Moving to Buttondown
Saying goodbye to Substack
Hi everyone, welcome to Adventures in History and Video Games... on Buttondown!
As far as I can tell, there won't be a terribly obvious way to notice I moved my newsletter, though you will notice the design elements have changed. Hopefully everyone has made it over; and I hope you don't mind.
I thought I'd write a short post for a couple of reasons. I wanted to make sure you knew that I had moved from Substack to Buttondown, first of all. Secondly I thought it was worth explaining why I did it.
I have been thinking about this for a while. Substack has a content moderation problem, which particularly blew up towards the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024. Most famously, Substack lost Platformer, a particularly successful tech newsletter. Since then the scale of that problem, the salience of that problem for users... that will shift from person to person. For me, the salience became enough. In the last few months I've been trying to lessen my dependence on larger companies; I have started buying goods directly from companies whenever possible rather than through Amazon, for example. And the most recent flare-up of the issue rubbed me up the wrong way. Hamish McKenzie, a co-founder of Substack, complained in response to a Substack user bringing up Nazis and other repugnant types that "I literally never see them" and said he saw worse things on Bluesky and other platforms.
Well, that's just not good enough, I'm sorry. It was a mealy mouthed attempt to get around the actual issue at best. At worst, it was pretty grim; McKenzie seems personally insulted, which I just don't think is good enough. Perhaps in this particular case the questioner was aggressive and he’s a little sick of it. Well, I’m afraid he has to do more, and the willingness to invoke a straw man argument is disappointing. So I'm moving on.
This newsletter is VERY small. I am grateful to you all! I will miss aspects of Substack. And I certainly don't judge people who enjoy that ecosystem. I have some subscriptions to Substack newsletters that I have no intention of cancelling. Good luck too, I suppose, to anyone who wants to cultivate an economic existence that doesn't support anything unpleasant, however indirectly.
With this shift I do want to write more. I hope you'll enjoy it. Perhaps the newsletter will grow a little. Let's see what happens. Thanks for bearing with me. Next time you hear from me I will be talking about video games again.