s09e07: The One Where I Don't Want To Talk About Substack Just As Much As You Do, And Yet
0.0 Context setting
Friday! Friday March 12, 2021. This week has been pretty good for work and writing, looks like.
I haven’t covered it here yet, but earlier this year, the team I’m working with shipped Vision 2023, the State of California’s Statewide Technology Strategic Plan, which I am very proud of!
I am equally proud that we were able to publish our research findings and insights which I think are potentially a bit unprecedented in scale? Go team! (That team being Cyd Harrell, Ryan Ko, Lauren Lockwood, Jennifer Tharp and Emily Wright Moore).
OK, today’s is a bit of a surprise episode. The things that caught my attention for this episode were:
Substack. Sorry.
Faces
Photographing big pieces of art
Something that is blue
Remembering the difference between metaphor and simile, but about videogames
A dumb philosophy joke
Title design
Ready? Let’s go.
1.0 Some things that caught my attention
1.1 Substack, I’m afraid
Look, yes, I’m going to talk about Substack. Just be thankful I’m not talking about NFTs. Here’s some background information which, I don’t know if you need, because, uh, we’re on Substack? This is Substack? This right here?
Anyway:
Substack (the platform delivering this very newsletter upon which I am sharecropping! How awkward! And yet I participate in capitalism too![1] is a platform that lets you write newsletters and charge money for them. It’s about 3 years old. I moved to it from Tinyletter, which is still running, and which I love (I have a thank-you mug from the team who ran it at Mailchimp), and part of the reason why I moved to it from Tinyletter is because Mailchimp admitted Tinyletter was a side project.
It’s a Y Combinator company, with a Series A investment led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Two things have been happening recently:
Substack has aggressively courted writers with large audiences at established publications to move to Substack. These writers are not employed by Substack, but are instead given an advance.
Some people with bad opinions who have also done bad things got very upset that they were encountering the merest suggestion of accountability for those bad opinions and bad things, left their organizations in hissy fits or parted on mutually beneficial ways that look good to all concerned and leave the door open to failing upwards. These people are people like Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald and a rationalist blogger who wishes to remain pseudonymous.
Yeah well if you’re so into newsletters then name five bulk email services
And so friends and acquaintances have made jokes about how Substack is providing in a sense a safe place for apparently “cancelled” people. For example, when Piers Morgan walked out of the studio and quit his job on Monday following the slightest criticism of his behaviour, a friend quipped “congrats to substack on Piers Morgan, huge get imho” which while yes is inside tech/media baseball is also a way of dealing with the absurdity of the situation through humor and I thoroughly approve.
So this morning, in my own particular media bubble, it was yet another quip from Kelsey D. Atherton about Governor Cuomo that tipped me over the edge (“Cuomo is like one tangible consequence of his actions away from joining substack”).
This is funny, you see, because now we are anticipating the movement of certain kinds of people with certain kinds of views to a certain platform. I am sure it is also called “virtue signaling” and “being part of an in-group”, both of which I have been told are bad.
Here, then is the evolution and causal chain in my mind of make a joke, potentially discover an insight:
Ha, with all of these people moving to Substack, Substack itself now seems a bit like Diet Parler (is this actionable? Gosh I hope not. If I were a paid writer on Substack I could benefit from legal assistance)
Wait, my newsletter is on Substack. Do I now need to explicitly tell people that I am not racist, sexist, transphobic and so on just by association of being on the same platform?
I mean, yes, of course I do.
Also, we should not say “I have a Substack” but instead “my newsletter, which is on Substack”, because we should not give power to brands in this way.
Are we going to see a variant of yeah, I was into {band} before they were cool as a yeah, I used {tech platform} before they became synonymous with right-wing cancelled people
Actually, I will go out on a limb and make a prediction: we’re going to see a lot more of the above qualification, that “Yeah, I used {platform} before it became known for being racist/sexist/misogynist/abusive etc.”
And that was only the first Substack thing today.
Hey Siri what’s an example of a disingenuous position?
… because clearly the Substack Discourse had been brewing for a while now and it was time to take control of the situation, so co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote a blog post explaining, in some detail but not others, why Substack contracts with and pays some writers (and what that means), Why we pay writers.
