is it a business or is it personal?

Substack keeps fucking up faster than I can write about it. This week brought the revelation that they'd fired freelance editor Sam Thielman for having the audacity to… continue a preexisting working relationship with a writer, Spencer Ackerman, who'd chosen to switch to a different platform after his Substack Pro contract ended. Per emails from Substack’s own “Writer Partnerships” department, this firing was the direct result of Thielman doing his job as a freelancer, i.e. editing Ackerman’s post about leaving Substack. I've taken the liberty of reproducing one of Thielman's own screenshots of the exchange below.

To put into perspective how ridiculous this is: imagine getting into a fight with Wordpress because you decided to switch to, idk, Blogger (back when Blogger still existed). Are there any circumstances under which “moving to a different blogging platform” would lead you to expect an email from Wordpress crying about how “deeply supportive” they'd been of your work? No there are not!!!!! They'd just break all your CSS in the migration and call it a day.

I don't know if Substack realized the depth and breadth of the fuckup due to the subsequent social media outcry or due to its own lawyers pinging "Writer Partnerships" for a quick chat ("hey um could we like maybe try to avoid even the appearance of tortious interference? if that's cool with you guys???") Whatever the reason, they've since apologized and made financial restitution to Thielman.^[1] Still, the incident concretely illustrates an issue that has long bothered me. For a business that only exists by taking a cut, Substack does not appear to understand how to treat its primary client base — writers — with a consistent modicum of respect. Worse, it seems torn between two fundamentally incompatible approaches to its core business:

• “we’re simply providing content-neutral tools with which writers can grow their businesses as independent contractors”, vs.
• “we’re cultivating personal relationships, exercising editorial discretion, and deliberately investing time, energy, and money into a certain subset of the writers on our platform (who then owe us some kind of loyalty).”

In its public communications, Substack has always toggled between these two modes at will.

pick a card...

The company (understandably!) touts the high-profile successes, those who have been able to make their living on the platform (often people who'd built preexisting audiences and credibility in legacy media, but hey). To its credit, Substack has also shown a willingness to experiment with providing services like legal review, which might not otherwise be easily accessible to individual writers, through programs like Substack Defender.^[2] And from the beginning, it's emphasized the flexibility and freedom available to its writer clients: if you're not happy with the service, you can always export a subscriber list and walk away.

Too often, though, Substack has failed to live up to the potential it promises. For years it's traded on the reflected glory of Supporting Writers™ without making it clear upfront that its support is conditional and might be withdrawn arbitrarily at any time. It's now fatally clear that its central promise of a quick and painless exit for dissatisfied writers can and will be selectively broken. Writers looking for a long-term, mutually respectful, non-restrictive partnership in exchange for a full 10% of their earnings might well balk at the corporate doublespeak gradually accumulating like lead in the bloodstream. The potential Substack writer now faces the shittiest possible version of the old two-door riddle: one gatekeeper never tells the truth, the other always lies.^[3]

...any card

In this stage of its development, Substack can't keep code-switching between the "rise and grind! no one owes you anything!" dialect of VC Brain Worms and an increasingly hollow pose of “uwu we just want to help writers ;-; why u mad bb”. At some point it has to choose between "smug but efficient capitalist" and "whiny bleeding heart". Between "the best rates in town for one-size-fits-all, basic tools" and "high-touch, high-trust consigliere who is always there to listen and to respond to what you need".

C’mon, man. Pick one and get good at it.