Our livelihoods depend on a ratings system that must change.
It was the last job of the night. At 9 o’clock in New York City, my Instacart Shopper app alerted my phone: an order for a store in Brooklyn with delivery to Manhattan. I was exhausted from a long day of shopping and delivering 24-packs of Poland Spring bottles and gallons of milk jugs, but I decided to chase the extra $30 and deliver to Jill on the Upper West Side. [Author’s note: Details have been changed to protect her privacy.]
The order was typical, but there were several out-of-stock items given the time of day, which I messaged Jill about through the app to no response. Hoping for the best, I dropped off the order. To my chagrin, the next morning a four-star rating appeared on my phone, which in the world of Instacart shoppers meant that I was effectively facing a massive pay cut.
Instacart does not give us insight into whom our low ratings come from, only a dose of paranoia and anxiety to figure it out and save our income. So, out of desperation and a sense — given my deliveries of the day before — that Jill was the rater in question, I drafted her a letter explaining how, thanks to Instacart’s ratings system, a rating like hers can destroy a shopper’s livelihood.
For a minute, I thought about dropping it off at her apartment, but then reality sunk in. Such a letter might appear extreme, accusatory, or aggressive, as well as make matters worse. I didn’t even know whether Jill was actually the customer who rated me. At the same time, the repercussions of four-star ratings have left me with little choice but to tell others about what it’s like on my side of the app.
I have been shopping for Instacart for eight months and usually work 40 hours per week to meet my expenses. As a commission gig, it felt like an opportunity to make more money than an hourly wage entry-level job in the entertainment industry, where I am pursuing a career. Yet relying on the app for income has illuminated to me the divisiveness of platforms that facilitate services such as Instacart. As a shopper, I believe the app perniciously prevents genuine communication between the two parties using it, while arming one with the capacity to truly punish the other in a way my customers might never know.
Instacart is a third-party app, similar to Uber or Airbnb but for grocery delivery. Just like other gig economy platforms, the app has two sets of users: those who order groceries and those who shop and deliver them. What transpires between shoppers and customers feeds on a precarious ratings system where a shopper’s wages tremble on a razor-thin margin of error. Someone in college with a 3.9 GPA would be considered an exceptional student, and an Uber driver with a 4.8-star rating is a trusty motorist, but an Instacart shopper whose rating falls to even 4.96 out of five stars could struggle to pay rent for the next month or even two.
The way Instacart works is this: A handful of orders appear on the shopper dashboard, and shoppers choose which orders they wish to fulfill, typically by how much pay the order promises. However, shoppers with higher customer ratings get first pick — the higher-paying orders. Even though shoppers in the, let’s say, 4.9- to five-star range provide virtually the same quality service, those even slightly below a perfect five-star rating can slip to orders that pay significantly differently.
Although Instacart automatically drops the lowest rating, I know that just one additional rating still has an impact: When I received a four-star rating after dozens of five-star ratings, my average dropped to 4.96. With it, my newly limited batches shrank my average earnings from $25 per hour to much lower, likely below New York’s $15 minimum wage. I became a bottom feeder, seemingly receiving the leftover orders that, by other shoppers’ definition, paid an amount that was not worth accepting.
For many, the urge to rate a delivery service four stars or lower makes sense on the surface. If the service did not deliver on its promise, the customer has the right to report and penalize this service — or, in this case, the worker.
A ratings system allows customers to feel safe using the service, filtering out any untrustworthy employees from handling your personal tasks. However, minor mistakes on several orders that might warrant a stern talk from a manager should not be enough to slash a worker’s wages. In my experience, however, this has been the case when receiving anything less than a five-star rating as an Instacart shopper.
For me, and for so many of the other shoppers I’ve talked to, a five-star rating versus a 4.96-star rating could mean the difference between a shopper who can pay the bills and one who cannot. That this might not even reflect the quality of their shopping but merely the bad luck of serving a punitive customer seems unjust. Shoppers should not have to live in financial and mental paranoia that one or two customers will demolish their income, livelihood, and family security with the swipe of a finger.
Ultimately, though, most customers aren’t aware of how harmful the ratings system can be. It is Instacart’s responsibility — and the responsibility of the many tech companies that pit workers against each other for profitability.