I first saw this via Kelsey Atherton again, where he (astutely, imho) pointed out two things that caught my attention:
1) That Substack Pro is “for giving big stacks of money to the writers you've heard of who all suck but say things venture capital likes, "Substack [basic]" (Substack pleb?) is for freelancers scraping by on organic audience growth in a bad economy” [Tweet]
and
2) That “if Substack is making a support-based distinction between Pro and everyone else, then Pro is a publication, and everyone else using the site as a platform is basically part of a contributor network.” [Tweet]
To which the answer to (2) is “Yes, that looks just like how Forbes.com works.”
Anyway, you are here, I think, for my armchair opinions, of which I have many! Here are some, based on Substack’s response to the Discourse:
In general, the issue is that Substack is paying some writers and not others and making decisions about that, which is in general seen as an editorial decision, because it affects the topics and published output. But Substack doesn’t see it this way, because they aren’t directing the work of writers, they’re not telling them what to write or doing editing. As Hamish says, “No-one writes for Substack — they write for their own publications.”
In a literal sense, then yes, Substack is not doing or involved in some decisions you might generically think of as editorial.
But I think this is a bullshit argument, and a disingenuous one. Because they say their decisions about which writers to back and sign advances with involve factors like these, amongst others:
the writer’s audience size
what they cover
how well that subject is covered elsewherethe respect they engender among their readers and peers
Substack doth protest that these are all business decisions and are like investment decisions and that therefore they cannot, absolute not, no sir, no madam, no folx, they cannot be editorial related. Because they are primarily and supremely motivated by money and profit which helps writers flourish.
[I am not going to excerpt or quote the following paragraph in the blog post because you can fill in the gaps if I say all your favorite hits including such classics as “sometimes heroes can be villains and villains can be heroes” and “you’re always going to offend someone” and “if they’re pissing someone off, then they deserve the most support”.
Of course, I think, like I said, this is a bullshit argument, because business decisions are also editorial decisions are also business decisions. I mean, for crying out loud, even the New York Times has audience editors and engagement editors these days.
No. These are active decisions. They will result in selection of content and trying to say “but they won’t, because we’re only motivated by money” kind of ignores… a lot? Like, really a lot? But, you know, all of that is okay because free speech and because supporting writers.
[1] Week after next, I have time to experiment with exactly how I’m going to leave.
1.2 Faces and names
I have a gut-founded theory based on an experience I had trying to track down a reply from someone: I could remember what their avatar/profile photo looked like, but not their name. This is problematic because I cannot search Twitter by avatar: the search operators I’d use would be from:{name} to:hondanhon. So, I need {name}.
This felt strange because in general it feels like I can remember screen names more easily than people’s names, and that this might be because of persistent association: on Twitter, at least, screen names are always right beside profile photos.
This implies that it might be helpful to have people’s names floating next to their faces all the time in what we now laughingly refer to as real life or the physical world.
Yes, this is kind of rehashing one of the use-cases for Google Glass and augmented reality (look, this prompted me to unintentionally recall a certain photograph taken in a shower and sharing is caring, so now you get to potentially recall that photograph, too[1]).
Some observations here for people working on how profiles/identity is displayed:
Not faces, though
First: note that I’m saying I’m associating screen names with profile photos or avatars. It doesn’t need to be your face. I’m kind of in favour of people getting to choose how they present to the world, so the relationship of names:faces is not exactly 1:1.
Collapsing and inflating dimensions for identity
Second: There’s something here about the limited nature of avatar/profile pictures and a tradeoff of simplicity and ease of use.
Consider: associating names with avatars works great until an event happens and then a whole bunch of people change their avatars in a display of solidarity or support. There are a bunch of ways to do this in, ha, the physical world, but one thing that the internet is great at lately is context collapse and the reduction of dimensions.
So while in the physical world you have a tremendous number of degrees of freedom to show identity and affinity (badges, clothes, accessories, pins, etc) mainly because at the very least the physical surface on display is… quite expansive? And has depth?
But Twitter and Facebook only really offer one single dimension to express identity in a persistent way: the profile image. There are apps that offer badging on Facebook, where for example a third party application takes your existing profile photo and makes changes to it, and then substitutes it for your current profile photo.
