Substack paid a secret group of writers to make newsletter authorship seem lucrative

The part that seems unique is that Substack is refusing to disclose who the paid writers are

By doing this, Substack is creating a de facto editorial policy. Their leadership -- let’s call them editors -- are deciding what kinds of writing and writers are worthy of financial compensation. And you don’t know who those people are. That’s right -- Substack is taking an editorial stance, paying writers who fit that stance, and refusing to be transparent about who those people are. Hamish writes:

We don’t disclose the names of the writers with whom we’ve done deals because it is their private information and up to them whether or not they want it publicly known.

He makes it sound like this is about protecting writers’ anonymity, but it’s not. Substack could easily allow their writers to publish anonymously, but still identify them by the names of their publications.

By standards of old-school journalism, yes, "we won't disclose who our paid authors are" is very strange. Matt Yglesias volunteered the info that Substack was paying him. He's under no obligation to do that. That's where a comparison with Ezra Klein and the NYT falls apart - it's very clear to everyone that Klein and the Times are in an employee/employer relationship. Yglesias has a Substack newsletter, but we don't talk about him as a paid employee of Substack, and if he hadn't said he got an advance from Substack, we would never know.

So Substack has an editorial policy, but no accountability. And they have terms of service, but no enforcement. If you listen to Hamish, they don’t even hire writers! They just give money to people who write things that happen to be on Substack. It’s the usual Silicon Valley sleight-of-hand move, very similar to Uber reps claiming drivers aren’t “core” to their business. I’m sure Substack is paying a writer right now to come up with a catchy way of saying that Substack doesn’t pay writers.

Substack seems to want to hide behind some kind of plausible deniability here, where any criticism of one of its paid writers won't reflect negatively on Substack because there's not a confirmed link. They can hide behind "we're not a publisher, we're just a platform" while also making backroom deals about who they pay to publish on their platform.