“Last week, we felt some criticism after Chris didn’t accept the terms of a podcast interview question about how Substack handles bigoted speech on Notes,” McKenzie said. “It came off badly and some people criticized us harshly for our naivety while others questioned how we discourage bad behavior and bad content in Notes. We hope that interview went better and that Chris had represented our position more clearly at that moment, and we are sorry for causing any inconvenience.” Any warning to people who care about Substack and how the platform evolves We’re spoiled for it. And just in case anyone has any doubts: We do not endorse or condone bigotry in any form.(emphasis us.)
But McKinsey still doesn’t specify exactly how this Notes bigotry will be moderated or how Notes moderation will compare to Substack’s newsletter policies. Instead, like Best in his decode In an interview, McKenzie questions the “default assumption that aggressive content moderation is the solution to the problems it is supposed to solve”. He argues that although there are large teams to moderate content, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have not reduced bigotry or resolved concerns about misinformation.
Substack claims it can solve these problems by using a different business model that focuses on paying writers rather than “algorithmically harvested attention” for ads. “We’re giving communities on Substack the tools to establish their own standards and set their own terms of participation rather than handing over everything that’s been handed to them by a central authority,” McKenzie says. (This is very similar to Reddit’s policy of letting people run their own subreddits, though Reddit is still largely ad-supported.)
At the moment, these tools are still in their infancy. Notes lets people block users, hide them, and delete replies, and McKenzie said Substack is testing ways to limit replies to subscribers. In the future, McKenzie said, “we will design Notes so that users can set specific conditions for sharing in their community all at once, or only occasionally.”
McKenzie also acknowledges that Substack may have to make changes along the way. “The truth is, we know Notes is a new space, and it has some fundamental differences from the basic Substack platform that people have known for the past five years,” he wrote. “We fully anticipate that we will have to adapt our content moderation policies and approach as the platform evolves.”