The Only Way to Continue to Host Comments Here at All is to Get Ruthless
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This post is 100% meta stuff and needlessly long. If you don’t comment you can definitely safely skip it. I’ve been doing a lot of spring cleaning around here in terms of settings and policies, which has been overdue. (I have also spruced up my personal website and, if I’m being real with you, it’s the best-looking writer’s site in the game.) Tomorrow morning we’ll have a spicy post about public morality and hypocrisy, Wednesday my review of Adelle Waldman’s new gem of a novel Help Wanted will finally run, and then a meaty subscriber-only post on Friday. Comments will be on for all of those. But…. Well, read on if interested.
In comments this past week I suggested that this newsletter would become permanently comment-free, due to an ongoing issue with a vocal cadre of commenters who seem to view that space as an important piece of culture-war terrain. The whole thing is tiresome and I have not wanted to devote the necessary time to wrangling the comments myself. Some of my longer-term readers asked me to reconsider, and to please go through recent posts and count the comments that I find unbearable and compare them to the whole. I have done so and concede that (despite what some critics in media would assume) the problem really is a vocal minority and I don’t want to deprive people who have participated for more than three years now, especially given that 90+% of the time comments have been lively but remarkably drama-free.
On the other hand, I genuinely hate what the comments section has become thanks to a few dozen people, out of hundreds of regular commenters, who ruin it for everyone. Thus my initial preference to turn comments off. But (again despite what some would tell you) my readership here genuinely is made up primarily of disaffected leftists, liberals who want to fight racism and homophobia and similar but want to fight them effectively, libertarians who are unhappy with the right-wing culture war turn in much of institutional libertarianism, those who think that being a moral agent in the world and politicizing everything all the time are two very different things, those who want to criticize liberal self-righteousness without turning into James Lindsey, the politically uncategorizable…. The incentives of culture war, both social and financial, push us to pretend that people like my median reader don’t exist, that there ultimately is just MAGA and Blue No Matter Who. But they do exist and I exist. Life is complicated. The universe does not sort itself into people with Hillary 2016 bumper stickers and people who wear t-shirts with the Blue Lives Matter flag done up like a Punisher skull. Sorry.
I have however also attracted some of the people I critiqued last week: those for whom the “anti-woke” tendency has eaten their brain, who have dressed themselves in some sort of rebel branding but ultimately are just Republicans who maybe don't care much about abortion. And the last category has, thanks to their aggression and lack of restraint, made the comments section unpleasant, for me as much as for everyone. My response the last six months or so has been to just not look at comments. The trouble is that the non-insane among you don’t deserve to live in that discursive environment, and (less important buy annoying) anyone can look at the comments and infer that I approve of them, which my enemies do for the obvious reasons. And I don’t want that to be the case. Turning off comments seemed sensible, especially because I could potentially turn off comments and Notes with one click, and Notes has become a not-fun place to be a Palestine-supporting trans-affirming immigration-welcoming lefty, to put it mildly. But people have asked politely for comments to stay and I aim to please. In order for that to happen, I have to take a much heavier hand in moderating comments moving forward, and I’m budgeting time to do so. I’m also going to be turning off comments on each post 72 hours after publication so that I don’t spend the rest of my life on this.
Two things I want to say in particular. The first is that both my critics from the left and the anti-woke types that get mad in comments insist on making the same mistake, driven by motivated reasoning: they fail to understand that I am what I say I am. In the post from Wednesday that I linked to, I listed dozens of things I’ve written in 2023 or 2024 that are straightforwardly left-wing. There are many more that I consider to be expressions of the better part of left-wing expression but which I left out so as not to debate edge cases. This all makes sense because, you see, I am a leftist. I have always been a leftist. I have devoted more hours to actual left organizing than the vast majority of my critics in media who insist on sorting me into conservatism. I’m just part of a left tradition that has great distrust towards identity politics, that’s all. The liberals and lefties who insist that I’m a reactionary place in-group signaling and culture war over substance; my challenge to them, as always, is to tell me what issues we actually disagree on. My problem with them are almost always problems of process and strategy. Meanwhile, as I touched on recently, the anti-woke types see someone who criticizes identity politic excess and assumes they’re a fellow traveler. Again, that your average radlib sees 95% agreement as too little while their enemies see 5% as more than enough points to a lot of crazy dynamics in American politics.