Though Instacart’s ratings system can lead to particularly perverse outcomes, it is indicative of a larger problem. Communicating through these apps on our devices, especially in a transactional way, will always put workers at the mercy of tech corporations, with little tolerance for small misunderstandings that can have serious ripple effects. It is a troubling precedent as third-party platforms increasingly become how we do not only business but also anything else in our modern world.
Unfortunately, my public service announcement will likely not enlighten Instacart on this matter. I believe it fully understands the toll of ratings on shoppers. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit last year, Instacart gained popularity as Americans feared crowded supermarkets. With a new spotlight shining on the app, Instacart suspended the effect of customer ratings on shoppers in March. Capitalizing on an emotional moment, Instacart then reversed the move months later as the pandemic raged on.
Then, just as 2021 began, a dozen in-store shoppers — salaried shoppers who pack “delivery only” orders for full-time shoppers like me to pick up — attempted to unionize at a Mariano’s in Skokie, Illinois. Instacart supported their right to do so, but shoppers reported that high-level Instacart managers soon appeared at Mariano’s touting “anti-unionization literature.” The unionization was eventually successful, but Instacart ultimately included 10 of these shoppers in a mass layoff of 1,900 in-store employees at select supermarket chains in January, which potentially had a chilling effect on other in-store workers considering unionizing.
As the pandemic has pushed Instacart to publicly care about shoppers, many, like me, feel it privately neglects us. Shoppers still suffer and work in the same treacherous environments that leave them vulnerable to Covid-19. As shoppers have witnessed the app fine-tune labor issues — such as a wage policy that counted shoppers’ tips toward their guaranteed base pay rather than paying them out directly — it often feels like Instacart thrives on a power dynamic of punishment and command between shoppers and customers. Customers possess a near-godlike judgment over shoppers, who never fully know which customers rated them and why, while it seems to me that customers don’t know that their ratings can have such drastic effects on shoppers’ incomes.
While some people are genuinely ruthless raters, I believe the reason most Instacart customers submit lower ratings stems from the app itself, including the fact that shoppers cannot rate customers for their own conduct.
Unlike Uber, where both parties can rate each other and drivers can get a sense of which passengers are more likely to drunkenly vomit in the backseat, Instacart shoppers cannot warn each other about customers who make their order a shopping hell.
In some cases, we must wait up to an hour in crowded supermarkets full of people coughing — our parking spot expiring — waiting for a customer to respond, knowing they may penalize us for any unseen messages about refunds and replacements. Instacart customers, conversely, can act as neglectfully as they please — being unresponsive to shopper messages, canceling the order as we deliver (which results in lost tips, sometimes up to 75 percent of our total pay) — without penalty.
Instacart doesn’t do a great job of notifying customers through the app about issues beyond a shopper’s control, like replacements or missing items, putting the onus on shoppers to communicate this. A large portion of my customers do not respond to my in-app messages about out-of-stock items, which are part of virtually every order, and on the occasions they answer my calls, they are often shocked to learn I have sent them a plethora of messages in the app.
If a customer is distracted or not tech-savvy, they can miss every message from a shopper about out-of-stock groceries, only to receive a bag of replacements and missing items, leading them to believe the shopper botched the order. Though Instacart says it removes low ratings if the customer’s feedback is a reason outside of the shopper’s control, such as an app outage, it also allows customers to choose among a variety of reasons for their low ratings. The limited protections Instacart flashes are like sweeping up dust in a burning building, overlooking their larger power structure where one party is at the mercy of another.
This stark reality highlights a dark side to Instacart’s old advertisement that shoppers can “earn up to $25 per hour”: Just as I surpassed that average, four-star ratings brought me right back down below it. I was first told by Instacart support that the closest way to recover those high-paying orders and dispute a rating is to contact a support team member in the app or file a complaint with the fraud department.
I, as well as other shoppers I have spoken to, have watched complaints sit in queues for weeks or even months, while support agents have told us different time frames for addressing these reports. I was even told by another agent later that there is, in fact, no way for a shopper to remove a rating, that we can only work our way out of it by taking on more orders.
Instacart’s policy is that a shopper must complete a whopping 100 orders — roughly a month of work — following any rating in order to erase it. Despite Instacart assuring shoppers their first low rating is removed, this policy means it takes only two ratings out of 100 orders to potentially harm our wages.
