Why our live show is no longer on substack

It's complicated...

This past Friday was the premier of our weekly live show on YouTube—after 42 episodes on Substack—featuring the fabulous graphic novelist Lucy Knisley.

There are two major reasons for this move.

Substack makes it hard to do the show, hard to get an audience

Substack makes guests and viewers jump through a number of frustrating—and quite frankly, unnecessary—hoops in order to participate in any way with the show.

Every guest has to create an account on substack in order to participate in the show. They then have to send me their username so I know where to find them in order to invite them onto the show. These hoops don’t exist for conversations hosted on zoom (which we now use) or Microsoft teams. We are used to getting a calendar invite, clicking once, and done.

I get it—substack is a smaller platform looking to grow its audience. By building account creation into the livestream experience they are bringing more people into the fold, into their ecosystem. Except, is that actually creating new readers, new creators? Almost every guest I’ve had who wasn’t already active on substack abandoned their account after our show was over.

And if that wasn’t annoying enough…

Anyone who wants to watch the show has to create an account on substack. They then have to answer or skip several maddening prompts asking them what kind of substacks they’d like to follow. When all they want to do is watch the show. Not only is this obnoxious, in some cases it’s alienating. I’ve had several friends tell me they gave up trying to watch our show because substack simply made it too confusing and cumbersome. YouTube has no such requirements.

So this part of the choice was easy.

The second reason gets a bit more complicated…

Substack has a dark underbelly that’s getting harder to ignore

When I first started writing on substack, a friend from college wished me all the best but told me he wouldn’t read it because substack refuses to “ban Nazis.” This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this but I let it go, mainly because I saw so many wonderful writers, thinkers, artists on the platform doing such important work to improve the world I thought the good had to outweigh the bad.

But then I had a guest draw essentially the same line in the sand. Lucy Knisley, after agreeing weeks earlier to be on the show, told me that she would not create an account on substack because “the lax content moderation has given it a reputation for platforming nazis.”

And they’re right. It’s been well documented how far-right voices have found audience, and financial support, on substack. And, despite this, how its founders have held on tight to their free speech absolutism.

And I’ve been struggling with this ever since I got here. But…I’m not ready to give up on substack entirely…at least not yet.

I guess I’m holding on to the, perhaps naive, hope that change from within is possible. That if enough of us stay here and use this space to shine light into the world, that it will overwhelm and chase away the darkness.

So, the weekly live show will continue on over on YouTube. And I’ll continue writing here. I hope you’ll stick around and continue to support this work.

But, if you can’t stomach it, I completely understand.

Hope to see you Friday for our show with Emma Cowan.

❤️
Adam