Building Community, Not Leaving It Behind

A (sort of late) to the conversation reflection

Reading time: About 8 minutes.

I discovered Substack because Roxane Gay started using it. By late 2017 it was the platform to be on. At the time I had a Patreon, but in a Covid World, what little income it provided dwindled even further as more folks felt the economic impact of a global pandemic and had to stop payment. I’d been publishing to Medium for years but was posting less and less as Nazis got bolder in their online harassment. I didn’t get a lot of bad-faith comments, and the few I got I would delete immediately, but I still had to see them in the first place.

Switching to Substack seemed like an obvious choice to make. I could move away from Patreon and Medium and get the best of both those platforms in one. I could have paid subscribers and be part of a growing blogging/newsletter platform that would make it easier for folks to find my writing.

Substack has other bonuses too. Unlike with Patreon, I can give away complimentary subscriptions to anyone I like, so friends and family I want to share my work with can access it without being forced into a subscription. Extra bonus, the paywall creates a way for me to moderate who gets to comment, which means cis men bent on upholding patriarchy can’t share their unsolicited mediocre worldview with me without paying for the privilege to do so.¹

I have never been under the illusion that Substack is anything but a tech company like any other tech company. Tech companies are notorious for being run by Libertarian dude-bros who genuinely have no concept that they are not the main characters of the Universe. I didn’t switch to Substack because they are aligned with my morals or ethics. I switched because it was fast becoming the place to have your work seen. As a writer and an artist, I like spending my time writing and making art and not running a content generating media company, which is what was happening with my balancing act between Medium, Patreon and social media.

So what about those Nazis?

I often say that the greatest thing about the Internet is it means people have been able to find community in a way they never could have before, and the worst thing about the Internet is that people have been able to find community in a way they never could have before. Yes, some Internet spaces are more obvious cesspools of hatred and bigotry, but it exists everywhere and it basically always has—Nazis operate on every platform online, albeit more covertly on some than on others.

I mentioned above that I don’t run a media company and have no interest in doing so. I don’t aspire to be an ‘influencer’ or to have any celebrity at all, to be honest. My dreamy situation would be to make a living from my writing and art without ever being perceived.

My ‘audience’ is so tiny I feel weird calling them an ‘audience’ at all. Especially when at least half the folks who read my blog are like, you know, my social circle—friends, family, friends of friends.

As I shared in my financial transparency post at the beginning of the year, eight of my 177 subscribers were paid subscribers. Forty-four were comp subscriptions I gave to people I know personally. In the commerce of the Internet, audiences matter. The greater your audience, the more likely you will get perks like ad revenue, funding, book deals, exhibitions etc. 177 is nothing in the metric of Internet power. Substack will not notice or care if I move off of it to somewhere else. It is not meaningful or effective activism for someone with a hundred readers on a good day to stop using a platform that Nazis are using just because now a lot of people know Nazis are using it.²

Leaving Substack would cost me. Not because I make money here—I earn between $25 and $33 a month in paid subs right now—but it will cost me in time and energy and connections.

Switching platforms isn’t easy. Yes, Substack made it possible to import all my writing from all the platforms around the Interwebs, including my long ago abandoned Blogger blog, but importing data isn’t a one-for-one process. Images get broken, text gets reformatted, and cross-posted links send people back to platforms I’m not using, often leading to error messages.³

It will take a lot of labour and effort on my part to switch to a new platform once again, expending energy I do not have on a project I do not want to engage in when I have much better things to spend my time and energy on. And it would not, in any way, make one tiny difference what-so-ever to Substack and the Nazi situation if I leave.

I get how helpless is can feel to be a human right now. The problems of the world are massive entangled messes.⁴ Our choices matter in these messes, but the degree to which they have an impact beyond scratching an ethical or moral itch, well… that depends.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and we can just as easily say there is no Internet free of Nazis. This doesn’t mean we do nothing. It just means we have to pause and consider the choices we make and how they will be most impactful.

We may make a moral choice for ourselves regardless of the wider impact it may or may not have. Several people I respect have chosen to move away from Substack. Some of those people have done so strategically because their audience is big enough that their leaving as an individual will communicate something to Substack. Some folks have left because they just feel better with that choice, regardless of whether it will actually change the situation.

I fully respect whatever choices folks want to make. I encourage making up your own mind about it through careful consideration and discernment and not telling other folks what you think they should or shouldn’t do. Take time and do research. Even if you aren’t a Substack writer, as a reader, you can decide to walk away. Cancelling a subscription payment is up to you but it will not get Nazis off the platform or send a message to Substack unless people are cancelling subscriptions strategically enmasse. It will lower my monthly income and the income of other writers you’ve been supporting—I lost one subscriber explicitly because of the Nazi situation, and trust, the $6 less I get a month matters to me and not to Substack, who just lost a few cents.

One thing I’ve learned about activism in my decades of being an activist, is it must be both sustainable and generative. I do not benefit from giving into things that deplete my precious energy, nor from ceding space to bigots, nor does anyone in my community. I do benefit when I focus the energy I have on the things that bring me joy and therefore make it easier for me to show up for the things that hurt.

In his own post on the subject, Robin of Your Trans Friend pointed out a group who will feel the impact of queer and trans writers leaving this blog space: Queer folks who come to this platform looking for community and content.

Rather than put my energy into moving to yet another platform (that will likely also end up with a Nazi problem, because I cannot say this enough, Nazis are people and every type of person is on the Internet), I choose to put my energy into uplifting my community, other writers and artists, and my own creative endeavours.

I am not the only one taking this route. There is a concerted effort to create an explicit queer community through Substack, which is great!

I won’t be chased away from spaces, on or offline, because hateful people have decided to congregate there and indifferent tech companies are doing nothing about it. I would rather figure out ways to build thriving queer community on and offline than fret when a Nazi starts a blog on the same platform being used by millions of people for millions of other reasons. I would rather spend my energy writing and making art than switching platforms. I would rather figure out means of mutual-aid that don’t require going through tech billionaire platforms. I would rather collaborate with fellow creatives to make beautiful art and share our stories.

And so that’s what I am going to do.

K.

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If you enjoyed this piece, you would porbably like this post too:

1. I will genuinely never understand the mentality that convinces a person to spend any part of their precious human existence harassing strangers online.

2. It needs must be said, the number of Nazis on the platform has been mis-reported. We are not talking about 4Chan levels of bigotry here, and most of the Nazi blogs aren’t actually monetized.

3. I switched the Substack in 2021 and I have yet to fix all the broken links across my various pieces of writing. I probably never will, to be honest.

4. Roxane Gay wrote an excellent piece on the anger of online spaces relating directly to our feelings of helplessness offline.