Bonus piece this week. I had the incredible pleasure of interviewing Chris Best, the co-founder and CEO of Substack. Chris is a product nerd and builder of things presently working on Substack, a tool for writers to go independent, publish their work to email on the web, and make money from subscriptions. Their big ambitious goal: build an alternate media universe with different laws that lead to better outcomes. Below, a critique of the last decade of social media incentives, a stand against our would-be censors, and a firm commitment to free expression.

FYI, the following has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

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MIKE SOLANA: In your and Hamish McKenzie’s recent essay, “The internet needs better rules, not stricter referees,” you say Substack is changing the publishing model. Before we get into all that, how would you characterize the publishing landscape before Substack?

CHRIS BEST: My general story on this is we’re coming out of an age of attention-monster social media. People used to get bored. People used to have this problem of like, I don’t know what to do with my time. Then the internet, and especially the mobile internet, took over ALL of our time and attention. It filled up every crevice in our life.

In the first phase of that — the attention suck — it was like this giant land grab. If you were making something that competed for attention space, you wanted to grab as much as possible, as quickly as possible, because there’s only so much. You were competing for people’s 10 minutes while they were waiting in line at the grocery store or whatever. So publishers made content free, and they made it as broadly-compelling as possible. The goal was to grab as much attention as possible in the lowest friction way possible, and to turn that attention into money through advertising.

And listen, none of that was nefarious. None of that was like, people with tented fingers going, “Aha! This will create something bad!” But when you create a system like this, you end up with a certain incentive structure. Then, if you build your algorithms to serve your business model, the incentive structure you create for people participating in your network drives a certain sort of behavior.

The platforms all optimized for things that brought cheap engagement at all costs, that interaction weighed to some of the worst aspects of human nature, and drove emergent behavior that gave us many of the things we see today. The legacy media just got totally steamrolled by all of this, and lives in the world created by these platforms.

SOLANA: Do you really feel that Substack is completely protected from this scaled advertising dynamic with its subscription model? There are a lot of legacy media institutions that have subscriptions, and have had subscriptions for the last 10 or 20 years, in addition to running ads. Personally, I’m also getting requests to run ads on Pirate Wires fairly often. I’m not biting, which maybe answers my question before I’ve asked it, but… do you really see this all changing?

BEST: I think the subscription model is necessary, but not sufficient, right? First of all, as a writer, that you can actually make real money doing this is by itself a big deal. I’ve convinced a lot of people to do subscription instead of ads, and usually they come back to me later like, “Thank you, you changed my life. I can’t believe I was ever thinking the other thing.”

People tend to think about this like, “I could make money with ads. I could make money with subscriptions. Two moneys is better than one money.” But when you’re making the best possible product to drive subscriptions, what you end up having to write is qualitatively different — and better — than the thing you’d have to do to drive the most ad revenue.

If you want to earn and keep the trust of a relatively small number of people who value your writing really deeply, deeply enough to pay for it, and you want that number to grow, the work you do in that world is different than the work you do if you’re like, “I need to get as many people to hear my Casper mattress ad read as possible.”

However, to your point, it’s not enough. One of the big problems with Substack now is people are like, “Great, we’ve got this place where the incentive structure works differently, and I want create this better product to earn and keep the trust of my subscribers… but the way that people find out about my stuff is still on Twitter.”

So we’re kind of downstream from this, you know, attention sewage factory of incentives. I think for Substack to live up to the idea of letting readers take back their mind, and their attention, and helping us all create this kind of alternate universe of content with different laws of physics… we need to do more on that front.

SOLANA: You said “you can make a living on Substack as a writer.” It’s true, and that dynamic is something I’ve found surprising myself.

Ten years ago, no one thought paying for writing was ever going to happen again. Twenty years ago, music after Napster — no one thought paying for music was ever going to happen. Now, it does seem that people are willing to pay. In fact, they like to pay. But one group they’re not willing to pay for: about a year ago you were attacked by this sort of, like, sad ex-Gawker writer, who ran the nerd vertical I think.

