I'm So Over This (or, the Trouble With Platforms)

I've spent the last year (and then some) wrestling with my relationship to platforms.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Imagine you start a cottage business making hot pepper jam. Once you've perfected your recipes, you've got to sell some jam. To do that, you need to get in front of potential customers.

You decide that a good way to do that would be to set up a table at the local farmers' market. So you apply to the market and sign on to rules about setting up, tearing down, attendance, marketing, etc. You know that everyone else at the market signed on to those rules as well. Finally, you pay your fee for the season and start hawking your sweet and spicy condiment.

That farmers' market you're now peddling your wares at? That's a kind of platform.

What is a platform?

That's a good question, considering it's a word we use quite often and a word we elide quite often. Broadly, a platform is a product that facilitates the exchange of other products or services.

In the digital context, Nick Scrincek, author of Platform Capitalism, defines a platform this way:

At the most general level, platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact. They therefore position themselves as intermediaries that bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects.

A social media platform allows users to create, publish, and engage with media. Etsy is a commerce platform that allows small businesses to list and sell their goods and services. Uber is a logistics platform that allows drivers for hire to connect with riders.

Platforms aren't new.

Where I live, I'm surrounded by physical platforms—flea markets, antique stores, and, yes, farmers' markets. Some are cooperative, but many are privately owned businesses—businesses that produce products (i.e., marketplaces) that allow others to exchange their own goods and services. Platforms like these have typically been a good business to be in. The owner can put underutilized capital—in this case, land or a building—to work, earning rent with relatively little in the way of ongoing overhead.

Platforms do offer value to businesses that use them. We often turn up our noses at "middlemen," but the people and businesses facilitating exchange serve a real purpose—and it's logical that they'd get a cut of the action.

In the farmers' market example, the "cut" is the seasonal rental fee you pay for the space where you set up your table. On Etsy, the "cut" is a percentage of each sale (among other fees...). On a social media platform, the "cut" is a combination of the data you create while using the platform for free, as well as the portion of your attention taken up by advertising.

Platforms mediate our experience of the products or services we access through them.

What Etsy puts on their home page or in an email about trends impacts what I go looking for on the platform. How Meta decides to tweak the algorithms on its platforms changes how I perceive public discourse and even my perception of my own family and friends. How that mediation occurs is largely dictated by how a platform decides on its cut of the action. In other words, content decisions are business decisions, and business decisions are content decisions.

Note: "content" doesn't necessarily mean words or video. The "content" being moderated can be goods and services, too.

We tend to think about content moderation as asking the question, "Does this post violate the Terms of Service?" However, Evelyn Douek, a law professor and expert in the nuances of content moderation, asserts that content moderation is a complex system that loops in a diverse array of decisions and decision-makers outside the usual framing. Whether or not an individual post should be displayed on a platform is, no doubt, an important consideration. But Douek asks us to consider all of the other institutional, managerial, entrepreneurial, and administrative decisions that lead up to that point.

Returning to the hot pepper jam example, it's not in the farmers' market's best interest to have five stands that all sell hot pepper jam. The market wants its customers to have access to a wide variety of products—and a market with five pepper jam stands is four too many. It doesn't matter if those four proprietors follow all the rules and pay their rent. They work against the market's interest in maintaining the widest selection of products possible.

Limiting the number of stands that sell any one type of product is a content moderation decision driven by a business decision. In this case, the market's owner made a decision about the market's brand—maintaining the widest selection of products. The market's business model supports that brand decision. Ideally, the market wants to have long-term relationships with businesses, and a good way to bring that about is by being able to deliver a steady stream of customers who want to buy.

Digital platforms make content decisions in similar—if even more complicated—ways. Choosing to make money on ads rather than user access fees changes the kind of content a platform will allow and amplify. The layout of a website influences the kind of content it encourages. The other users of a platform create cultural forces that privilege certain kinds of content over others—and who those other users are is the result of upstream decisions, too.

These upstream decisions are easy to forget. The platform’s interests fade into the background, and we're left thinking that the world we see through a platform is a true representation of the world that is. When we open an app, we forget about the brand, business model, legal, and management choices that inform the world we see. When we shake our fists at The Algorithm, we forget that a whole host of decisions came before that algorithm was ever coded and are, therefore, embedded within it, changing how and what we create, share, and engage with daily.

Looking back over what I published this year, a big theme was the challenges inherent in work dependent on platforms.

Platforms are where two of my mid-life obsessions—economics and media—merge with my life-long obsession with worldview. They're markets that mediate our perception of and beliefs about reality in material ways.