After Vox reached out to Instacart (the company declined to comment on the record), the company released an update last week about the measures in place to help shoppers with its medieval ratings system, such as automatically forgiving the lowest rating. But to someone who has been a full-time shopper for almost a year and knows the ins and outs of these policies — I have experienced the brunt of them — the update felt disingenuous. Instacart mentions at the end that “there may be small pilots and adjustments in the coming months.” I am rooting for Instacart to do it, but I will hold my praise until I see it.
At this point, you might be wondering why I would stay working at a job like this. Like many shoppers, I do enjoy the process of shopping, the autonomy of accepting orders, and the flexibility of the hours. Some transactions can be touching when I have the opportunity to deliver to a customer who is clearly in need of this service, such as a single parent at home with their child or anyone unable to carry 40 pounds of groceries up the stairs.
However, Instacart has chosen to highlight the flip side of this concept, leaving interactions like those few and far between. More commonly, a class war of ratings prevails. The Covid-19 pandemic only accentuated the tension of ratings and forced Instacart to reveal — as another shopper put it — those who can afford to stay home and those who cannot.
Instead of truly connecting customers and shoppers, Instacart exposes the power dynamic between us. This tension divides us as humans, each side walled off from genuine communication through the threat of a rating. While shoppers are aware of what we sign up for, the “we appreciate essential workers” signs on the windows of the wealthy residences we deliver to become tiresome when their ratings do not reflect it.
Sadly, so long as our future is ruled by a similar fleet of third-party apps, the two parties actually using them will drift further from mutual understanding, always viewing each other based on the designs of a middleman making a profit. This digital reality conditions us to expect our every need to be satisfied instantly, distancing us from what others endure to deliver it. In turn, it is easier to pin our frustrations about the unrealistic promises of these apps on the workers immediately carrying them out. But in rating some employees as “bad apples,” we ignore the companies that might be rotting trees and instead keep their business model alive.
The ratings system feels like a way of teasing eager workers with high-paying orders before luring them into low wages. At any given time, countless shoppers with low ratings are accepting orders that amount to a wage they might not otherwise agree to in order to claw their way back to the high-paying orders they relied on previously. Such a dilemma is likely why Instacart axed its old claim that shoppers could “earn up to $25 per hour,” as many felt sustaining that pay was unrealistic.
Instacart is a microcosm of a more pernicious future where consumers believe a utopia can exist for themselves without creating a dystopia for someone else. On the other side of each transaction, though, in the case of Instacart, is a shopper politely fearing a low rating.
Even reviews for the positive interactions, which I cherish, that yield grateful feedback on the app are deleted when they fall outside the 100-order range. The ratings system so much defines the experience of the platform that I often feel judged not as a shopper or person, but like an updated version of myself, a sum of my recent ratings — a four-star version of myself. I do not want to move into a future where we view others and ourselves that way.
In the end, it was this tension that made it inherently hostile and uncomfortable for me to deliver a letter to Jill asking her to reconsider her rating. Instead, I messaged an Instacart support agent about the issue. Following our chat, I was taken aback when the app forced me to rate the agent and our interaction.
In all honesty, my instinct was to rate them one star — the agent did nothing to help me, and this was seemingly the only place I could make my voice heard. But I stopped myself, knowing how these ratings systems might work and that my low rating would hurt them. I understand that ratings pit us against each other, and this is core to Instacart’s success. My hope is for customers — and maybe the company — to understand this too.
Ehud Sopher is a screenwriter and director based in New York City.
How capitalism and the pandemic destroyed our work-life balance.
As we confront the one-year anniversary of the US locking down in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are also confronting the one-year anniversary of America choosing work above all else.
Many of us stopped seeing our families and friends, while accepting without question the idea that we would not stop working. We stopped going to theaters and restaurants, but we did not stop working. We stopped going to offices, but we did not stop working.
Our government could have paid people to stop working and stay home, where they could not catch the virus. It did not; it told service workers they were essential and sent some of them out to risk their lives working instead, and then half a million people died.
We were forced to choose between our health and our jobs. Most of us chose our jobs; those who dared to choose their health instead were offered almost no resources. When companies shut down and jobs vanished, the unemployed among us had to pry vanishingly tiny benefits out of an overtaxed and underfunded system only to be told they should really go out and find new jobs.
