on Substack have come to the platform of their own accord, without any kind of deal.

2: We do have a strong philosophical stance on this. We think taking a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press is both the right thing to do, and critical to the success of our broader mission. We've written about this a few times, e.g. https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati... and https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more

That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.

4. YES!

> We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.

I'm interested in hearing more, I recently had a Substack recruiter reach out to me and was curious about this because I work at a tech company w/ some internal "activists" (I don't consider them to be activists).

How would you talk about it with them while hiring? It seems like you might need to bring up uncomfortable (and potentially risky) things like politics (?) during an interview?

What to do if your employees start doing walkouts or what not? At the company I work for this happened. A lot of people don't feel comfortable standing up to the ones who are most vocal about cancel-culture (if you disagree with them you may be labeled and considered a "fascist" (ugh) or even worse a "nazi" and your career impacted), I find that most people just stay silent in the face of this and the organizers of these movements seem to rule the roost in the workplace.

Great job either way I'm a Substack supporter! :thumbsup:

Sounds like you need a new job with a more inclusive culture.

It was a well known company where the walkout made the news.

My main thing in stating this is just to say that at this point in time I'm looking for a Coinbase/37Signals style work environment where I don't have to take part in others activism or "be an ally" by doing as told.

This is happening the most "inclusive" workplaces, and it's spreading. Count yourself lucky if you haven't encountered it yet.

That philosophical stance is very common at the beginnings of a platform. E.g., Twitter being the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party". Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. But over time, tensions develop between the theory and the practice.

So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support?

From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that category. What about, say, open antisemitism? Will you host and help fund the American Nazi Party or the KKK? How about more borderline actors, like people who promote racist conspiracy theories and ethnic cleansing, but stop short of direct calls for violence?

> Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan.

4chan has never been about free speech, it had rules since the beginning which are constantly enforced.

If your definition of free speech requires that a platform have no rules whatsoever, then there has never been a free speech platform anywhere on the internet, because such a platform would have to accept illegal content and spam, and could never moderate anything.

But that's not my point, 4chan has clear rules that are not about illegal content: https://4chan.org/rules. There are moderators/janitors enforcing thoses rules and a report system. The first rule is:

"1. You will not upload, post, discuss, request, or link to anything that violates local or United States law."

But that's only the first rule. There are 17 global rules, and each board has a few.

Exactly. My point with Poole is that he started a platform that was much more accepting than competitor sites. Eventually he wasn't happy with how it turned out and walked away from it. Easy enough to do when it's a small operation. But with a larger operation like Twitter staff are invested enough that they won't just say "fuck it". So you see stronger TOSes build up over time.

The CPUSA and SWP have been pretty irrelevant for the past couple decades. They're being left out because even hardcore leftist just aren't thinking about them at all. Modern leftists aren't flocking around the organizations that were the extreme left of the 20th Century.

The keyword here is "extremism". Doesn't matter whether the extremists label themselves as left or right.

Exactly. I read his response and said, "Wait, did I say anything about the far right?" No, I didn't.

In the US, right now violent extremists are almost all from the far right. At points in our history, we have had violent far-left extremists, so it's not impossible. It's not even inconceivable; given spiking wealth inequality, in some ways I'm surprised I haven't seen any anti-billionaire violence. Ditto climate-change and eco-terrorism. But it's definitely the case that extremist threats here are mostly from the right.

But I do think it's telling that he saw me pointing out the KKK and the American Nazi Party as examples of current violent extremism and thought, "How dare you attack the right!"

The CPUSA? You've got to be kidding me.

Sorry, your comment doesn’t quite have enough Red Menace hysteria. Could you mind dialling it up a little? Ideally, extrapolating from zero people, since asserting “society has a problem” from the political leanings of exactly one person seems almost like rigourous thinking.

You’ve already nailed the misrepresentation of the composition and purpose of an advisory body, so you can leave that part alone; the overwrought hyperbole there is already evident after a cursory check of what SAGE is.

> So the idea that society doesn't have a problem with communist extremism is unfortunately not quite accurate. It's still out there.

It doesn't seem like communist extremism is the problem we are dealing with today. Unless you'd like to argue Putin's GRU lackeys are communists (which they're not, but either were and are nationalists). What you are doing here is essentially a whataboutism. What about the COMMUNIST extremists?! Yeah, well, what about them? They're irrelevant in the current playing field. The danger is coming from the right: alt-right. But either way, we can just call all of them extremists. Just don't pretend its 50/50 extreme left/right cause that's not the world we are living in. Not anymore, anyway.

