Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost
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Newsletters? Google killed RSS so we could have newsletters?
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I think i only follow Robert Evans. Have any ghost recs?
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Google weirdly gets a lot of credit for killing things that are very much alive and well.
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aren't podcasts still RSS. I'm like 90% sure they are.
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A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem.
What on Earth? They hosted like three Nazis, which is part of the overall commitment to letting people talk which leads them to host a ton of really good people. And then, when everyone on the internet yelled at them for it, raising a pretty reasonable counterpoint, they kicked the Nazis off. That all happened over a year ago.
It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them
I read the citation for this statement. What it says is very different from actively promoting the work of fascists and recruiting them. There is a whole fascinating conversation to be had about why some high-profile lefty journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald all of a sudden became Nazis, but it's very misleading to assign 100% of the blame in this way to Substack, purely because they were working with those people before it really became completely clear to everyone that they for whatever bizarre reason had become Nazis. It's a lot more complex situation that is being summarized in this extremely glib spin-soaked fashion.
And it's funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen
Okay, fair enough. This is pretty interesting and I hadn't known it.
On the other hand, Substack also hosts Sy Hersh, Tim Snyder, Salman Rushdie, and God knows who else. If they were planning to slant their coverage based on the fact that Andreesen's company gave them $15 million in 2019 (which they then quickly turned around and gave big chunks of to working journalists), you'd think they would be making some kind of effort to downplay the leftist voices which they are currently hosting, outnumbering the "problematic" voices which might be there but which I have literally never run across there.
Elon Musk also, apparently, tried to buy Substack in 2023, and they told him to fuck off.
This whole article reads like a bad-faith hit piece aimed at one of the organizations that actually is trying to provide a space for good journalism including left-wing authors, and making sure that it's sustainable and they can get paid. By trumping up some various things into much bigger deals than they need to be.
I wonder who would be interested in ginning up big bad-faith hit jobs against good news outlets, encouraging people on the left to savage and abandon them for various little misdemeanors until the only news outlets left are either bought and purchased by open fascists, or too small and scattered to make a difference?
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Someone needs to tell Carole Cadwallader to move her resistance headquarters out of the Nazi bar. There are a lot of people who’d subscribe to her journalism if it didn’t also involve funding the enemy.
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RSS is the hero that saved us from Spotify (et at.) walling off podcasts behind their paywall.
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Yes and ironically there are services like kill the newsletter that will re-RSS your tired ass newsletter.
But anyone cool that uses fulltext RSS gets an auto subscribe from me.
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Is there no FOSS alternative we can promote?
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Substack and Ghost both support RSS. Problem is no one uses it anymore. They either don't know or don't care. It also doesn't provide an option for paid subscriptions.
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I don't think we've been saved just yet. Their market share is still growing and they don't support importing RSS feeds. Nor do they support outgoing video feeds for RSS. And they continue to pay for exclusive partnerships.
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Ghost is FOSS, that's part of the whole point.
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Has Ghost refused to host "Nazi" publications?
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I don't think we're completely saved forever but they tried making podcasts Spotify-exclusive. I remember a bunch of Gimlet podcast hosts being like "please come to Spotify to listen to us -- it's better than it used to be!" They ended up caving because people didn't listen. Podcasting is built around RSS -- even though people aren't really aware of it -- and people expect to get them this way.
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I'm following everyone from substack and every other resource on RSS. Nothing dead about it. Maybe someone is unhappy with their particular way of accessing it? I've used Feedly ever since Google ruined their own reader. Google abandoned a lot of things during that period of innovation.
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How do readers access Ghost? I got sucked into a trial membership but I don't intend to publish, just read, like I can do on substack. I don't want to be on the problematic platform but can't figure out how to gradually use Ghost instead, especially since hardly anyone's over there yet.
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Ah my bad, I saw $9 on the site and figured it was a paid service things
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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.