Her complaint was many people aren’t willing to pay for the sort of writing she personally values — many of her friends, basically, could not make a go of it on Substack. Now, it seems to me that if you don’t have an audience willing to pay for your work, that’s no one’s fault but your own, and maybe you should be doing something else with your time. But the piece got a lot of traction, and people seem really mad about this, the idea that not every “important writer” can attract an audience on Susbtack.

What are your thoughts on the idea that not everybody can make a go of it on the platform, in the way that perhaps someone like this sad ex-Gawker writer could at a place running ads?

BEST: I’m going to try and steer clear of the internecine media drama element of this question. But the thing that Substack let’s you be and do as a writer, if you’re successful, is this ultimate amazing thing I think, where you have complete independence, and you get to do the work that you think is valuable for an audience that loves you and wants to read it, and wants to support you.

And, you know, you can potentially make not just a living, but like really a lot of money, right? If you can get a thousand people to pay for your newsletter, and they’re retaining, and they like it, and they care about it — the hardest part by the way is just getting people to read it, once you can get them to read it you can get them to pay — that’s a very compelling value proposition for the right kind of person, right?

But there are more people who want to be actors than get to be successful movie stars. We see this dynamic everywhere, and on Susbtack it’s like, “Here are my intellectual ideas, please worship me and give me lots of money.” The number of people who are going to want that is always going to be greater than the number of people who can achieve it.

SOLANA: Right, this is just the truth of writing. Kurt Vonnegut made a living selling short stories, something you could do 70, 80 years ago. Now, to this day people are trying to sell short stories, pitching literary journals and things like this, it’s just that no one wants to read them. But back in the day most people didn’t want to read them either! Vonnegut was one of the few people who could make a living at this.

BEST: There’s always more people who want to do it than can do it. However, there is this case to be made of like, if we just take a step back and look at writing and cultural production as a whole, how valuable is this? How valuable is it to people individually? If what I read shapes how I think, how I see the world, how I understand society, if it shapes who I am… how valuable is it to me? And then for society, you know, having sensible discourse and culture, how valuable is it?

Are we in general overpaying or underpaying, over-investing or under-investing, in this literal market of ideas? I think we were dramatically under-investing, and by correcting that, it’s not going to mean that literally everyone who ever wanted to be a writer can just do it now, but lots of people who had something to give the world as a writer — like you, frankly — who otherwise might not have done it, will now find a way to do it, and the world will be richer for this.

SOLANA: Thank you — 

One sort of abstract question before I get into the rules of the internet. You’re talking about, you know, how valuable it is for a piece of writing that shapes someone’s worldview, or helps them understand something important about the world.

Maybe that’s part of what’s happening, or maybe it’s most of what’s happening. But I get a lot of feedback along the lines of “you’re putting to words what I feel, and what I know or what I think,” which is not the same thing as educating someone, and it’s not the same as, you know, shaping their worldview. It’s almost like they’re saying “you make me feel less lonely.”

This makes me think people are connecting with me as an individual, or a personality. Then the other piece, they maybe feel like I’m providing them with… almost weapons in the form of words to survive this, like, Twitter hellscape world we live in, where you can get canceled for saying the wrong thing, or even the right thing in the wrong way.

I guess my question is just… why do you think some writers are so popular, while some, who are maybe just as good, and even have a similar worldview, or are writing similar things, are not?

BEST: Okay, first of all, nobody’s subscribing to a writer on Substack because they don’t get enough email. Right? No one’s like, “I need more content to read and you are an excellent creator of content. Thank you for making this content for me.” It’s not that kind of deal at all.

Let’s take a step back, because no one thought this was ever going to happen. My experience when we were starting Substack was like, I would explain this idea to people and they’d say “that all sounds great, but I’m never going to pay for writing on the internet, idiot.”