How are they irrelevant? Maybe it feels that way in the USA but the UK just went through a period of time where the government was officially and formally manipulating the behaviour of the population on the say-so of an actual communist. That seems pretty damn relevant.

You also need to think a bit about this - why wasn't this extremist fired from her position? Well, not surprisingly, it's because a lot of her fellow academics are fellow travellers, as was often made clear by many of their comments. They aren't literally members of the communist party, but they are certainly sympathetic to that way of thinking. I've talked to them directly, the things they come out with are astonishing.

Meanwhile, nobody even remotely right wing has had any influence at all, especially not in recent years. The libertarian wing of the Conservative party, such that it is, was reduced to constantly voting against the government, which always failed because they were supported by Labour. The "opposition" primarily "opposed" the government by demanding it do whatever it was doing, but faster and harder.

You have to actually prove someone is an extremist beyond Communist Party membership. This isn't the 80's, the accepted argument isn't that one proceeds from the other anymore. It's rare that the same organization retains extremist character for generations, I'd expect modern extreme leftists to found new organizations, not join stodgy old Communist Parties.

This is ridiculous. It's like saying membership of a Nazi party wouldn't imply extremism. Of course being a card-carrying communist is an extreme position. Communists around the world have repeatedly established horrific dictatorships that murdered their own people in vast numbers, usually accompanied with mass manipulation of the population through propaganda. If a behavioural psychologist of all people thinks that's the type of government she wants to have, it is de facto proof of extremism, and says nothing good about the people around her who say nothing about it.

Consider how it'd look if she was a member of a Nazi Party. Nobody would accept that. There's no difference.

Believe whatever you want, but that's just not where the shared cultural assumption is anymore. It carries the same weight to someone born after the fall of the USSR as asserting someone must be royalty because of their purple jacket.

Convincing people requires that you work forward from the assumptions they hold toward your views. I'm not sure what asserting that other people actually do hold your assumptions when they keep telling you they don't accomplishes.

You're asserting that the "shared cultural assumptions" have changed, and I'm asserting:

1. No they haven't. Lots of people found Michie's associations unacceptable and astonishing.

2. Anyone who does think that communism is not any longer an extreme position, is simply not well informed. Communism itself hasn't changed. Go look at the state of Xinjiang to see this. It's supposedly full of concentration camps.

>1. No they haven't. Lots of people found Michie's associations unacceptable and astonishing.

Okay, and if you continue to communicate the way you are, those are the only people who will be interested in your ideas. You have to play the same game as your audience if you want to win.

(The alt-right is also irrelevant in the current playing field.)

Wishful thinking. The only people who are supporting Putin in The Netherlands, is the alt-right FvD and PVV. We had an alt-right president in USA, who tried to undermine NATO. Finally, it -along with nationalism- is on the rise in general throughout Europe as well as the world, including during the COVID pandemic.

I haven't heard of any communists being deplatformed for like 20 years. So although I hope Substack will treat them in the same principled way as anyone else, it's kind of irrelevant.

You forgot to mention Antifa.

Yeah a worker led economic theory vs a racist ideology. Your argument boils down to this: if any country based on a particular ideology did many horrible things, then that ideology should be rejected.

please go ahead and defend your capitalistic gov that exterminated people in vietnam, hired nazis, bombed black neighborhoods, destabilized and created brutal dictatorships in latin america, bombs kids in yemen, enables apartheid..and once you're done digesting that think about the. slave. trade.

This might be the most low effort whataboutism I’ve read in a while. I’m not sure if you even tried to be relevant with your examples. Please put more effort into your comments.

Why would these actors want to publish on Substack in the first place? They have their own platforms already. Alt-right content is highly "meme" based (e.g. the whole thing with frogs and 'Kekistan', or the Qanon LARPing), it doesn't do well on a platform focused on long-form texts with serious intellectual interest.

I'm not trying to promote their blog and am not a fan of it and won't link it, but I know of at least one Substack blog by one such actor who indeed makes their blog highly meme-based. The fact that you can insert arbitrary inline images in blog posts and write whatever text you want near them is pretty much all you need.

One obvious answer is revenue. Getting money in is a real struggle for extremists, who tend to get banned from traditional platforms. Think of it as like paying membership dues.

Thank you for #2, I never knew these points

> Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions.

I think I'm going to start subscribing to two writers in particular and see how that goes. This is a great model.

I just want to say thank you for allowing other views contrary to the mainstream narrative to flourish.

I enjoyed these articles, you really nailed it. I think if you ever add podcasts and videos you could be the next YouTube, without the click-maximizing algorithms.

