Cup of Coffee: January 15, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to the first Cup of Coffee newsletter to be published on and disseminated from its new home at Beehiiv!

Today’s post is a free one so that I can welcome both paid and free subscribers to the new joint and so we can get through the housekeeping stuff we need to get through at the same time. In the meantime, if you’re not a subscriber yet, or if you’re a free subscriber and you’d like to upgrade to paid, you can do so here:

Also, you can share this newsletter with anyone. It’d be great if you did!

As it’s both the first day at our new school and a holiday, the usual format is taking a day off. Today’s newsletter is about the whys and hows of us being in the new place.

Why I left Substack

Most of you reading this know about the article Jonathan M. Katz published in The Atlantic back in November about Nazis using Substack. Most of you also know that I was one of the nearly 250 writers who signed on to an open letter calling for Substack to weigh in on the issue. Most of you further know that the response, from Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, arrived on December 21 and was not at all encouraging. I wrote about why that was the case the same day.

Substack has attempted damage control in the wake of McKenzie’s December 21 response, but it has been unsatisfactory to say the least. Casey Newton of Platformer wrote a detailed account of why that effort has been lacking. In my own view, it simply seems like Substack wants to have it both ways: it wants people to believe that it’s opposed to extremism but it doesn’t want to risk losing the business of extremists, the business of those who are OK with sharing a platform with extremists, or to get any heat from the usual assortment of terminally online edgelords who claim to be all for free speech but, in practice, tend to defend only right wing jackasses.

That sort of spinelessness is simply not something I can abide, particularly because Substack aims to be more than just some neutral content platform. Rather, it seeks to serve as a social media platform and it actively promotes certain content to the point where it’s indistinguishable from endorsement. So I made my decision to leave.

Why I left when I did

As I told my subscribers in December, I planned to be deliberate with my move off of Substack. This newsletter is my livelihood and I did not want to risk, in my haste, picking the wrong platform and losing subscribers, either inadvertently due to technical issues or because the mess and disruption alienated folks. I was prepared to wait weeks or even months to make the move. But then something happened that made me decide to bolt now.

Some people on Substack’s management team reached out to me in the wake of the open letter, trying to reassure me and asking me if I wanted to get on a conference call with Substack brass to see if they could address my concerns. I appreciated the outreach — no matter what else you can say about it, Substack has always been good about that kind of thing — but I told them that I didn’t think it’d change my mind so I’d pass rather than waste their time and mine. They were cool about that too and left the door open for me to talk to them whenever I wanted.

But then on January 10, right after Casey Newton of Platformer wrote a piece about Substack’s half-hearted efforts in all of this, I received this email from a Substack manager:

To say that Jesse Singal “is not for everyone” is an understatement. Indeed, he is a leading figure in the laundering of anti-transgender extremism and the platforming of widely debunked anti-trans horseshit. As such, he bears considerable responsibility for the transphobic moral panic which has spread across America over the past several years and which continues to do great harm to the most vulnerable people among us as a result.

I am not going to presume that there is not some putatively reasonable rebuttal to be lodged in favor of Substack in all of this, but I’m not interested in it if it comes from Jesse Fucking Singal. And I sure as hell have no interest whatsoever in continuing an association with any platform who views Jesse Fucking Singal as its champion. I mean, “hey, we’re not as bad on the Nazi question as some people are saying, and if you don’t believe us, maybe the arguments of this this anti-trans jackass will change your mind” is not quite the pitch Substack thinks it is.

So yeah, that’s why I moved now rather than waiting around. When people show you who they are, believe them. No sense in farting around about it.

Why I moved to Beehiiv

Mostly because it seems to do everything Substack does, more or less, and is particularly well-reviewed for the basics of newsletter delivery and stuff. There are other platforms like Ghost which are sexier and prettier, but the central mission here is reliably delivering the decidedly lo-fi Cup of Coffee to readers every day and Beehiiv seems up to that task.

I’ve only been messing around with Beehiiv for a week or so, and I’ve only been putting it through real paces in the past couple of days, but it seems to have all of the functionality I require. From a technical perspective it’s a bit trickier to use for a moron like me. Some things like changing fonts and appearance seem unnecessarily fussy. There are certain bits of functionality that I haven’t fully grokked yet. My hope is that it all smooths out after a few newsletters. I presume it will, at least with respect to the important stuff. In the meantime, I apologize in advance for any wonkiness you might encounter.

Finally, many people have asked me “what happens if Nazis show up on Beehiiv?” The short answer: Nazis and other jackasses are everywhere and it’s naive to think we can fully avoid them. That said, Substack is unique among platforms in its efforts to promote its newsletters and its efforts to expand itself into a social media concern. I am certain there are or will be horrible newsletters on Beehiiv. But I do not believe that (a) the people who run Beehiiv will do friendly promotional interviews with white supremacists like Richard Hanania; or (b) will use some algorithm to tell Cup of Coffee readers that if they like this newsletter, they’ll love to read a newsletter about Great Replacement Theory. I feel like that’s a pretty notable distinction.

Random Things

• I think I migrated every subscriber over, paid and unpaid alike. And I think everyone was put into the correct bucket. If, however, your subscription does not appear to be correct — for example, if you’re a paid subscriber and you navigate to the home page and cannot access the articles marked “premium” — please let me know;

• If you just navigate to the home page on your own, it’s possible it won’t have you logged in as a premium subscriber. All you need to do is to log in by entering your email address. Beehiiv will then send you a confirmation email, you’ll click the link, and you should be good to go;

• The two categories of premium subscribers I had the most trouble with were people I have previously comped and people who were given gift subscriptions by another subscriber. They did not port over as premium and I had to manually switch them. It’s entirely possible that I missed one or two, however, so if you are someone I have comped or if you’re on a gift subscription and you cannot access premium, again, please let me know;

• Gift subscribers are actually getting a second gift. Substack’s coding was screwed up and it did not list when a given gift expires. As such, everyone on a gift subscription has been extended until one year from yesterday. That could give some of you an extra few weeks on an annual subscription. It could give some of you close to an extra year. Which, welp, cost of doing business for me. Happy late Christmas gift from your old play Craigy;

• The billing/renewal dates of all premium subscribers carried over to Beehiiv. I’ve already seen people whose renewals came up yesterday and this morning go through, so I presume it’s working fine. In order to keep anyone from being billed twice, I permanently paused billing on Substack. Eventually I’ll just nuke it in its entirety, but if anyone notices a rogue Substack billing, by all means, let me know;

• All of the Substack posts going back to the advent of the newsletter in August 2020 have been imported to the archives on Beehiiv. There are some hiccups, though. I don’t think it ported old comments over and it may not have brought videos over either. These are pretty small concerns, but I’m not nuking the Substack archive yet. If there’s something any of you need you should still be able to find it over there. Or you can ask me and I’ll try to track it down;

• If there are any stylistic things — fonts, colors, formats, whatever — which seem like a problem, please reach out to me and let me know. I’m not married to any of the (admittedly very basic) choices I’ve made in that regard and I mostly just want a pleasant reading experience;

• I do not know if emails from Beehiiv are more or less likely to end up in spam or promotions than the Substack ones were, but please, in the early going, make a special effort to check those places if you don’t get a newsletter.

That’s all I can think of at the moment. Welcome, y’all. Here’s hoping this works out. And again, any word-spreading you can do will be super helpful.

Have a great day, everyone.