Those of us who were lucky enough to have jobs we could do from home brought our work into our living rooms, our kitchens, our bedrooms. We pivoted. We shared strategies for how to be productive and overcome the stress of trying to work during a global health emergency. We challenged ourselves to meet and even exceed our pre-pandemic goals, against unfavorable odds. Despite everything, we prioritized work.
America has treated work as a sacred object throughout this past year, as something that is valuable for its own sake: more valuable than the money with which it is meant to provide us, more valuable than contact with our loved ones, than our mental health, than our lives, than the lives of our neighbors. We have treated work as something to be taken home and cherished.
Work is our lover. And this year, we took it to bed.
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In 2011, the scholar Melissa Gregg published a three-year ethnographic study of the professional lives of a group of knowledge workers in Brisbane, Australia. Titled Work’s Intimacy, Gregg’s study found that as mobile technologies like laptops and smartphones and wifi proliferated, and as jobs became more precarious and subject to mass layoffs, office workers had begun to experience their entire lives as work-centric.
Everyone Gregg spoke to believed that it was their personal, individual fault that their work took up so much of their lives: It was because of their personalities, or their specific situations. It wasn’t because of anything work had done to them.
One worker told Gregg it was her “own style” that saw her checking her email outside of her paid work hours, because it “gives me a peace of mind.” Another said she felt grateful that her part-time job allowed her to spend time with her kids, and so “I don’t mind working extra on those other days [for which she is not paid, while she is also watching her kids], particularly just keeping an eye on things so that it works.” Receiving new deadlines at 5 pm was just “the nature of project work,” said a third.
Gregg outlines specific strategies that corporations use to engender this sense of personal obligation to work in their employees. People naturally form bonds with their colleagues, and then they understand themselves to be a team and want to put in extra work so as not to let their teammates down. And then corporations take advantage of that human social bond. Meanwhile, a decentralized management structure means that the manager who failed to hire adequate staffing so as not to overwork existing employees becomes invisible, and thus blameless. When you have to work an extra shift because your boss is caught shorthanded, it becomes your responsibility, not the responsibility of a company that didn’t prepare itself.
There’s also the issue of self-identity. People in knowledge professions identify with their jobs, and typically want to present themselves to the world as competent and dedicated professionals. When they understand that being a competent and dedicated professional means working at all hours, they work at all hours.
And then mobile technology brings work into our homes, rendering it inescapable. “The coerciveness of communications technologies,” Gregg writes, “is their capacity to enhance a pre-existing psychological connection to the job, just as the convenience of the devices allows work to take place in more and more places.” Our culture makes us already disposed to spend our leisure hours thinking of work, feeling obligated to it — and then our technology provides an added incentive to just go ahead and do that work, no matter where we are or what time it is.
What we’re left with is a situation in which workers in knowledge professions find ourselves thinking of work at all times, obsessing over it, devoting ourselves to it, even in our most private and intimate settings, even when we say we want to be thinking of other things. What is this experience, Gregg asks, but the experience of being in love?
“Classic definitions of love see the beloved as ‘the only important thing’ in life, compared to which ‘everything else seems trivial’ … leading to ‘the sense that one is in touch with the source of all value,’” Gregg writes. “A significant number of participants in this study spoke about work using language very similar to these tenets.”
To be sure, Gregg adds, just as often, the people she spoke to talked about work in terms of “efficiency” and “productivity.” But, she argues, this attention to efficiency seemed to exist for its own sake, not to make room for anything new. “The time spent engaged in work-related tasks regularly rivaled or came at the expense of other experiences,” she writes. “There was often little time for the very domestic or leisure pursuits we might consider to be the rationale for needing to be efficient in the first place.”
It makes sense to be obsessed with your job if you’re not sure you can get another one easily. But that, too, Gregg argues, is part of the coercion of modern office work in our era of mass layoffs, and just one more way we are pushed to treat it as a love object. “Precarity,” she writes, “is another manifestation of work’s intimacy.”
We obsess over our jobs because we know we can’t count on them. So we keep thinking about them after we leave the office, and in the end we find ourselves unable to get them out of our minds, like a bad boyfriend.
Gregg was writing from 2008 to 2011, in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 recession. But her conclusions about post-recession knowledge workers in Australia seem to be if anything more relevant to pandemic-era office workers in the US, because the pandemic has only exacerbated the issues she identified.
