why content creators are all in the bad place

If you care about what else the platform you use to create and publish hosts, and start doing you research, what you'll find will usually be disturbing.

If you haven’t watched The Good Place yet but have been planning to, or are making your way through it, this is your cue to stop reading by the end of this paragraph as there are spoilers ahead. Basically, the show revolves around the souls of four deeply flawed people who believe they ended up in Heaven after a mixup, only to realize at some point that they are actually in Hell being psychologically tortured by a team of demons running out of innovative ways to make sinners suffer as everyone who dies on Earth now finds their way there, leading the powerful demon tasked with torturing the quartet to suspect a conspiracy to condemn all humans to eternal suffering.

After highly convoluted experiments, wild goose-chases, and quests through planes of existence ranging from infinite and finite, mortal and eternal, they end up in what is more or less the waiting room of Heaven with a book of accounts showing the fates of millions of souls based on balances of the good they’ve done vs. the evil they caused. To their horror, they discover that there is no conspiracy. Humanity basically screwed itself by setting up an extremely exploitative system which turned the thoughtful and simple act of sending flowers to a loved one into a chain of pollution, road rage, wage slavery, and enrichment of pathologically avaricious sociopaths.

In short, if you wanted to summarize the message of the show in a single sentence, it would be that there’s no ethical consumption in modern capitalism. We didn’t do this on purpose, and most of us are not consciously enjoying this state of affairs — which is a major point in the show after the non-spiracy is revealed — but we participate as society gives us little choice, and it’s up to us to fix it because no one else, especially not whatever is in charge of the universe, cares to do it. We’re going to be punished either way, just pick your poison and try to get through life with as much dignity and empathy intact as you can muster.

Most of the web has probably forgotten by now, but there were several major to-dos about Substack hosting bigoted and neo-Nazi blogs, replete with comparisons to the now famous viral Nazi bar story, and encouragement to leave this platform if you use it for your newsletters. And that’s not to mention thriving Substack hubs of anti-vaxx blogs the denizens of which are long past the point of cherry-picking studies and are openly demanding public executions of doctors for administering vaccines to anyone, ever. Clearly, it’s time to move to a new platform, right? To find a place that hasn’t yet been turned into a Nazi bar. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier said than done.

Ghost is another very popular platform that’s been around for a while, having started as an open source JavaScript based alternative to WordPress before pivoting to be a competitor to newsletter engines. But if you looking through its most profitable, most read, and most in demand sites advertised as a the pinnacle of what Ghost can do for you, it takes all of a minute to be directed to The Quillette, a publication for bigots and fascists who want their favorite reactionary polemics presented in a posh, polysyllabic manner emulating academia. In other words, publications like Platformer left for Ghost to avoid reactionaries only to now be advertised side by side with them.

Another alternative, beehiiv, has the excellent Bad Astronomy newsletter, but is a big hit with crypto and AI hustlers, a space rife with fraud, hoaxes, and pump and dump schemes. WordPress also wandered into the newsletter space, although moves to its new email engine aren’t exactly smooth. But it’s also made a deal to allow generative AI companies to scrape sites hosted on Automattic’s WordPress.com platform to add to their training sets. Incidentally, this platform also powered blogs by climate change denialists, alt med gurus selling snake oil, and far right British tabloids. Want to pivot to video? Then oh boy, do I have bad news about YouTube for you.

Fine, what about the youths and that TikTok they’re so crazy about? Unlike you may have been recently told, it’s not “owned by the Chinese Communist Party” and used only to spy on Americans. (I’ll dive into the divestment-or-ban debacle in a different post.) But it’s true that Chinese interests own a fifth of the platform, another fifth is owned by employees, and 60% are owned by American and Japanese investors. At the same time, ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing, surely has ties with the CCP since it has to in order to operate in the country, and one of TikTok’s biggest owners has been on a spending spree of funding far right campaigns in the U.S.

