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Substack is now a playground for the platformers

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What does Alex do Do Berenson, Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald have anything in common? All have come out against the de-platforming — be it a Twitter ban or losing a job in a reputable publication — only to find a new home for Substack and great wealth.

Bulletin board advertising platform, Founded in 2017 and the ever-struggling advertisements have presented it as an alternative to advancing the media-driven industry, He has positioned himself as anti-Facebook—Quality and thinking where victory prevails over engagement algorithms. But many of his most famous writers believe that he encourages harmful content. Such success raises an awkward question for the new media darling: If Substack is the future, what future is it creating?

For Chris Best CEO and co-founder of Chris Best Substack, the future cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. “The way we ended up, where these monstrous attention-grabbing social media feeds dominate how people spend their time and attention, has really negative consequences.” Enter Subsize. And Alex Berenson.

Berenson, first a New York Times The writer, who was banned from Twitter in August 2021 for promoting false claims about the safety and effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines, has a thriving business at Substack. It earns $ 720,000 a year from its subscribers, though oddly enough does not appear in the Substack rankings senior writers. The other says that not being in Berenson Substack’s rankings is not a conscious opportunity to promote, but a “technical mistake.” The other could not say when the problem was identified or when it would be resolved.

Mistake or not, Berenson’s popularity creates a clumsy tension for Substack, which he presents as an alternative to an ad-based model and a mere flaw in the care economy. “We think the first generation of ways to play on social media and the internet basically broke a lot of things,” he says. While others acknowledge that social media and the early Internet helped people connect in new ways, he believes he also broke it. existing business models It is impossible to go back because of the excellent writing, even with so many publications, The Nhe York Times perhaps the main one among them, they are getting to do big money from good writing.

Others believe that Substack is a new way forward for the world of media, and a harbinger of a new democratic world. Social media broke journalism, and Substack is here to store it. When they launched Substack, Best and its founders, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi, compared them to newspaper entrepreneurs 200 years ago, saying their innovation was just as important. It was designed to stay away from the media since its creators saw it as a crazy wheel to collect clicks through anger because it goes viral on social media. “That’s why the incentive structure that is created doesn’t support and reward excellent writing. He accepts and rewards things that drive us crazy, ”says Best. “And that’s a failure, both for the individuals we care about and who care about having a good view of the world, and for society in general, because it disturbs us.”



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