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Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best by Nilay Patel
Substack enters new territory with the launch of Substack Notes. Can it handle content moderation, running a consumer product, and beefing with Elon Musk and Twitter?

It’s going to be fun watching Chris Best speedrun the content moderation curve, especially because he desperately wants “subscription network” to be different from “social network” or even just plain “website with a comments section” or “forum” or “group chat” when it comes to moderation, and he’s going to find very quickly that it’s just not and that he’s going to have to make calls. Some of these calls, (actually a lot of them), are going to be difficult, all the moreso because they’ll have to be made quickly, and he’s going to get some of them wrong and he’ll have to correct. But that correction will never be enough for the people who insist on bloviating on how content moderation should work while refusing to take any time to dig into any of the actual problems, and at any given time 50% of your customers will be pissed off at you. I hope he has fun.

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How two insurgents are taking on Twitter by Casey Newton
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.

Casey has the right of this. Chris Best is going to try to be all free speech wing of the free speech party about all this, and he’ll either speedrun the moderation curve exactly like literally everyone else who has run a successful online thing that allows for comments, or he’ll give us another Elon-like demonstration of what it looks like when someone fails spectacularly at this and refuses to learn, even if it’s not at the scale of Twitter.

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NYT editor says company won't leave Twitter by Sara Fischer
The New York Times does not plan to stop using Twitter, its top editor said Saturday, despite the fact that Elon Musk, the company's owner, has taken seemingly targeted actions against the Times, and has called the outlet's work "propaganda."

OK that’s their right.

However, as long as journalists are refusing to leave Twitter, don’t expect me to have any simpathy or empathy the next time Elon does you dirty, because you’re apparently just fine with all of it.