Our colleagues are some of the only human contact we have left, so of course we feel extra loyalty toward them. Our work identity is all that is left to us when other activities are forbidden, so of course we feel compelled to think about it even when we are off the clock. Layoffs have cascaded across the country, so of course we feel more insecure than ever.
And now work doesn’t only leave the office to sneak into our houses for a little idle email-catchup here and there.
Work is in our homes all the time now. Work has very literally gone to bed with us. Work wants to have a serious talk about where this relationship is going.
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Our tendency to treat work like a lover is the result of centuries of social conditioning and systemic incentives that few of us have the power to redirect on our own. The only way to fix these problems, to let something besides the labor we sell to our employers be the loved object at the center of our lives, is to pursue systemic change: union protections, labor law reforms, repairs to our social safety net that mean we don’t have to obsess over the precarity of our jobs.
But while we are pursuing systemic change, we do all still have to live in our existing, not-yet-changed system. So what options do we have for surviving in this system in a pandemic year? How do we find a way of living our lives that doesn’t revolve around a fetishistic obsession with work?
There are a few possibilities for survival in Jenny Odell’s 2019 book How to Do Nothing, a manifesto of sorts against what Odell calls “the attention economy.” That’s the idea that we should be caught up in our work, our screens, and everything else that capitalism wants to sell to us or extract from us at all times.
“We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations,” Odell writes, “and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found.” And so the “nothing” in Odell’s title is not really nothing, but is instead something that capitalism understands to be valueless. It’s time apart to think, reflect, connect, and converse. Time that does not go into producing goods to be sold or into buying goods from other people.
Odell argues that we can create that time through a conscious turning away from our screens and the pursuit of physical context, both in our neighborhoods and in our natural landscapes. “I propose that rerouting and deepening one’s attention to place will likely lead to awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community,” she writes. “From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of ‘doing nothing’ is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.”
Odell’s logic suggests that to prevent work from invading the time in which we are not paid to do it, we must be intentional about what we do in our leisure time. So instead of scrolling listlessly through Facebook and Twitter and Instagram in search of frictionless connection with other people, we can join mutual aid groups and form genuine bonds with our actual neighbors, in person. Instead of passively accepting whatever entertainment our screens offer us while we plug away at off-hours work, we can become interested in the natural landscape all around us, in the weeds that sprout up from the cracks of our sidewalks and the birds that nest on our telephone wires. And this shift in attention, Odell argues, will allow us the time and space to form richer, more nourishing connections with the world in which we live.
To turn away from work and the technology that enables it is, in this moment, an act of extreme privilege. But Odell argues that if we have the ability to push back against the systems that teach us to build our lives around work, then we have an ethical duty to do so.
“Wherever we are, and whatever privileges we may or may not enjoy, there is probably some thread we can afford to be pulling on,” she says. “Sometimes boycotting the attention economy by withholding attention is the only action we can afford to take. Other times, we can actively look for ways to impact things like the addictive design of technology, but also environmental politics, labor rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, anti-racism initiatives, measures for parks and open spaces, and habitat restoration — understanding that pain comes not from one part of the body but from systemic imbalance. As in any ecology, the fruits of our efforts within any of these fields may well reach beyond to the others.”
To withhold our attention from our work and from our screens may make us feel guilty, as though we are somehow cheating. But that shouldn’t be surprising: We’ve been taught to treat work as a loved one. So turning our attention away from it, to other and more valued objects, would be a kind of adultery.
Toward the end of How to Do Nothing, Odell describes driving down a highway outside Santa Cruz, coming around a corner, and suddenly seeing a nature preserve filled with hundreds of birds. “Unexpectedly,” she writes, “I started crying.” She felt an overwhelming connection with the birds who lived in this refuge, a terror that it might be destroyed, and a sense that by preserving the birds and the refuge, she could somehow preserve herself. And she had a very clear sense of the right term for this sense of connection.
“It’s a bit like falling in love — that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else’s, that you are no longer your own,” she says. “But isn’t that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them. How much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way!”
As Gregg recognized, our technologies are coercive. They conspire with capitalism to make us feel that we should spend all our time gazing at our screens, absorbing frictionless, context-less ideas. But Odell suggests that if we are able to build connections to the world outside of the attention economy, we will find our screens less compelling — and that this shift, too, will be an act of love.
