Writing as a public good

The newsletter platform Substack has grown controversial. For an overview of the controversy, see Ben Smith. To get in the trenches, read Nathan Tankus’ impassioned letter about why he’s leaving the platform.

I am mostly aloof to the Substack wars. I love trans people. I also love, read, and learn from people that some trans advocates accuse of being hateful. The humans are complicated. Love them. I have little sympathy for the big names who’ve made careers of being “canceled”. But I worry that the growth of media that blur personal and political spheres is reshaping offline norms in ways more likely to impoverish our private lives than enact useful change. These media include Twitter feeds and old-school blogs. But Substack newsletters, because of the incentives and ultimately influence that come with monetization, raise the stakes. This is most clear in the authors whom the platform woos with advances under “Substack Pro“. Substack may ostentatiously recruit trans activists to “balance” complaints that they’ve become a refuge for bigots, but arguably their and their authors’ pecuniary interest is in a lively culture war, hot on both sides, rather than in forms of deliberation that might be more constructive but less exhilarating.

As a person who likes to write but who thinks professionalization corrupts public affairs writing, these are issues I give some thought to. Jeet Heer makes a good point when he tweets “Writing is either a career or it’s an aristocratic hobby. If it’s an aristocratic hobby, it’s closed to most people.” At the same time, when writing becomes a career, the institutions and incentives beneath that career cannot help but shape the writing.

It would be good if we could finance careers in public affairs writing while largely insulating authors from financial and career incentives. Substack’s subscription model may (or may not) prove an improvement on the listicle-inspiring ad model. But the direct pecuniary stake in subscribership it provides (and gamifies) will color what authors write. People are willing to fund their clique’s warriors, so offering political “red meat” is an obvious strategy to win subscribers. As Glenn Greenwald puts it, “They’re not paying because they’re getting something in return; they’re paying because they want to support journalism that they think…needs to be heard.” Functionally Substack shares a perhaps uncomfortable kinship with ActBlue or WinRed. A subscription-based model is going to encourage writers to to flatter the interests of especially more affluent readers. Substack subscriptions are expensive compared to paywalled conventional journalism, on almost any quantitative measure of writing unlocked. Finally, in my view, public affairs writing ought to be a public good, where authors contribute to a universally accessible, intertextual commons, rather than marketing paywalled silos. It’s not writers’ responsibility to bear the weight of this ought. We need to find ways to finance the people who cultivate the commons. But it is a commons that we want, rather than a labyrinth of paywalls or (worse) a few dominant publications everyone has to subscribe to.

In writing as in many other domains, I think “high-powered incentives” — extrinsic money rather than intrinsic goods like pride in virtue or quality — are essential at low levels but destructive at high levels. We expect and want baristas and warehouse workers to be primarily in it for the money, although of course they take pride in the quality of their work too. The tax and shareholder-value revolutions of the 1960s through 1980s destroyed American society by turning the people near the top of our social hierarchies into rapacious maximizers, and we should undo that, quickly. In writing and in general, external incentivizers can easily distinguish outright incompetence from a basic capacity to do the work. Above a certain level, however, quality is difficult to observe. Incentivizing putative correlates of quality encourages gaming, with a net effect that is ambiguous at best. At high levels, people’s “skin in the game” should increasingly become attached to broad, cooperative outcomes rather than narrow measures of behavior.

In light of all this, one way the Substack model might be improved is with caps and refunds. As with Substack now, there would be paywalled content, but the paywall would be stochastic. When a browser hits a piece, if it’s an identifiable subscriber it’s allowed through. If not, a quiet lottery decides yay or nay. The odds of denial would go down as the number of subscribers go up. At very low subscriberships, this would effectively be the current model, a hard paywall. At very high subscriberships, all content would effectively be open.

On its own, this would be a prescription for free-riding and death spirals. Why pay expensively to “subscribe” when other people have already unlocked the writing for you? However, what if the net cost of subscribing declines with readership, so that if many people subscribe, the contribution requested is very small?

