Yes, I encountered one of my Subscribers who is a tester. Hopefully it won’t be so heavy on censorship like straight has been I think Dr. Malone seek legal help for his own account on Substack.
So I’m taking another angle. Diversity of income. It’s great to specialise but in an era it uncertain outcomes relying on just your expertise is actually dangerous from a risk analysis perspective. It’s the straight path to singing for supper. It is why I haven’t monetized my Substack. I’m making money gardening, house painting, landscaping, design and consulting as well as lawn mowing and dishwasher.
The internet is a NET. Nets are used for catching things.
My 2 cents- DONT GET CAUGHT.
However your article is VERY important. Writers and content creators should be paid. Stripe is in finance. Money is now simply debt issuance so it is usury and it’s necessity should be restricted as much as possible.
Not really what I am used to. They have to give a reason. This is not usual, and if Stripe is going to do something different, they should tell us why.
Someone ought to be regulating it. They (Stripe) need to answer to some outside regulator. This is where regulation is necessary. If Substack doesn't care, and Stripe doesn't care you have the beginnings of dictatorship. Capitalism leads to monopoly, which defeats the principle of a "market" being in control. The theory of "Free market" has apparently now reached its end. The biggest corporations today tend to be corrupt and out to gain control over us, rather than just offer a product we can refuse. If you say to Stripe "I refuse to work with you," then you will not get paid? Because they hold control over it? Does not sound anything like the "Free market" to me. And if Substack goes along with it, what is that? "All you writers can say whatever you want but only some of you get paid." That is the highly-principled policy of Substack now? Substack will listen to Stripe. They won't listen to some peon who does not even get paid. What a corner to get put in. I never liked the idea of charging people for writing ideas, which is what I am doing so I never wanted to be a paid writer in the first place. Are people who write non-political or niche Substacks getting cancelled or just the controversial sort of person? I wonder if recipie hobby Substacks will be cancelled.
Great article, but I wouldn't expect change from Substack. To make a few points:
1. Asking a Canadian to provide additional information about themselves is particularly concerning since it is a country that persecutes dissidents and shuts down the bank accounts of protesters and political undesirables. That Stripe would do this and Substack is silent in the face of it means no one should trust either of them; should you be in actual danger for what you say, they will help the state catch you.
2. From what I recall, when Substack was pressured to censor "Nazis," it actually did end up caving and doing so banning a couple of obscure publications. However, this was hardly noticed at the time and barely anywhere reported on the fact that they did end up caving to censorship demands.
3. If Substack was serious about free speech, they would follow the lead of cypherpunks like Julian Assange, Satoshi Nakamoto, and Ross Ulbricht. Why does anyone need to provide personal identity to them in order to receive a payment at all? It shows the lack of integrity, skill, and trustworthiness of the Substack team.
Darknet markets and other services on TOR provide users ways to trade, buy, and sell all sorts of illegal goods without anyone ever having to reveal personal identity to the website itself. It is none of Substack's business who anyone is or what country they live in. So why do they make it their business?
There is no excuse for Substack not to allow payments via Bitcoin, and it should not be necessary to provide them with more info than a wallet address. Legal reasons are no excuse either: either they are not skilled actors capable of utilising the proper opsec and evading LEOs long term on the clearnet, despite there being private torrent trackers that have done so successfully for 10-20 years, or the safety of their users and their dedication to free speech are tertiary to their obedience to oppressive states that seek to prosecute people for what they do and say online.
4. For all the above reasons, Substack is not trustworthy and anyone in danger of censorship or persecution should operate using zero trust principles and without reliance on them as a payment processor in the first place, without ever using them as one or providing personal info.
In the future, it can be safely predicted they will follow the pattern of other websites and become less secure and more censorious; not otherwise, as they prioritise market and state concerns over user safety, privacy, and security, quite unlike any serious service such as DNMs, other Onion services, and torrent trackers. Whether or not it is their intent or just a lack of foresight, Substack is easy pickings for intelligent services to use to track down dissidents, and given how much data there is on all of us, this should be feared in the future as a likely course of action from our totalitarian states.
This why I will not take the leap on here. I have followed this issue and the lack of interest or action by Substack is worrying and actually unprofessional as they do not respond at all.
New to your publication but this is a problem at the credit card level. Visa/MasterCard have explicitly stated their intentions to censor speech which means that economically sustaining free speech requires other measures.