“I find that I’m looking at my phone less these days. It’s not because I went to an expensive digital detox retreat, or because I deleted any apps from my phone, or anything like that. I stopped looking at my phone because I was looking at something else, something so absorbing that I couldn’t turn away,” Odell writes. “That’s the other thing that happens when you fall in love. Friends complain that you’re not present or that you have your head in the clouds; companies dealing in the attention economy might say the same thing about me, with my head lost in the trees, the birds, even the weeds growing in the sidewalk.”
We are, hopefully, only months away from reaching herd immunity in the US. But when this pandemic ends, the structures will still be in place that brought us to this relationship with our work, this fraught and fetishized intimacy with our jobs and with getting enough done, this belief that this pursuit is worth more than our lives.
We do not have to be trapped in an endless, stifling love affair with our own labor. We can build our lives around other things, things that matter more to us: our loved ones, our communities, the world in which we live. We can try to reform our labor system.
We can start by teaching ourselves how to turn away from work.
The newsletter startup’s new controversy, explained.
Jude Doyle has been publishing a Substack newsletter since 2018, not long after the startup launched. This week, the writer, who describes themselves as a “non-binary author, columnist, and all-around weirdo,” announced that they were leaving and setting up shop at Ghost, a nonprofit publishing platform.
The why Doyle left matters because it illustrates the tension Substack faces as it tries to be both a platform — where it simply sets up a place for anyone to write anything and steps away — and a publisher — where it makes choices about the kinds of writers it wants on Substack.
But the how is just as important because it illustrates a potential problem looming for the buzzy, Silicon Valley-backed company: In a very short time, Substack has supercharged the newsletter industry and helped make it newly attractive to a wide range of authors. But unlike other digital platforms, Substack doesn’t have any lock-in that will keep writers — popular or otherwise — from bolting to competitors.
And competitors — including ones from Facebook and Twitter — are definitely coming after Substack.
First the why: Doyle says they left Substack because they were upset that Substack was publishing — and in some cases offering money upfront to — authors they say are “people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”
That list includes some of Substack’s most prominent and recent recruits: Former Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald, my former Vox coworker Matt Yglesias, and Graham Linehan, a British TV writer who was kicked off Twitter last year for “repeated violations of [Twitter’s] rules against hateful conduct and platform manipulation.”
Substack’s main business model is straightforward. It lets newsletter writers sell subscriptions to their work, and it takes 10 percent of any revenue the writers generate (writers also have to fork over another 3 percent to Stripe, the digital payments company).
But in some cases, Substack has also shelled out one-off payments to help convince some writers to become Substack writers, and in some cases those deals are significant. Yglesias says that when it lured him to the platform last fall, Substack agreed to pay him $250,000 along with 15 percent of any subscription revenue he generates; after a year, Yglesias’s take will increase to 90 percent of his revenue, but he won’t get any additional payouts from Substack.
As Yglesias told me via Slack (he stopped working as a Vox writer last fall but still contributes to Vox’s Weeds podcast), the deal he took from Substack is actually costing him money, for now. Yglesias says he has around 9,800 paying subscribers, which might generate around $860,000 a year. Had he not taken the Substack payment, he would keep 90 percent of that, or $775,000, but under the current deal, where he’ll keep the $250,000 plus 15 percent of the gross subscription revenue, his take will be closer to $380,000.
Substack has been experimenting with this kind of offer for some time, but last week, it began officially describing them as “Substack Pro” deals.
The money that Substack and its writers are generating — and how that money is split up and distributed — is of intense interest to media makers and observers, for obvious reasons. But the general thrust isn’t any different from other digital media platforms we’ve seen over the last 15 years or so.
From YouTube to Facebook to Snapchat to TikTok, big tech companies have long been trying to figure out ways they can convince people and publishers to make content for them without having to hire them as full-time content creators. That often involves cash: YouTube set the template in 2007, when it set up a system that let some video makers keep 55 percent of any ad revenue their clips generated.
But YouTube has also shelled out advances for specific kinds of videos it wants from specific kinds of creators. A decade ago, for instance, it spent hundreds of millions trying to get celebrities like Madonna and Jay-Z to make stuff for the site. Facebook has done the same thing, which is why at one point the New York Times had a seven-person team dedicated to making Facebook Live videos. (Facebook’s Instagram, interestingly, has been quite slow to figure out how to share revenue with its creators.)
