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As they say, anything that you do for a living rather than passion, you'll eventually end up economizing to minimize costs- including time and effort- relative to expected income.
When people make their opinions the basis of their livelihood, their future intellectual freedom is shaped by the nature of their payment structure. If you draw a salary, you're not exactly going to be criticizing the hand that feeds you for long. If you make commissions, you're going to optimize for iterations to earn more commissions.
But when you go substack-style subscriber model, you're going to be pressured to keep providing people what they pay money for. The information you have is that they paid money for [x], and your brand grew from your reputation, and thus recommendations, for saying [x]. And if you don't, the subscribers go away. You live or starve by your brand.
In some respects this is more ideological constraining than a salary structure, since a salary-payer may have special interest in your input if you change an opinion. If you live on [organization Y]'s salary-dole, and you raise issue that [organization Y] may not like, that could be really valuable to know. Your reputation for supporting X makes warnings against X all the more credible. It's like if the Catholic Church criticizes papal conduct. If your job is providing advice / recommendations, this is the most important sort of advice you're liable to offer, and thus justify continue paying for. (Up to a point- if you get a reputation to anti-X instead, it may turn differently.)
In a subscriber model, however, going against the audience grain is a recipe for losing buy-in, but without gaining equivalent opposite payments. At which point, a variation of 'the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent' kicks in. Your audience base can remain unhappy and unwilling to fund you longer than you can get by without an audience base, and you can go under sooner than it takes to build a new audience base.
At which point, your incentive structure is that if you want a comfortable existence, don't fail to deliver what keeps you in a comfortable existence.
I wonder if this is the natural course of all Substackers? Fleeing big media for Substack was meant to be a way to seek independence from traditional constraints, but if it just enables a stronger form of audience capture that ever existed before, while encouraging writers to avoid risks and double down on the same crowd-pleasing themes over and over, we may find ourselves missing the old system.
Kulak isn't a journalist, of course, but I do notice something of the process with more 'mainstream' Substackers. It may have taken a few years, but, to pick an example, I feel like Freddie deBoer has ended up just writing the same half dozen articles over and over, as predictable as the tide. I can think of a few others that I read that seem to be sliding down the same incline.
Maybe it's all just bad.
My response to the 'missing the old system' is 'the grass on the other side is always greener.' That substack has its own authorial restraints doesn't mean it doesn't successfully establish independence from traditional media constraints. It just means that it's a change of constraints, rather than an absence of constraints.
Which, frankly, is not going to change. In the same way that the abolishment of private markets under communism didn't mean that people didn't have to work for a living, there is always going to be a tension between 'what the writer wants to do' and 'what the paymaster is willing to pay for.' And as long as there is a need to justify receiving limited resources- and there will always be limited resources- there will always be a paymaster in some form.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a net gain. The fact that Tracingwoodgrains and Kulak are equally eligible to make a living giving their opinions is still better than a world where only one or even none of them could because established opinion-generators ran the system like a cartel.
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