Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost
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What, no Jason Pargin?
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Yeah, they have a paid+hosted option, or you can use the FOSS stuff it is based on and go it on your own. It's a pretty good system I think.
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I wonder who would be interested in ginning up big bad-faith hit jobs against good news outlets
The author of the article. It doesn't take long to uncover their politics and they are absolutely not involved in any right wing conspiracy.
There's nothing really wrong with substack. People just like to shit on anything that doesn't pass whatever purity test they happen to use.
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absolutely not involved in any right wing conspiracy.
How do you know that? Do you know them personally, or audited them or something?
I don't know that they are, and looking over their resume it does seem unlikely. But, also, I would have said that same thing looking at Taibbi's or Greenwald's resume in 2017. I just know that in this story, they are presenting things in this absolutely wildly inaccurate fashion that would be right at home in a right-wing conspiracy. Certainly, working at The Intercept for a long time isn't some kind of bulwark against being infected with right-wing-propaganda-ism, with Greenwald himself as one absolutely interesting counterexample clearly on offer.
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The attraction of substack for at least some writers is that substack actually pays their more popular or prestigious writers. I don't know how many or whether there is a published list of them, but at least a few of them are getting paid rather well (6 figures/year or maybe more). If Substack is recruiting and paying Nazis, then that is of interest and concern. Most writers there aren't getting paid by substack, though they may have readers who buy subscriptions. That is open to pretty much everyone and the fanfiction saying "don't like, don't read" works for me here. Saying Ghost is a more attractive platform because it has more censorship is kind of a head scratcher. And calling Taibbi and Greenwald Nazis is ridiculous. Disliking the Democrats doesn't make someone into a Nazi.
That said, I don't personally like substack very much and am always glad to hear about alternatives.
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I don't think the software matters much tbh. It's about payment aggregation, search hit aggregation, and for some "prestige" substack writers, actually getting paid by the platform.
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Can a reader user on Ghost follow multiple Ghost accounts? I haven't used Substack but my understanding is that it is similar to Patreon and OF in that I can subscribe to multiple accounts and have them show up in a central feed. Can I do this as a subscriber on Ghost? And do multiple servers federate to allow for that?
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Substack has had a Nazi problem since its inception. At first, there was a liberal backlash, but they all eventually went there anyway.
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Still remember the decoder podcast where the CEO was asked, would you remove an article that says "we should deport all brown people", and he danced around how he wouldn't get into specifics of moderation.
Just your standard 'Free speech absoluteism'
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Thank you for the additional context, I've heard peoples criticisms of substack but hadn't heard any of this additional info
Ghost still seems cool though
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Yeah, Ghost is great. I'm not trying to say any bad thing about it. I think they're slightly different: Substack went to bat in a big way to foster a community where real journalists could do their journalism there, and get paid for it, and to a large extent it worked. That's why there are so many high-profile lefties writing there. Ghost is trying to set up a FOSS-style platform that anyone can use. Ghost has monetization too, but they didn't prime the pump with it nearly as much as Substack did.
They're both great. I think it's pretty likely that anyone who's screaming about Nazis on Substack is just looking for reasons to scream, and the Nazis have very little to do with it except as an excuse.
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Really glad you brought the opposite perspective to the table here
thank you! -
Yes:
One, its terms of service ban content that “is violent or threatening or promotes violence or actions that are threatening to any other person.” Ghost founder and CEO John O’Nolan committed to us that Ghost’s hosted service will remove pro-Nazi content, full stop. If nothing else, that’s further than Substack will go, and makes Ghost a better intermediate home for Platformer than our current one.
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Suppose it makes sense to use a cybertruck as the hero photo then
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That sounds like they'd ban content promoting the eating of the rich, too.
I'm all for banning fascist content, but I don't wanna lose the French revolution vibes.
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That and the nature of this community lol. I think everybody reading this would prefer federated/distributed communication over centralized control.
Nazis on a server? Don’t visit that server. Nazis visit your server? You got some simple decisions to make on if your server is going to be a Nazi server.
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So like I said, the whole thing is pointless, because Substack changed their minds and kicked out the Nazis about a year ago. Anyone who is attacking them for being a Nazi platform is looking for an excuse, because it isn’t true anymore.
That’s the point, right? Give public pressure to platforms so they will deplatform the Nazis? What sense does it make to fail to notice when they do, and pretend that are still hosting Nazis, and talk incessantly about it when some important non-Nazi is just trying to pursue the critically endangered act of journalism on this platform which has no Nazis?
Why would you do that?
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F [email protected] shared this topic
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It's a standard terms of service and a verbal "commitment" which isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
I'm sure you'll find the exact same wording on substack's tos.
The problem is that what social media denizens call Nazi and what Ghost and substack call Nazi are all wildly different things.
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The real problem is that there are crazy people who define anybody right of them as a Nazi.
But, we're not ready to have that conversation yet
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I've seen people defend Substack saying it's not so bad, or the bad is a necessary evil to protect free speech.
I'm gonna say it: fuck free speech, I like myself some censorship. I sincerely believe some things are too harmful to be allowed to openly proliferate, that there's often a feasible path to reaching that conclusion, and it's not that difficult.
We mustn't avoid this because "it harms free speech." Nazis love that argument, and they're a threat to much more than just free speech. They shouldn't get to block attempts at censoring them, and they specially shouldn't get support to do so, because they're one of the reasons it's necessary in the first place.
"But not every case is clear-cut like Nazis," people will say, "you shouldn't support censorship, since it can be used for evil. Innocent ideas always get censored, too." To which I'll reply, "tell me more about those innocent ideas." When that happens, tell me. I'll reach out to people in charge, spread the news, get mad, help you in any way I can to fix it. We'll do it together. Fucking tell me more.
But lo and behold, many innocent ideas turn out to be dog-whistles or worse, it's always the same shit.
I don't care if it's Substack, or Ghost, or Twitter, or Reddit, or whatever. It's one thing to platform harmful views unaware. I get it, moderation is hard. Once aware, though, if your response is "but free speech," fuck off. It is moral and correct to censor Nazis. Same for people saying immigrants will eat your pets, or that gays want to sexualize children, change their genders, and harm women. Fuck that.
Platforms defining themselves on free speech is a red flag. "We're popular with both extremes" isn't a defense, it's a self-report that you're just a mercenary and like it that way—both sides being users means double the revenue.
Substack may not be Nazi-central, but it's surely a product of broligarchy.
