Substack's Hamish McKenzie on censorship, discourse, and Joe Rogan ARE NEWS-LETTERS THE FUTURE OF FREE SPEECH?

SOCIETY HAS A trust problem," Substack cofounders Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi declared in a joint statement late January. "More censorship will only make it worse."

Substack, a leading online newsletter company that publishes the likes of polarizing journalist Bari Weiss, Brown University economist Emily Oster, COVID-19 contrarian Alex Berenson, and lefty iconoclast Glenn Greenwald, was reaffirming its hands-off approach to content moderation at a moment of intense pressure to "deplatform" controversial voices. That same week, rocker Neil Young accused Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan of spreading pandemic misinformation and demanded that the platform remove his songs if it continued to offer Rogan's show; days later, the White House urged Spotify and all other media companies to be more "vigilant" in policing public health news and commentary.

"As we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable," McKenzie and his partners wrote, "our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression."

Those principles have been good for business thus far. Since launching in 2017, Substack has grown to more than a million paying subscribers, boasts a valuation of $650 million, and has drawn venture capital funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz. The company's pitch to writers is seductive: You set a couple of subscription tiers (the most common price points are $5 a month and free), you let Substack facilitate the payment processing in return for a 10 percent cut, and then all the customer information and content is owned not by the platform but by the creators, who can leave at any time. In 2021, flush with investment money, Substack began a "Substack Pro" program of cash enticements to lure name writers away from imploding media organizations or their own unpaid blogs, including Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone and Matthew Yglesias from Vox. Of late, the company has taken an interest in breaking into the lucrative podcasting biz, poaching Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog's Blocked and Reported from the market-leading Patreon payments service. (It may soon also sign a deal with The Fifth Column, which Reason's Matt Welch co-hosts with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan.)

McKenzie, Substack's chief operating officer, is a technology journalist by training, having worked for PandoDaily and written the 2018 book Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution To End the Age of Oil. Like his co-founders, McKenzie believes fervently that the independent-operator newsletter and podcasting model, as opposed to the cheap conflicts of social media and industrial neuroses of legacy journalism outlets, is the way out of a news and political conversation that has become distrustful and coarse. "We started Substack to improve discourse and help restore financial dignity to writers and help readers take back their minds," he says.

Welch spoke with McKenzie in San Francisco this February.

Reason: When journalists dream of making a new startup--newspaper, website, whatever--there's always this special idea that this will be the one where all our favorite writers will actually all get rich, too. Did you find the secret code of being a journalist who started a company that actually makes journalists money?

McKenzie: I'm relieved that there is something that can work. I feel like writers in the last couple of decades especially, but maybe forever, have been undervalued by the economy, considering how much value they give to the world. So it's nice to see some momentum on that front.

Substack is very open about being anti-algorithm. Is there something fundamental to the advertising model that impels the algorithm?

We're not strictly anti-algorithm. Algorithms are like equations, right? They appear all over the place and do different things. But we're very skeptical about the consequences of organizing the media ecosystem around engagement.

You guys have said that algorithms as used by Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter produce and incentivize cheap conflicts.

I don't think it's the algorithms that do that; it's their business models. These artificial intelligences arise to maximally serve the business model. The thing that the business model needs is total monopolization...