I worry that there is no good solution for as long as fintech isn't allowed to truly decentralize. There's no reason your bank can't authorize online payments with an open protocol, it's a choice at this rate.
Not convenient at all, but I doubt it's a violation of Substack's TOS to import paid subscribers from who pay in other ways. Just because it's not integrated doesn't mean it's not an option.
Visa/MasterCard are only as much of a problem as allowed to be. Ross Ulbricht got around this ages ago allowing people to trade goods in exchange for currency without the state having any say in the matter. It is why he is locked up for well over 100 years in an American dungeon never to see the light of day again. The solution is Bitcoin and operating like a good darknet market.
Bitcoin however has been well neutered by the clowns who use it as an investment rather than as a currency who have ensured the majority of it belongs to American financiers unfit for its intended purpose, and it is thus quite difficult to acquire it anonymously today or to launder your Bitcoin, but it can still be done and there is not much in the way of alternatives.
The three greatest cypherpunks: Assange for liberating information from state control; Nakomoto for liberating currency from state control; Ulbricht for liberating the exchange of goods and services from state control.
Why not monero? It has surely eclipsed Bitcoin as "peer to peer digital cash", at least in practice.
You may be interested in Mitra which is a fediverse server that allows for paid posts for Monero. I plan on experimenting with it for my new premium show!
For future reference, it's considered common courtesy to request permission to quote someone, even if what they said was posted in a public forum. Had you done so, I would have added that the Stripe account I was using was one I had taken out for another project that went belly-up, so technically it doesn't apply to your main point. Nevertheless, I wasn't especially impressed before I set up on Substack, and wasn't thrilled I was restricted to using Stripe.
Take it from an old journalist who got repeatedly fired for actually being unbiased, courtesy is always important when you're reporting, whether personally or professionally. 😉 It was always my most useful tool when I was pursuing a story.
A very well-researched piece about the constant attack on the First amendment. Thank you for this.
@Hamish, @CB and @Patrickcollison are playing on the same team, the ole game good cop, bad cop. Substack is not the playing field for free speech, it has never been. The only advantage is, that you own your subscribers. Therefore, save them daily and save your content weekly. You never know ...
I have also informed Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best several times about this problem and have also suggested — even with my help — Substack to become his payment processor. There was never an answer. This is the answer to this question.
I have posted my note from yesterday which you linked above to mostly all content providers with over 1,000 paid subscriptions. ONE answer came in, defending the system from a nice MAGA guy. I have not expected more, but I did this to uncover that you must be compliant in this simulated free speech arena if you want you grow beyond 1,000 subs.
Robert Malone spent thousands of crowd funded $s on legal defense, that is not the average publisher here.
My yesterday note proves that all big paid accounts are corrupted by the system and play the game following the rules.
I am also fascinated that nearly nobody questions the Substack prices. If you have 10,000 subs at $80 yearly, you are paying 80,000$ (EIGHTYTHOUSAND!!!) for near to nothing. For much more, you pay on Mighty Networks 2,148 yearly. But wait, I forgot, these 10k guys get even paid by Substack to join and might not pay these ridiculous fees.
For avoiding misunderstandings — I'm not concerned about high fees when I get a super service. But that does not happen here.
One last point. Always consider that the starting point of Substack was the University of Waterloo. The same place where the privacy scam BlackBerry started. I was also not liked when I told Balsillie and Lazaridis in 2011 that their technology is spyware for 3-letter-agencies. But then Ed Snowden came ...
For now, I must assume that Substack is the next BlackBerry.
But I'm always open to be convinced about the opposite.
A friend of mine was demonetized on Substack because of Stripe. I hear though they are pilot testing Apple Pay.
Thank you!! That is slightly encouraging, although not sure how Apple Pay will be on censorship
Yes, I encountered one of my Subscribers who is a tester. Hopefully it won’t be so heavy on censorship like straight has been I think Dr. Malone seek legal help for his own account on Substack.
any update to this, Charlotte? Inquiring minds would love to hear!
MORE on Stripe, please. Who OWNS, FUNDS INVESTS in and Censors it❓
Peter Thiel is apparently an investor
Listener / Reader Funded just like NPR & PBS. Are THEY also guilty of “Crowd Funding”❓❓❓
Well technically those are non for profit entities that publicly disclose everything with full transparency.
stripe teases
So I’m taking another angle. Diversity of income. It’s great to specialise but in an era it uncertain outcomes relying on just your expertise is actually dangerous from a risk analysis perspective. It’s the straight path to singing for supper. It is why I haven’t monetized my Substack. I’m making money gardening, house painting, landscaping, design and consulting as well as lawn mowing and dishwasher.
