🔗 Why Substack is at a crossroads - by Casey Newton:

But turning a blind eye to recommended content almost always comes back to bite a platform. It was recommendations on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube that helped turn Alex Jones from a fringe conspiracy theorist into a juggernaut that could terrorize families out of their homes. It was recommendations that turned QAnon from loopy trolling on 4Chan into a violent national movement. It was recommendations that helped to build the modern anti-vaccine movement.

The moment a platform begins to recommend content is the moment it can no longer claim to be simple software.

And yes, I acknowledge the irony of linking to a post that is hosted on Substack that is about the problem with Substack. While I think Newton is dead-on in this particular excerpt, I wish that he had more to say about what he is planning to do with his own content there.