Chris Best is the co-founder and CEO of Substack. He compares direct email subscription publishing models against algorithmically driven content platforms like YouTube.
“And so the direct connection, in addition to being this way, you can bring your audience with you is a way to give humans the power to override the algorithm and say, Hey, I've got this trust relationship with my audience. I want to exercise it and go out on a limb and say, Hey,”
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More from Chris Best
Opinion
Best: Peer review is a mistake driving a crisis of fake science
“I think a lot of science is totally broken. I think that they're like, I think that a lot of the, and I think that the scientific project is incredibly important and one of the most valuable things in history, but that the practice of science and the Current s…”
Chris BestSep 2, 2025▶ 38:32Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Best: Liberal media figures bore the brunt of 2020 cancellations
“The people that it really, I think in 20, 20, the thing that surprised me, the people that felt the brunt of that were not conservatives. We're not Republicans necessarily. It was the people in the liberal media. In, you know, in, in, in my telling, I would sa…”
Chris BestSep 2, 2025▶ 5:23Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Opinion
Best: TikTok is a Chinese slot machine harmful to democracy
“The elephant in the room is TikTok. It's like this Chinese run slot machine game thing. And the type of people that are attracted to making that thing are not necessarily the ones that are going to Make for the strongest democracy, right?”
Chris BestFeb 6, 2023▶ 22:57The 4th Estate: How Media is Changing in Washington, D.C.
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Best: Ousted mainstream journalists boosted Substack's early growth
“The fact that this thing that we were creating this new economic engine for culture that gives you this independence happened to be there at a time where a bunch of the most interesting writers in the world were getting summarily Tossed from their long-time in…”
Chris BestSep 2, 2025▶ 5:46Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Insight
Best: Copying legacy social media ad models would break Substack
“And I think there are definitely like the thing that would break Substack is if we just looked at the same way that the legacy social media things built advertising and said, oh, we're just going to copy that. Like that's going to work because And if we did th…”
Chris BestSep 2, 2025▶ 22:40Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
Disclosure
Best: Free speech is not Substack's primary mission
“I've always seen the free speech thing as sort of an important pillar, but not the main pillar of what Substack is actually setting out to do.”
Chris BestSep 2, 2025▶ 3:36Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media
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