Technology

Free speech POV aside, Substack is running a business as a publisher of content. They sell advertising space. You know what de values your advertising space? Unsafe hateful content. Advertisers care about "brand safety" in terms of what their ads appear next to. You can't run a good advertising sales business if the advertisers don't have guarantees on brand safety.

Another day of thanking ~~god~~ the devs for the decentralized Fediverse and Lemmy 🙏😔

What a stupid argument. Imagine replacing "nazis" with "pedophiles" in her answer

Money is the only vote that matters. Avoid the Nazi bar. Don't give them ad revenue or search engine relevance (for what that's worth anymore).

Here's a Wired article featuring four good alternatives to Substack.

Gen Z needs to understand the historical lesson that the Blues Brothers taught those before them. Illinois Nazis exist, and some days they demonstrate, as per their right to freedom of speech - but this is as much as an opportunity to humiliate them and openly critique the mindset as anyone else. Dark little underground communities flourish behind closed doors.

This is plainly irresponsible.

TIL that Substack is apparently a bunch of crypto-fascists who expect people to believe they don't support Nazis, they just give them money and a place at their table to talk about it.

Tell me you are a fascist WO telling me you are a fascist.. 🤣🤣..

And then people wonder why we're so scared of Facebook if the fediverse is "supposed to be open".

The answer is literally in front of you, people!

Translated: McKenzie just wants the sweet money and is trying to gaslight us into thinking platforming nazis is ok.

“Yeah they’re nazis but hey, they bring the money in. Why should I ban them?”

This tracks with my previous attempts at reporting that Sinfest guy. Posts hundreds of comics that blatantly break multiple official substack content guidelines and I get the effective equivalent of a promise for "action" combined with a dismissive eye roll. They completely ignored my follow-up email detailing the complete lack of action and the dozen or so new content guideline violations.

Jesus Christ censorship has become such a meaningless word now.

we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

Happy Opposite Day, everyone! 🥳

I see literalnazis.com is available for cheap if anybody want to 302 that to substack.

Only thing I can recommend is finding their advertisers and letting them know what they're advertising on

If a Nazi has a large subscription following than Substack would be directly profiting from Nazi content.

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views.

"But we'll gladly host those views on our platform, run ads alongside them, and profit from them."

Cool... so they now facilitate and directly benefit from Nazi activity. Sounds great when you put it like that.

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

Are Musky and Hamish McKenzie’s friends because that sound like the same bullshit he would say. Also, hasn't deplatforming actually been shown to work?

For anyone who remembers the interview the CEO did with the Verge back when they launched Notes, this isn't surprising at all.

You can see a transcript here. The relevant section can be found by searching all brown people are animals or more specifically just animals and reading on from there.

I'm not sure if the video footage of the interview is still available, but it's even worse because you can see that the CEO is completely lost when talking about the idea of moderating anything and basically shuts down because they have nothing to say all while the interview is politely berating them about how they're obviously failing a litmus test.

Do note that above the point where "animals" occurs is some post-hoc context provided by the interviewer (perhaps why the video is no longer easily available?) where they point out that the question they asked and the response they got wasn't exactly as extreme as it first appeared. But they also point out that it's still very notable despite the slightly mitigating correction and I'd agree entirely, especially if you watch(ed) the video and clocked the CEO's demeanor and lack of any intelligent thought on the issue.