I have a follow-up question to #3. Like the parent post I commend your stance on free speech, but recognise you host some controversial figures that other platforms have been happy to ban. The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower, and as Substack gets bigger it's naturally going to attract more attention, both from those who call for increased censorship, and from those who others might want to censor. The particularly controversial writers are naturally going to gravitate to Substack if it's the only place that will let them have an account.

So do you ever worry that you might end up like Parler? What happens if AWS, Cloudflare, payment processors etc. decide to kick you off the internet because of whom you publish? Right now it seems unlikely that they'd become that intolerant, but a lot of unlikely things have happened in tech in the last few years.

Are you worried about this eventuality, and are you preparing for it?

> The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower

I'm not affiliated with Substack, but I'm having difficulty with your premise here. There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. What opinions is "Big Tech" "censoring" and why should one think there's any validity to your slippery slope argument?

Well, for starters Gab is banned from the App Store for their near-absolutist stance on free speech.

More than that is the general culture of suppression of the "wrong" view of reality. Most people who were merely to the right of center moderates in the 00's are now accused of being absolute evil if they voice any opinions. I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired & won't be able to feed their families. The suppression and censorship is very real.

One or two exceptional counterexamples do more to prove the rule than to disprove it.

> I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired

In fairness, there are multiple explanations that don’t involve this being objectively true, while also being how these people perceive their situation.

True, but as long as people are willing to self censor then it doesn't matter if they would be punished if they spoke out, because they won't. Perceived risk is indistinguishable from actual risk if that risk is avoided by total avoidance.

Aside from that, there are a lot of "cancellations" in the news, even if they're exceptional and only highlighted as a result of sensationalist reporting (or, more conspiratorially, behavioural control) the risk may still be actually too high. You only probably only have to be de-personed once for it to have a lifetime effect.

Yes, they're not persecuted. They're delluded. As Stalin would say.

The appearance of persecution has always been a tool of censorship. Chilling effects etc.

It's a lot easier to create the appearance of a threat than to actually persecute lots of people, especially in the current social media landscape.

>There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.

Well, touting the fact that the App Store, in its benevolence, allows an app by an ex-POTUS, like it's some sort of triumph of free speech speaks volumes, doesn't it?

The ability of an ex-president to have such reach would go without saying in the past. Now it's up to the whims of Big Tech - and Twitter and others had already cancelled them.

I was just about to point out, there’s no great likelihood that all will survive the next election, either…

They're probably using Big Tech as a stand-in for Big Social Media Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).

Amazon AWS also deplatformed right leaning services.

Yes, but not because they were right leaning. According to them, it was due to the lack of moderation and dangerous content being hosted.

But they define dangerous content as anything right leaning, and lack of moderation as lack of deletion of said content.

I don't mind Parler being deplatformed as long as similar standards are held for others. Given that Facebook was also a major contributor to the organizing of January 6th I think it makes sense people were asking for their deplatforming as well. That never happened though, and goes unanswered w.r.t. the logic that you've shared.

Deplatform all of them, right? How about the telephone companies that transmitted their conversations? Or the hotels and AirBnb for housing them? And the restaurants that served them? And Uber and airlines that transported them? And the sporting goods store that supplied them? And …

I mean, I'd prefer deplatforming not being an option, but the momentum for it as a tool is far too strong. It's far more expedient that the folks that are championing that as an option also have to use it on institutions they're associated with or favor for similar actions.

The definition of “dangerous” has become rather flimsy these days.

Feels weird to have to say this, but Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.

> Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.

He may be the leading candidate to be the republican nominee, but that's not the same as the leading candidate likely to win.

Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.

>Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.

You keep using this word, "fringe". I don't think it means what you think it means...

"Fringe" and "extremist" are relative terms.

By definition whoever wins the most votes is mainstream, not a fringe extremist.

Well, there are only 2 real candidates, so yes the likely republican nominee is a likely candidate to win. The polls all show democrats losing in a landslide in the midterms. That puts the republican nominee in very good position.

Aren't his favorables better than Biden's and Harris's? [1]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/02/18/...

Trump was always going to be the leading candidate. He could have won a second term if not for his fumbling over COVID and his meltdown over secret commies stealing his votes. No one was ever going to vote for Biden twice, the left only hates him less than they hate Trump and half the country never stopped drinking the Trump Kool-Aid. You can't beat a man who has a cult and started a revolution with... whatever the hell Biden has going for him. Once again the Democrats will probably snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Are you saying Trump could have won in 2020? I think the pandemic killed his presidency... it's like 1932 when Herbert Hoover got voted out because of the Great Depression, regardless of whose fault it was.

It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts.