But on other systems, like Reddit, there are mechanisms like flair, which isn’t something I was initially familiar with as a Brit until a) Office Space and b) Wonderfalls, where I understood flair to include something like decorations-and-expressions-of-personality-on-your-clothes-mainly-in-the-form-of-pins. In this way, flair has always felt a bit like the word pep, as in rally or spirit as in week.
I digress.
On the one hand, you have ease of use: there’s only one axis and it’s upload-a-photo, and lots of people do that and if you don’t do that then you’re an egg and it’s a signal of low quality and low trust. People like expressing their identity, so I’m interested in why this hasn’t had more exploration. I have some ideas, like:
product management is super boring and process-oriented now
partly because it’s so metrics driven
and strategy is metrics driven
the problem of introducing a new interaction in a product at scale, i.e. you have a billion active users and something isn’t successful because it only has a 5% uptake in the first 6 months and are you serious? 5% of a billion is, like, a lot? Of course what’s hilarious about that is that a new thing unencumbered by the expectations of scale does try the new thing and gets, say, fewer than 5% of a billion users but this is seen to be a competitive threat, so now that innovation gets ruthlessly copied into the billion DAU product hm does this ever happen
Basically, profile photos should be more like Geocities. There. That’s the tweet.
[1] Thanks to Isaac Hepworth for pointing out (I did ask, to be fair) that this image got turned into a patent diagram. [diagram, patent]
2.0 Some shorter things that caught my attention
It’s not esoteric, I swear
Via Steve Lieber, Jonathan Case made a video about how he photographs oversized art which is too large to scan. It is an interesting video! But because I have my brain, it makes an association to focus stacking, which is when you take a bunch of photographs focussed on different elements of a picture and then merge them so you end up with an image where every single part is in focus. You may be thinking: well, Dan, that sounds rather esoteric. And then I would say: well, self, you know how Apple product imagery looks a bit weird and like it’s rendered? It’s not. It’s focus-stacked. So anyway, what my brain is thinking because of this video is: I wonder when something like auto-magical focus stacking will come to something like an iPhone through computational photography? The main observation I want to get across here is if there is a thing worth doing that is relatively hard to do, then someone will try to do it with software.
Translucent blue
Someone made a Twitter client for PalmOS and I am in love, if only because the demo unit is also a translucent blue Handspring Visor, I think. If you know what these things are, then you are of a good internet age, like me.
What is production, but continuous deployment persisting?
If I had the free time, I would set up a website at ship.these.us [squatted], it would be on Github and all it would publish would be its version history.
Dancing about games
Leigh Alexander wrote about the experience of ending up on the same subject as your partner, but from completely different origins/angles and described it like this:
sometimes quinns and i accidentally find ourselves approaching the same space from two totally different angles, like finding yourself back to back with your partner in a gunfight [Tweet]
In their case, it was Alexander’s husband launching the Official Blaseball Roundup show, and what caught my attention about this was a) just the concept and loveliness of arriving at the same place as someone close to you with your own perspectives and that making something beautiful together, and also b) immediately using the simile[1] of finding yourself back to back with your partner in a gunfight.
The imagery: I can see it in my head, at least, of the trope of the steadicam (drone now, I guess) circling around the two characters, back to back, the suggestion or implication about the choreography and dance involved in really great action sequences, the evocation of stand-offs or a crescendo leading to a pause to take your breath in a scene before diving in again and tying that to the pleasure in your work with a partner is just, well. Yum.
It goes without saying that Alexander [website] is an excellent writer, some of my favorite narrative design of hers being for Reigns: Her Majesty (which is a game you should play), and some of my favorite fiction of hers is The Soft Truth (2018), and most recently, The Void (2021).
[1] I am 41 years old and I still need to look up and double check which one of metaphor and simile is the thing, and which one is like the thing.
Titles
I am a big fan of motion graphics and title sequences, so here’s two quick things:
Art of the Title has SXSW’s 2021 Film Awards Title Design Finalists up as well as their own top 10 title sequences of 2020.
Okay, that’s it for today. Phew!
How are you doing? It’s Friday where I am, not that days mean anything any more. I hope you have a good weekend. I’m going to be researching where to move Things… to.
Best,
Dan