A simple way to do this would to impose a compensation cap. Suppose an author requests $5 per month or $60 per year with a $150K cap. If she accumulates 2500 subscribers, she’s hit the cap. Thereafter, revenue from additional subscriptions gets distributed pro rata as a refund to subscribers. If she has 5000 subscribers, each subscriber would get $30 back, making the net cost of supporting the author only $30 per year. If she has 50,000 subscribers, the cost drops to $3 per year, literally spare change, just a quarter per month, and the writing becomes part of a wide-open commons. Once an author has hit her cap, she still ought to (and I think still would) promote her work and try to get people to contribute. But her incentives would become egotistical and altruistic: Egotistical because public affairs writers want their work to be influential and widely available (as long as they are also paid). Altruistic because encouraging new subscribers would decrease the burden on writers’ already loyal subscriber base, and because more exposure really might contribute to the process by which ideas and insights make the world a better place.

A gentler approach might replace a simple cap with an asymptotic limit. Each dollar contributed would go to one of two pools, author payment or pro rata refunds. The first subscribers’ funds would go almost entirely to author payments, but as cumulative revenue increases, the share going to the author would decline, and the share going to refunds would increase, so that the author’s payment as a function of total revenue approaches a horizontal asymptote. Under this scheme, the transition from extrinsic peddle-subscriptions-to-pay-my-rent incentives to more intrinsic and altruistic incentives would occur very gradually. If one wanted to maintain some degree of financial incentive for authors to expand their contributor base and reduce subscriber burdens, the asymptotic limit could be by an upward sloping line, but with a slope much less than one, so that at the limit say 10¢ out of every new subscriber dollar would go towards the author, and 90¢ to the refund pool.

If you’ve got better ideas than these, please contribute them to the commons! We want to fund a lot of writing, of high quality and from a wide variety of points of view. But we want those voices to be independent, not just of particular institutions but also of the incentives imposed by variable remuneration. The humans are clever. Surely we can figure this out.


The “cap and refund” idea owes inspiration to buylibre.org and Clark Evans, ht Sigfried Gold. It bears some similarity in mechanics and in spirit to a suggestion by Ryan Cooper that a nationalized music streaming service pay out artists “progressively” — i.e. at gradually decreasing rates per-play, in order to encourage a musical commons conducive to a broad creative class rather than the winner-take-all status quo. The Glenn Greenwald quote is via Jemima Kelly‘s reporting, but the paragraph where I embed the quote is too wordy to include a hat-tip.

I want to add that this piece is not intended as an anti-Substack diatribe. I read and subscribe to a bunch of Substack newsletters, including some of the controversial ones. Overall, I think Substack has inspired a welcome renaissance in less institutional writing. I hope the current renaissance is a step on a journey to better things, that its concentration on a single platform decreases and that it evolves in a less winner-take-all direction. But overall I am grateful for Substack, and competitors like Ghost. If I were a better writer, I’d consider trying to make a living on these platforms myself.

 
 

8 Responses to “Writing as a public good”

  1. Steve roth writes:

    Loving the asymptotic approach, thinking I’d publish a blog under that system. Maybe call it…Asymptosis! ;-)

  2. Detroit Dan writes:

    This strikes me as ingenious, and a bit counterintuitive. I think the standard model is that you write for free, then when you get popular enough people will pay for it. So the question is how do you build an audience? I guess you start out by offering free content, then move to the paywalled platform once you’ve got a shot at getting paid subscribers.

    Anyway, congrats as always for looking at the common good. The invisible hand of the marketplace is wonderful, but doesn’t always add up to what’s best for society as a whole. I just went back and reread Social democracy or feudalism. Experimenting with new models that combine aspects of capitalism and socialism (markets and governments) makes sense if societies are to keep up with the forces unleashed by technological advances.

  3. Carol writes:

    So. I pay for the Guardian and Vox which are free free to the public. This ends up being a public media style underwritten by private individuals rather than maintained by paywalled subscriptions. TPM paywalls some articles and doesn’t others. This does require some thinking.

  4. Uri writes:

    How do you feel about “paid subscribers get the writing a day early?” systems? We still get a universally accessible, intertextual commons (pretty quickly), and paid subscribers still get to feel like they got something for their support, but (I think) non-paying readers still get 99.99% of the same value.

    The issue I see there is that in our current media ecosystem you only have a short window where your writing is “focal”, and if your biggest fans are sharing your writing while it’s not yet publicly available that can rather dampen the impact.

  5. Lori writes:

    Using “aristocratic hobby” as if it’s one word is basically shaming non-aristocrats for not monetizing their hobbies. If it sounds like a pot shot at aristocrats, you’re not listening hard enough.