Of course, as is the case with any writer or publication, the people with the healthiest attitude are those that have no particular emotional relationship to the writer’s politics at all, and respond to the writing itself, how informative it is, how useful its arguments are, how much it entertains. I’ve got a lot of readers like that, who are immune to the notion that they have to agree with someone to think that they’re worth reading. They tend to be baffled at the idea that they have to see me as a fellow traveler just like they’d be baffled at the idea that they have to share the politics of the guy who’s gonna build their deck out back. They’re just buying the product. But a lot of people, including very smart and thoughtful people, can’t do that these days, can’t separate the personal from the political.
And I think that, too, is a vestige of some strange turns in American political life, one that (as far as these meta issues go) might be the worst: the core assumption that politics is fundamentally associative in nature, that the core of politics is to define who you are and are not tight with on a social (or parasocial) level. A lot of the blowback from Wednesday’s piece was not “I can’t believe you betrayed me on X value or Y policy” but rather “I can’t believe you criticized Z person.” But that’s what independence is, the willingness and ability to criticize those perceived to be on “your side.” And there are certainly people out there who have contrary values to mine without feeling the need to try and discipline and disparage me. I disagree with Andrew Sullivan plenty, but in 15+ years he’s never asked me to be anything other than I am, and that’s a rare trait indeed. Most people don’t operate that way. Of course, since I praised Andrew here, there are some who will insist I must therefore answer for something the New Republic published when I was in 8th grade, and that exactly is our present dilemma.
I thought it was clear that the proposition I’m selling here is my writing ability, my point of view (which is very different from my positions on issues), and my independence. But it’s only independence if you’re free to offend anyone.
Anyway… I must particularly object to the tactic of invoking my mental health/my bipolar disorder to explain away an argument you don’t like. It’s bad form by any measure. Saying that something I’ve written that you don’t like indicates some inherent mental instability is lousy diagnostic practice, if these people were actually even trying to diagnose me, which they weren’t; they were trying to discipline me. And I will not be disciplined in that fashion in my own space. You are perfectly free to speculate about my mental state with Catturd on X. It’s useless to say, but I’m still just chilling, appropriately medicated and under the care of a psychiatrist and therapist and PCP. My therapist specializes in psychotic disorders and I see her every week, rain or shine, and she’s very happy with where I am. Indeed, now that I’ve added semaglutide to my usual meds, my concern has been lack of emotion rather than the opposite. (So far so good.) In any event, that shit is gross, it’s disingenuous, and it’s not gonna happen here anymore.
Here are the rules.
Any comments that purport to assess my mental health, to express disingenuous concern for my mental health, or to otherwise use my psychiatric history as a means to discipline me or insult me or influence what I say will receive an immediate lifetime ban. Goodbye.
Any comments that are intentionally insulting, condescending, or expressed in a tone designed to express personal disdain for me will receive a week-long ban and potentially a lifetime ban if it’s obviously designed to try and get my attention. There’s forceful disagreement, there’s telling me I’m dead wrong, that’s fine. There’s even plenty of personal insults that are not going to get you banned, though they may get you crammed on like Chris Dudley. But there’s a certain species of unearned superiority and derision that’s emanated from anti-left spaces lately that I won’t tolerate. The only arbiter of when these lines are crossed is me. This is my shop and I run it how I want.
Any comments that violate my particular rule against bringing certain unrelated controversies into discussions of posts that have nothing to do with them (Israel-Palestine and trans issues most obviously) will receive a one-week ban as a warning. Comments designed to obviously reference either those issues or that policies in a way that skirts or mocks this rule (“This makes me think of that thing we’re NOT ALLOWED to talk about, for some reason….”) will result in a lifetime ban. Stay on topic please.
Any comments that attempt to dictate my politics to me, that insist that they know better than I do what my own politics are, will receive a week-long ban, unless they violate points 1 or 2, in which case I will ban permanently. It’s perfectly fine to express an argument that you think my politics are inconsistent or self-defeating, that my particular combination of positions doesn’t make much sense. But you don’t get to say “this is wrong because what you actually believe is….” I won’t tolerate people purporting to tell me my own beliefs.
Any comments that simply annoy me a great deal will result in a 24-hour ban as a warning, and subsequent bad behavior may result in a longer ban. I will invoke this rarely. But if you’re trying hard to get my attention and annoy me, eventually I’ll give you what you’re looking for.
Any comments about the length of the piece will result in me saying “then read half, dipshit.” Nobody’s forcing your hand, choch.
