Some Tentative Thoughts on Substack
Politics Some Tentative Thoughts on Substack Josh Blackman | 7.29.2026 9:01 AM I launched my original blog on WordPress back in September 2009, shortly after I graduated law school. At the time, I was also very active on the nascent Twitter to promote my posts. Over the past seventeen years, the landscape has changed quite a bit.
- ▪Politics Some Tentative Thoughts on Substack Josh Blackman | 7.29.2026 9:01 AM I launched my original blog on WordPress back in September 2009, shortly after I graduated law school.
- ▪At the time, I was also very active on the nascent Twitter to promote my posts.
- ▪Over the past seventeen years, the landscape has changed quite a bit.
Reason Magazine files mainly under politics. We currently carry 482 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Reason.com |
| Canonical URL | https://reason.com/volokh/2026/07/29/some-tentative-thoughts-on-substack/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:01:38 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T13:10:40.786Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T13:10:40.786Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | m28y-gM9XByI · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Politics Some Tentative Thoughts on Substack Josh Blackman | 7.29.2026 9:01 AM I launched my original blog on WordPress back in September 2009, shortly after I graduated law school. At the time, I was also very active on the nascent Twitter to promote my posts. Over the past seventeen years, the landscape has changed quite a bit. Podcasts have surged in popularity. Advisory Opinions, Strict Scrutiny, and others command massive audiences, and their hosts write best-selling books. Social media has shifted from long-ish threads to bite-sized POV videos. And Substack has emerged as a popular platform that authors can monetize. The Volokh Conspiracy has moved from place-to-place, but has remained largely the same: posts by a host of authors are sorted chronologically.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Reason.com.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Reason.com
