Leaving Substack for Beehiiv
Substack's leadership can't be trusted, and I'm going to find success elsewhere.
A week ago, all seemed, if not well with Substack, then at least functional. They had reportedly backed off their, “Nazi money spends, so we’ll keep monetizing those newsletters under the guise of being free speech champions,” posture while trying to save face by saying they were just adhering to their pre-existing policies. But then Substack needed to be slimier, so they tried to betray Platformer, one of their biggest publications. Jonathan Katz does a good job of laying it out in detail, but basically Platformer and the heads of Substack had off-the-record conversations about how Substack was monetizing hate speech. Both sides agreed to be off the record so as to have a free-flowing exchange of ideas in order to come to a mutual understanding. But then Substack leaked those conversations to a friendly outlet. Furthermore, they’ve basically been working behind the scenes with allies who also claim to want “free speech,” but really just want the opportunity to spread hateful rhetoric without any kind of repercussions.
If this is how Substack is going to treat Platformer, which was one of its biggest newsletters, then I shudder to think how they would treat my tiny little newsletter. These are not honest brokers, and they’re so mendacious that they can’t simply own their own viewpoints. Also, even if you don’t want to take Katz and Platformer’s word for it, Josh Drummond ran down all the garbage that you can find on Substack in just an hour. You’ll find anti-vax nonsense to straight-up rantings of a white supremacist. You can shrug and say, “Well that’s just the Internet,” but this isn’t someone buying a domain and learning HTML. This is using Substack’s tools and potential for monetization to spread hate and misinformation.
My guess as to why Substack is so inviting for this stuff is not only the attitudes of its owners, but because it’s such an easy platform to use. I’m not surprised so many established and credible authors tried to make it work on Substack, because in terms of ease-of-use, it’s a glowing success. Their UX team should take a bow. But just because something is easy, that doesn’t make it right, and I feel like Substack will eventually sink under not only the weight of its leaders’ ineptitude, but also it costs a lot of money to host so many free publications, and that’s not sustainable. It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point in the not-too-distant future, free Substacks are required to host ads, and Substack decides what those ads should be. That’s not a deal I want to be a part of.
All of this is why I’m flying over to Beehiiv. I did a bit of investigating into what should be my new platform, and in terms of cost and infrastructure, Beehiiv seems the best bet. Obviously, things can change, and maybe at some point I have to go find a new place. But I’m tired of devoting time and effort to online places that don’t value my presence. Twitter went down the tubes, but Elon Musk assumed everyone was as addicted to the platform as he was. Also, making crappy things and thinking people will happily buy them is kind of Musk’s thing.
I’m annoyed I have to leave Substack because it has good tools, and I’m sure I’ve picked up some readers through its recommendation algorithm, which Beehiiv won’t have. It’s now going to be even more difficult to build a readership, but given the amount of time I put into my newsletters, I don’t want to feel gross every time I write one.
Thankfully, my good friend Dave Chen, who runs the excellent newsletter Decoding Everything, is sponsoring my first year on Beehiiv. It’s a tremendous show of faith on Dave’s part, and I’m grateful for his backing. I’ll be linking to his stuff in my upcoming newsletters, but my hope is that you’ll already be subscribed to Decoding because Dave’s work is consistently professional and thoughtful.
Also, I don’t begrudge anyone sticking with Substack, or really with any platform at this point. I used to be mad about it, and sometimes I’m still a bit confused, but I’m not here to play Internet Cop (although that would be a good movie after Maniac Cop, Scanner Cop, and Samurai Cop). I feel like I need to do what’s best for my creative goals, and Substack no longer appears the best platform for me.
Anyway, thanks for reading this bit of housekeeping, and you don’t have to change anything on your end. The membership list will transfer over to Beehiiv, and while the newsletter format may look slightly different (e.g. a different font), it will all be the same to you. Paid subscriptions with exclusive articles still go live on February 6th, but it will be over on Beehiiv.
Recommendations
Parker Molloy did a good job of summing up my thoughts on the recent spate of “We Must Understand the Trump Voter” articles coming out as if we haven’t been aware of these people for the past eight years. While it’s fun to live in the tension of “These people are voting for a horrible person, but they can’t all be horrible people!” I think what these voters want and what they care about is pretty straightforward at this point. The media’s issue is that they don’t want to portray a large swath of the American populace as being anti-democratic, so they have to call them something else despite their clear beliefs.
As for a physical media recommendation, this is not a deal like I normally post. However, one of the best movies of the 2000s finally available in a great 4K set for U.S. audiences: Oldboy. Park Chan-wook is one of South Korea’s best directors, and it’s hard to undersell the impact he made with his 2003 revenge-thriller. While most of Park’s work still hasn’t received the mainstream attention it deserves, he’s an outstanding filmmaker. His most recent film, Decision to Leave, was one of my favorite films of 2022, and I can’t wait for his upcoming Max limited series, The Sympathizer starring Hao Xuande and Robert Downey Jr. Now’s the time to understand why Park is a visionary, so you should pick up the 4K of Oldboy (also, there’s no need to bother with Spike Lee’s 2013 remake; it’s not even Lee’s cut of the movie).