It seems to me the Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in 2020. However in 2022... mathematically, they're almost guaranteed to cede the House and maybe the Senate as well, depending on how events in Europe and general economic trends play out.

> It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts.

I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird. Who actively wants their life to be worse?

>I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird.

Trump knew that mail-in votes would favor the Democrats, so he spread a conspiracy theory that mail-in voting was rampant with Democratic ballot fraud (it wasn't,) going so far as to attempt to defund the Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting altogether[0].

Of course, this meant Republicans avoided mail-in voting en masse, so when the (primarily Democratic) mail-in ballots came in after the initial numbers appeared to favor Trump, and the tide turned against him, the cries of fraud only became louder.

That's what Trump does, he poisons any well he can to harm his opponents, even if he has to drink from it afterwards. It's political because he made it political, the way he made masks and vaccination political because he thought COVID would distract from his narrative of a "roaring economy" and because he thought wearing a mask would make him look weak in front of the press, who he considered his enemy.

[0]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/24/why-trumps-...

> That's what Trump does, he poisons any well he can to harm his opponents

Not a fan of Trump either, but would things have been so much better with Hillary as President? Her actions are equally if not more heinous than Trump. She’s just not as obvious about it.

Yes, I said that if not for those events I think Trump could have won. Better leadership with COVID along with his (somewhat fictitious but still compelling) narrative of turning around the economy would probably have put him over Biden. Even though Biden won by a sizeable margin of popular votes - and as a candidate, he received more votes than any other candidate in history - he won with fewer electoral votes (the only votes that actually matter) than the 78,000 votes in three swing states which got Trump over in 2016.

> [Biden] won with fewer electoral votes [than] Trump over in 2016.

That's both not true and trivially checkable.

In 2016, Trump won by 77,744 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In 2020, Biden won by 42,844 votes in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.

I got my numbers here[0] so feel free to fact check me. I may have been imprecise in referring to electoral votes specifically, but I think I am correct about the margins of victory.

[0]https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/did-biden-wi...

But you say only the electoral votes matter? Why does this weird three swing states that aren't even all the same so have different populations accross the elections margin matter?

I think what GP is saying is that even with large, multi-million margins in the popular vote, the result can still be "close" because many of those votes count for nothing in the electoral college. Hillary Clinton could have received four million fewer votes in California 2016 and she would still have won that state while losing the electoral college. But if she had merely won an extra ~100,00 votes in a few crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, America might have had its first female president.

I haven't checked the numbers but I think GP is arguing that the Biden-Trump result was "closer" in this sense than the Clinton-Trump result was; i.e. the margin in the electoral college and nationwide popular vote may have been wider, but 2020 was still a closer call in the small number of swing states that might have actually changed the overall result.

Ah, you're talking about the fewest number of regular votes that would have to change so that the electoral college would flip. in that case I'd say 42k and 77k are essentially the same number, given the large number of voters we're talking about. But yes, Biden's victory was tighter than Trumps in that calculus.

Although, in the situation you propose, 2020 would actually be a 269-269 tie. Which means any unfaithful elector could refuse to vote for their candidate and throw it to the other party. And even if no one did, then Congress would break the tie in a pair votes that would presumably go for Trump and Pence if people voted on a party line.

"Electoral votes" appears to be a term you've created to mean "the smallest number of votes it would be possible to flip to change the result of the election, if allocated perfectly", rather than what most people would assume you mean -- electoral college votes. Given your definition, you are basically correct.

Trump won 306-232 in 2016. With faithless electors, this became 304-227. He lost the popular vote. As you note, 77,000 votes in the three closest states could have flipped the election.

Biden won 306-232 in 2020 (the same margin, or better if you allow for the faithless electors). If he lost 42,000 votes it'd have been 269-269, which would have led to the House of Representative contingency, which might have elected either Biden or Trump (or ended in a different outcome, frankly). It'd take another 33,000 votes to give Trump an unambiguous win by flipping Nevada.

This is an interesting curiosity -- but for Aunt Maria getting the flu, the election could have been different! But we're in increasingly silly hypotheticals. Knowing what we know now, it's clear Clinton would have done more to target the states she narrowly lost. But the problem is that state votes are correlated with one another and so the number of hypotheticals you need to sustain to "flip" exactly those votes without turning out any additional votes or affecting the campaign strategies is pretty weird.

Even if you take the prototypical version of this question "Did Ralph Nader 'cost' Gore the 2000 presidential election by 'taking' at least 500 of his votes in Florida?" it's sort of a rabbit hole of absurdities. The answer is surely yes to the question, because the answer to any hypothetical is yes when the margin is that close. But beyond that not super productive.

