(VERY PARTIAL) CROSSPOST: ALEX HEATH: SubStack Is Opening Up to AI: Interviewing CEO Chris Best
A platform built for writer–reader relationships now has to survive venture capital, discovery algorithms, and AI intermediaries in a world of frictionless payments, neo-Nazi edge cases, TikTok brain-
A platform built for writer–reader relationships now has to survive venture capital, discovery algorithms, and AI intermediaries in a world of frictionless payments, neo-Nazi edge cases, TikTok brain-melt and ad-driven outrage brain-hacking feeds…
Just a couple of bits from an interview SubStack honcho Chris Best gave a couple of weeks ago.
To summarize:
Chris Best:
Each publication should be its own corner of the internet that the author effectively owns: SubStack wants to become the last good-app agora—giving writers a fighting chance to matter.
SubStack is “blogging with a business model”: people come to SubStack for guidance on what matters and what to care about. SubStack is proof that reading isn’t dying, some of its previous form factors are.
Writers who think they can leave once they are big tend to badly underestimate how much the SubStack discovery funnel is doing.
The internet has “barbelled”: some people don’t read at all, some lose their mind on TikTok, and some read more than ever. Legacy media sites drowned readers in bad UX (horrible CSS, jumping videos). Subscriptions are underrated and align incentives toward depth, quality, independence, and creator control.
Some sponsorship forms can be compatible with high-quality work if structured to deepen relationships.
SubsSack is opening up to AI via MCP: supporting writers means integrating with the tools they want.
“Slop” = content made “without intention,” that nobody believes in—AI didn’t invent slop but massively scales it; the key is intention.
Just “making the good thing” you believe in is necessary but not sufficient; you still need tools and distribution.
SubStack is for free speech: readers—not SubStack—decide who gets paid, and payment should reflect reader choice, not editorial gatekeeping.
Alex Heath:
Notes that even his own operation is still stuck clipping content for feeds, competing in the same races to the bottom as everyone else.
How much does being on SubStack mean that you condone all the content on the platform, even (especially?) the neo-Nazis?
Being monitored and performance-tracked at Business Insider was a form of RLHF that drove a race to the bottom.
At SubStack, success follows building something people want to pay for over time in an ongoing relationship with a body of work.
“Make yourself legible to AI” is going to be the new SEO cliché.
Ellis Hamburger:
Questions the strategy of tolerating a lot of offensive content: surfacing it makes people leave.
Subscription‑oriented metrics are more tethered to long‑term reader value and less to sheer brain-hacking attention spikes.
(VERY PARTIAL) CROSSPOST: ALEX HEATH: SubStack Is Opening Up to AI
CEO Chris Best reveals that MCP integration is coming soon. Also: His theory of AI slop, why YouTube is the real competition, and where independent media goes next.
Alex Heath
May 22, 2026
<https://sources.news/p/substack-opening-up-to-ai> <http://sources.news>
Substack is building a MCP server. CEO Chris Best… didn’t give a date, but… Substack is wiring itself so that AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT can read, write, and act directly on the platform on a creator’s behalf. It’s a direction the rest of the industry is converging on.… Beehiiv just opened itself up to MCP, and a growing list of platforms are wiring themselves…. If writers want to use these AI tools, Best argued, Substack has to meet them there…. You can watch the conversation above or listen to it in your podcast player of choice by clicking this link.
Plenty of Substack’s creators are openly hostile to AI. Best’s answer to them is a theory of slop. “Slop is not a thing that was made by AI,” he said. “It was a thing that was made without intention.” AI didn’t create the problem; it just massively scaled it, he argues. To Best, the tools are amplifiers, not shortcuts. “If we just never use the word AI, and you just see things that are genuine and human and great, that’s the answer.” Best is also increasingly clear about who he’s actually competing with, and it isn’t other newsletter tools. He has called YouTube Substack’s main content competition, and on stage, he said the goal is to pay creators more than YouTube does. His longer-term pitch is that Substack becomes “the intellectual and cultural capital of the internet.”
A few more takeaways from the conversation:
The recent wave of Substack creator-exodus stories: It’s not an “en masse” trend. Best said Substack continues to grow steadily, but wouldn’t share specific metrics. He wouldn’t update the “more than 50 creators earning over $1 million a year” stat, but said it’s now “a lot more.”
AI for creators: His “dream” is a tool that auto-clips a podcast, posts it across networks, and translates it into every language.
Substack ads: They’re coming, but don’t expect a programmatic ad server.
Free speech: Ellis and I pressed him on whether Substack should demonetize content it finds distasteful; his answer was that readers, not Substack, decide who gets paid.
Brad here: Let me now give a few very edited tidbits from the conversation: the parts that I found the very most interesting:
Alex Heath: The star of the show today [is] Chris Best, the CEO of Substack. He doesn’t do a ton of these. I’m really glad he agreed to do it…. I said…. “Will you please just do an interview with me at some point?” And he said yes. So he’s a man of his word as well. Let’s welcome Chris….
Chris Best: We’re working to make each publication its own corner of the internet that [its author] own[s]. Our aspiration is to have Substack become the intellectual and cultural capital of the internet. It feels to me like we’re on track for that. It’s probably one of the only good apps these days…. The way we designed the URLs for Substack was specifically inspired by Tumblr….. People often say… to me in an accusatory tone: “Substack is just blogging but with a business model,” or “Substack is just like Tumblr.” Those sound awesome to me. That sounds great…
[…]
AH: The thing I hear in the independent‑media world is: when you get big enough and Substack’s network effects no longer matter as much to your growth and business, then it makes sense to leave and you don’t need to give Substack 10 percent anymore.
