People Want a Platform that Won’t Betray Them
The return to written content has been happening slowly over the past few years. There are a few reasons for this, but the linchpin was far-right pundits getting banned from Twitter or being let go from their jobs. They turned to Substack as a way to communicate with their fanbase.
Then it boomed, with journalists leaving their outlets to start their own newsletters on the platform. Left-leaning Twitteratti signed up, too.
The platform is now more than written content. You can do it all there - podcasts, videos, words.
But Substack lost a lot of users within the past 12 months because it has a nazi problem. There were lots of think pieces about this, as shocked writers and subscribers clutched their pearls. I say this flippantly because, again, it was alt-righters who catapulted the app to fame in the first place. Plus, Substack has a hands-off moderation policy. Anyone who has been on the internet for more than five minutes knows that those policies always allow the worst of us to flourish.
And let’s be real here, it’s very obvious from Substack’s CEO’s Decoder interview that he is also on the alt-right spectrum. The use of the term “gotcha questions” is always a giveaway.
I am not making any moral judgment on whether or not you should personally use Substack, but lots of people do.
People are factoring morality into the apps that they use and the content they consume.
While Substack is growing, I don’t think its nazi problem is going away. A lot of people are just now discovering the platform. Those people aren’t aware of its alt-right affiliations. A lot of its long-time users aren’t either. Not everyone is chronically online or chronically observant. Focus on these issues will ebb and flow but what it comes down to is that . . .
People will always be looking for a platform that won’t betray them.
And that’s why we’re going to return to the blogosphere. Not the days of Xanga, Vox, or livejournal (though I do miss Xanga and the community I built there), but old school Wordpress sites. Those sites never went away, but a lot of people did ditch them for Facebook pages, Instagrams, YouTube, and eventually TikTok.
With the exception of YouTube, people feel betrayed by most social media platforms. Algorithms and an over-reliance on AI moderation paired with zero customer service has soured most people to Meta - and of course, Zuck getting rich off of selling our data to everyone and every country he can is an immediate app uninstall for a lot of people.
TikTok has yet to betray its average user, but our government is certainly about to with regards to the app. Millions of people will lose access to free marketing for their businesses. Marketing that has made some of them millionaires. Plus, some of those businesses are run entirely on the app.
To be clear, TikTok is not owned by China and its data is stored by Oracle, the same company that secures the data of the U.S. government.
The app hasn’t screwed over its average scroller, but its content creators might feel differently. The company changed its content production payout system with the promise that it would make even more people TikTok rich. The opposite seems to be happening. Creators are very openly speaking about a massive decline in revenue. Many have started producing longer form content on YouTube, where revenue is better. Some have left the app entirely in favor of other platforms.
People are moving to YouTube, but its payout system is also subject to change. The only consistent revenue stream with this kind of creative work is a revenue stream that you exclusively control.
Which brings us back to individual websites and the blogosphere. The article you are reading right now is on Squarespace. The hosting service and website builder is increasingly adding options to make it desirable for creatives. It’s not quite there yet, but that is very clearly where the company wants to go.
Despite Squarespace’s eventual play for supremacy in this space and the multitude of other content management systems out there, I think the majority of people are going to return to Wordpress and its many plugins due to it being open source.
Social media conglomerates aren’t going away. They will, as TikTok already is and Meta is trying to be, function more like a search engine.
These sites will be part of an ecosystem of larger conversations. Those conversations will be grounded on people’s individual sites.
In a world where control is currency, people want a platform where the only who person who can betray you is yourself.