The internet is a NET. Nets are used for catching things.
My 2 cents- DONT GET CAUGHT.
However your article is VERY important. Writers and content creators should be paid. Stripe is in finance. Money is now simply debt issuance so it is usury and it’s necessity should be restricted as much as possible.
Not really what I am used to. They have to give a reason. This is not usual, and if Stripe is going to do something different, they should tell us why.
Their reasons are bogus. The reason given for The Last American Vagabond was that he is a crowdfunder, but that’s not the case.
Someone ought to be regulating it. They (Stripe) need to answer to some outside regulator. This is where regulation is necessary. If Substack doesn't care, and Stripe doesn't care you have the beginnings of dictatorship. Capitalism leads to monopoly, which defeats the principle of a "market" being in control. The theory of "Free market" has apparently now reached its end. The biggest corporations today tend to be corrupt and out to gain control over us, rather than just offer a product we can refuse. If you say to Stripe "I refuse to work with you," then you will not get paid? Because they hold control over it? Does not sound anything like the "Free market" to me. And if Substack goes along with it, what is that? "All you writers can say whatever you want but only some of you get paid." That is the highly-principled policy of Substack now? Substack will listen to Stripe. They won't listen to some peon who does not even get paid. What a corner to get put in. I never liked the idea of charging people for writing ideas, which is what I am doing so I never wanted to be a paid writer in the first place. Are people who write non-political or niche Substacks getting cancelled or just the controversial sort of person? I wonder if recipie hobby Substacks will be cancelled.
Remember back in the day they always said “vote with your dollars”, we did, turning away from operative media. Now they control your “dollar/vote”.
excellent comment
Great article, but I wouldn't expect change from Substack. To make a few points:
1. Asking a Canadian to provide additional information about themselves is particularly concerning since it is a country that persecutes dissidents and shuts down the bank accounts of protesters and political undesirables. That Stripe would do this and Substack is silent in the face of it means no one should trust either of them; should you be in actual danger for what you say, they will help the state catch you.
2. From what I recall, when Substack was pressured to censor "Nazis," it actually did end up caving and doing so banning a couple of obscure publications. However, this was hardly noticed at the time and barely anywhere reported on the fact that they did end up caving to censorship demands.
3. If Substack was serious about free speech, they would follow the lead of cypherpunks like Julian Assange, Satoshi Nakamoto, and Ross Ulbricht. Why does anyone need to provide personal identity to them in order to receive a payment at all? It shows the lack of integrity, skill, and trustworthiness of the Substack team.
Darknet markets and other services on TOR provide users ways to trade, buy, and sell all sorts of illegal goods without anyone ever having to reveal personal identity to the website itself. It is none of Substack's business who anyone is or what country they live in. So why do they make it their business?
There is no excuse for Substack not to allow payments via Bitcoin, and it should not be necessary to provide them with more info than a wallet address. Legal reasons are no excuse either: either they are not skilled actors capable of utilising the proper opsec and evading LEOs long term on the clearnet, despite there being private torrent trackers that have done so successfully for 10-20 years, or the safety of their users and their dedication to free speech are tertiary to their obedience to oppressive states that seek to prosecute people for what they do and say online.
4. For all the above reasons, Substack is not trustworthy and anyone in danger of censorship or persecution should operate using zero trust principles and without reliance on them as a payment processor in the first place, without ever using them as one or providing personal info.
In the future, it can be safely predicted they will follow the pattern of other websites and become less secure and more censorious; not otherwise, as they prioritise market and state concerns over user safety, privacy, and security, quite unlike any serious service such as DNMs, other Onion services, and torrent trackers. Whether or not it is their intent or just a lack of foresight, Substack is easy pickings for intelligent services to use to track down dissidents, and given how much data there is on all of us, this should be feared in the future as a likely course of action from our totalitarian states.
This why I will not take the leap on here. I have followed this issue and the lack of interest or action by Substack is worrying and actually unprofessional as they do not respond at all.