In general I think most people would, collectively, analyze Biden's victory over Trump as somewhat more decisive than Trump's over Clinton or Bush's over Gore, though less decisive than either of Obama's or Bush 2004.

Parler got booted from everywhere based on alleged connections to Jan 6th that, in my estimation, were very tenuous, no worse than what had been seen on more established platforms, and seemed to me to be little more than a convenient pretext to shut down an upstart competitor. Whatever your take on Parler, the episode was a sobering lesson in just how difficult the big players in this industry can make it to do business if they decide they really want to get rid of you.

Maybe the word "censorship" is too loaded, but the claim that big tech platforms permit a narrower range of expression than they used to is so uncontroversial that it's barely worth defending. That's not always a bad thing; many of the people who've been banned in recent years are noxious pricks whom I don't miss, but what happens when the people who've been banned from Twitter and YouTube, kicked off AWS, terminated by Cloudflare and blocked by Visa and MasterCard decide to start a Substack because its commitment to free speech means it's the only place that will host them? I won't name names but I can think of, for example, a couple of semi-prominent figures who have been banned from other platforms due to their, ahem, "heterodox" views on vaccines, who now write on Substack and reportedly make a very healthy income from doing so. And worse actors might join the platform if they haven't already.

Is it really such a conspiratorial "slippery slope" to suggest that if the people who've been banned from everywhere else grow a huge, lucrative audience on Substack, then Substack is going to come under increasing amounts of pressure to kick them off - pressure far greater than what it's received so far in the face of lesser controversies? What form might this pressure take?

A scenario much like what you describe has sometimes been discussed by someone who did wind up moving their writing efforts to Substack later on:

> HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

> There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.

> So while some small percent of Reddit’s average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit’s political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...

Also elaborated in the latter Neutral vs Conservative: The Eternal Struggle https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

> Substack is great because at least there are some voices out there getting heard. Alex Berenson and Glen Greenwald among the best.

I've mixed feelings about Greenwald, but he is smart and occasionally makes good observations. What good things can be said about Alex Berenson, who The Atlantic memorably called The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man [1]? He seems to depend on basic scientific illiteracy in his readers. Where Greenwald would respond to a substantive critique like the Atlantic's, Berenson seems to hope his readers remain unaware of the critique.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...

Berenson responds to that laughable description all the time. He loves nothing more than to call himself that when he gets proven right - again - often at the expense of writers in the Atlantic; I'd guess a quarter of his posts consist of "ha ha" type responses where he juxtaposes a tweet he made early in the pandemic alongside a government announcement or newly released scientific paper saying the same thing.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-pandemics-wrongest-m...

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/cdc-director-walensky-re...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pandemics+wrongest+man%22...

If you think he didn't respond to that then surely you don't actually read his blog.

I don't read his blog.

Neither of the two links you provide to his blog take any of the claims from the Atlantic piece and refute it. He mocks the title of the Atlantic piece but does not respond to its content. As far as I can see, it's bluster, pure rhetoric

Do you have any instances of Berenson actually attempting to refute specific claims made in the Atlantic piece?

If you don't read his blog then you probably shouldn't make claims about what he does or doesn't say in it, nor about the scientific literacy of his readers (much higher than average - they will happily peer review studies he posts and highlight in the comments when he's misinterpreted them or when the study is bad). So sure, he has responded to the Atlantic directly, many times.

The Atlantic on why Berenson was wrong: "[he is] arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can)."

The last three words are links to junk studies or articles of the sort that suddenly became fashionable after April 2020, after many years of studies saying there was no such evidence. But Berenson was and is correct. Mask mandates don't stop transmission or protect against COVID and this has been proven over and over again. Here's Berenson responding to this point by refuting it with another study, but this one is actually high powered and has a reasonable methodology (it isn't a dumb modelling study or lab experiment):

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/school-mask-mandates-use...

"On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed"

They were claimed to be 95% effective at stopping infection after two doses. Nobody has believed this for a long time, not even governments, which is why Israel is now up to 4 doses and it still isn't working. This claim was a correct reading of Israel's data.

Now, Berenson shoots from the hip. He likes to treat Substack as if it's Twitter and sometimes publishes stuff that turns out to be wrong. But he doesn't have to be right 100% of the time or even 50% of the time to beat the media outlets criticizing him. The Atlantic should especially pipe down because it's probably the Pandemic's Wrongest Publication:

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-oh-my/comme...

They've served up some great headlines in recent times. October: "Four measures that are helping Germany beat COVID" (Germany is currently one of the most restrictive countries in Europe). December: "We know enough about Omicron to know we're in trouble" followed by in February: "Open everything: the time to end the pandemic is now".

