I hope the New York Times does quit Twitter. New York Times coverage has gotten a lot saner in the last year, and I think having to rely more on their base readers, rather than just cash in on viral social media clicks for individual pieces, has helped. The drive to go viral on Twitter, Facebook etc. really worsened the quality of the news media for a long time across the board
It's not a question of the corporate account quitting, it's whether the journalists stop caring. WaPo had a major blowup when one of it's most Xitter obsessed lunatics (Sonmez) decided to have a meltdown in part because the editor told the staff to lay off the site.
Also, NYTimes has a robust commenting system... it's already got most of the components necessary to be a social media site on their own. The distinction between social media / news site is only going to keep getting blurrier.
NYT and NYT reporters don't seem to engage usefully on X anyway, and a bot that posts their links will be almost as good. Maybe it can even reformat the link previews.
I agree that time off X will increase the NYT's balance and objectivity. It is genuinely valuable for the world to have more orthogonal perspectives, rather than coalescing into an "Indigo Blob" on X -- as Nate puts it.
However! The Times and Times staff should be able to extract meaningful revenue from impressions on X + dedicate some resources to creating content specifically for the platform (unless Musk specifically demonetizes them).
We bifurcated and then striated further to "reliable" news sources. To trust a major news source implicitly rather than relying on individuals...if the Times becomes FULLY sane, it will be a huge win for society.
The thing about Twitter is it is still, for now, free to use. If the alternative is greedy Substackers gouging their gullible readers, then give me Twitter all day long. You can get a digital subscription to a major newspaper, with all the news and opinion and extras that go with it, for only slightly more than the cost of one Substack. And the Substacker isn't under any actual obligation to produce content! We could all sign up for subscriptions to the Silver Bulletin and then Nate decides to never post again.
The walled gardens of social media were already a retrograde step from the freedom and independence of the early web. For those gardens' walls to be replaced by paywalls would be disastrous. Musk's tenure at Twitter has been a mixture of disappointing cowardice and self-inflicted blunders. But as long as Twitter remains free and open, it will still be preferable to the grasping commercialism of Substack.
This is a slightly unbelievable take -- if you were to subscribe to a Substack that then didn't satisfy your expectations in some way, you can always unsubscribe! The "obligation to produce content" that Substack writers are under is driven by the market for high-quality, often idiosyncratic, longform writing that you can only typically find aggregated on this website or on Medium.
Surely the bigger issue with the independent scrappy writer model that the early web epitomized is that, in contrast to the Substack model, this earlier age of the web was rife with great writers who had very little long-term incentive to keep writing; an paradigm of romantic idealistic hobby writers sounds great, but is vulnerable to churn, and the writers who succeeded in the long run were often those who compromised their own independence to join larger organizations or to make money off of sponsored content or corporate marketing.
I much prefer a model where the writers I love are completely free to write about what they want and what they independently are driven to write about -- that is the Substack model. So many great writers have been previously subservient to (or maliciously targeted by) larger corporate media entities: Nate Silver is a case in point, but you could also point to Yglesias, Scott Alexander, Freddie deBoer, etc.
If you are really a cheapskate most Substacks will give you occassional content without subscribing. That content is subsidized for you by all the people who don't mind paying.
Complete tangent off your main point, but the price theory that goes into a lot of these substackers heads is really bizarre. I don't know if they realize their competition is literally newsrooms of hundreds of people but yeah, people are rational and aren't going to pay the same price for a fraction of the content. I wonder if in the future there might be a Substack+ type model or bundling of various creators. I look forward to a day where it can be rational to support individual creators with your wallet, but we need creators to be rational about price and hope for Substack to increase monetization methods and traffic in the long run. Here's hoping.
Yes, in some ways the problem is the greed of Substack setting such an insane lower floor for subscriptions.
But then it returns to the greed of the individual writers, because there are other paid-for newsletter platforms with no or a lower minimum floor, yet they chose to come to the over-priced greedy platform instead.
Yeah, great point. I think I'm currently paying for 4 Substack subscription. I don't really want to pay for any more. So if I find somebody else I want to pay for, I'll probably cancel another.
They need to figure a way to create some sort of bundling or co-op or something.
Substack is a huge ripoff. And I just can’t give money to a group of people that platformed Alex Berenson who ended up killing a lot more Americans than Osama Bin Laden.
Twitter used to be magical. I remember being able to friend producers of the Simpsons, sports journalists, acclaimed writers, academic minds, and you would be able to have a conversation with them that they responded to on earnest like you were contemporaries.