Then I had this parlor trick, where I’d ask “who’s your favorite writer?” And they’d say, “well, Mike Solana” or somebody, right?

SOLANA: Right, they all said Mike Solana.

BEST: They all said Mike Solana, I have weird friends.

But then I asked “would you pay five bucks a month for THAT person?”

BEST (continued): And they always said “oh yeah, obviously that person I would. But that’s different, they’re great.”

Then I thought, a-ha, there’s a culture shift that’s ready to happen here where people would pay for the writers they care about, but they don’t even know that they would do this yet because if you ask them they tell you emphatically not. But when presented with the opportunity… they just do.

I think the underlying motive here is to take back your mind. As a reader, I feel I’m kind of having all my attention gobbled up by these things on the internet. People are trying to grab as much of my attention as possible, and it feels like I’ve lost control. I’ve lost the ability to choose for myself: what thoughts I’m thinking, who I’m spending time with, what kind of worldview I’m inhabiting. And I want to take that back.

I want to choose for myself who I’m going to trust. I want to choose how I’m spending my attention. To the extent that what I read shapes how I see the world and shapes how I think about myself and society, I want some say in that, in what I’m reading.

I want to pay someone to curate a slice of my attention spend in a way that improves my life. Whether that’s making sense of the world, whether that’s bringing the important journalistic reporting, whether that’s writing fiction that nourishes my soul, whether that’s a really fun cooking blog — there are lots of things that provide different elements of this for different people. But the common theme is: I want to choose my own heroes. I want to choose for myself who to trust. My limited resource is no longer my money, it’s the time I have on this earth. And if I can spend a bit of money to spend that time better, and support the people making stuff I care about, that’s a really good deal.

SOLANA: One of the big things that’s happening on the internet right now, driven by huge technology companies, themselves driven by culture and politics, is the push to protect people from dangerous forms of thinking, dangerous personalities, really… wrong think. It sounds kind of silly. It sounds maybe a little bit hysterical, but I just, I genuinely think that’s what’s happening. There is a huge anti-free speech movement, politically motivated, and it seems to be growing. We see the push on every single social media platform.

In the piece you wrote with Hamish, “The internet needs better rules, not stricter referees,” you touch on some of this. I want to start with the “refs.” Who are they? What do you think they want, and how do you see Substack as a solution to their role in our discourse?

BEST: So, we ended up with a bunch of these attention monster feeds, there’s the Facebooks, the YouTubes, the Twitters, the TikToks. Because of the business model, and because the companies are very competent, the emergent ecosystem has some properties that drive people crazy.

I loved your piece Jump, by the way, that touched on a bunch of this stuff. I think that’s a real problem, even though none of the people running these companies are like mustache-twirling villains, and even though it’s understandable how we got here, it really is a problem. The angst that people are feeling is not coming from nothing.

Because of the feeling that this stuff is driving us all crazy, there’s this increasing sense of like “Oh God, oh God, somebody has to do something.” And this — censorship — is something, therefore we must censor. I think the pressures there is like, well, these companies should be doing lots of good censorship to make sure that bad things don’t happen, or maybe the government should be forcing them to, or maybe they shouldn’t be doing it because then they have too much power, but the government should be doing it because good God, somebody has to have control of all this stuff!

So the refs in this case are either the companies, or the people who are pressuring the companies, or the government, or the people that are pressuring the government. And they’re all like, “Somebody has to tamp down on all of this out of control speech!” But I think it’s a misdiagnosis of the problem.

When you try to apply that solution, when you’re like, “Well, we’re going to keep these incentive structures that drive us crazy, and then we’re also going to play censorship whack-a-mole,” you A) don’t solve the original problem at all. Then you B) end up with the second problem of… yeah, you really are playing dictator for what the discourse can be, and people lose trust in this, and see a giant conspiracy.

