Jason Kottke, 21st December 2023:
“Substack explains why they are paying Nazis to publish on their platform. Friends who publish on Substack, are you ok with this? If not, maybe try Buttondown or WordPress or Ghost or literally anything fucking else.”
Greg Storey, 27th February 2024:
“Tumblr and WordPress user data have been sold to train AI, and Automattic intends to do it again moving forward. Content posted on both platforms between 2014 and 2023 was shared without user’s permission. Even worse, the data exchanged included private and deleted posts, private answers, and “content from premium partner blogs” for clients like Apple. […]
If you’re using Tumblr or WordPress it’s time to seriously consider moving on to software made by companies with more integrity. Any integrity frankly is better than what you have now. I can’t say enough about Ghost, Kirby, and Craft.”
* * *
It doesn’t matter what I actually think about the above two issues. I’ve come to believe that Substack’s Nazi problem was at least a little overblown, and I’d need to research the WordPress issue more thoroughly before coming to any kind of conclusion. But it’s all kinda irrelevant.
Instead, let’s take a hypothetical example. Some poor soul is running a newsletter on Substack. They read about all the Nazi stuff in December, and try to do the right thing: so they move to a self-hosted WordPress installation, as Jason recommends above. All sorted, right?
Only to now be told this month by someone else that, sorry, you backed the wrong horse. Don’t go with WordPress, they’re the bad guys.
That’s two moves, in the space of two months. I guess our hypothetical person could move again… but will the next service they choose turn out to be the bad guys too? How long will it be before that happens? A month, two months, maybe a whole year?
How long do they get to spend writing, before the tedious admin kicks in again?
* * *
I spend a great deal of my time these days on Dirty Feed. Probably too much, for a site that has never earnt me a penny, and costs me a fair few. Some of the research for this site over the past few years has been taken to absolutely ludicrous levels.
I really don’t want to spend my time doing more website admin than I have to. I want to spend the time actually writing. To unpick all my work and move once is one thing. But where is the guarantee that I won’t have to do it again? And again? And again?
I gave a theoretical example above, but this really isn’t theoretical for me. I spent years building myself a home on Twitter; I got to the point where I had a real audience on there, with people who genuinely enjoyed a lot of my work, however stupid it was. And then, of course, Musk blew it all up.
Now I want to be very clear on this: the reason I finally stopped posting links to my articles on Twitter was because it was becoming a less and less useful place for me. Sure, I was uncomfortable about being on there, but the final decision was based around sheer practicality. It’s your call as to whether that makes me a bad person, of course, but at least I’m not trying to hide anything here. Far fewer people were reading my stuff, and that’s mainly why I left.
So once the writing was on the wall for Twitter, I thought very carefully about how I wanted to proceed. My main blog is self-hosted WordPress, but I still needed an external funnel to get people over to the site in the first place.1 In the end, I decided on Substack. I put a lot of work in getting people to sign up for it. By December, I’d built up 750 subscribers.
Just in time to hear: nope, Substack is evil, why the hell are you using that?
* * *
Here is my blunt answer. If you ever wondered why I’m still on Substack, or why I still use WordPress: I am not chasing moral scruples across the internet. I simply don’t have time. I’d rather I spent my energy actually writing fun things for you all.
Might that change? Of course. There are things which not even I could cope with. But the bar for that change is set extremely high.
Because when my time on this planet is nearly over, I’ll end up looking back on my life. Yes, I will want to have lived what I consider to be a vaguely moral existence. But I’m probably not going to judge that morality based on the internet services I use, just as I don’t really judge myself on where I shop, or the restaurants I go to. Some people do, and that’s fine. But I have a finite amount of space in my head, and my priorities lie elsewhere.
I will judge myself on how I treated the most important people in my life, of course.2 It’s a slightly unfashionable view these days, but I will also judge myself on whether I’ve done useful things in my day job at any point.3 But I’ll also judge myself on whether my writing managed to be what I consider moral. At first glance, that sounds like an absolutely ludicrous thing to say, when the last thing I wrote about was deleted scenes in Red Dwarf. Perhaps beyond ludicrous.
But I will stand up and risk being called pretentious. Because with conspiracy theories of all kinds everywhere, seeking to find out the real truth about something can feel like a revolutionary act, no matter what subject matter you write about. You can, I truly believe, have a moral stance when writing stupid pop culture nonsense, even if you’re not talking overtly about the social issues contained within.4 Lazy thinking is lazy thinking; if you fall into regurgitating the same old disproven anecdotes about your favourite TV show, maybe you’re also regurgitating other, less savoury things elsewhere.
Truth is something to strive for, no matter what the subject. I like to think that this site does actually mean something in this regard. I’m not perfect – see the update on this article – but I try. And it truly is something that I will care about on my death bed. To have attempted, wherever possible, to write the truth, not merely what’s convenient.
But I can only get that shit done if I’m not changing platforms every five minutes. And yes: I’m OK with that.
UPDATE (28/2/24 @ 4:45pm): One thing which is perhaps worth clarifying with the above: there is, of course, a huge difference between self-hosted WordPress (from the WordPress Foundation), and the hosted WordPress.com (from Automattic). Am I in danger of conflating the two with this argument?
Personally I don’t think so, although I should have been clearer. Greg Storey in the article linked to above explains why:
“Without more answers, 404 Media reports that it’s unknown if any of this impacts self-hosted blogs that use Automattic plugins like JetPack which is all but required to run a WordPress site these days.”
I do indeed use JetPack – VideoPress for my videos is an absolute godsend for me these days. But that plugin really does blur the lines between “self-hosted” and WordPress.com, to the point where in terms of privacy, there might not be an awful lot of difference. For instance, despite the bulk of this site being self-hosted, all my videos are uploaded using the WordPress.com interface, and are hosted by Automattic.
To be fair, I’m probably more uncomfortable of this line-blurring than anything else about WordPress. But that doesn’t really change the substance of my main argument above.
Yes, RSS is great. Yes, I encourage everybody to use it, even to the point of my RSS feed being full content so you never even have to visit the site. But practically, most people who are interested in my articles will never use it. ↩
Right now I think I could do better, but then who couldn’t? ↩
Ten years channel directing for a public service broadcaster may well end up being the most valuable thing I ever do in my career. That’s fine. ↩
You end up touching on them implicitly in all kinds of ways, of course. ↩