I have had conversations with Sam Simon of the Simpsons and Brad Neely of China, IL where I could ask confirm my thoughts and ask questions. I ended up being constantly involved with sports writer George Malik about the Wings and it was great.
But eventually everyone interesting would just post a bit of bait to an article and immediately after a bunch of morons would start fighting like every comment section. No one interacted anymore. The platform was dead when the people with interesting things to say turned it into a funnel like Nate says here. I would still visit, like to get the NFL draft picks minutes before the broadcast, but hat ended as well.
When Elon bought it I knew that it was destined to become a hype machine for himself and his capitalist cronnies. But I am completely aghast that people who are tied to good journalism haven't bailed because the platform is now just yellow journalism on steroids. To associate is the equivalent of the Times buying a rack in-between the inquirer and sudoku puzzles in the checkout line.
Everyone should quit Twitter. I did the moment Elon bought it. You are only helping the world get worse by propping up X. Leave it and let it become Truth social so everyone can just ignore it. Make it so Google no longer puts it in every search page.
I wish I had the capital Elon had when he started. I have an idea to destroy all the social media ethically. But it will never happen because the world isn't designed to allow anyone but billionaires to control anything. That's what X stands for.
There are usually other ways out of suffering. Sometimes you need other people to help you find them. I take multiple medications and see a therapist myself, and years ago I wouldn't have believed how much it can help. You write so well that it would be a loss to not be able to share your voice anymore. I promise you there are other ways to cope, and that there is someone who can help you find them. If you haven't found it yet that doesn't mean it's not out there.
One of the interesting things about this article is your priors Nate: you seem to believe Elon makes statements and arguments in good faith. I think he's more like Trump, where someone's had so much money and privilege in their life that nothing matters but the troll's grin.
A lot of what Elan does is with an eye towards satisfying his ego which is wrapped up in weird religious beliefs (make as many kids as possible), doing PR for his personal indiscretions, "freespeech" so he can tarnish people at will, and good old fashion power, money, and ego-satiation.
Although yah, I've heard he's doing poorly on the money-front lately. Cheers to The Times leaving Twitter!
I think we're in this weird place right now as a country where we should be very skeptical about people speaking in good faith, but we keep giving them the benefit of the doubt because we don't know how to cope with the alternative possibility, that we're a nation of trolls.
It's striking to compare Nate's experience versus Matthew Yglesias. Both occassionally subjected to random torrents of hate/misunderstanding on Twitter while being incredibly respected by many others. Both with an iconic web platform that they lost and left for Substack. Both with significant misgivings about the way Elon Musk is running X, while not really wanting to leave X or watch X die.
The most striking difference is Nate seems a little more bitter about the negativity on Twitter whereas Matt seems a little more blase. Is this just a difference in personality? Difference in public persona? Is it just that Nate's move to Substack is a few years behind Matt's trajectory and he will start to come out of the other side of it? Or has Nate actually lost more at the hands of the Twitter drama.
I guess what I am trying to say is that Nate we love and you support you. I hope you know that the people who get what you are saying and appreciate you for saying it aren't always the ones that jump in with the commentary.
"For the Times, however, the share of traffic it gets from Twitter is almost certainly quite fractional." I was surprised that this claim wasn't accompanied by a source or data. I don't necessarily doubt that you're right but where would I even start to gain the same level of certainty you have on this? It's a critically important variable in the bet Elon's made here by knee-capping creators.
The more substack succeeds the more it will have every incentive to do what the social media companies do. It's already released its own twitter clone and it practically begs me to download its app and get right into its own walled garden. Don't make the mistake of thinking the VC money is on your side this time!
Musk in fact did the Times an unwitting favor - the algorithmic changes and his unpopularity within media have largely dissolved Twitter as the gathering place for writers and journalists. They still talk, but the throttling of links and the suppression of accounts without Twitter Blue has made the use of Twitter as the journo town square a lot more difficult. Which redounds to the benefit of the biggest publication in the world, the only space big enough to serve as the focal point of the industry.
Serious question, should NYT or WAPO provide a new Twitter? They seem to have all the business capabilities (ads, subscriptions, editorial process, coverage of the broad scales of interests). I would think they could acquire the tech at a reasonable price (Post or others). They would be well positioned to pull in the broad scale of content providers. I always thought Twitters biggest benefit/competitive advantage was the aggregation of content across all those different interests (news, politics, entertainment, sport, etc.). It's what keeps me there rather than going to an alternative.