Like Substack, YouTube and the other big consumer tech sites fundamentally think of themselves as platforms: software set up to let users distribute their own content to as many people as possible, with as little friction as possible.
That stance usually generates criticism in cases where someone finds odious content on, say, YouTube, and then YouTube does or doesn’t explain why the clip is on the site, and then may or may not get around to taking it down. The current Substack controversy is a little different: Critics like Doyle say they’re upset that Substack is funding authors they don’t like — either directly via advance payments like the one Yglesias got, or just by letting them keep a share of subscription revenue they sell.
“Substack isn’t a self-publishing platform,” Doyle wrote earlier this month. “It curates its writers. It pays them, sometimes massively, and it makes choices as to who gets paid well and who doesn’t.”
The “Is this company a platform or a publisher or a tech company or a media company?” conversation is a long-running one that plenty of digital media companies end up participating in, willingly or not. It usually gets answered with some kind of shrug.
It’s unclear if Substack’s version of this story will work out any differently, though for right now it is generating a fair bit of negative attention: On Thursday, for example, writer Annalee Newitz told her Substack audience that the company is a “scam” and that she intends to leave. Other writers, including Elizabeth Spiers and my Vox colleague Emily VanDerWerff are voicing similar thoughts.
One sort-of solution Substack critics have suggested is having the company identify which authors are part of the Substack Pro program.
“It would allow other people on the platform to make an informed decision about whether they want to be on the platform,” Spiers told me via Twitter DM. “I think if you’re a progressive, you’d want to know if you’re publishing on a platform that is essentially subsidizing a Breitbart. And I’m sure conservatives would want to know if Substack was exclusively subsidizing leftists. … If they’re not embarrassed by who they’re publishing and see no problem with it, why won’t they make that list public?”
Like everyone else who doesn’t work at Substack, I don’t know how many authors are in its Pro program. But I would be surprised if they are consistently on one end of the ideological spectrum. A writer I know who was offered a Pro-like deal last year (but didn’t take it) is someone who is not a straight white guy and whose politics are very much left of center.
More to the point, Substack is aware that it now has a reputation as a platform for white guys who don’t want to or can’t work at traditional publications anymore, and the company is eager to point out when it has high-profile writers who don’t fit that mold. The company’s most successful author, as of late last year, is Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor who generates a daily explainer that puts the news of the moment in historical context.
“It’s good for us to manage the perception [that Substack caters to conservative writers]. It would feel really bad for me if people who would be really great on Substack don’t feel like it’s a good place to be for them,” Substack CEO Chris Best told me in December.
Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie says the company may offer more transparency for the Pro deals it signs in the future, but won’t commit to letting users know who has existing deals.
“We completely understand why some people think it would be wiser to make the list of people we do deals with public,” McKenzie told me via email. “We’re thinking of ways that might make the Pro deals more open in the future, but we also want to honor our existing commitments to the writers who signed Pro deals on the understanding that it is up to them whether or not they want to publicize their deals. Whatever the ultimate outcome might be here, we will always stick to the principle of the writer, not Substack, being in charge.”
Substack may need to work on its perception problem, but it certainly doesn’t need additional publicity in some parts of the world: Lots of people in tech and media are very aware of Substack and are trying to figure out how to compete with it.
To be clear: You don’t need to work with a company like Substack or Ghost to create and sell your own newsletter. Ben Thompson, the business and technology writer whose successful newsletter served as the inspiration for Substack, built his own infrastructure cobbling together several services; my former colleague Dan Frommer does the same thing for his New Consumer newsletter. And Jessica Lessin, the CEO of the Information, told me on the Recode Media podcast that she’d consider letting writers use the paid newsletter tech her company has built for free.
But since Substack — kickstarted with $17 million in venture money — seems to have proven that there’s a large group of people who want to write newsletters for a much larger group of readers, very big companies are now coming for the same market. Earlier this year, Twitter bought Revue, a Substack competitor, and is now starting to promote the service to potential writers:
I was making a Twitter thread and Twitter just told me I should think about making a Twitter-owned newsletter instead/as well.
— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) February 25, 2021
Reminder: Substack relies on Twitter to help source potential writers, and to find new readers for Substack writers. pic.twitter.com/QVZdQzpfGQ