Questions For You Around Substack Ethics and Norms

As I try to puzzle my way through some challenges and how I want to move forward ... and what else is true for me this week.

I utilize the Chat tool here on Substack as a spot to nightly share what is true for me that day. Sometimes it’s a deep thought, sometimes it’s a mundane one, sometimes it’s just a recap of what happened during the day. Then I invite others to share what’s true for them that day. I truly want to know so please join me there nightly to touch base! I have really been enjoying the camaraderie, vulnerability, compassion and support that people are offering in this particular space. All subscribers (free or paid) are invited there.

Question for Discussion:

That said, as you’ll see from the last entry here that I made in Chat in the middle of the night, I’m struggling with something here on Substack. Ultimately, I need to figure out what’s right from my own inner compass but I thought I would open this up for conversation here. The basic question is - what do you consider to be the norms and ethics around: paid subscriptions, sharing other people’s contents, what is shared on Notes. But let’s get into the details …

Background

I share weekly roundups of what other people are writing on Substack. These are not just links to their work but excerpts, commentary through my lens of how it all relates to art and mental health, and drawing parallels that hopefully contribute to bigger conversations. The main one is free. The weekly notes roundup is free. The writing about writing is paid.

The point is to build community, encourage people to find those who are writing work similar to theirs and connect, promote everyone to a new audience, and curate conversations along key themes. I tag every writer in the post, then I list them again on Notes when I share that post.

The Issue

This week it was brought to my attention that people are finding this work damaging or hurtful in some way. I tried pretty hard to understand their concerns but I admit I’m still metabolizing and processing because it really caught me out of left field that their experience was so different from my intention. From what I understand, these are the concerns:

• The long lists of everyone’s names in Notes is a turn off because it feels exclusive and cliquey rather than inclusive.

• Many people don’t like the marketing aspect taking place in Notes and the paid writer roundup feels too marketing for them in a tricky way.

• What felt tricky to them was that they realized they were tagged in the post but would have to subscribe to see what was shared and said about their work. They felt tricked and used.

• This led to a big conversation with a lot of people that brought up issues around paid subscriptions in general, what’s being paid for more specifically, the problem of notes as social media, and so much more. It’s a rich conversation that isn’t all about me but it got me to do a lot of thinking since it came up.

My Initial Reaction

I was honestly really sad that the experience was taken that way since it’s really the opposite of my intention. That made me want to take it seriously, engaged to understand better the gaps between my intent and impact, and see what the best course moving forward might be. I don’t think you ever please everyone and I think you have to do things the ways that are right for you … but I also believe in self-reflection and making sure my actions align with my values.

What’s Clear For Me

Here is what’s clear for me so far:

• Many people have a negative experience of those long lists of people tagged in a post being shared as a list on Notes. This felt to me like an easy one to get clear on because I don’t have any agenda for sharing those and if they are feeling more exclusive / annoying than inclusive than I’d rather just not share them. Meaning I’ll tag people in my posts, and I’ll restack relevant posts that I’m loving and share those in Notes with a tag, but I will stop doing huge roundup lists on Notes itself.

• Many people don’t want or intend to pay for subscriptions here at all. Or very little. And what’s clear for me is that those aren’t my people. I came here from Patreon for the specific purpose of growing my paid newsletter that I already had into one that will financially support me. I could delve deeper into the why but the point is that it’s clear for me.

What I’m Still Trying to Figure Out

Here are the questions that I still have, and if you have thoughts on these, I’m open to hearing all about them as I continue to metabolize and process. I’m going to drop a poll below each of those so people can quickly respond anonymously but I welcome deeper comments.

Is it okay to do a roundup of Substack posts if they are paid posts?

The biggest problem that arose out of this, as far as I understand, is with my roundups of writing about writing being for paid subscribers. The person who was tagged but then realized it was for paid subscribers felt used and tricked. I never want anyone to feel that way. However, I don’t see it that way and my attempts at trying to understand their point of view kind of stalled out.