Anyone reading Berenson has been consistently about 6-12 months ahead of the "mainstream" journalism curve. Anyone reading the Atlantic would have been exposed to a whiplashing of overwrought nonsense that bears no reality to what actually happened.

This isn't the right thread to have this argument and I imagine dang will remove your post, but I just want to note: Trump and his supporters aren't merely alleging that there were some irregularities in the election (which may be true), or that the media was overwhelmingly biased towards Biden (which is definitely true.) They allege that there was enormous, widespread fraud that stole millions of votes and handed the election to Biden despite Trump being the rightful winner - and also that the evidence for this fraud is mounting and damning and there's a huge conspiracy by the media, big tech, etc to cover it up. That's a much stronger claim than anything you say and I'm yet to see good evidence for it.

I'm not sure why you're talking about COVID, Russia, oil prices etc because none of that was mentioned; I actually agree with most of what you wrote in your latter paragraphs. But this isn't the place to have this kind of flamewar.

There's always this effect of "X says there are lots of foo, incredible amounts. But we are good people, which is why we believe that there is practically no foo."

"What, you disagree that we should kick off people who claim that we're wrong to say that there's practically no foo? Let me round you to the X's, who claim there's lots of foo, which is crazy."

(Of course, this caricature is immediately picked up by the people who actually do believe there's lots of foo, and who very much appreciate either them passing as moderates, or the moderates being counted as them.)

And, of course, the reverse. In an outrage-based social media landscape, it is impossible to be a moderate: you will be rounded off to the extremists regardless of what you actually say.

Voting machines are bad. Their use makes it easier to commit fraud. However, those claiming fraud in the 2020 elections claimed "absolute proof" of fraud (Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy's, words) when they were demonstrably bluffing.

It is both the case that voting machines can be compromised and that we know the most well-advertised claims of election fraud in the 2020 election are themselves fraudulent.

https://blog.erratasec.com/2021/11/example-forensicating-mes...

>> However, those claiming fraud in the 2020 elections claimed "absolute proof" of fraud (Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy's, words)

And the other side claimed absolute proof of no fraud?

If you're talking about experts in voting systems, no they didn't. Trump's CISA appointee to oversee election security, Chris Krebs, claimed the election was highly secure, which in a sense it was, because Trump had long been advertising concerns about the election which stimulated election security efforts. But in security you can never be completely sure the attacker doesn't have some trick you haven't thought of, so nobody competent claimed absolute proof of no fraud.

Well, the problem with your second point ("free speech") is that it tends to attract and retain a specific kind of writers: those who aren't accepted anywhere else.

Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term.

And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that typically bundles many different voices) also attracts readers that are ideological/obsessive.

That's a feedback loop that could end not well.

>Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term.

Probably very well, for the same reason that Joe Rogan's podcast is the most listened to podcast in the US: those views are widely accepted by about 50% of the population.

Despite your pejorative labelling you aren't actually finding extreme minority viewpoints on substack, you're finding modern-day mainstream conservative perspectives.

The readership potential is huge.

Well, to mention just one example, "The Abbey of Misrule" (https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com) pushes antivaxx rhetoric. I don't know if that represents "50% of the population" (let's hope not) but it's abhorrent in any case.

I don't find any of this offensive or extreme. Easily within the mainstream conservative spread. I think you need to broaden your news sources.

> Internment. Mandatory medication. Segregation of whole sections of society. Mass sackings. A drumbeat media consensus. The systematic censoring of dissent. The deliberate creation by the state and the press of a climate of fear and suspicion. What could possibly justify this? Perhaps the combination of a terrible pandemic which killed or maimed large percentages of those it infected, and the existence of a safe and reliable medicine which was proven to prevent its spread. This, of course, is what we are said to be living through. This is the Narrative.

> But it is clear enough by now that the Narrative is not true. Covid-19 is a nasty illness which should be taken seriously, especially by those who are especially vulnerable to it. But it is nowhere near dangerous enough - if anything could be - to justify the creation of a global police state. [1]

If you don't see the conspiracy theory in this, then I can't help you.

(Me, all I need is the capital N at "Narrative".)

[1] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-vaccine-moment-par...

It doesn't posit the existence of a conspiracy anywhere. "Narratives" can be emergent phenomena, just like religion is. It doesn't require cigarette smoking men in back rooms.

You seem to be particularly triggered by the word narrative - ignore that word if you like, or mentally replace it with "what governments tell us" and which part of what was said above is false?