Of course, you have a very direct and meaningful way of protesting a specific ban or this new aggressive moderation policy in general: you can discontinue your subscription. You can vote with your wallet. I am a very imperious person by nature and it’s hard to get my attention, but like anyone I’m susceptible to financial influence and pulling your individual subscription is always going to be meaningful. We’re down about 5% this year in annualized revenue, generally owing to my posts in defense of trans rights and Palestinian lives, which is fine - I would be concerned if revenues never went down because of stances I’ve taken, and for that price I buy freedom. But it also works the other way, and choosing to cancel your subscription in response to a comment ban is meaningful for both of us. As someone who has had nothing before I will never take your subscription dollars for granted.
(Subscribing, it should go without saying, is also a message to me. THE MOST POWERFUL MESSAGE OF ALL.)
Lifetime bans can be appealed in email but if you’ve been intentionally shitty it’s quite unlikely that I’ll unban you. (And a lot of the offending comments lately have really had this deep desire to personally insult, so you know who you are.) These rules are actually all much easier to follow than you might imagine. There are many commenters who have been here since the first year and who manage to criticize everything I write while keeping a clean jacket. To pick an example, commenter Slaw has been engaging here for years, they’re clearly to my right and express things in a way that’s more abrasive than I might like, yet they stay on the right side of all of these rules consistently. There are others who do similarly. And I absorb critical comments by the dozens on every post without issue. I think people underestimate my comfort with criticism or ugly political battles; I spent years in the anti-Iraq war movement, which was constantly ripping itself to shreds, I was on media Twitter as a critic of identity politics in the mid-2010s, I used to comment on Mega McArdle’s blog at The Atlantic as a socialist…. Trust me, I’m not unwilling to be criticized. There is no sense in which you don’t have the right to disagree or even to critique me harshly. But there’s a certain tone that I associate with the whole anti-woke thing, an affected jokiness that also has a remarkably bitter edge, that I find increasingly grating. And there’s no reason for me to deal with that when I have the big red button.
I’m sure, of course, that this will invite frivolous claims of hypocrisy. But in fact I’ve always said that a comments section, and some other online spaces like it, are not open forums and will naturally be governed by different rules. For example. when Gawker Media writers were facing comments that they felt were offensive, and complained that management there was giving them insufficient tools to address that problem, I publicly sided with the writers. (I would show you proof but that has been lost to the tide of time on one of the twelve or so blogs I’ve written in my life.) In contrast, I thought that the previous regime at Twitter was far too censorious because a social network like Twitter simply isn’t an intentional community the way a blog’s comments are. I don’t know what the point of a rigorously ideologically-policed social network is, really. Could I articulate the principle, exactly? Probably not. But I feel like there is one and, anyway, this is how this is all going to go down here, in my place.
I’m also working with Substack to disconnect my project here from the various social network features they have introduced in the past year or two. As you know, I’ve been quite critically of those who make a show of leaving Substack because of its supposed lack of ideological cleanliness. This makes no sense - any platform they go to hosts far-right content. Even the most hyperactively censorious platform like “beehiiv” (which is genuinely the worst name in Silicon Valley history) will host such content unknowingly because there is no system sufficiently advanced to audit every last word that appears on its servers. If it becomes big enough to be financially solvent it will be too big to monitor that tightly. The installation vs. hosting distinction doesn’t make much sense to me, but anyway I’ve already demonstrated that there’s far-right content hosted on the big Substack competitors, not just on installs. And I find it deeply untoward how people use these decisions to advertise. (Just go, jackass!) The notion that the executive suite at Substack is made up of right-wingers is also dopey and demonstrably untrue. They’re generally inoffensive and well-meaning dorks who have built a platform they’re proud of and genuinely care a great deal about independent writing and want it to succeed. I’ve probably defended Substack as often and as effectively as anyone, as the company takes most of the shit it takes because it holds a position on free speech that was the default liberal view until about twelve years ago, no matter how uncomfortable that fact might be for contemporary liberals.
You always and forever will share the internet and society with far-right types and you need to make peace with that fact in whatever way you can. Only the dead have seen the end of fascism. There’s no one weird trick to rid you of a world shared with the fash, except to be an hero. Sorry.