Here’s why to me it doesn’t feel like I’m creating a paywall for those writers: I offer anyone seven days free trial. Furthermore, I offer the writers I’ve mentioned one month free. And I also offer anyone a pay what you can subscription starting at $10 for a whole year so to me that’s not putting the writer behind the paywall and unable to see what I’ve shared. To me, the writers do have free access. In my mind, it exposes those writers to an audience of people who do choose to pay for writing, so it’s good for those writers if they’re looking to find paying subscribers.

But it’s not received that way by some so I want to think more about it.

To that end, is it okay to be excerpting work from Substack writers at all?

So this is the big one that I’m trying to puzzle through. I share dozens of excerpts each week in these roundup posts. I quote them, link to them, celebrate them, share why I thought it was relevant, add my own thoughts and comments to stimulate further conversation, recommend writers to each other, and more. Overwhelmingly, people have responded positively to this.

However, this recent discussion made me wonder if the people who feel negative about it just aren’t saying anything. On the one hand, that’s fine. That’s how I am on social media of any kind - if it’s not for me, I delete and move on. I don’t engage.

But because I am sharing other people’s words, I want to make sure that I’m really thinking through the ethics and potential concerns of that. It’s not plagiarism; it’s clear whose words they are and the intention is to send people to read their full pieces. But are there writers who really don’t want their work curated in this way? If so, what’s my responsibility ... is it enough to put a note at the top of the roundup that I’ll gladly remove anyone who doesn’t want to be there? Or is there something else I should be doing?

How do I want to approach paid subscriptions?

I’ll be perfectly transparent - I never came here to write for free. I’ve been a full-time writer for almost twenty years. I believe in the subscription/patron/ model of creatives supporting each other. I won’t dig into all of my why’s but here’s my clear intention:

• I put full-time work into Substack and I’m trying to earn a full-time income from it. That means I need about 1000 subscribers paying full price annually.

• I am self-funding a year of this work in order to see if I can make it happen.

• During that year, I am offering a lot of writing for free in order to “prove” myself in this arena and really show people what they’ll be paying for if they choose to pay.

• In that process, I’m trying a lot of small “paid opportunities” to see what works best for people and what doesn’t.

• Ultimately, if I can’t get enough paid subscriptions when including free material, I’ll switch to offering only paid material. If that doesn’t work and people aren’t interested in paying to support it, that’s okay, but I’ll move on to other things.

That part is all clear. What’s fuzzy right now is whether I want to keep doing roundups at all, whether I want to do them in this same combination of free/paid or not, what else I do and don’t want to offer paid … Ultimately, I have to determine this myself but this is what I’m thinking about.

What is the purpose of Notes for me?

Finally I am pondering what purpose Notes has for me. I am clear that I won’t continue posting those long lists of tagged people. I am clear that I will continue sharing stuff that really resonates with me and I want others to see it.

But beyond that, I’m really fuzzy. It’s beginning to feel Twitter-like there and I was never a Twitter person (I was on it, I hated it, I haven’t been on it in like a decade, I’ve never missed it.) Can I continue to make positive connections there? If so, how? Do I want to? Is that where I want my time and energy going? Do I want to focus just on the essays and the Chat threads and stay out of Notes? Nobody can answer that for me but myself so I’m thinking about all of that right now.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming … Here’s the recap of what was true for me this past week or so:

I’m trying to get back to taking photo walks as a meditative form of exercise.

September 18, 2023

What's true for me today is that it's my long day of classes and I'm in between the first and second one and I am so tired. But there's not enough time to nap so I'm eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich and trying to adjust my attitude. 

The attitude is negative because I love my first class of the day but feel like the second is a complete waste of my time and it really annoys me to have to be someplace for three hours that feels like a waste of my time. But I'm choosing to be in school, in this program, and it's a required class, so I really want to work on adjusting my attitude so that I can embrace the gems and release the rest. 

