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Comment by barrrrald | Hacker News Reader

This post didn't age well – 3 weeks later Substack announced a $100m fundraise at $1.1b valuation. [1]

Ana's contention that Substack is "rickety" seems motivated by her conviction that they should adopt a more assertive, aggressive censorship regime, and that "we need a world where a social safety net protects risky writing".

There are certainly many interesting questions about the future of media and Substack's business – but the parade of people saying it can't succeed without more moderation keep being proven wrong.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/business/substack-fundrai...

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This post linked to a different article (former Bloomberg reporter) that said it expected this round to be at $750 million ($50 million above the previous valuation).

And so yes, that's significantly less than it ended up being, $1.1 billion, but I'm not sure it impacts the argument being made. Except that the multiple would be even greater!

I don't think moderation has anything to do with it and it's not the core of the argument in the article. They've taken a huge valuation and investors will want a return on that. The problem is that there's just not that much loyalty in this space. I don't care where the content is hosted as long as it's not annoying, content makers don't care so long as they can make money. When substack starts needing to extract value they have to do it in a way that's annoying and chances are high we see the next platform appear. We've seen it before.

It would be lovely to see a platform get big taking a sustainable approach. But that investment money buys marketing and hype.

> This post didn't age well – 3 weeks later Substack announced a $100m fundraise at $1.1b valuation.

From the article: Newcomer says Substack is “pitching investors on a round between $50M and $100M that would value it above its roughly $700M last round price.”

Also: And if Substack does manage to raise that $100M they’re looking for now? Things will get worse.

The implication of her article is that they’d have a hard time raising that money and/or that they somehow aren’t doing well - I don’t see any evidence of this cited anywhere in her post.

No, the implication is that raising such a high level of VC would put huge pressure on Substack to grow and enshittify, thereby ruining the platform for writers who currently think it's good.

In other words, their current business model does not support their valuation, which necessitates a pivot.

She specifically talks about what happens next after raising that $100m. The higher valuation creating more urgency to be profitable, which could lead to a descent into Twitter-style outrage engagement stupidity, influencers, etc.

If she's wrong about anything, it's that you can assume enough people will leave a declining platform to keep it from staying alive.

Counterpoint:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/timeline-softbanks-bets-wewor...

At no point in this post does she even write the word "censor"/"censorship". The post relentlessly criticizes Nazis but wanting silence to her dissent isn't pro-speech, it's just pro-nazi.

I'm really sick of this argument. You never see free speech extremists defending anti-fascism or even questioning the decisions of governments as long as they're right wing.

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