But, Christ, this social network stuff. As I suggested above, the kind of distinctions that people draw about this stuff are always more confused than I think they want to admit. Core to the soggy liberal anti-Substack argument lies the notion that a blogging platform or similar should be neutral while social networks should be aggressively censored. I have no idea why that’s the standard, other than that it’s transparently an argument of convenience, but that’s what they’re sticking with. And, indeed, Substack has added a ton of social networking stuff, seemingly to the detriment of the actual CMS, which has been buggier this past year, although has improved in the last month or so. I don’t care for any of it. It makes my job harder when it comes to criticizing the panhandling media types who pretend that the newsletter platform you use is a choice throbbing with moral valence. It also has exposed me to a lot of unpleasant people who are burning to take out their inexpressible anger on me, the anger they have with society and themselves. That’s not fun because I never signed up to take part in the forum; Notes was foisted on all of us, and I think that was just a mistake on Substack’s part. The initial email announcing Notes should have led to a one-button decision to participate or not, which thereafter could be found in settings. And you would click it on or off, and if you clicked “off” then that would be it, you would have no connection to Notes, end of story. Throwing everybody into a new social network they didn’t sign up for one day plays into every dopey anti-Substack narrative out there.
Instead, we got all of this social network stuff forced on us. This includes the recently-unveiled direct messaging system, which is just baffling to me. This is an email newsletter! The communication with my readers goes through email! They can reply to one of my emails, or they can just send a message to my email address, which is listed on the front page of this newsletter’s website. Why on earth would I want another way for people to reach me? For what purpose? Well, just for the social network aspect, I guess, except that I don’t want anything to do with that. Do you see the notifications in that image? That’s my nightmare, man. I don’t want to engage with that stuff, but I also don’t want notifications begging me to clear them. And yet there they sit. The number of notifications even pops up in my browser tab! Ugh. I just want to write a fucking newsletter. I get why they’re doing this, kindof, and I understand that for a lot of people who have the typical kind of Substack (which has nothing to do with culture war but is instead about, like, gardening or scrimshaw or 8-track tapes) this can be a cool way to grow community. But I’m a grown-ass man and I didn’t want any of this. Substack’s CMS is legitimately excellent - given my hatred for Wordpress’s new “blocks” infrastructure, I may even prefer it to the OG - and has gotten better over time. The team at Substack is very receptive to my constant demands. But the use of Notes as a cudgel with which to beat independent media, wielded by people whose industry is dying, was predictable and avoidable.
The last fucking thing I needed in my life was more notifications! My goddamn car has notifications I can’t turn off!
However! As I have puttered around in settings for the first time in a long time, I have to note that they’re now giving you much more robust tools to reduce your exposure to this stuff than I thought. I wish this stuff had been present at the beginning of Notes and/or made much more visible then. This button you see here is the key: it’s exactly the one-button solution to just excise yourself from all of that business. There’s also a lot more granular control in there too. As you can see, this button disables comments along with the liking and the restacking and what not, and that’s not ideal for me. But the constant liberal fainting-couch routine of saying that to host writing on Substack is to necessarily join Truth Social is disingenuous to say the least. You don’t have to engage in any of that stuff. I do concede, again, that the ability to shut if all off was too long in coming or too poorly advertised and the Substack team tripped over their dick with the whole Notes rollout. I also concede that Notes is quickly becoming exactly what its liberal critics make of it, but then, that’s as much their fault as anyone else’s. Substack is doing all of this with an eye to the stock price; I’m guessing that they feel an integrated publishing platform and social network will have a better IPO, and they’re probably right. You could of course argue that this pecuniary motivation is more damning than if they were just committed right-wingers. But the fact remains that they’re not, and it’s so typical of smug liberal horseshit that people insist on pretending that they are. That’s just not the problem here; the actual issues are bad enough. Stop gilding the fucking lily.
Finally, let me make this weird analogy. When the Harry Potter universe game Hogwarts Legacy came out last year and became the biggest video game hit of 2023, a friend of mine got very upset about it all. The video game media had decided that the game was a referendum on JK Rowling and her controversial views on trans identity, long before it was released, and refused to consider it in any other terms. And so when the game because a huge hit, my friend took that exact narrative to heart - that the people who had bought the game were expressing their views on trans people in doing so, which meant that some 22 million people (at least) were choosing Harry Potter over trans rights. But I consoled her by saying that I would be surprised if more than one in ten of those people had the slightest idea that there was any such controversy at all. Normies love Harry Potter and normies don’t care about culture war. It may very well be the case that a good number of them would side with Rowling if given the choice, but I’m totally convinced that most people who bought that game never even thought to make that connection. I’m willing to bet Substack is the same - I highly doubt the average Substack writer has the slightest fucking idea that they’re supposed to be participating in culture war by being here, let alone the average Substack reader.
And ultimately that’s probably for the best. The 21st-century pretense that your consumer choices (like your choice of email newsletter provider) are somehow a matter of great political importance is capitalism manipulating you. You’d think the “Substack is for fascists” people would have the political education to understand that. But then, if you took capitalist consumption as an expression of political ideals away from those people… what else would they have left?