However, as aforementioned, I'm tired and when I'm tired I'm cranky and it's harder to find the positives and I really just want to go get into my bed with trashy TV (Selling Sunset is what I'm about right now) and I'll get to do that but not for another almost four hours. And when I get home the dogs will want attention and at some point I have to figure out dinner and ... these are not terrible problems to have. It's okay. But it's true for where I'm at right now in my world. <3

Putting this seasoning on everything right now

September 20, 2023

What’s true for me today is that I tried to write this in chat on desktop and there’s no way for me to add a new thread there. Weird. Maybe some glitch with the new updates? Although the updates are on the app and I’m not sure how that all works. Everyone seems to be chatting in notes and threads about the app update today. Meh. I hate updates. Always. I have known too many people in tech and seen how so often updates “improve” on things that were not broken. I really just hate the culture of updates as opposed to the idea of taking your time to create something right the first time. It’s not that I don’t get it, it annoys me that this is the norm instead of the exception with apps and gadgets. But that’s a me thing. So it’s no surprise that I don’t like this one. It’s visually cluttered to me ... but I’m also aware that there are reasons these get done and I’m whatever about it. 🤷🏻‍♀️

What else is true for me today? I’m sleepy. I feel like I have a lot to do. But also I’m in bed lingering with pups starting with work I enjoy so that’s a nice thing. I feel physically gross which I think is mostly because it got ridiculously smoky here from the fires up north. I try to remember to just be grateful that we are safe from the fires themselves here but the smoke definitely feels yucky. 

Absolutely embracing autumn

September 21, 2023

What's true for me today is that I am physically not feeling well and it's a bit of a battle to make sure that doesn't creep into my emotional state. The two are very intertwined for me and I'm already feeling down as I start the day, although I've implemented some morning practices to assist me in combatting that. I realize I'm using words about fighting, which is what it feels like, and I wonder as I write this if I could reframe that in a gentler way and if that would shift something for me. What could I do instead of battling or fighting or combatting that urge to fall into a mild depressive state until I physically feel better? I will be honest in saying that I don't want to welcome or accept or make space for it. I don't want to go from combatting it to befriending it. But perhaps there's something in the middle that would feel better?

They make me happy every single day.

September 23, 2023 am

What's true for me today is that my dog is in a bit of pain and I'm feeling some dog mama guilt about it. The short version of the story is that we've been dealing with a lot of anxiety and reactivity with her and although she has a trainer and we're working on it, she's just having a hard time right now. Because of that and getting sick and the smoke and being busy with school, I really haven't gotten her outside enough. I do training and play in the house and she's been okay but just not enough outside time the last week or two. So yesterday we went to a Sniffspot (basically you airbnb a private yard for an hour if you don't have a yard of your own) and all was great and happy and then she heard a dog in the distance, went a little wild, and somehow hurt her leg. I can't tell quite what's wrong with it but she had a rough night being uncomfortable. And I feel bad because it feels like if I was getting her out for good exercise every day then she wouldn't have hurt herself. Which may or may not be true. And it's not huge guilt or anything, just tiny guilt. But it's compounded by the fact that I know she's getting spayed and bloat prevention surgery on Tuesday so she's going to be miserable in her body for a bit longer. <3 

September 23, 2023 pm

What’s also true is that I have had a challenging experience here on Substack this week that has me rethinking if/how I want to continue the roundup posts I’ve been doing. It’s bothering me enough that I am having trouble sleeping as I think it over. I feel overwhelmed and saddened by it all and am thinking I just need to take a step back, pause, and check in with what my inner compass is saying. But it’s hard to do that. Which makes me wonder if the social media nature of Substack is affecting me more than I thought. It definitely has a lot of my attention and I am wondering about the pros and cons of that for my mental health. Just things to think about. But I’d like to get some sleep now so I thought maybe I’d get it out of my head and then be able to rest. We’ll see. 

What’s true for you today?

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