Post

Since I get asked this on occasion I may as well address it in its own thread (and later link it to my pinned post). Why does this labeler only label individual posts, not accounts? Journalists may eventually migrate from Substack to another platform and I don't actively monitor this. 1/

I really want to encourage people to host newsletters elsewhere, so this labeler is more likely to have false negatives (i.e., fail to label a link to a Substack) if it encounters any issue with a link. If Johnny Journalist suddenly leaves Substack I don't want their posts to still get labeled 2/

simply because Johnny Journalist's entire account has been labeled. The default moderation setting on this labeler is info/warn but some people set it to "hide" which hides all posts with the label. Therefore they would never see posts from an account with an account-level label. 3/

Even if Johnny Journalist hosts their newsletter on Substack, they may post useful information and links to articles/resources/etc that don't lead to Substack. Those posts should not get labeled, but an account-level label could confuse people. 5/

Plenty of people on this platform post links but don't have their own newsletter on Substack. I don't want them to get slapped with an account-level label just for reading and sharing things hosted on Substack. 6/

"But you could make a separate label to use for accounts!" I could. I still stand by all the above reasons for why I don't want to. Thank you for reading and for boycotting Substack! 7/7