  6. Harald Korneliussen writes:

    The stochastic paywall you suggest isn’t great because of what it does to ours, the subscriber’s, incentives. When I support an opinion writer these days, it is because I think what they say is important and want their voice to be heard. But if me paying a writer causes that writer’s work to get MORE locked up, that’s not great.

    I think Uri’s model is the best when it comes to release. On Patreon, I support two people who do it this way – release everything (minus possibly a few things that have little value except to hardcore followers) to the world a day or two after supporters get it.

    But Patreon’s model is not the best when it comes to funding. Flattr’s flat-rate subscription model is, and remains. The problem with that is that sellers were too proud for it – which would certainly be a problem for the more redistributive variants you propose too.

  7. Eli writes:

    > I have little sympathy for the big names who’ve made careers of being “canceled”.

    The work of this sentence is on the quotes. But what of those who actually *were* canceled?

    > But Substack newsletters, because of the incentives and ultimately influence that come with monetization, raise the stakes

    This is pure alarmism. A tiny handful of already-influential people who were already putting out fake-controversial takes on the regular are now doing so in long form. What stakes are you concerned about?

    > This is most clear in the authors whom the platform woos with advances under “Substack Pro”. Substack may ostentatiously recruit trans activists to “balance” complaints that they’ve become a refuge for bigots, but arguably their and their authors’ pecuniary interest is in a lively culture war, hot on both sides, rather than in forms of deliberation that might be more constructive but less exhilarating

    Pretty sure the hot culture war is well-established already without Substack and the only reason anyone on the establishment side cares is now their reasonable enemies can have a place to earn money, but more importantly not get immediately canceled, suspended, unpersoned and have their entire following removed from them for straying from orthodoxy, a freedom that the establishment ever so dearly wants to crush

    This is for the time being of course. In short order Substack will indeed comply and enforce the requisite censorship after their Fake “Diversity of Speech Controversy Growth Hacking” period is deemed complete.

    > As a person who likes to write but who thinks professionalization corrupts public affairs writing, these are issues I give some thought to.

    Again. The professionals on Substack Pro may all be complete Substack Sycophant attack dogs, but they were for the most part all already earning money writing professionally. Except for Freddie Deboer. He wasn’t earning any money, and is thus the most rabid of the Substack Sycophants. Yarvin is another example of a Substack Sycophant. He just doesn’t disclose any relationship. Nothing has been corrupted in these writers due to the financial model Substack offers them, and none of the writers’ views have changed. All that’s happened is centralized conformist editors and peers no longer can hold a sword above their heads *quite as strongly* as before. But let’s be real. All these writers are still self-censoring at every turn. Substack’s TOS require it.

    > Jeet Heer makes a good point when he tweets “Writing is either a career or it’s an aristocratic hobby. If it’s an aristocratic hobby, it’s closed to most people.”

    It’s still closed to anyone who has actually divergent opinions. For them it’s neither a career nor an aristocratic hobby

    > As Glenn Greenwald puts it, “They’re not paying because they’re getting something in return; they’re paying because they want to support journalism that they think…needs to be heard.”

    You quote this as if people supporting independent journalism were a nefarious thing and not an actually great proposition. But let’s be real. All the people making money on Substack are completely defanged by dint of it being a centralized platform.

    > We want to fund a lot of writing, of high quality and from a wide variety of points of view. But we want those voices to be independent, not just of particular institutions but also of the incentives imposed by variable remuneration. The humans are clever. Surely we can figure this out.

    This idea of your wanting diverse viewpoints feels very disingenuous considering your entire thesis up until this point being that Substack is itself enflaming the culture war. Which is actually a mutually beneficial and completely fake conflict agreed upon by both NYT/Journo class and the Substack Pro/VC class.

    I’m not sure why it’s concerning to you that writers might get rich. Frankly, to accept the mostly-overblown premise that Substack offers independent writers anything at all, the more independent a writer is, the more I want to make them obscenely rich to insulate themselves from the mob. Why exactly shouldn’t they get “fuck you money”?

    Not that anyone truly independent is ever going to get rich on Substack, nor on Ghost for that matter. Which…your final note shows you’re in humble agreement on, being that you are actually independent—though establishment-sympathetic.

    PS. Hope you’re doing well. Was good to see you on the call. Hope there’s another one soon.

  8. Matt writes:

    You may be interested in the Subscribe to Open model that some scholarly journals are experimenting with.