🙄 You’re about to become a content moderator.

So what is your personal terms of service?

Hi there, and welcome back to Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power. Three essays in three weeks! That’s something to celebrate. 🎉

• In my monthly long-form essay, I decided to answer the important question: is AI ‘hallucinating’ or are we? This was shared by 1440 and

  Technology Made Simple
  , among others, racking up over 12K views. That’s a lot for Untangled — thanks for spreading the word!

• I followed up that deep exploration with the question on everyone’s mind: how does the Netflix show ‘Ultimatum’ explain complex algorithmic systems?? 🙃

To complete the trifecta, I thought I’d check in on the dynamic, ever-evolving relationship between creators and their audiences. Enjoy!

---

In “Tokenizing Creators,” I argued that if the crypto trend of social tokens took off, it would alter the role of the creator and the relationship with their audience. (I’m freeing this essay from the archives paywall for the next two weeks if you want to give it a read.) I outlined what it might look like if I decided to launch an $UNTANGLED token that you could buy, sell, and exchange for exclusive content. Here’s what I wrote 18 months ago:

The token doesn’t just affect the value of my newsletter, it changes my role and our relationship. I’ve become an equity — a stock. You, dear reader, have become an investor. This shifts the location of my precarity — I’m no longer at the whim of algorithmic systems or finicky policy changes but I’m now subject to the vagaries of the market, or, more memorably: pump and dump precarity.

Well, luckily, that trend hasn’t materialized — at least not yet. But the relationship between content creators and their audience is set to change again. See, with the launch of Notes, Substack has effectively turned me into a content moderator. If other decentralized services like Bluesky take off, you, dear reader, will face the same fate. Let’s dig in.

To date, content moderation has been centralized. Teams of people at Facebook and Twitter, etc. have decided what content to leave up, take down, and who to kick off the platform. They built rule books hundreds of pages long to adjudicate these decisions at scale. If you don’t put these rules in place, social networks turn into a Nazi bar. Yet enforcing these rules makes people real mad. Every significant moderation decision creates a reinforcing feedback loop that spirals out of control.

Moreover, content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. We all vary in our views on what constitutes hate speech, discrimination, whether someone is inciting violence, or just making a joke — even what separates fact from fiction! These centralized teams have to make imperfect, subjective decisions about cases that aren’t obvious slam dunks — they’re complex, contextual, and blur the borders of a rule that wants so badly to be clear.

Enter Substack, which has a “your house, your rules” approach to moderation — it is trying to ‘decentralize’ moderation responsibility to writers. In other words, writers like me would become benevolent dictators, writing mostly what they want, deciding what comments are kosher, etc. Now, at some level this makes sense. Typically, the farther down the technical stack one goes, the less responsibility that company should have for moderation. Not zero, but less — and in some sense, Substack is a kind of infrastructure — it’s essentially enterprise software for writers.

But then Substack launched Notes, which is a consumer-facing social network.