Casey Newton wrote about this a lot two years ago: https://www.platformer.news/why-platformer-is-leaving-substack/
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The far right is racist against Jews, but the conservative Christians think the Jews are the chosen people, how does that work out?
Substack is a very useful platform. Both in that you get all the email addresses of your subscriber base, so they don't lock you in there, and the monetization they have set up.
The fediverse should target it to replicate much or all of its functionality. It is MORE than a mere blog. It has a big ecosystem one blog can't replicate alone. The payment system would be particularly difficult to copy well.
This is known for a long time already and the reason why I boycott Substack. If you publish there, you are supporting right wing propaganda. Find a different platform!
Getting harder and harder to find non Nazi bars...
I don't fully understand, TBH. Is it particularly hard to create a substack competitor? Why don't we just... Do that
I think it's a bold strategy to leave the bigger more populated and used platforms to constantly exist on the smaller less relevant ones that never grow and offer everything the major platforms do just worse.
Shall we take Stalingrad? nonono it's full of nazi's, lets focus on Dieppe
That doesn't make any sense. We all left these platforms. Like an exodus. How would that make it harder for these nazi's to take over these platforms?
If you publish there, you are supporting right wing propaganda.
Not how taking a cut of subscription revenue works. If you publish right wing propaganda, then maybe you have a point.
How does utilizing and profiting from a service known to promote and profit extremist ideology aid that service in the promotion thereof? By taking a portion of the profits, you direct traffic and money to the service, which is then directed to extremists. Seems pretty clearcut to me.
I have a Substack and a Ghost (an alternative that's better in some ways and worse in others). The benefit to Substack is that growth on there is very possible with little participation in the social media like aspect they have, Notes. Ghost, meanwhile, has made growth incredibly difficult since they don't have that social media feature and you need people to actually sign up for your site instead of just clicking subscribe. It's kinda frustrating because I genuinely don't want to support Substack in any way but I write about videogames for almost 150 subscribers with continued and consistent growth and leaving that would be....annoying. What I've ended up doing is simply refusing to do any paid subscriptions through Substack so they don't get any money from me and instead have made a buy me a coffee and will eventually make a patreon.
There's also just the reality right now that most of these types of places have some Nazis on them since Nazis are now just chilling out in the open as opposed to hiding in their basements like they used to. There's only so much you can do if you want to be on the internet as a creator.
... Don't they take a cut of most subs?
Yes, and that's exactly why the article is important. They can either hide behind a "we are just a vehicle for posters" or they can refuse to host the content. They are choosing the former.
Yes, and that’s exactly why the article is important.
Explaining to us how subscriptions work like we're idiots is important? Or was that common knowledge a revelation for you?
It does seem like the headline + mechanics are entirely uninteresting and unsurprising. I guess the 'newsworthy' thing here is that substack platforms the neo-natzis?
It also platforms a bunch of ex-guardian journalists, who will say plenty about the harm being done by corporate buyouts and influence in traditional media. So I have a hard time taking this article, from this venue, very seriously.
For example: fox news, every podcast service, the opinion pages (and some news sections) of most major newspapers, and (I assume) more have all been profiting off of amplifying fringe right-wing folks. Is substack substantially worse? Are they doing anything policy wise that we should advocate for? Regulators who aren't doing something they should?
Is everyone really advocating for some substack CEO to start deplatforming people based on ideology? How quickly do you reckon that will be weaponized to deplatform any anti-zionist content? I'd take an 'open for all' framework over arbitrary deplatforming based on ideology every day of the week. Particularly considering the 'new definition' of anti-Semitism being adopted everywhere that equates most criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism.
Use Ghost (or any other Substack alternatives that DOESN'T promote hatefulness and harassment)
Nazis can use Ghost too.
But has Ghost ever sent out swastikas in push notifications?
So what other website people should use instead of Ghost or Substack?
Idk, it depends on what they're trying to do.
Austerity, ignorance, and scarcity breed fascists, not a SaaS TOS.
Can't you see what British Corporate Media (e g. Guardian) is trying to do?!
https://open.substack.com/pub/the307/p/british-corporate-media-is-pushing
Fuck corporate Substack, use open source Ghost
It's a good summary of the shit situation, but is there something in this article that wasn't already common knowledge?
Most people don't know about this, no. Now we have a mainstream publication reporting on it that we can point to.
i think you're overestimating common knowledge. like, even knowing that substack exists is pretty good for common knowledge.
Months ago, YouTube pointed me toward a video that recommended Substack as a platform for some hobby. I made a public comment pointing out that Substack was profiting from spreading Nazi ideology. The YouTuber replied, said something like "No way, they're not really doing that, are they?"
Maybe I'm naive, but I expected a YouTuber to be more terminally online than I am, to have heard of the Substack Nazi problem already. I also expected a YouTuber to at least Google "Substack Nazis" or similar before replying to some internet nobody. But apparently, no.
A lot of the coverage of the Substack Nazi issue that I've seen has been, broadly speaking, social media material, including blog posts. Those of us who read such stuff (like me, maybe you too) probably have some incorrect intuitions about how well-disseminated the ideas we find that way really are. Having a mainstream source like the Guardian pick up the story may be useful even if it doesn't say anything new to us.
I genuinely had no idea. There's tons of people I follow on there that are most certainly not Nazis, and that's the only place they publish stuff :/
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