What I’m trying to say is that when it comes to the state of the modern web, if you’re trying to find a platform that isn’t guilty of something objectionable or problematic, it just isn’t going to happen. Even the decentralized Mastodon has major problems with neo-Nazi servers and lolicon. In today’s cyber-feudalist hellscape all you get is to pick something probably sub-optimal and live with your choices as best you can. Much like the characters of the Good Place and the flawed people they represent, the ones who have given up on trying to do the right thing in a world which spits in their faces when they do. Why, it almost makes you want to take things into your own hands…

One of the curses of having learned how to code as a kid who couldn’t play games he wanted and ended up writing new versions of them himself, is that when you’re using a more or less serviceable platform that doesn’t actually give you the options that you want, or changes things on you in ways you don’t like, your first thought is to emulate Futurama’s Bender in your head and hiss “fine, I’ll build my own platform.” But then, by the time you’re basically done with the API and are putting together a front end, there is a nagging thought. How much is this going to cost me to run? Sure, there are free tiers on cloud providers, but those have usage and time limits.

You need a database instance. A platform to run your API and front end code in some sort of container for scaling. An email sending engine that negotiates all the rules for avoiding being spam trapped and verify your good intentions. On top of that, there’s security, encryption, moderation, and file management. By themselves, they’re not all that intimidating. Even altogether they’re not much of a challenge for most seasoned programmers. But all of them cost money. Also not that much, but realistically, you’re looking at $50 per month or so to get started, and that becomes hard to justify when you’re not making any money off this and have other expenses.

In fact, keeping the old blog as an archive costs about $30 a month. Stock graphics for illustrations? Another $30 per month. Software to do audio and video promos, or manipulate those graphics? Another $55 per month. Oh, and you need a domain, as well as an SSL certificate which is another $75 per year, or more depending on what the chosen domain is. Add a few more ancillary expenses and you’re looking at being a grand in the hole for the first year of running a halfway decent newsletter using your own code and tools. On top of all that, there’s traffic, as the number of people online increased 11-fold since the year 2000, and their time online more than doubled.

Back at the dawn of the web as we know it, you could get away with a tower or two as servers hosting a straightforward website that was either a collection of static HTML pages with minimal JavaScript, or written in PHP with a small database to store posts that powered early blogs and message boards. Today, the typical website is far more complex, displays far more data, provides far more options, and stores far more data, minimizing reloads and processing dozens of calls in the background, each timed to reduce loading times. With malware and bots running wild across the internet today, they also need to be more secure, resilient, and standards-compliant than ever.

This is why clouds, platforms, and networks won over a vast and loose constellation of sites like in the Web 1.0 days. Cost and convenience. They more or less solve the problems for you. Nearly half of all websites on the web are build on Wordpress not because this platform has amazing performance and code quality — I’ve looked into its structure and source code more than once and will stand by that criticism — but because it provides a plug-and-play base that handles all the basics and can add a series of scripts which can handle even more, saving a lot of time and money. This is why a lot of professional media outlets run on it as well.

It’s been ingrained for many web users to expect information for free. If they had to pay for access to the internet and also to surf it, it would’ve never taken off. But the fact of the matter is that it costs increasingly more to bring users quality content on your own, with custom built tools, ads now pay a pittance as their quality is worse by the day, and you’re now also competing with a tsunami of generative AI garbage and bots flooding search results. If you can’t make your own custom apps and sites and justify the expenses involved, you’re also relegated to platforms which see ethics as that thing that gets in the way of making maximum profit for shareholders.

So, as much as I don’t like it, and as much as I don’t trust Substack, or the majority of current platforms for that matter, until I can financially and logistically justify moving to something custom built, it seems like it may be best to just keep moving forward, and ideally grow this newsletter to that point. This may sound naive, and probably is, there may be something to be said for not just leaving a bar which has Nazis trying to become regulars, but to stay, bring friends of your own, and voicing your discontent about the Nazis until the owners decide to save themselves. The argument is on your side after all. Just look at what happened to the Nazi bar version of Twitter.

Rather than simply hop around more newsletter engines in search of the mythical non-problematic platform, I’d rather build something stable, for the long term, and to have features and tools that I want and need because the last thing I want is to find myself drifting from bar to bar just to find myself in the same situation. While I respect those who want to stick to their guns as much as possible and demonstrate how much they despise the negative associations, my hope is to work on a longer term solution while focusing on the things that will get me there. It feels about as pleasant as a surprise colonoscopy, but that’s where my mind is right now.