Note: I get a small percentage of any Amazon sales made through my Amazon Associates link.
What I’m Watching
In the past week, I happened to watch two movies that both starred Roy Scheider and John Glover. The first was John Frankenheimer’s delightfully trashy 1986 film 52 Pick-Up. The film stars Scheider as a businessman who gets blackmailed by a trio of pornographers (Glover plays one of the blackmailers alongside Robert Trebor and Clarence Williams III). They have a tape of Scheider with his lover, and they’ll out him unless he pays them $105,000 (I assume they came to that number because it splits evenly three ways). Scheider wants to protect his wife, played by Ann-Margaret, from scandal, but doesn’t have the money to pay the blackmailers.
What elevates the film from B-movie sleaze is not only the outstanding performances from the whole cast (Ann-Margaret, for example, has kind of a nothing role, and then absolutely delivers as the heartbroken and wronged wife), but Frankeheimer’s terrific direction. The film is also about how men frequently work to hide their trespasses, but it’s always women who get exposed. You can check out 52 Pick-Up on Prime Video.
I then saw one of Jonathan Demme’s early movies, 1979’s Last Embrace. In this one, Scheider plays a spy who had to spend time in a psych ward after his wife was killed in front of him on assignment. That’s a neat place to start from (and decades before the Daniel Craig James Bond movies were like, “What if James Bond was traumatized?”), and then it gets an ever cooler twist when Scheider’s spy receives a note in Hebrew about the Avenger of Blood, “Go’el.” I wish I could say it lived up to that premise, but the film kind of falls apart in the third act with a big twist that doesn’t really work. That being said, you can see Demme is already fully mastering his craft, and honing the kind of thoughtful approach you would see in The Silence of the Lambs.
What I’m Reading
Hiding And Seeking With The New York Times by David Roth [Defector] - As usual, Roth does a terrific job of encapsulating an issue that’s been on my mind to the point where I feel like if I wrote it myself, I’d only come up with a lesser version of his article. I’ve seriously been considering ditching my Times subscription because their journalism has been so bad lately. Between breathlessly reporting what’s happening at elite universities and softening Trump (this headline about Trump being a eugenicist is a pretty good example), I feel bad giving this outlet my money on a monthly basis. I love the crossword and the recipes, and there are other sections as well as columnists that add value to the paper, but as Roth points out, the Times sets the terms of the discourse, and then denies responsibility when it has real-world consequences.
The 4K Blu-ray Collectors Market Is the Future of Physical Media by Adam Chitwood [TheWrap Pro via Yahoo!] My good pal Adam wrote about how physical media is still a viable revenue stream for studios since there will always be consumers who want the best presentation of the films they love. While physical media may be baffling to those who prefer to stream, this article lays out the upsides for film fans, who will usually opt for a hard copy rather than hoping the movies they love happen to be on the right streamer at the right time.
Disqualifying Trump Is Not Antidemocratic by Adam Serwer [The Atlantic] - The Atlantic has too many boneheads writing for them to make them a worthwhile subscription, but Serwer is so good that he almost makes a subscription worth it just on his own. In this article, he argues (correctly) that removing Trump from the ballot may be unusual, but Trump is an unusual candidate. We typically don’t have candidates try to overthrow the government if they lose, and simply letting the voters “decide” doesn’t rectify the problem since he’ll only abide outcomes where he wins. Either the Constitution matters, or you support the desires of Trump and the violence he’s willing to support. You can’t have both.
What I’m Hearing
I gave the new TCM podcast, Talking Pictures a listen, and it was interesting to hear their first guest, Nancy Meyers, not only talk about her career, but also about semi-retirement. While she says she may try to direct another movie (her last one was 2015’s The Intern), it would need to be in L.A. because she doesn’t want to spend months of her life on location. That’s a completely valid concern, and it makes me wonder how someone like Ridley Scott does it where he’s churning out a new movie every year or so. I’m pretty sure Scott has a home, but does he basically live out of a suitcase? The logistics intrigue me.
What I’m Playing
Well, I finally burnt out on PowerWash Simulator. What started out relaxing eventually became a bit too much in terms of area to cover and impediments to covering it. On the one hand, I can’t really fault the developers since games are supposed to get more challenging as they go along. Still, it detracted from my enjoyment, and while I may return at some point in the future to do some of the DLC, I’m also going to wait for them to patch the PS5 release, because my game crashed quite a bit.
I’ve now turned my attention to a NewGame+ play through of Spider-Man: Remastered as well as Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Spider-Man is still fun, but Wonder is particularly joyous. There’s just all kinds of minor touches that make it feel like a classic Mario game, but one made in the 2020s. It’s simply delightful.
Good luck with the move! I went with Ghost as Popculturology’s new home, but I’m interested to see what Commentary Track looks like on Beehiiv.