A personally curated Newspaper for the 21st century.
TwiX may quit you by going bankrupt. Elon seems intent on transforming TwiX from the Yellow Pages into the back pages of your local, free, weekly alt paper that has dozens of advertisements for “massages.”
Ok so I'm not the only one who was getting spammed with Cheech and Chong gummy ads. I've since deleted the platform; I find that it's borderline useless between the ad spam and funky algorithm tweaking that seemed to change daily. I also don't wish to reward a Boer by making his horrible investment a little less bad. Hopefully you and the Times will join me some day.
If I see a NYT article on Marginal Revolution, or cited in a blogpost, it is a must-read. If I see a NYT article re-tweeted on Twitter, it is likely an op-ed, and worse than the next tweet. The 2015-2019 years were actually worse for the NYT in this regard. 2020 "this needs context" warnings were a steep price to pay, both in content and in sheer amount of screen volume, but it made the NYT op-eds read much more like a Twitter feed.
A friend joked that Twitter is to journalism what the downtown bar is to lawyers. NYT has the odd problem of both workers and avid readers wanting to be in the bar, and then getting pilloried when their reporters tweet racist content, criticize the paper, etc.
It's surprising to me that NYT, which I assume already has some strict policies on Twitter usage, does not simply pull its reporters off the app. NYT could continue to upload links for traffic, albeit with less emphasis on images, which seems like it would result in less clickbait. Reporters, however, are probably as good at presenting themselves on Twitter as the median Twitter user, and thus dilute the power of the brand substantially.
I hope the New York Times does quit Twitter. New York Times coverage has gotten a lot saner in the last year, and I think having to rely more on their base readers, rather than just cash in on viral social media clicks for individual pieces, has helped. The drive to go viral on Twitter, Facebook etc. really worsened the quality of the news media for a long time across the board
It's not a question of the corporate account quitting, it's whether the journalists stop caring. WaPo had a major blowup when one of it's most Xitter obsessed lunatics (Sonmez) decided to have a meltdown in part because the editor told the staff to lay off the site.
Also, NYTimes has a robust commenting system... it's already got most of the components necessary to be a social media site on their own. The distinction between social media / news site is only going to keep getting blurrier.
Yeah it probably has to for news to survive.
NYT and NYT reporters don't seem to engage usefully on X anyway, and a bot that posts their links will be almost as good. Maybe it can even reformat the link previews.
I agree that time off X will increase the NYT's balance and objectivity. It is genuinely valuable for the world to have more orthogonal perspectives, rather than coalescing into an "Indigo Blob" on X -- as Nate puts it.
However! The Times and Times staff should be able to extract meaningful revenue from impressions on X + dedicate some resources to creating content specifically for the platform (unless Musk specifically demonetizes them).
We bifurcated and then striated further to "reliable" news sources. To trust a major news source implicitly rather than relying on individuals...if the Times becomes FULLY sane, it will be a huge win for society.
The thing about Twitter is it is still, for now, free to use. If the alternative is greedy Substackers gouging their gullible readers, then give me Twitter all day long. You can get a digital subscription to a major newspaper, with all the news and opinion and extras that go with it, for only slightly more than the cost of one Substack. And the Substacker isn't under any actual obligation to produce content! We could all sign up for subscriptions to the Silver Bulletin and then Nate decides to never post again.
The walled gardens of social media were already a retrograde step from the freedom and independence of the early web. For those gardens' walls to be replaced by paywalls would be disastrous. Musk's tenure at Twitter has been a mixture of disappointing cowardice and self-inflicted blunders. But as long as Twitter remains free and open, it will still be preferable to the grasping commercialism of Substack.
This is a slightly unbelievable take -- if you were to subscribe to a Substack that then didn't satisfy your expectations in some way, you can always unsubscribe! The "obligation to produce content" that Substack writers are under is driven by the market for high-quality, often idiosyncratic, longform writing that you can only typically find aggregated on this website or on Medium.
Surely the bigger issue with the independent scrappy writer model that the early web epitomized is that, in contrast to the Substack model, this earlier age of the web was rife with great writers who had very little long-term incentive to keep writing; an paradigm of romantic idealistic hobby writers sounds great, but is vulnerable to churn, and the writers who succeeded in the long run were often those who compromised their own independence to join larger organizations or to make money off of sponsored content or corporate marketing.
