Substackers Against Pangram
In which Substackers Against Nazis had the last laugh.
Yo,
If you’ve been in Substack long enough, I’m sure you must have known about “Substackers Against Nazis”. A few years back, some people who were did not like that some Substack authors had national socialist sympathies threatened to leave the website. Most didn’t. Some did, only to return later on. The whole thing fizzled out, and I didn’t think much of it.
Afterwards, you have something similar, like “Substackers Against Andrew Tate”. Again, not much came out of that either. Again, I didn’t think much of it.
As you can tell, I didn’t really take those people seriously. But with this Pangram stunt…. maybe, maybe they were on to something. Just a little early.
Now the reason I didn’t take these movements of “leaving Substack” seriously is because the whole thing felt performative to me. If you’re going to leave, just leave.
So that’s why despite the name of the article, I’m not actually planning to leave. However, I am seriously considering it. Why? Because the whole Pangram thing tells me that whoever’s really in charge of Substack has nothing but contempt for whatever writing exists in this website.
Think about it, whatever you’re going to write here is going to be at the mercy of some AI, in the name of fighting “AI slop”. Did Chris Best and all the people who run Substack think their users are stupid? They must have. After all, there’s no real way to opt out of this feature (the only way to disable it is by having your work scanned in the first place, and even then you have to do it one article of the time - which tells me that they understood people will want to opt out and they do it in a way that’s more trouble than it’s worth).
But as I said before, the people who runs this site have nothing but contempt for its users.
Literally same energy as this:
Also the whole thing’s a gimmick let’s be real (remember that Substack as a private company does not share its profit margins to the public, make use of that information what you will).
I’m not saying anyone should leave Substack or even that I should leave Substack. Frankly, I don’t know what anyone should do. I’m saying that Substack does not have the best interest of their users in mind.
Act accordingly.
-Michael P. Marpaung