In the meantime, one other subject took over my Notes feed Thursday: Substack CEO Chris Best’s interview Thursday on the Decoder podcast, in which host Nilay Patel pressed him on the company’s content moderation capabilities. Asked whether Substack would remove (the implication was remove from Notes) a post that said “all brown people are animals and they shouldn’t be allowed in America,” Best refused to answer. “I’m not going to get into gotcha content moderation,” he said. I wouldn’t really say it’s a “gotcha” to ask a platform about the limits of its community standards. Particularly when a company that had previously built email and web infrastructure for independent entrepreneurs — some of whom have plainly noxious beliefs — suddenly throws them all together in a ranked social feed. A service where every reader has to manually opt in to receiving a publication, as with Substack’s emails, can get away with doing less moderation. For the most part, it’s merely providing the plumbing. But now Substack is going to take those same noxious writers and promote them to its wider user base, using the same opaque algorithms that drive everyone insane on every other social product. For the moment, Substack appears to be hoping that the laissez-faire ethos it brings to content moderation as an infrastructure provider can survive the jump to making full-fledged social products. If Substack did, it would be a first. We’ve seen what radically scaling back content moderation has done for Twitter. Of all the ways Substack could clone that platform, this is not the one I would choose.