That all sounds pretty accurate and reasonable to me. I guess we can't help each other.

I read all of the articles that are available for free by that author and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Well within the overton window.

Y'all really think that moderate conservative writing - it didn't stray in terms of emotion into what I would consider rhetoric - is abhorrent? Wow. That's some thick-walled bubble you're in.

We have different ordinaries.

Yeah.

You're the one calling this service - which has attracted a sizeable number of perfectly mainstream conservative writers - 'the perfect honeypot.'

We definitely do have different ordinaries.

Thanks for the rec! This looks like something I'll be adding to the list of Substacks I check regularly.

You're welcome! Substack is fast becoming a perfect honeypot.

"Antivaxx rethoric" is just more labeling to dismiss people for not complying with whatever the new authoritarian push is. Hell, all the labels get put together and people who opposed Lockdowns and hurtful covid policies got called racist far right anti vaxxers because it's easier than using actual data.

Much of the "anti lockdown/mask/covid vaccine mandates" was and is slowly vindicated day by day no matter how much money or power you throw into the mix to convince people otherwise.

The Pfizer publications https://youtu.be/7YOD9drZasM are definitely being ignored by most media but are just one more nugget that those you called anti vaxxers that wanted the right to make their own risk analysis were right and those who sold you a lie did it knowingly.

Abhorrent is your intolerance and the happiness with which much of the population pushed segregation and deshumanization.

Okay! ;-) There you go.

> the right to make their own risk analysis

I really wonder where this comes from though. Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?

You can talk to "these" people. It's a number of factors. As with anything in social media the more extreme views get amplified.

I mean everyone talks about their "bubbles" but very few acknowledge how cognitively hard it is to be open. For that it is best to talk person to person without outright throwing facts around.

I once talked to someone who really believed Hillary Clinton is at some center of some devilsh things eating babies and shit. Well, it turned out it to be a more desperate emotional expression (a personal thing), of course she didn't directly admit it, but it was nonetheless very interesting and insightful. I wouldn't have found that out if I didn't go through the first uncomfortable and awkwards moments of actually leaving my bubble. Someone could dismiss that as only emotionally unstable, I didn't.

So, when a POV seems extreme to you and is held by seemingly 50% of the population: there is really something rotten in the state of Denmark: Leave your bubble form time to time, dude.

I'm not in charge of the mental health of my fellow humans.

If someone I know and love believes that Hillary Clinton is eating babies, I will engage and try to find out more.

But if it's some random woman on the Internet, I'm really not interested.

> Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?

To push that analogy a little farther, consider how people would have reacted if, in 1905, months after the Wright Brother's successful flight tests, the United States had made air travel mandatory and suppressed discussion of its attendant risks.

I think the mRNA vaccines are a tremendous marvel and our best tool for defending ourselves from COVID. But they are not a panacea, and we cannot build trust in them by demanding it.

To start with, I agree with this:

  > I think the mRNA vaccines are a tremendous marvel and our best tool for defending ourselves from COVID. But they are not a panacea, and we cannot build trust in them by demanding it.

But I think the aviation analogy has to be pushed a lot farther for it to be relevant to COVID vaccines, and the analogy stops making sense well before that. The main differences would seem to be:

  - Unlike heavier-than-air powered aircraft in 1905, COVID vaccines in 2021/2022 are effective, and probably crucial at fighting a pandemic which has killed a very large number of people and otherwise impacted many more.
  - The mechanisms by which mRNA vaccines work are basically mRNA translation (making proteins) which has been known about for 50 years or so and is well understood (I think, though I'm not an expert), and protein subunit vaccination, which is also well understood, and in fact already in widespread use.
  - Vaccination is (if I understand correctly), not only useful for an individual, but also useful for the population if vaccination rates are sufficiently high. There is therefore a valid public health reason to encourage high vaccination rates.
  - The United States government has not made vaccination mandatory in general, it has made it mandatory in certain (admitedly quite broad) circumstances. More importantly perhaps, mRNA vaccination in particular has never been mandated (as far as I know), so people who would rather get a different type of vaccine (e.g. an adenovirus vector vaccine) can do so, to the extent that supplies are available.
  - I don't believe that the US government has suppressed discussion of the risks of mRNA vaccination (which are pretty clearly much lower than the risks of not being vaccinated in nearly all cases). Depending on which online/social echo chambers one prefers to inhabit, there has likely been some suppression of discussion due to groupthink or something similar.

I don't believe that there is an analogy with aviation that captures all of these, or even just the important ones, but it seems pretty clear that using airplane airworthiness as en example of how most people are happy to outsource most risk analysis to experts most of the time is reasonable, but using early aviation technology as a detailed analogy to mRNA vaccine development and application in response to COVID is not likely to be useful.