New to your publication but this is a problem at the credit card level. Visa/MasterCard have explicitly stated their intentions to censor speech which means that economically sustaining free speech requires other measures.
I worry that there is no good solution for as long as fintech isn't allowed to truly decentralize. There's no reason your bank can't authorize online payments with an open protocol, it's a choice at this rate.
Not convenient at all, but I doubt it's a violation of Substack's TOS to import paid subscribers from who pay in other ways. Just because it's not integrated doesn't mean it's not an option.
Visa/MasterCard are only as much of a problem as allowed to be. Ross Ulbricht got around this ages ago allowing people to trade goods in exchange for currency without the state having any say in the matter. It is why he is locked up for well over 100 years in an American dungeon never to see the light of day again. The solution is Bitcoin and operating like a good darknet market.
Bitcoin however has been well neutered by the clowns who use it as an investment rather than as a currency who have ensured the majority of it belongs to American financiers unfit for its intended purpose, and it is thus quite difficult to acquire it anonymously today or to launder your Bitcoin, but it can still be done and there is not much in the way of alternatives.
The three greatest cypherpunks: Assange for liberating information from state control; Nakomoto for liberating currency from state control; Ulbricht for liberating the exchange of goods and services from state control.
Why not monero? It has surely eclipsed Bitcoin as "peer to peer digital cash", at least in practice.
You may be interested in Mitra which is a fediverse server that allows for paid posts for Monero. I plan on experimenting with it for my new premium show!
How is Square's track record when it comes to free speech? They are a Jack Dorsey venture after all.
Still TBD - I need to investigate that part further, but have not heard of them policing the speech of their merchants.
Don't think Square is the way to go mate...
https://web.archive.org/web/20200629092343/https://www.businessinsider.com/square-withholding-money-from-merchants-amid-pandemic-2020-6
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/06/23/square-is-withholding-up-to-30-of-payments-made-to-some-merchants/?sh=66c8da9f4130
For future reference, it's considered common courtesy to request permission to quote someone, even if what they said was posted in a public forum. Had you done so, I would have added that the Stripe account I was using was one I had taken out for another project that went belly-up, so technically it doesn't apply to your main point. Nevertheless, I wasn't especially impressed before I set up on Substack, and wasn't thrilled I was restricted to using Stripe.
apologies - it was a public comment directly responding to me and my post. But I understand.
Take it from an old journalist who got repeatedly fired for actually being unbiased, courtesy is always important when you're reporting, whether personally or professionally. 😉 It was always my most useful tool when I was pursuing a story.
Gotta be a DeFi payment platform. What happened to STEAM?
A very well-researched piece about the constant attack on the First amendment. Thank you for this.
@Hamish, @CB and @Patrickcollison are playing on the same team, the ole game good cop, bad cop. Substack is not the playing field for free speech, it has never been. The only advantage is, that you own your subscribers. Therefore, save them daily and save your content weekly. You never know ...
I have also informed Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best several times about this problem and have also suggested — even with my help — Substack to become his payment processor. There was never an answer. This is the answer to this question.
I have posted my note from yesterday which you linked above to mostly all content providers with over 1,000 paid subscriptions. ONE answer came in, defending the system from a nice MAGA guy. I have not expected more, but I did this to uncover that you must be compliant in this simulated free speech arena if you want you grow beyond 1,000 subs.
Robert Malone spent thousands of crowd funded $s on legal defense, that is not the average publisher here.
My yesterday note proves that all big paid accounts are corrupted by the system and play the game following the rules.
I am also fascinated that nearly nobody questions the Substack prices. If you have 10,000 subs at $80 yearly, you are paying 80,000$ (EIGHTYTHOUSAND!!!) for near to nothing. For much more, you pay on Mighty Networks 2,148 yearly. But wait, I forgot, these 10k guys get even paid by Substack to join and might not pay these ridiculous fees.
For avoiding misunderstandings — I'm not concerned about high fees when I get a super service. But that does not happen here.
One last point. Always consider that the starting point of Substack was the University of Waterloo. The same place where the privacy scam BlackBerry started. I was also not liked when I told Balsillie and Lazaridis in 2011 that their technology is spyware for 3-letter-agencies. But then Ed Snowden came ...
For now, I must assume that Substack is the next BlackBerry.
But I'm always open to be convinced about the opposite.
Stripe is becoming the Live Nation of payment processing...
For me, it is, the evidence is overwhelming.