I much prefer a model where the writers I love are completely free to write about what they want and what they independently are driven to write about -- that is the Substack model. So many great writers have been previously subservient to (or maliciously targeted by) larger corporate media entities: Nate Silver is a case in point, but you could also point to Yglesias, Scott Alexander, Freddie deBoer, etc.
I don't think the average Substack writer and average medium writer are comparable. The content on Medium is...lackluster at best.
Do you know if there are any Substack writers who are financially successful, who weren't already famous writers before joining Substack?
I'm just curious if Substack will be a way for new writers to gain traction, or if they have to do it elsewhere first.
If you are really a cheapskate most Substacks will give you occassional content without subscribing. That content is subsidized for you by all the people who don't mind paying.
Complete tangent off your main point, but the price theory that goes into a lot of these substackers heads is really bizarre. I don't know if they realize their competition is literally newsrooms of hundreds of people but yeah, people are rational and aren't going to pay the same price for a fraction of the content. I wonder if in the future there might be a Substack+ type model or bundling of various creators. I look forward to a day where it can be rational to support individual creators with your wallet, but we need creators to be rational about price and hope for Substack to increase monetization methods and traffic in the long run. Here's hoping.
substack baseline sub is $5 per month. you can't go lower
Yes, in some ways the problem is the greed of Substack setting such an insane lower floor for subscriptions.
But then it returns to the greed of the individual writers, because there are other paid-for newsletter platforms with no or a lower minimum floor, yet they chose to come to the over-priced greedy platform instead.
Yeah, great point. I think I'm currently paying for 4 Substack subscription. I don't really want to pay for any more. So if I find somebody else I want to pay for, I'll probably cancel another.
They need to figure a way to create some sort of bundling or co-op or something.
Substack is a huge ripoff. And I just can’t give money to a group of people that platformed Alex Berenson who ended up killing a lot more Americans than Osama Bin Laden.
Twitter used to be magical. I remember being able to friend producers of the Simpsons, sports journalists, acclaimed writers, academic minds, and you would be able to have a conversation with them that they responded to on earnest like you were contemporaries.
I have had conversations with Sam Simon of the Simpsons and Brad Neely of China, IL where I could ask confirm my thoughts and ask questions. I ended up being constantly involved with sports writer George Malik about the Wings and it was great.
But eventually everyone interesting would just post a bit of bait to an article and immediately after a bunch of morons would start fighting like every comment section. No one interacted anymore. The platform was dead when the people with interesting things to say turned it into a funnel like Nate says here. I would still visit, like to get the NFL draft picks minutes before the broadcast, but hat ended as well.
When Elon bought it I knew that it was destined to become a hype machine for himself and his capitalist cronnies. But I am completely aghast that people who are tied to good journalism haven't bailed because the platform is now just yellow journalism on steroids. To associate is the equivalent of the Times buying a rack in-between the inquirer and sudoku puzzles in the checkout line.
Everyone should quit Twitter. I did the moment Elon bought it. You are only helping the world get worse by propping up X. Leave it and let it become Truth social so everyone can just ignore it. Make it so Google no longer puts it in every search page.
I wish I had the capital Elon had when he started. I have an idea to destroy all the social media ethically. But it will never happen because the world isn't designed to allow anyone but billionaires to control anything. That's what X stands for.
Very well said.
Thank you. Would you believe I am suicidal?
There are usually other ways out of suffering. Sometimes you need other people to help you find them. I take multiple medications and see a therapist myself, and years ago I wouldn't have believed how much it can help. You write so well that it would be a loss to not be able to share your voice anymore. I promise you there are other ways to cope, and that there is someone who can help you find them. If you haven't found it yet that doesn't mean it's not out there.
call 988
One of the interesting things about this article is your priors Nate: you seem to believe Elon makes statements and arguments in good faith. I think he's more like Trump, where someone's had so much money and privilege in their life that nothing matters but the troll's grin.
A lot of what Elan does is with an eye towards satisfying his ego which is wrapped up in weird religious beliefs (make as many kids as possible), doing PR for his personal indiscretions, "freespeech" so he can tarnish people at will, and good old fashion power, money, and ego-satiation.
Although yah, I've heard he's doing poorly on the money-front lately. Cheers to The Times leaving Twitter!
I think we're in this weird place right now as a country where we should be very skeptical about people speaking in good faith, but we keep giving them the benefit of the doubt because we don't know how to cope with the alternative possibility, that we're a nation of trolls.