The first piece I published in 2024 was a response to Substack's "nazi problem." In it, I wrestled with the moral compromises, precarity, and additional labor we are saddled with when we use a platform. Later, I did a series of pieces on the creator economy—a topic that wouldn't exist without the present ubiquity of platforms. I wrote about being "platform-pilled," that is, living in the strange matrix of assumptions about what works online.

Throughout this year, I also noticed that I'd become envious of people who published their work independently of platforms. I saw that independence as a bold self-confidence, a recognition that there was nothing a platform could do for them that they couldn't do for themselves. I wanted to experience that freedom for myself.

My gradual shift away from platforms certainly isn't unusual. But I think it's worth running through here quickly. I last posted on Instagram or LinkedIn in late May or early June of this year. The last time I posted on Facebook was in December 2020. Twitter became unusable in early 2023. I've used Substack Notes on and off, though not nearly as much as I thought I would when I moved my newsletter. I use Bluesky daily but post infrequently.

Over time, I realized that the upstream decisions platforms had made and were continuing to make made it harder and less rewarding to pursue the kind of work I wanted to do. I learned how to make the most of these platforms early on—and in doing so, I learned to push aside my own interests, perspective, and worldview so that my work fit the contours of decisions I had no input in and rarely even knew about.

In the words of Nilay Patel, I was platform-pilled.

On Tuesday, Substack announced its official partnership with Bari Weiss's The Free Press. Here's what they had to say about the choice:

We view The Free Press as an ideal partner for this initiative because of its longstanding presence on Substack, which extends back to its founding in early 2021, and because of its commitment to pursuing high-integrity journalism. The Free Press is old school in the best way, with meticulous editorial standards that it upholds through in-depth reporting, fact-checking, editing, original photography, and more.

Here are how others have characterized Weiss and The Free Press. The Nation's Chris Lehmann called The Free Press Weiss's "Substack house of grievance." In The New Republic, Ana Marie Cox labeled Weiss the "intellectual dark-web doyenne." Media Matters documents how The Free Press has "become the platform for a self-titled whistle-blowing operation on gender-affirming care for transgender youth." But perhaps writer Wajahat Ali put it best: “It is a salon for the privileged laments of the powerful masquerading as the grievances of the oppressed.”

Unlike Substack, I'm willing to admit my own bias in selecting those sources.

Sure, lots of people love The Free Press. But lots of people love Donald Trump, too. They love Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. These are all unserious people who learned to leverage the upstream decisions of platforms for fame and fortune.

The fact that Substack found The Free Press to be an "ideal partner" is beyond farcical. It's bullshit—a blatant disregard for truth and consequences.

Or, as Anil Dash put it recently:

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators' work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable.

Here's the thing: I'd already planned on moving off of Substack over the holiday lacuna.

I've been moving in that direction all year, but it takes time, attention, and a lot of work to make that move.

I moved to Substack in May 2023 because I believed it would be (some of) the best of two worlds: the newsletter service and the social media platform. Also, I wanted things to be easy. There have been some positives to this move—new subscribers, a little revenue, a different kind of community.

Over the course of this year, I began to see that the upstream choices Substack made gave me all the downsides of a social media platform and that the upside didn't exist in any appreciable way. Moving back off of Substack isn't so much quitting this particular platform but an effort to be far less reliant on (and dominated by) platforms generally.

I don't know what I'm going to do next year. Probably publish less, teach more, and focus on my "day job" as a podcast and video producer. I want to tackle ambitious topics and stories that don't work in my current publishing schedule. I would rather not work 7 days a week, even if I enjoy 95% of what I do.

The fact that Substack chose to announce the partnership with The Free Press this week didn't sway me. It just provided a focal point for what's really been a years-long reckoning with being yoked to a platform.

I'm going to take the next month or so off. I'll start publishing again in late January or early February 2025. My plan is for all of my writing and teaching to live on the same site.

I’ve already paused premium subscriptions. I don't plan to unpause them. Instead, whatever I do that's "premium" next year will be pay-as-you-go, with special consideration for folks who have chipped in over the last year. My announcement post was originally going to be a philosophical look at what subscriptions are and how they impact us—which I still plan to publish, but it’ll wait until 2025.

As a 'thank you' to those who've been supporting my work, active premium subscribers will receive extra goodies, a first look at the new site, and access to a much more navigable library of the premium content I've produced over the last 18 months.

Well, when I started writing this morning, I meant to jot off a few paragraphs and then share the essay I began 2024 with—the one about how creators are always between a rock and a hard place when it comes to dealing with platforms. But I think you've got the idea. If you'd like to read or revisit that piece, you can do so here:

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If you’re not already a subscriber but want to keep following my work as I pull back from my dependence on platforms, you can still subscribe here. I’ll be moving my email list once I’ve got the new site set up!

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