A short examination of the Substack moderation controversy in relation to toxic masculinity and the manosphere. Part 2
There is a persistent, rather romantic myth floating around the creator economy. It’s the idea that platforms like Substack are digital meritocracies—a kind of utopian, decentralised coffee house where the cream of literary talent naturally rises to the top through the sheer, undeniable force of good prose.
It is utter bollocks.
Spend any amount of time observing the mechanics of these platforms with the clinical detachment of a digital quack, the reality becomes glaringly obvious. The algorithm readeth not thou perfectly balanced, Beat-inspired cadence. The algorithm careth nothing if thou hast spent twenty years honing a novel. The algorithm giveth not a single solitary fuck if thy prose is more masterful than one of those hypnotic speeded-up videos of a carpenter restoring some rusty forgotten item. The machine reads exactly one metric with any genuine enthusiasm: conversion rates.
If you are giving your work away for free you are functionally invisible. If you are writing for the love of the craft, or perhaps just to maintain your sanity whilst navigating the labyrinthine realpolitik of the shitty place swarming with humans where you work, well then your Substack domination plan is flawed at the algorithmic level. You are not an active participant in the creator economy; you are a freeloader occupying server space. The Substack algorithm is a highly tuned financial instrument, and its sole purpose is to identify content that successfully shakes the loose change out of a reader’s pocket.
Now I want to make this absolutely clear. I am NOT saying free subscribers or even followers are worthless. Far from it. A free subscriber is still an incredibly gift and a privilege to any writer, and it’s a person willingly signed up to hear from you. Treasure these people. But let us not mince words; to the Substack algorithm these people are not revenue, and therefore they are the people clinging to the outside of the bus without a paid ticket.
To try to get you inside the vehicle, Substack wants you to get a ticket. And its code is trained on the knowledge that highly polarising, grievance-driven content generates intense parasocial loyalty, deep emotional investment, and exceptionally high conversion rates for paid subscriptions.
Which brings us to the dark, beating heart of the subscription model.
The 10% Hate Tax
Substack likes to shield itself behind an explicit commitment to “free speech absolutism”. But a neutral public square doesn’t take a cut of the action. Substack operates on a revenue-sharing basis, extracting a flat ten percent commission on all paid subscriptions. When the landlord takes a slice of the rent, the moral architecture of the platform shifts entirely.
Because there are no corporate advertisers to appease, Substack faces no immediate financial penalty for hosting extreme or highly controversial content. If the tenant in the digital flat upstairs is writing pseudo-academic justifications for male supremacy, or farming outrage with misogynistic slurs, the landlord still gets paid. Because Substack operates on this revenue-sharing basis, the company financially benefits from the presence of extremist echo chambers. Every time an incel subculture rallies around a new manifesto and smashes the subscribe button, Stripe processes the transaction, and the platform takes its cut. By combining this revenue model with a libertarian approach to content moderation, Substack has built a highly efficient engine for the monetisation of cultural grievance.
I’ve been seeing people in Notes asking why the Substack algorithm is sending them people with opposing views. It even happened to me. At first I thought it was just a glitch or maybe something about my edgy stories and the way I sprinkle curse-words as though they are black pepper and deserve to entirely coat every single thing I eat so that I must constantly carry a toothpick everywhere like some 1950s bad-boy. But the mystery is sadly just a bare-faced marketing manoeuvre.
The Algorithmic Tapeworm and the Mongoose Dilemma
The algorithm is not a neutral discovery engine; it is a digital tapeworm. Having been swallowed by the public, it now dictates the rhythm of their pulses and the content of their dreams; its primary function is to ensure that no one encounters an idea that has not been previously chewed and spat out by a machine designed to extract capital. Because Substack operates without advertisers, it doesn’t just tolerate the irony bros and the manosphere—it actively weaponises them against you to drive engagement.
Writers arrive on Substack like cute, naive puppies in a pet shop. We think a nice person has bought us to take us to a loving home where we can write our Beat-inspired prose in peace. The next thing we know, we’re fighting for our lives in the back of a pub car park against some bloke’s prized cockerel.
II realised this recently when a fellow writer questioned why their feed was suddenly flooded with aggressive sceptics. I had experienced the same phenomenon: quoting a feminist author immediately prompted the algorithm to throw a payload of incels my way.
This is a core mechanic, not a glitch. The algorithm deliberately takes your progressive, feminist ideas and sticks them directly in front of the people most likely to be violently triggered by them. It buys you from the pet shop and throws you straight into the ring with a cobra. As I eloquently shouted into the void of Notes: I AIN’T NO FUCKING MONGOOSE!
The Live-Fire Exercise and Building Your Own Casino
I recently published a piece critiquing the normalisation of male harassment. Right on cue, the ecosystem provided a live-fire demonstration. The subject of my critique launched a textbook DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) campaign, threatening me with vague pseudolegal action before sliding into the private DMs of female writers to orchestrate a whisper campaign against me. The algorithm got exactly the bloody car park brawl it wanted.
I originally thought the only solution to this algorithmic sewage was to burn it all down and leave. But then, the drama kicked off properly, and something remarkable happened. I had an enemy, but it turned out my enemy had a nemesis. The real writers, the fellow informavores, and the actual human beings on this platform rallied around me. For the first time, I realised I had found an active, engaged audience of real people. I found a fiercely protective community that thrives in spite of the algorithmic rot.
So, I am not leaving the fetid digital nightclub of Substack just yet. mostly because there are genuinely brilliant humans trapped inside it, fighting the good fight. But you cannot beat the house when the house takes ten percent of the rot. The only winning move is to build your own casino.
Out here, on my own self-hosted VMs, there is no digital tapeworm deciding who gets to read this. There is no outrage engine quietly routing my Beat-inspired cynicism to a designated demographic of irony bros just to boost Stripe conversion rates. I retain my independence, I write for the actual humans who want to be here, and Silicon Valley extracts absolutely nothing from the exchange.
If you are reading this on my site, you already understand the value of an independent internet. You have stepped off the engagement farm. Stick around; this is the sanctuary, and I am glad to have you in the casino.
But to truly dismantle this ecosystem, we need to understand the fragile psychology of the men it profits from. We will dive deeper into the historical reality of true alpha dominance—and why the modern manosphere is actually just a collection of trembling hypochondriacs terrified of oat milk—in Part 3, dropping on Tuesday, 7th April.
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