Depends which country and which airline, right, along with a whole pile of context.

Trust is earned. The airline industry has earned a lot of trust by having, amongst other things, extremely thorough accident investigations and extremely high safety standards. They also introduce new technology slowly and conservatively. People don't have to take the word of random 'experts' for this, because they can see with their own eyes that plane crashes are extremely rare. In the even rarer case where it's discovered to be due to genuine negligence or malign behaviour (see: Boeing 737 MAX fiasco), that is very widely discussed and executives are held to account via legal liability frameworks.

The COVID vaccine industry has not earned this trust:

1. Vaccine makers insist on blanket exemptions from legal liability of any kind in order to sell vaccines to a country, even if it is shown in a court that they were negligent. Check the leaked Pfizer contracts if you don't believe me. Governments have changed their laws in some cases to enable this (liability exemption pre-dates COVID).

2. People can see, with their own eyes, that vaccines have side effects they weren't told were possible. Now the law courts are forcing documents out of the FDA we can see that Pfizer knew about these side effects but didn't tell people about them (probably others too).

3. When something goes wrong and someone is injured by a vaccine, there is no crash-style investigation process. Instead it's swept under the rug, e.g. doctors will happily deny there's any connection between a vaccine and a severe reaction that happens just hours later.

And so on, and so on.

The problem with people who hate "anti-vaxxers" (they usually aren't actually anti-vaxx in general), is that they don't seem able to handle nuance or complexity. Even the derogatory label anti-vaxxer is like this, it strips all the complexity from people's positions. Comparisons between airlines (massively trusted, earned) and Pfizer (recipient of the biggest corporate fine in history, not massively trusted, earned) are in no way useful because not all institutions are the same.

> The Pfizer publications https://youtu.be/7YOD9drZasM are definitely being ignored by most media but are just one more nugget that those you called anti vaxxers that wanted the right to make their own risk analysis were right and those who sold you a lie did it knowingly.

Nobody doesn't have the right to make their own risk analysis. That's assuming they're capable of it and we both know that's not the case.

It really serves no purpose to link to these kind of videos, the ones with an official sounding title and authored by "a retired nurse teacher" who nonetheless calls himself "doctor".

If people don't waste 20+ min of their day sitting through the entire video and then picking it apart to have an endless back and forth of "ok but what about this other 90 page garbage pdf report I found" then it's like you've won the argument that nobody wants to have in the first place. This kind of stuff is rotting the internet from within like there's no tomorrow.

>Nobody doesn't have the right to make their own risk analysis. That's assuming they're capable of it and we both know that's not the case.

You start out by saying that people have the right to make their own risk analysis, suddenly add on a condition (if they're capable of it), determine (by yourself?) that they're not capable of it, invalidate your initial conclusion and end up saying (without saying) that people actually don't have the right to make their own risk analysis.

Now that's abhorrent.

I can't edit the above comment anymore, but I would like to add this: my point isn't really about Substack specifically; it's about the fact that it's difficult (impossible?) to be "content neutral", and pretending otherwise is a fallacy.

(And how is porn not speech? If you ban porn then you're not defending free speech in any meaningful manner.)

This can be defended in two ways:

1. Practical. Porn is banned because Stripe doesn't allow payment for porn. In turn Stripe doesn't allow that because the chargeback rate on such payments is very high, supposedly due to the number of people who buy porn because they want it and then get caught by their spouses and claim their card must have been stolen. At any rate, a blogging/newsletter platform is not exactly optimized for porn anyway. The people who want to buy and sell that are better served by other platforms.

2. Theoretical. Porn is not "speech" because speech encodes ideas or viewpoints. The reason freedom of speech is important is because ideas and viewpoints are important, as it's only through the competition of ideas that progress occurs. Defending free speech takes a lot of work, but can be justified by the benefits. Defending porn would take even more work, but wouldn't yield the same social benefits.

Substack links go to the bottom of the reading pile for exactly this reason. It’s a dumpster fire of extremist ranting, and I don’t have the time or energy to sift it. I can’t imagine ever wanting to share a platform with their authors.

> Firstly - love love love Substack

It's fascinating that the top-level comment telling us how they "love" Substack is from someone who apparently thinks the fight against Covid is equivalent to modern-day Stalinism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30637571 further in this thread).

Whoops.

No more fascinating than observing that the person with the biggest problem with Substack in this thread is someone who thinks industries and regulators are all perfect, all the time, and sees conspiracy theories everywhere, even where none are being proposed.