I gotta get out of here man
Hello. I am leaving Substack and switching over to another newsletter platform called Ghost which you are looking at right now. Ideally this won't change anything for you the subscribers in any way and you don't have to change or update your payment settings. At least that is what they tell me. If something does seem wrong on your end let me know. All of the old posts were ported over here as well and some of them may look janky here and there. Ghost requires a bit more technical know-how and I have no idea what I'm doing yet. Hope I don't completely eat shit and fuck up my means of making a living!
I suppose the savvy move in terms of marketing would be to flail around melodramatically and try to turn this into a whole fucking thing to generate publicity for myself for like one half day but I cannot emphasize strongly enough how little I want to take part in never mind be the subject of one single more conversation about "free speech" on platforms and cancel culture or whatever. Substack can do whatever they want I suppose. I've certainly shared my thoughts on how they handle things with them over the years regularly and sometimes they have listened and sometimes they have not. In any case it is no longer my problem.
I know a lot of you have decided you didn't want to pay for a Substack account any more and I completely understand that. Perhaps you'll come back. For what it's worth Ghost is a non-profit and open source and not funded by VC tech guys who want to make the line go up forever. Could be that there are things about Ghost that fucking suck that I will find out soon but I'll deal with that as it comes.
Here's a link (that I think should work?) for 25% off a paid subscription.
I sometimes think it's a little unfair that Substack has become synonymous with transphobic and anti-vax and reactionary shit because there are hundreds or maybe thousands of people doing very good work on there that get drowned out. Nevertheless here we are.
That's what we were hoping to push back against the past year or so with our collective work at Discontents. I don't think it moved the needle unfortunately.
They were also good to me personally over the past four years and I do appreciate that.
Despite thinking about it constantly I don't have a logical and airtight argument about regulation of content on platforms or whether or not there's any means of ethical posting. I guess for a while now it's just felt like a bummer to be on there. The vibes as they say are off.
All that said it's important to keep in mind that what we're talking about here is a guy using a different email company to send out his sad little emails.
I hope you'll continue reading either way. Thank you as always for your years of support it means the world to me.