The company said this did not represent a reversal of its previous stance, but rather the result of reconsidering how it interprets its existing policies.
We’re not taking back what we said about how we wouldn’t kick Nazis off the platform… but we’re kicking Nazis off the platform.
What a fucking laugh. Fuck Substack.
I agree, it’s a tiny step in the right direction, but definitely too little too late.
It’s not though, like they say themselves it’s only a reconsideration of the existing policies which is to maximize profit, morals be dammed. First they welcomed Nazis because Nazis gave them money and now they don’t because Nazis cause other people to stop giving them money. If Nazis wasn’t bad business nothing would have changed. This whole ordeal showed what kind of people they are.
Plus, they can’t even admit they’re caving to public pressure. Ego-ridden Nazi sympathizers, weird how that keeps happening.
They’ll just do something similar to what Musk did on Shitter initially, pretend to kick them off and then quietly let them back on.
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Yeah this deserves no praise. This falls squarely under “Fuck around, find out” since it wasn’t even weeks ago that they said they wouldn’t remove Nazis from the platform.
They’re still angling for a way to allow hate speech on their platform, they’re just hiding behind “taking down content that incites violence” as if that in itself isn’t bare fucking minimum expectation to begin with.
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its new policy interpretation will not include proactively removing content related to neo-Nazis and far-right extremism. But Substack will continue to remove any material that includes “credible threats of physical harm
Not even removing nazi publications
Title gives a very wrong impression of what’s happening.
You can tell most people didn’t read the article.
And I wonder how do they define ‘credible’? Are they literally going to research a writer to determine if they’re capable of following through on their threats?
I know/knew next to nothing about substack 6 months ago.
Now I only associate them as the other platform that allows Nazis on it.
Maybe they’re trying to get Elon to buy them.
Am I crazy, or is this Bud Light-levels of corporate idiocy!?
First they piss off non-Nazis by saying they won’t remove Nazi-speech. Then they cave to the backlash and remove Nazi speech, pissing off all the Nazis (who they obviously wanted to create a “safe space” for). But everyone else won’t be coming back because of the obvious, mask-off intent…
Even if they didn’t support Nazi publications, it would be hard to stay loyal to such an incompetent company…
At least they’re trying to backtrack and weasal up to the sane side instead of just doubling down and saying, “Fuck it, yeah, we’re Nazis now.”
“We’re not backtracking, we’re just doing a 180° turn from our previous course”. Fucking clowns, probably the Nazi money wasn’t enough to compensate the loss of subscribers.
Good to know there’s still enough sane people left to make an effort like this.
Who tf is platformer.com and why should I trust this report?
5 newsletter they are removing.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/8/24030756/substack-nazi-newsletter-content-moderation
No further commitment.
Thnx.
I’m never coming back. And I was paying for multiple publications. Fuck off you Nazis.
Fuck you substack, you showed us who you are.
They had a come to Jesus moment with Stripe.
Didn’t take that long to walk back on the decision
Maybe I don’t understand Substack that well, but it seems like its market share would be extremely vulnerable. It’s just a way to provide a newsletter (also published on the web) and accept subscriptions (and presumably they take a cut). It’s really easy for someone to set this up themselves even with minimal tech skills. If they already have a following on Substack, they just tell their subscribers to move, and potentially could even import the subscriber list to a new platform. It’s not like social media where there’s a lot of boosting or whatever from others on the platform, so the switching costs are high.
So unless I’m missing something, I hope people who don’t want Nazis around just move somewhere else. Because from the sounds of this article, they’re not really doing much about the Nazis.
Since they take a cut even on the nazis lists, they are going to take a hit in any case so they simply choose the smaller one. As a company is the logical pragmatic approach to use.
Why now? Maybe they are seeing high profile defections at a higher rate?
At the very least, the term "Substack* was becoming synonymous with “Nazis.”
Still is
Cool, so all pro israel posts are getting banned?
So the fediverse has missed an opportunity here.
Get subscriptions into the system, but decentralised (ie, not bound to a single platform / corporation) and you’ve pretty much got substack on the fediverse automatically with authors having all the control substack gives them and more.
It’s a real no-brainer except that the fediverse’s aversion to money and any sort of “transactional” internet means such things are an afterthought here it seems, unfortunately.
It saddens me a little, because on top of that, there seems to be relatively little impetus to lean into bringing blogging back on the fediverse (compared to trying to merely clone twitter), when it seems like the perfect fit for the fediverse and its decentralisation (unlike cloning twitter, which won’t really happen on the fediverse TBH). And just when a company could have been taught a lesson the fediverse seems to me to have dropped the ball.
there seems to be relatively little impetus to lean into bringing blogging back on the fediverse
There’s literally a wordpress plugin.
