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helps me a ton if you surrender your email to my blog!! free version is great, but the paid sub gets you an exclusive weekly blog 😎

theguardian.comRevealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newslettersExclusive: Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism

Jake, I'd like to ask. Are you aware of Substack's stance re: hosting nazi newsletters and articles on their site? Instead of taking this content down and banning the accounts that post it, the platform has simply continued taking its cut of their revenue. www.theguardian.com/media/2026/f...

I've been a fan of the pod for a while now and you and Peter's work holds great value for me—but that's exactly why I feel I *have* to ask. Have you considered hosting your personal writing on a different platform? If not migrate outright just yet, would you consider mirroring your posts elsewhere?

as a reader, I would rather not have to give substack any more traffic, ever. as *your* reader, I would love to support your paid work, but I refuse to do so if it would mean that any small amount of the money went directly into substack's pockets.

Obviously, there's other means of supporting you and Peter, like your Patreon, and I'm not *demanding* that you let me pay you differently just so *i* can have a clean conscience. But I figured that your readers should probably voice their problems with the platform that hosts you, if they have any.

Thanks for asking sincerely. I am aware of this, and I think Substack deserves criticism for it. Where I struggle is with what, absent a specific organized campaign with demands and a theory of change, me leaving Substack materially accomplishes.

Substack has become one of the few places where I’ve managed to build a real audience and turn my writing into material support for myself. I’ve had to create that success largely on my own, in places where institutions and even supposed allies have not offered me equivalent opportunities.

There’s a larger question here about where this standard ends. If the principle is that I shouldn’t use a platform that hosts or profits from Nazi content, does that mean I also need to leave YouTube? Twitch? Other enormous platforms that have hosted and monetized hateful or extremist material?

15/9/26, 11:21 pm0 reposts3 likes

I thought about this while writing my first set of replies. In this specific case, I would argue that Google, Amazon, Meta & co. have all reached such extreme levels of profits and overall influence that they are too large to completely escape from. Whereas Substack has not.

I understand that building your platform must have taken years of tremendous effort, and you depend greatly on your writing reaching your audience. But we are not yet at a point that Substack has absorbed the near-totality of online writing into itself, or where only they can sustain such a service.

Ultimately, if you don't see this as worth doing at an individual level, I don't think I have anything I could say to persuade you otherwise. I simply believe that distancing yourself, within reason, from platforms like Substack is all the more valuable *because* you are a professional writer.

You're not just *some* individual. This is, in part, your profession. I would not expect you, or anyone else, to scrub their blogs clean overnight just out of principle—but I believe there is a path towards diminishing your dependence on Substack that does not cost you in immediate reach.

I’m very receptive to how collective action can produce change. But I’m wary of politics becoming a series of individual purity tests where the primary tangible result is that people with relatively little institutional power voluntarily give up the platforms they’ve managed to build.