CB: People say that. Then they leave, and then they realize the network effect was doing a lot for them. Then they come back…. [While] there’s probably a cap on how many Substacks someone can actually read… the cap is higher than you’d expect… in how people spend their attention….
AH: For all the articles and studies about the decline of reading, it seems like maybe the form factor just wasn’t right….
CB: That’s definitely part of it.… [On] your former employers’ sites… you’d be attacked by horrible CSS and videos leaping out at you. The internet pushes things to the barbell. Some people aren’t reading at all. Some people are zooming into TikToks and losing their minds. And some people are reading more than ever…. If you just want facts, you can ask Claude these days, and maybe it’ll get it right sometimes…. [But:] “What matters? What should I pay attention to? What should I care about?” That’s why people come to your Substack… in politics, tech, finance…fashion, food, lifestyle and culture, literary analysis, and a bunch of places you might not expect….
The only thing that saves that from being messianic tech‑bro nonsense is that we’re not the heroes of the story; you are. We want to give you everything you need to have a fighting chance to matter… to build the network that gives you a growth boost you’re getting less and less from everywhere else… to be one place on the internet that actually wants you to discover something deep and to make a real connection…
[…]
CB: People underestimate… subscription[s]…. We want to put you in control, have creator independence, and reward depth and quality. Subscriptions do that very well…. [But] some kinds of sponsorships also do that…. We’ve come to the view that this is something we can and should help with… in a way that deepens the value of the subscription, deepens the relationship, and reinforces the high‑caliber brand…. How do we do it in a way that supports creator ownership?…
[…]
CB: We’re opening up Substack to AI through MCP…. If we say, “We’re supporting creators; we want you to use the tools you want,” then we have to integrate with these things…. Slop is… a thing made without intention…. [that] you’re tricked into consuming that nobody believes in…. You can make slop without AI…. [But] it massively increases [the problem]…
AH: Even we are still stuck trying to grow by clipping things for the feeds… competing against everyone else racing to the bottom forever. Is there any advice you give?…
CB:
You can… make the thing that’s actually good… [that] you believe in… [that] is worth someone’s time…. But… [that] is also not enough…. We are building tools…. My dream for podcasts…. I have the most interesting conversation. Then the robot finds the clip, shares it to platforms, figures out the right formats…. Wouldn’t it be nice to have tools… [to] translate it into different formats?…[…]
AH: Your morals are: free speech, and we’re not going to get in the way of people’s decisions. Is that fair?
CB: Yeah. That’s fair…
And:
The AfterParty
AH: People ask me all the time, “Can’t believe you’re on Substack. Why? Do you condone some of the content there?” Of course I don’t. I don’t condone a lot of things…. If Substack started recommending Nazi Substacks next to me, or somehow bundling me into that, then we’ve crossed [the line]…. So far, even with the feed and network effects, I still feel I control how “Sources “ shows up on Substack…. That said, “no Nazis” is not a high bar…. Maybe you can argue that being on Substack puts me “near” it; I can see that argument…. [But] I just get nervous about people policing each other’s platform choices based on the owner’s morals….
EH: I’m confused by the strategy…. If you surface a lot of offensive stuff, people will leave…. Trying to satisfy everyone hasn’t worked for a long time…
[…]
EH: Dylan Field… came in mid‑interview…. We just didn’t see him. Dylan, if you’re listening: I wish you’d yelled loud enough for us to notice. It would’ve been a magical moment to have a former guest interrupt the live show…. His question was: “You’ve had the experience of being RLHF‑ed constantly by monitors at Business Insider and now other metrics at Substack. How did both of these RLHF methods make you feel, and how did they change your behavior?”…
AH: At Business Insider, on the one hand, it was nice to have transparency on performance…. [But] it drove a race to the bottom around… the metric was…. If you’re getting zero pageviews, you’re not going to be happy…. At Substack… building something people want to pay for is about long‑term value….. The metrics feel more “nice to know” than “must obey.”… [People] are paying for the underlying relationship and the body of work, not just this one dopamine hit.
EH: I totally align with that…. Substack…subscriptions push you to think about durability: what keeps people around, what feels retentive and valuable….
AH: I love Dylan’s RLHF framing. Metrics absolutely shape behavior; the question is whether they’re tethered to long‑term value or just to attention spikes…. The theory is: people plus agents will look past the sludge for actual alpha and real human work…. “Make yourself legible to AI” really is the new coffee‑shop cliché…
Brad here: SubStack is truly the revival of the weblogging utopian dream: hat each writer might have a corner of the public sphere that is genuinely theirs—a stable address on the internet where they can speak in their own voice, in their own rhythm, our of their own expertise, unmediated by reporters who work more for their sources and their advertisers than for their readers, to readers who come because they want that voice and that rhythm. But social media brought walled gardens. And the economic and technical infrastructure was aligned around advertising inventory, pageviews, attention-harvesting, and scaring the s*** out of your readers so that they glued their eyeballs to your screen. As Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Melissa Bell found with respect to <http://vox.com>, the money they had taken and the people they had hired to try to find voice and reach meant that they were primarily the serfs of the advertising department of FaceBook.
SubStack’s claim is that it has flipped that: the platform’s core product is the writer–reader relationship, with payments and delivery mechanisms built to amplify that relationship rather than strip-mine it for CPMs.