I mean that looks a bit more like wordpress expanding their platform/ecosystem to get more engagement from mastodon (AFAIU, they’ve implemented user based federation only) … which is all good.
But it’s not the same thing as fulfuling the fediverse promise of a single ecosystem in which you have many options/possibilities to create the social graphs and interactions you want. In this case, something like a platform/plugin etc where any fediverse account (lemmy, mastodon, etc) allows you to subscribe/follow a blogger through a subscription, which is paid if desired, all without really having to leave the fediverse and be bound to the whims of any particular platform/company.
I don’t know much about wordpress so maybe all of that is there already?
But, if there hasn’t been some migration from substack to wordpress, then I have to presume it’s because that ecosystem doesn’t provide the same thing that substack does, and which I suspect the fediverse with its more social-media inclined platforms could provide if it had native and well-integrated blogging platforms or features with the ability to have limited subscription-driven access.
Maybe Ghost will consider adding activitypub support
That definitely sounds interesting (I’ve heard some are moving to Ghost, and from their page it definitely looks interesting).
The issue though is money. The fediverse doesn’t do money, transactions and subscriptions, and so Ghost would have a hard time seeing value in federating as they wouldn’t, AFAIU, be able to federate a subscription system over the protocol and so wouldn’t be able to integrate with the userbase already here.
And this is one of the problems the fedi has. It’s kinda on the roadmap for the development of the protocol, but probably a long way off. And even if it were in the protocol, it wouldn’t work until other platforms added the features for a subscription system and successfully developed working federation of it, which in the case of, say, Mastodon and Lemmy, would only serve to benefit some other platform like Ghost rather than themselves.
So unless Ghost develop the necessary parts for the fediverse … I’d be doubtful something like that is happening any time soon.
Otherwise, more abstractly, if I’m onto something with this take, I believe it’s a good example of how the fediverse’s dependence on monolithic platforms rather than a more modular ecosystem of composable apps that all operate directly on data shared over the protocol may actually start hurting the attractiveness of the ecosystem.
I don’t understand the confusion.
Just use ActivityPub to publish blurbs and links to content available on your Ghost blog. Ghost supports subscriptions so you can then stand up a paywall when people click through.
Nothing about ActivityPub requires you syndicate full article content to the fedi. Hell my own blog doesn’t do that, if only because Mastodon is not a good place for long-form content.
Fair!
Its not a missed oppurtunity, it just hasent happened yet. Lemmy/Mastodon aren’t a great fit for this, but it sounds like a new service might be.
Unfortunately the only payment implementation would likely be crypto, as otherwise every instance would have to setup a payment processor account, as most artists use things like substack to not deal with that. It would be hard to justify paying stripe/etc a large amount per month without taking a cut of the authors sales, especially if there are no authors on your instance making sales.
it just hasent happened yet
I appreciate optimism, and thinking about what can be done now is certainly the point of asking these questions.
But I think realistically the fedi may only have so many opportunities to prove itself to the world. On the whole question of how does someone handle business and money with the fediverse, it already seems to be behind.
I dont think we have a limited time frame to prove things. Mastodon is at 3mil users, Lemmy is holding on the tens of thousand’s, we have the intial traction it takes to get a social network off the ground.
As long as these popular networks share activitypub, than the protocol itself is available for other like minded networks with different focuses, like a substack-a-like. It’s the strength of an open protocol and a lack of profit motive that lets these fledgling services standup and survive while they mature into reliable competitors to for profit offerings.
I’m with you. But just to clarify, I’m not talking about time per se but rather these opportunities where a platform like Substack or Twitter drops the ball. I worry they’ll be somewhat limited in the short-medium term.
Maybe I’m wrong and their occurrence is a symptom of some deeper shift that will persist until a new equilibrium is reached.
My fear though is that a fatigue will settle from this online discourse fracturing, and people will get tired of “moving” or keeping track of what new thing they’re supposed to join and realise, with a serious kernel of truth, that part of the point of online spaces is to pick one and stay there and build a culture there and standup for that place’s quality and resilience against whatever forces would seek to trash it.
If something like that settles in, I can see something like the fediverse getting a bad reputation as an ecosystem that misses the point of the whole thing with its shifting and fragile instances. Maybe I’m way wrong, but I’ve put this on my bingo card.
