Originally published at: Can Substack Recover the Blogosphere We Lost? - TPM – Talking Points Memo
When I started Jacobin in 2010, my first milestone of the magazine “making it” wasn’t a glossy cover or a TV hit. It was landing on a Crooked Timber sidebar. If you came of age in the mid-to-late 2000s, you know the sidebar I mean: that “blogroll” column of outbound links on sites like Crooked…
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I appreciate the insight of how things started, where they were, how they’ve changed and what’s happening now.
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One of the problems is that each of these sites requires payment and for most of us, that means that we have to be careful about how many we sign up for.
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That’s true of many sites but I’m not sure you could even say “most” of them work that way—many sites have a paywall for some but not all of their posts, and even the Bulwark (at a hefty $100 per year) has a ton of free content.
You’re right that the paid subscription is a difference from the blogosphere of old, but I didn’t want people not to investigate the good content that’s out there because of perceptions that it’s all behind a paywall.
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I’m sad to see Substack linked here given their overt support of Nazis.
There are plenty of platforms. Please don’t patronize Substack.
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Two problems I have with substack: the payment scheme for individual writers (unlike TPM, which is a news organ all on its own) basically is pushing out the non-wealthy. I’m on a fixed income now, and have to pick careful where I spend my media budget.
The other, of course, is the Nazi issue. For example: Substack promotes a Nazi
I won’t give my dollars to a platform that has that. Period.
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Something about Substack that keeps my voice out:
The one time I tried to follow (or whatever the right term is) someone there, I typed in my email, and before I even got to the choice between the free version and the paid version, IT HAD FILLED IN MY CREDIT CARD NUMBER.
Fortunately, it was an OLD credit card number, one that was a few years out of date. But I still have no idea how Substack got it from my email address, so there’s no way I’m giving any Substacker my email address in the future.
The result: I will never be able to comment on anyone’s Substack post, whether or not it’s a publicly available post. So I can’t even comment on Substack to say, look, this happened to me here, and it’s keeping me out.
So no, Substack will not be able to become what the blogosphere had been.
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It’s possible that your computer or phone did this, not the website itself. If the field is coded “CC number” and your computer at some point stored that information, it will autofill.
That sounds like a browser feature. Both Firefox and Chrome have options to save and autofill payment info. To see if it is enabled, go to settings and search for “autofill”.