¡No pasarán!

The Straphanger Substack is Moving to Another Platform

I’m winding down the Straphanger newsletter on Substack. This will be one of the last emails I send out from this platform. This week, I moved all of my dispatches, the entire archive of almost 50 posts, to a platform called Ghost. Rest assured, the Straphanger dispatches will continue—they’ll just be coming from a different site.

I’ve done this because of Substack’s continuing publication of Nazi newsletters. (Not vaguely Fascistic, but full-on, 1930s-style-eugenics-advocating newsletters. I’m talking Swastikas-and-everything.) I shared some of my thinking on this in this earlier dispatch. At that point, I was mulling sticking around. But, as Casey Newton of Platformer has amply documented, the founders of Substack have acted in bad faith by taking down just a handful of these newsletters—ones with a collective readership of less than 100—while allowing the worst offenders to continue publishing.

Platformer has moved to Ghost, which is where I’ve gone too. It has a policy against hate speech, and doesn’t do Notes or publish algorithm-compiled digests of popular newsletters (which could in theory include Nazi posts). Ghost is just a platform, with no other ambitions—at least for now!—than to allow writers to publish their newsletters, and to support those writers by allowing readers to subscribe.

If you’re getting this email, you’ll also get upcoming Straphanger posts in your inbox. You probably won’t notice any difference—in fact, the dispatches will come from www.straphanger.blog, and Ghost’s name won’t appear anywhere. If you’ve already paid for a subscription, you’ll continue to have access to the archives and to each and every newsletter. I’ve been working with the Ghost staff to make sure that payments are transferred, using the Stripe system. A nice feature: Substack took 10 percent of writers’ subscription fees. I pay a monthly fee to be on the Ghost platform; if you’ve signed up for a paid subscription, 100% of what you’ve contributed will go to me, the author. (If you have any problems, please reach out, and I’ll try to resolve them ASAP.)

So don’t worry, you don’t have to take any further action: all you have to do is stay tuned. Oh, OK, mabye one thing: you could do me a solid and invite people to check out the newsletter in its new home, which you’ll find here. I think it looks pretty good—even better, in fact, than it did on Substack.

I hope this platform deals with its, er, “Nazi problem.” As I’ve written before, I’m a strong defender of freedom of expression. (My worldview was formed over the years by exposure to all kinds of writers, some of them with outlooks that, in retrospect, were odious.) But I’m also free to leave a publisher that chooses to profit from those committed to expressing hatred.

For the time being, the old posts will remain on this site. But after this one, there won’t be any new posts appearing—all the action will be happening on Ghost.

PS My other Substack, The Lost Supper, will be be making the move to Ghost in the next week or two.