Battleground's New Home on Ghost
New Look, New Website 😍
New Look, New Website 😍
After some deep thought on Substack’s Nazi problem, I have made the decision to move Battleground off of Substack and on to a new publishing platform called Ghost. While the decision was sparked by a moral conundrum, this move is ultimately an upgrade as the switch to Ghost opens the door to more tools, more customization and more control over my content. Here’s what this transition will mean for Battleground in 2024:
You don’t have to change a thing. Today, I’ll be transferring the full email list over to the new platform. Future emails may look aesthetically different but you should receive all new posts in your inbox, just as before. (Expect new content next week!)
All new content going forward will be hosted on https://battleground.ghost.io. This will the be the last new post hosted on Substack and old content will be remain archived here on this domain for the foreseeable future. (I will be slowly transitioning relevant older content onto the Ghost site over the coming months.)
Ghost is not free! While this move allows me to stand firm on my morals while upgrading the site, it doesn’t come cheap. Please consider supporting Battleground’s transition by donating via the “Buy Me a Coffee” button below.
Why I’m Leaving Substack
When I joined Substack, I saw it as a “salon suites” model for digital publishing. Substack would give access to the utilities necessary to get my publication off the ground in return for a share of my revenue. While Substack may be providing its services to all types of writers (some of whom may be raging bigots) I signed up expecting that I would be fully separated into my own walled garden. The only way to interact with others would be to knock on someone’s door and step into their ‘suite’ voluntarily. But recent changes to Substack’s features have eroded this “salon suites” model.
The introduction of Twitter-like Notes and Recommendations’ network-building capabilities amount to tearing down the walls of the suites and replacing them with cubicles. Sure, we still each have our own spaces, but now it’s much easier to overhear what’s going on in the cubicle next to you. The rhetoric of Substack has shifted to emphasizing a singular Substack community, one where we’re expected to interact with each other with the platform’s newest features. So if Substack is both cultivating a singular community and increasing its control over who gets reach on the platform, shouldn’t they have a duty to moderate the content to keep the community accessible to everyone? Its leaders fundamentally disagree…
Substack Is a Nazi Bar Now?
If you haven’t read the infamous ‘Nazi bar’ tweet from 2020, read it, because that’s what happening with Substack right now. To paraphrase, a bartender explains how allowing a single Nazi into your bar can easily snowball into you becoming the owner of a Nazi bar…
“They bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down… you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."
Substack’s leadership utterly failed at the task above, sharing that they would “stick to [their] decentralized approach to content moderation” and not kick any openly fascist Nazis off the platform. After the "Substackers Against Nazis” campaign took off, leadership responded by deplatforming a small handful of white supremacists (five to be exact), further underlining how unserious they are about addressing the problem. As highlighted above, you can’t just punish “the mean ones” and expect the nice ones to keep playing nice. Those “nice ones” have already mounted their own counter-protest that acts as a defense of the more hateful writers on Substack.
I’m not sticking around to watch this play out. Like several other writers, I’m jumping ship for a non-profit, open-source platform that’s much less likely to fall prey to the whims of enshittification. Not only do our actions send a clear message to Substack, it also hastens the platform’s “Nazi bar-ification.” Because if the only people who are willing to be a part of this community are okay with hateful bigotry, then congratulations, you’re now the leader of a community of bigots.
Bye Substack.