My Hope for Substack Notes

Back when I was in college, Usenet was all the rage in the nerd circles. It was new and compelling, and I spent many more hours in discussions online than I did on my schoolwork. I was excited by it, because for me it was an entirely new way of having conversations. I attended what was then one of the most vehemently left-wing universities in the US, and here’s the kind of conversation I was accustomed to having:

Me: People should be free.

Classmate: Capitalism is slavery.

Me: What do you mean by capitalism?

Classmate: You don’t know what it’s like to be poor!

Me: What do you mean by capitalism?

Classmate (to another classmate): Hey, she thinks people should just starve!

Second classmate: Wow! How’d you get to be so uncompassionate?

Me: What do you mean by capitalism?

…and so on.

But here, on the Usenet forums, there was a new way of interacting. A way that kept track of what everyone had said, and where you could go back into a conversation and pull out a quote and say “no, look: THIS is what I said. And this is what YOU said”, and the conversation could proceed from there.

It was so incredibly civilized. And I was excited for the future because I thought “wow, just wait until EVERYONE is connected this way - it will change the way we interact with each other, it will elevate our conversations, and our very society will become more rational and civilized!”

I know. I’m laughing too.

So I was wrong that the format of these conversations – in writing, online, in discrete threads that could easily be viewed back to their beginnings – would somehow ensure civil discourse. It must have been something else that did that.

I’m not going to say that I know now what that something else is. I don’t. But I have an idea:

I suspect that a great deal of the “noise” we see on most social-media platforms is generated by people who don’t put a whole lot of thought into what they say. We’ve all seen examples of this: The folks who sound forth with great animation and fervor against something someone else has written… but without in fact having read what they’ve written, beyond the headline.

Or the folks who are content to parrot, for example, what the CDC says about the new experimental juice that everyone needs to put into their bodies right now or they are enemies of humanity.

Etc., etc.

Here’s what I love about Substack Notes: Only those who have Substack publications can post or comment there. Which tells me that, even if that doesn’t guarantee some level of intelligence or sophistication or commitment to civil discourse, it IS an indicator that a person has just a little more of a commitment to thinking carefully about things. Carefully enough to sit down and compose articles rather than just commenting on (and many times, spitting on) what others have written.

I’m prejudiced. I value creators more highly than I do complainers. Or maybe I should say that I value creating more highly than I value complaining. (Since of course we all do some of both.) I see the structure that Substack has erected as being supportive of having creators in the conversations, while discouraging those who do nothing but complain. Or, to be more specific, those who complain without having put a whole lot of effort into understanding what they are complaining about.

Is this an airtight barrier? Of course not. Folks can of course sign up for a Substack account and never use it to publish anything, but just to go into Notes and take pot shots at the people who do publish. But I imagine even that takes a little more effort than the typical (unpaid) Twitter trolls are going to expend.

Anyway, I guess we’ll see. I could be wrong about this too. But what I’m seeing so far on Notes is encouraging: Mostly civil conversations, between people who are hungry for that. Many of the people here have spent the past three years being attacked and even deplatformed for talking about things that they have worked for many many years to understand. They place a high value on civil discourse, and they have an appreciation for what has been lost or broken elsewhere in society.

That’s a community worth being in.