Hello World

On platform choices, professional responsibilities, and picking your battles

I recently posted a short note about moving from Wordpress to Substack after ten years on WP. A number of people replied, commented, or DM’d me to express their dismay, along the lines of “why are you supporting Nazis?”. A few begged me to reconsider.

So I did. I paused the work I was doing on migration and setup, and I paused the post I was drafting on Substack. I read the LeaveSubstack site, and talked with its author (thank you, Sean 💜). I had a number of conversations with people I consider experts in content creation, and people I consider stakeholders (my coworkers and customers), as well as my own personal Jiminy Cricket, Liz Fong-Jones. I also slept on it.

I’ve decided to stay.

I said I would share my thinking once I made a decision, and it comes down to this: I have a job to do, and I haven’t been doing it.

I have not been doing my job 💔

I’ve gone increasingly dark on social media over the past few years, and while this has been delightful from a personal perspective, I have developed an uncomfortable conviction that I have also been abdicating a core function of my job in doing so.

The world of software is changing—fast. It’s exciting. But it is not enough to have interesting ideas and say them once, or write them down in a single book. You need to be out there mixing it up with the community every day, or at least every week. You need to be experimenting with what language works for people, what lands, what sparks a light in people’s eyes.

You (by which I mean me) also need to be listening more— reading and interacting with other people’s thoughts, volleying back and forth, polishing each other like diamonds.

How many times did we define observability or high cardinality or the sins of aggregation? Cool. How many times have we talked about the ways that AI has made the honeycomb vision technologically realizable for the first time? Uh, less, by an order of thousands.

Write more, engage with mainstream tech

My primary goal is to get back into the mainstream of technical discussion and mix it up a lot more. Unfortunately, to the extent there is a tech mainstream, it still exists on X. I am not ruling out the possibility of returning, but I would strongly prefer not to. I’m going to see if I can do my job by being much more active on LinkedIn and Substack.

My secondary goal is to remove friction and barriers to posting. Wordpress just feels so heavyweight. Like I’m trying to craft a web page, not write a quick post. Substack feels more like writing an email. I’ve been trying to make myself post more all year on WP, and it hasn’t happened. I have a lot of shit backed up to talk about, and I think this will help grease the wheels.

There are platforms that are outside the pale, that exist solely to platform and support Nazis and violent extremists—your Gabs, your Parlers. Substack is very far from being one of those. All of these content platforms exist on some continuum of grey, and governance is hard, hard, hard in an era of mainstreaming right wing extremism.

Substack may not make all the decisions I would make, but I feel like it is a light dove grey, all things considered.

To be excessively clear: I do not believe that I am “supporting Nazis”. I feel a lot more ethically compromised by the $15.99 I spend on YouTube every month than the $0 I spend on (or receive from) Substack. You, of course, are welcome to disagree.

Some mitigations

I have received some tips and done some research on how to minimize the value of my writing to Substack. Here they are.

• Substack makes money from paid subscriptions, so I don’t accept money. Ever.

• I am told that if you use email or RSS, it benefits Substack less than if you use the app. RSS feed here.

• I will set up an auto-poster from Substack to Wordpress (at some point… probably whenever I find the time to fix the url rewriter and change domain pointer)

I hope these will allow conscientous objectors continue to read and engage with my work, but I also understand if not.

A vegan friend of mine once used an especially vivid metaphor to indignantly tell us why no, he could NOT just pick the meat and dairy off his plate and eat the vegetables and grains left behind (they were not cooked together). He said, “If somebody shit on your plate, would you just pick the shit off and keep eating?”

So. If Substack is the shit in your social media plate, and you feel morally obligated to reject anything that has ever so much as touched the domain, I can respect that.

Everyone has to decide which battles are theirs to fight. This one is not mine.

💜💙💚💛🧡❤️💖,
charity.