Substack doesn’t want writing or journalism – they just want profit

Polymarket and the contentification of the entire platform

Photo by Amit Lahav on Unsplash

None of this is new. The tech-libertarian bros who run Substack have always been chasing the money. But now they’re partnering with Polymarket, the gambling app that masquerades as a “prediction market” and pretends to have some beneficial value to society. Namely, Polymarket claims that everyone betting on everything gives us some better idea of what the future might look like. People with money riding on an event are more incentivized to make accurate guesses, and in the aggregate they claim this acts like some sort of hive mind.

And, of course, the bettors do want to be right. But that doesn’t mean they are. And, like nearly every capitalist endeavor, the folks at Polymarket are awfully quiet about the negative externalities of this whole affair. The negative side-effects of this new degree of gambling ubiquity are many, and growing rapidly. For example, with just over five minutes left in Super Bowl LV, a fan ran onto the field for a minute. Turns out, Yuri Andrade claims to have bet $50,000 that someone would run onto the field. So he made it happen himself. And that’s just the latest instance where the “betting on everything” market doesn’t help predict the future, but incentivizes people to make their bets come true.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Numerous forms of insider trading appear to be running rampant on Polymarket, people are losing billions to the house, and Polymarket is largely unregulated and is failing to honor some bets. More broadly Polymarket reflects the unequal dynamics of society. 70% of “traders” lose money, while just .04% are capturing most of the winnings. Like other libertarian-tech developments, Polymarket claims to be a revolutionary way for people to earn money while really regurgitating broader capitalist inequality. Ultimately, prediction markets are an attempt to commodify and profit from every societal development, every event, every moment. It should not be difficult to understand how detrimental that is to the fabric of our society.

But Substack feels differently. What was once an email newsletter app has been veering away from that initial orientation for years now, and this development feels like the culmination of the shift towards vulgar content. It’s not about “saving journalism” or “helping writers,” it’s about profits for the founders and investors. And slop, mindless content that gets clicks and shares, goes a lot further toward that real aim than nuanced analysis. Of course a few good journalists have found a home on Substack, but even in those cases individual journalists or small outlets have no hope of really replacing the decimated ecosystem of national and local journalism.

No, the real aim is engagement and cash flow. From letting Nazis publish whatever they want to turning Substack into another social media app to partnering with Polymarket, the Substack guys have never hidden their real priorities. In the companies’ announcement of their collaboration, Substack co-founder Chris Best writes that, “Polymarket has also joined our sponsorships pilot, supporting a cohort of creators who integrate these tools into their work.” This isn’t too different than the other sorts of “influencer sponsorships” that Polymarket and rival Kalshi have been doing for years. These companies pay people to promote their gambling product all the time. And now Substack is backing that model at the corporate level.

In sharing the news about this growing partnership, Chris Best also writes that, “Polymarket lets people trade shares of future events, like elections, economic trends, and scientific breakthroughs.” It’s fascinating that the head of this supposed writing enterprise is comfortable writing something so utterly meaningless. No one is trading “shares of future events,” that phrase means nothing. It’s a weak euphemism to say that they’re partnering with a gambling enterprise, and that they’re lying to you about the nature of their latest corporate backer.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

What’s really happening is simple — Polymarket is trying to expand as rapidly as possible to pay off their investors and turn as much profit as possible. Substack is doing the same. But, there’s an extra hiccup. Polymarket is caught in dozens of legal battles around the world. The Netherlands just banned them. Multiple states are suing Kalshi and Polymarket (although the Trump administration is trying to support them, and Don Jr. is on the board of both). And the crux of all these legal battles is whether or not prediction markets are simple gaming, gambling companies. They are, but they’re required to argue otherwise for the future of their business model. Substack is now one of the many organizations abetting this lie.

The lies go both ways. In their announcement of this partnership, Polymarket declared: “Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets.” This empty premise is also what they declared when partnering with CNBC and CNN. On the national news you can now see the live odds of numerous geo-political wagers presented as news. Never mind the insider trading, or the twisted monetary incentives people now have to influence world events in the worst ways.

The truth, of course, is that journalism is better when it’s actual investigative work that makes power uncomfortable, not when it’s doing marketing for a betting site. But Substack and Polymarket aren’t interested in journalism, they’re interested in profit. We know that, and we’ve known that. What we learn more about every day is the lengths Substack is willing to go to in order to acquire that profit. I’ve been one of the writers here who thought that because I was contributing so little (financially) to Substack that I could shrug it off. If I channel $200 a month their way, that doesn’t have much impact. And that might be true, but one of several things I’ve wished away is that the incentive structure on Substack have become completely distorted.

What began for me as simply sending you an email has changed quite dramatically. Writers here are now expected to perform for the social media algorithm Substack has created, and we’re quite heavily incentivized to do so. Now we’re also being incentivized to promote a gambling app that’s tearing at the social fabric of society. We’re incentivized to make shitty, now even harmful, content — and we’re actually quite heavily disincentivized from producing thoughtful, in-depth writing.

So I’ll be leaving Substack. This newsletter will keep coming to you from another, less profit-driven platform. I’m well aware that my overdue departure is just a blip. The much broader trend of profit-motive infesting and enshittifying everything is the story here. One feature of late-capitalism is apparently everything becoming a casino. The house always wins and, in the long-run, the 99% lose. Capitalism has already done massive damage to journalism, writing, the arts and more. Polymarket and Substack are just the latest in a long, detrimental sequence. But we’re all obliged to find ways to work against the profit drive destroying that which is precious to us, to take steps big and small, to organize and make choices to combat the relentless, degrading power of capitalism. So catch you next time from another platform. - JP