Since time immemorial, humans have embraced the troll as a way to survive ;)
It's striking to compare Nate's experience versus Matthew Yglesias. Both occassionally subjected to random torrents of hate/misunderstanding on Twitter while being incredibly respected by many others. Both with an iconic web platform that they lost and left for Substack. Both with significant misgivings about the way Elon Musk is running X, while not really wanting to leave X or watch X die.
The most striking difference is Nate seems a little more bitter about the negativity on Twitter whereas Matt seems a little more blase. Is this just a difference in personality? Difference in public persona? Is it just that Nate's move to Substack is a few years behind Matt's trajectory and he will start to come out of the other side of it? Or has Nate actually lost more at the hands of the Twitter drama.
I guess what I am trying to say is that Nate we love and you support you. I hope you know that the people who get what you are saying and appreciate you for saying it aren't always the ones that jump in with the commentary.
Matt, for one, has a very low threshold for blocking people. He doesn't seem to take twitter too seriously, whereas Nate apparently does.
"For the Times, however, the share of traffic it gets from Twitter is almost certainly quite fractional." I was surprised that this claim wasn't accompanied by a source or data. I don't necessarily doubt that you're right but where would I even start to gain the same level of certainty you have on this? It's a critically important variable in the bet Elon's made here by knee-capping creators.
One Substack subscriber is worth a hundred Twitter followers.
Substack > X > MSM > Facebook
The more substack succeeds the more it will have every incentive to do what the social media companies do. It's already released its own twitter clone and it practically begs me to download its app and get right into its own walled garden. Don't make the mistake of thinking the VC money is on your side this time!
Musk in fact did the Times an unwitting favor - the algorithmic changes and his unpopularity within media have largely dissolved Twitter as the gathering place for writers and journalists. They still talk, but the throttling of links and the suppression of accounts without Twitter Blue has made the use of Twitter as the journo town square a lot more difficult. Which redounds to the benefit of the biggest publication in the world, the only space big enough to serve as the focal point of the industry.
Serious question, should NYT or WAPO provide a new Twitter? They seem to have all the business capabilities (ads, subscriptions, editorial process, coverage of the broad scales of interests). I would think they could acquire the tech at a reasonable price (Post or others). They would be well positioned to pull in the broad scale of content providers. I always thought Twitters biggest benefit/competitive advantage was the aggregation of content across all those different interests (news, politics, entertainment, sport, etc.). It's what keeps me there rather than going to an alternative.
A personally curated Newspaper for the 21st century.
TwiX may quit you by going bankrupt. Elon seems intent on transforming TwiX from the Yellow Pages into the back pages of your local, free, weekly alt paper that has dozens of advertisements for “massages.”
Ok so I'm not the only one who was getting spammed with Cheech and Chong gummy ads. I've since deleted the platform; I find that it's borderline useless between the ad spam and funky algorithm tweaking that seemed to change daily. I also don't wish to reward a Boer by making his horrible investment a little less bad. Hopefully you and the Times will join me some day.
If I see a NYT article on Marginal Revolution, or cited in a blogpost, it is a must-read. If I see a NYT article re-tweeted on Twitter, it is likely an op-ed, and worse than the next tweet. The 2015-2019 years were actually worse for the NYT in this regard. 2020 "this needs context" warnings were a steep price to pay, both in content and in sheer amount of screen volume, but it made the NYT op-eds read much more like a Twitter feed.
A friend joked that Twitter is to journalism what the downtown bar is to lawyers. NYT has the odd problem of both workers and avid readers wanting to be in the bar, and then getting pilloried when their reporters tweet racist content, criticize the paper, etc.
It's surprising to me that NYT, which I assume already has some strict policies on Twitter usage, does not simply pull its reporters off the app. NYT could continue to upload links for traffic, albeit with less emphasis on images, which seems like it would result in less clickbait. Reporters, however, are probably as good at presenting themselves on Twitter as the median Twitter user, and thus dilute the power of the brand substantially.
Just curious - are Google searches for "Twitter" a good approximation of its popularity?
Theoretically, if everybody in the world had a Twitter account, Google searches for the word would head towards zero, wouldn't it?
They wouldn't because you wouldn't believe how many people enter a site's name into Google (or, here, Yandex) _each time_ they want to enter it.
The thing I liked about twitter was tweetdeck. That's gone now. I'm not giving him money. So I don't user twitter/x/whatever anymore.
Or you could just quit all social media forever:
https://sassone.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/thoughts-on-social-media/
Agreed that the tweet linked in footnote 1 is among the best (of yours or anyone else's), classic sentiment.