SOLANA: Well, there is a conspiracy, isn’t there? There are a handful of people with a lot of power who are conspiring to set speech norms, and you yourself, and me — certainly — I find myself on the other side of that acceptable boundary often enough to be concerned about it.

BEST: I think it’s become sort of, unfortunately, unfashionable to just be generically in favor of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and in a way that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think it’s just an unfortunate byproduct of the weird culture war moment we live in.

But all of the reasons freedom of speech and freedom of the press matter haven’t gone away. It’s not the case that, well, now that there’s Facebook free speech is a bad idea. I think that is a mistaken reaction to what is still a real problem.

SOLANA: I mean, there is a difference in the world of social media though, right? It’s the scale of potential reach. I can tweet a wrong piece of information that reaches a million people in 24 hours, and I’m not even that big.

You have these massive accounts that can blast something out to tens of millions, a hundred million people a day. Does that change anything? Does that change, philosophically, how we think about this?

BEST: In one way it changes everything, right? This is what technology does.

Technology isn’t good or bad. It makes us more powerful. You can say all that stuff you just said… you could have said that about the printing press, right? It’s like, “Oh God, all of a sudden one person can distribute to tens of thousands of people and drive a whole city crazy.” That happened. We had a Protestant reformation that swept the world, and wrecked a lot of shit, and was bad in a lot of ways.

Dealing with the fact that technology can change our world so quickly is a hard problem, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But my hunch is trying to roll it back, or using an old way of thinking about new problems, isn’t likely to work.

We need to find a way to move forward and ask, okay, in a world where everyone can reach everyone else, and we’re all wired into this giant global information brain thing, how should that work? What would be a good version of that instead of “Oh God, oh God, somebody stop this!”

SOLANA: In your piece, you clearly favored robust freedom of speech, but there was a caveat: of course not in the case of violence or illicit activity. This sort of cracked the door open, if in a justifiable way, for censorship.

What I’m wondering is, have you censored anyone yet?

BEST: You mean like have there been people we’ve removed from the platform? Yeah.

SOLANA: And what is the bar there, for removing people from the platform?

BEST: The bar there is our content policy. Before we had any fun dramas about this, we wrote an essay, “Substack’s view of content moderation.” This is like classic, quixotic Substack fashion, writing down how we think about this, and what we care about, both to get it on the record in public before there’s a problem, but also to clarify the position for ourselves, to help us understand how we think about this.

At Substack, we believe the best thing we can do as a platform is create a really broad arena for freedom of the press, and very narrowly circumscribe things that we do kick people off for, which we tell them. We’re kind of just willing to do that, and live by that, and build a thing that depends on people trusting that we do that. And we have done that.

SOLANA: It seems you’re saying you’re committed to transparency on the rules. On Twitter, for example, people are vanished all the time, and no one quite knows why. But you’re willing to be open about the rules specifically?

BEST: Yeah, if we end up doing tons and tons of moderation because we have to for some reason, that’s a failure of the system’s design. That’s not the world we want to live in. And so really what we want to be able to do is build a system that can allow for people to be able to say the things they want to say. That to me is like, okay, this system still works. And that’s the high-order bit.

Then there’s still, you know, we get a lot of “Download MP3” spam things. And we’re like, okay, we’re going to kick them off.

But in general, we want to take a strong stance in favor of free expression.

SOLANA: I think the big problem — and I love that by the way, I admire it, I’m on the same side as you. But content platforms are getting a lot of pressure on the question of “what is violence.” There are forms of speech that many people now consider violence, which are not violence, and were not considered violence even a year or two ago. As that definition of violence creeps, and the pressure to censor mounts, how do you guys see yourselves reacting?

BEST: I think we just have to kind of stand for sanity. There’s not an answer that’s like, well, we’ll absolve ourselves of having to even make these kinds of decisions by some fancy thing that blah, blah, blah.

We have to have a sensible perspective on free expression, and we have to be willing to stand up for it, even under extreme pressure.

-Chris Best, Substack