The Anti-Twitter

Twitter has, in the past few years, produced much gnashing of teeth from those not in line with woke or leftist orthodoxy. With cause, of course - it's blatantly obvious to everyone, even those on the Left (though many pretend otherwise), that Twitter's apparatchiks have long imposed biased censorship on the platform's users.

Twitter being a private company has frustrated many who see this tipping of the public square scales as something deserving action. Some called for the government to apply antitrust law. Others called for rescinding of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields platforms from content liability. I was and remain skeptical of both.

An alternative platform - Parler - emerged to challenge. It was quashed by a cabal of Big Tech, to much outrage, before recovering. Donald Trump, who LOOOVED his Twitter before he got banned (Twitter really felt invincible, it seems), eventually started his own microblogging platform - Truth Social.

Neither really made much of a splash, since they appear to be places for conservatives and Trumpists to grumble with each other while no one else notices. Twitter caters to a small subset of the populace (the politically active therein comprise perhaps 2% of Americans), but it's the subset that matters in terms of politics and policy, and all those journalists, activists, wonks, politicians, and other prominent figures addicted to Twitter are not going to step away from it to join a clone.

The reality of microblogging, as we've witnessed not only in politics and policy, but in culture, sports, "influencing," entertainment, etc., is that it's so often "of the moment." Gut reactions, visceral responses, first-to-comment eagerness... it's all instinctual.

Or, in terms of Sigmund Freud's tripartite breakdown of the psyche, it's all id.

That 'id' and 'idiot' share a common prefix is a coincidence too convenient to elide here. How many people have you witnessed do massive reputational damage to themselves with an ill-considered Twitter blurt? How much better would Trump's Presidency have been had the Untethered Orange Id (TM) not had a instant global disseminator for his meandering musings and bewildering fleetings?

The short format begets the problem. Twitter, by its nature, is going to draw from our ids. So will any other short-form platform. A remedial alternative has to avoid that pitfall.

Behold, Substack.

While by no means the first individual-blogging platform (Blogspot has been around since 1999, and there are many others), Substack is proving to be the one that is drawing many prominent political voices. Bari Weiss, who flounced from her gig at the NY Times in legendary fashion in what may very well be a significant cultural inflection point, has built a big-enough following on Substack to actually fund a support staff in addition to sustaining her career. Others have done the same.

I can't say why Substack, and not others, is turning out to be the go-to for good political writing, but it doesn't matter - it just matters that this platform, with its long-format content, lack of censorship, and great accessibility, is providing to those who seek something more than id-driven babble from the political sandbox.

My own experience tells the same tale. The site my tech partner and I launched back in 2016, Pigs and Sheep, enabled me to share content to the world, but my regular audience peaked and plateaued fairly quickly, and even a name change to The Roots of Liberty didn't break the plateau. Needless to say, we never reached a financial break-even. I moved to Substack this past December, knowing I'd have to start from scratch in terms of subscribers, but that happened very quickly. By late February, my subscriber count exceeded the Roots total, and it's been growing ever since (to all my subscribers... THANK YOU! and to my paying subscribers, THANK YOU^3!!!). This is my 300th post on Substack, and every new subscriber notification motivates me to continue blogging. As do comments, likes, and shares.

There's clearly something that "works" about the platform.

That it is long-format incentivizes quality of content. Unlike Twitter, where even a regular can miss countless tweets in the deluge, and where "followers" doesn't necessarily mean "eyeballs to a particular Tweet," Substack flows into subscribers' email accounts. Obviously, some will be glanced at rather than perused, or perhaps even skipped entirely, but a writer is incentivized to generate good product.

This greatly downplays the id's role, and elevates the ego and superego. Therein lies the correct foundation of an anti-Twitter. It needs to be much more signal, and much less noise. A platform like Substack encourages this, and as an amplifier of long format (and therefore much more likely to be rational or at least measured) thought, it can elevate national discourse and help rescue us from the feral scrum that is modern day politics.

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Cheers!
Peter.