Substack | Newsletters | Moderation Policy

Substack and the Nazi Bar: I’m Not Sticking Around

And it’s very frustrating

Have you ever heard of the Nazi Bar problem?

It’s a pretty simple premise. A guy owns a bar, and when it first opens it’s a nice free space. Lots of people come in, there’s great diversity at all the tables, it seems like a pretty welcoming place for everyone to hang out and have a drink.

But it turns out that it’s a little too welcoming.

A neo-Nazi guy comes in, covered in white supremacy tattoos and hate symbols, and starts spewing bigotry and racial slurs left and right at all of the other patrons.

The customers are uncomfortable, and they walk up to the owner of the bar and they say “Hey, guy, that neo-Nazi over there is making your bar feel pretty unsafe for us. Can you ask him to leave so we can go back to enjoying ourselves?”

Bartender says “Hey y’all, it’s a free country. His money is just as good as yours, he’s a paying customer. As long as he isn’t punching anyone, he can stay.”

And the neo-Nazi keeps being a bigoted asshole, and pretty soon, he starts bringing his friends. And as more and more Nazis turn up, more and more of the diverse patrons leave, not wanting to have to put up with insults and jeers while they’re just trying to have a nice night out.

They’d rather find another place that has rules about bigotry and harassment and runs a tight ship, a place where everybody can feel safe. They’d rather have their drinks in peace, and not have to put up with abuse for no good reason.

They would rather not have their money go to the owner of the bar that lets Nazis hang out. If they’re going to pay good money for a drink, they’re going to expect to be treated with respect by the business they’re funding.

Pretty soon, the only patrons in the bar are neo-Nazis. The owner of the bar only profits off of Nazi patrons, and he has no incentive to keep them out.

It’s now a Nazi Bar.

I hate to say it, but Substack has put itself on the path to becoming the Nazi Bar.

For the first couple of months, I was in love with the platform. It’s easy to use, it’s great for finding followers, and I was growing steadily and making good connections. And then, even better, they announced Notes; basically Twitter-lite.

When Notes first went live, it was great. I dropped the racist, transphobic, and anti-Semitic cesspool that Twitter had become, and I jumped into Notes with open arms.

I and a lot of other writers were saying to each other that it was like being at a party with a bunch of other people in the same industry. We were making friends, shared ideas, and having a great time.

But even before the honeymoon phase of Notes, there had been rumblings. I’d had to ban two trolls from my ‘Stack who were harassing me. One was using anti-Semitic slurs and hate speech, the other was your average Bible thumper telling me I’m going to hell for being LGBTQ+, the usual stuff.

Bible thumper dude gave up right away; I haven’t seen them anywhere again. I guess banning them was enough to send them elsewhere.

But I started noticing the anti-Semitic guy everywhere. On other chat threads, on other comment sections of other ‘Stacks, and always the same shit. Literal racial slurs. Insults. Blatant anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and hate speech.

Banning him from my personal ‘Stack removed his comments from my writing, but he was free to go wherever he wanted across the rest of the platform. And he could harass me freely in other comment sections, as well.

He was not subtle. It was explicit and it was genuinely shocking. If you had typed any of it on Medium, you would have been banned instantly.

He had his own Substack, he’s a writer on the platform.

And then Notes launched, and he joined it. Pretty soon he was everywhere. Everyone was reporting him, blocking him, warning other people about him, he was all. Over. The. Place.

I had already reported him at least three times, several weeks before Notes. Now, dozens of people were reporting him.

For a while, nothing seemed to have been done at all. He kept popping up, he kept harassing people, and he kept posting slurs and hate speech.

And then came the interview with Substack’s CEO.

We asked for clarification. We begged for it. We kept hammering them. All of us who write about human rights, especially anti-racist writers and most especially people of color, everyone banded together to demand an answer.

And we got one. Substack wants to ensure we can all moderate our own spaces, but they really don’t want to moderate Notes.

We kept pointing out the problems with that, how blocking people doesn’t remove what they say, it only makes it so you can’t see it.

They can still go on to harass other people, or they can tell their subscribers to go and harass you if they want, they can still find ways to attack you if there are no consequences.

I asked what would happen if someone wound up being doxed. If someone posted my address, my name, my contact information- if they were blocked, I wouldn’t even know to report them. And even if I did report them, it took them weeks to do something about the anti-Semitic guy.

Weeks of someone’s contact information and address online, there for every troll and extremist to find and read? How long would it take for someone to get seriously hurt? How long before harassment would extend to phone calls or actual physical mail?

And then, today, I saw a Note from another writer. Anti-Semitic guy is back.

So the long and short of it is, I’m not going to be sticking around for much longer. I’m looking at other platforms and giving some free trials a hook. Right now, Ghost is looking like my most likely alternative.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be figuring out what I need to do to move World-Weary off to its new home, wherever that might be. Thankfully, exporting subscribers is an easy process, and everyone who signs up for that newsletter will hopefully have a seamless experience and barely notice anything different.

And what’s even better is that I’ll be able to expand even more. A full blog, a newsletter, a better home for my experiments in podcasting…maybe even video if I’m feeling like taking a risk.

While it sucks to see a platform with so much promise fall flat on its face like this, I’m choosing to see the bright side. I’m being given a chance to put my money where my mouth is and take my business elsewhere.

I’m not going to keep buying beer at the Nazi Bar. I’m going to open my own bar instead.

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