Oh, Jesus. Yeah, that’s bad.

Holy shit! Search and you get this type of thing as the results.

As far as I can tell, it’s just Google Search without the bullshit, them having punted to a branded version of Google instead of maintaining their own DB. That’s… actually remarkably useful. I think I will still use DDG but just the idea of using a search engine that’s too unpopular for anyone to want to garbage-ify seems very compelling.

It is rare for me to read something on the internet that literally knocks me back in my chair a little

And, if he’d lost the coin toss, he would have decided he should flip again, because that one didn’t count.

It is. It’s not like rat poison, but a single clove can be enough to poison them, so yes they should absolutely not eat garlic bread.

Definitely I recommend to host your instance outside of places with the shitty laws. Not sure how much that’ll do for you, but it’ll at least buy you some time.

Honestly I’m 100% on Team Steam as far as this screenshot, for the record. I just thought the story was interesting. Her shirt has a big hole for her boobs to come 80% of the way out through, and the game has sex bots in it, among other issues. I feel like this is a likely-successful attempt to garner more publicity for the game.

Honestly, the chain of trust model for TLS certificates is just broken from top to bottom in practice. It’s sort of along the lines of “anyone could walk past the building / into the apartment building basement and start flipping switches or fucking things up with the HVAC system” / “paper checks can be forged by anyone who cares” type of thing: It’s mostly just that no one cares enough to exploit the problems with it. But yeah, for anyone who takes seriously things like CA root certificates staying secure and is bothered when they’re not, they basically spend their entire time that is thinking about it being bothered by it, because right now it’s all broken.

I actually used to pay for YouTube Premium for quite a while. It was $7/month and I split it with someone so it cost me $3/month to eliminate the very slightly annoying ads, which was well worth it.

Since then, they’ve taken a hard right turn down Shitty On Purpose Lane, I’ve long since stopped paying them, and after the most recent round of making the ads ten times worse a few months ago, I pretty much only use Librewolf unless I am for some reason watching it on my phone.

I feel like Google has completely forgotten the concept that made them the only successful search engine, all those ancient years ago. It’s okay. The world doesn’t mind teaching lessons again, in my experience.

Hm, yeah, it works again now. Coming as it does after I got some kind of warning on a Google service a couple of days ago, Hey warning! Your browser is unsupported, please switch to Chrome! (and then a hidden button that took some digging, to bypass the warning and just let me use the site), I assumed some kind of fuckery.

I still do, actually, I think probably even if solved this is the cue to look into doing something else…

If I were in a conspiratorial frame of mind, I might think that there are people who are trying to push the “Substack = Nazis” narrative, by spreading it around in contexts where the “official” content of their message is actually something different, which is usually a lot more effective at spreading the gestalt you’re trying to spread around than just spamming “Substack = Nazis” everywhere.

The whole framing of the underlying freakout, that if Substack sent you a push notification about somebody’s blog, they’re obviously endorsing it, and it’s “being pushed algorithmically” by Substack, and look, here’s this very visual-picture-friendly juxtaposition of the Nazi logo in a Substack notification, even if the actual accusation is being walked by to “I think they should ban Nazis and this shouldn’t even be an issue” (which would be a fair thing to say) and “I’m alarmed that they took VC money from some pretty suspect people at different points in their history” (which would be a fair thing to say).

But, that’s not what they lead with. What they lead with is “don’t take any action” (they did take action), “‘oops, all nazis’ notifications issue” (not even sure what that means, but Substack is overwhelmingly leftist obviously, not “oops all nazis”)… you get the idea. There’s some other innuendo stuff in there, implying that “free speech” is just a cover because Substack loves Nazis so much that they’re hosting a ton of solid left-wing journalists and providing them funding, just so they can have a handy excuse to host this one Nazi blog with 768 followers, which is the real goal.

Ask me if I’m salty about this whole conversation lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy (I just learned about this one and since then I’ve been seeing it everywhere; Lemmy people love to do it it seems like)

Yeah, a lot of times becoming teacher/student with someone you already have a different standing with just doesn’t work out all that well. If it works then great, but if it doesn’t then t’s better to just have a different person teach you honestly.

Once I tried to teach my GF at the time something, started talking to her like one of my students, and she absolutely hated the process and rejected it completely. And lo, after talking with some other people because initially I couldn’t even tell what happened, I was enlightened.

from content on their site, that they full control

They don’t. Or, rather, to exactly the degree that Google “controls” the mail servers that forwarded the spam email to you.

Anyway, you seem to be grasping the point I was making now, so great. Anyway, to me, the bottom line is: It’s better to let people talk. I federated with Hexbear and lemmy.ml, too (or did, back when I had a server of my own, sniff), for exactly the same reason. It’s not Substack’s fault that there are Nazis in the world, and in this particular case and framing, I don’t think moving them to some other segregated platform does anyone any good. I actually think it helps the Nazis a lot to separate them from the main flow of information exchange. I realize I’m in the minority in thinking all of this.

The best way to combat that is not having Nazi shit.

Banning Nazi shit, especially if you are now taking a ton of money from standard silicon valley VCs, is the first step towards banning all “antisemitic” shit. It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump away. I think I actually had this exact conversation specifically about Substack with someone, at great length, a few years ago, and they were pointing to Germany as an example of how it should work (banning Nazi shit), and I pointed out that the same laws could easily be used against pro-Palestinians, and they all told me I was crazy.

AND OH, LOOK WHAT HAPPENED IN GERMANY

We’re probably not going to see eye to eye on it. Whatever. Anyway: I’m not in favor of Nazis. I’m in favor of left-wing platforms. I’m noticing that you are not taking the standpoint “We need to get the Nazis off Substack, because it’s a good thing, but the Nazis are horrifying.” That would actually be totally reasonable to me even though it’s not my opinion. You’re taking the standpoint “Fuck Substack all the homies hate Substack,” apparently, which I have a problem with. Or that seems to be your stance. Am I wrong? Maybe so, if so tell me.

I don’t like policing people’s speech, even when literal Nazis are involved. I’m probably in the minority on that. But I just don’t like all the disingenuous ways of attacking Substack that all seem to boil down to some pretty dishonest framings… everything you’re saying now, I think is more or less reasonable, we just don’t agree on it. As long as you’re not saying “SUBSTACK IS PROMOTING NAZI BLOGS ON PURPOSE BECAUSE THEY’RE NAZIS,” as some people seem to be, I think we good.

Are you under the impression that someone at Substack manually reviews every notification that goes out, for every user-generated post / blog? I feel like you failed to grasp the essential point I was making. Yes, comparing it to “Google is sending me push notifications about herbal supplements!” is precisely the analogy I’m intending to make. You are aware that those email notifications are also push notifications, sent to you by Google, based on user-generated content, right?

I have no idea what youre on about with the URL

Seems pretty straightforward to me. Is there a better way I can explain it to you, do you have any questions about the explanation? What part doesn’t make sense?

I have no idea if Substack is planning to take this blog down (actually I kind of doubt it, now looking into it more). But it seems like you’re failing to grasp really incredibly simple things that I’m saying, which makes me kind of not trust your overall judgement about what the far more complex issue of what the right overall judgement and opinion to hold towards Substack is.

I don’t know why, but someone speaking in the background in a language I don’t speak drives me insane. It doesn’t have to be loud, I don’t have to be trying to concentrate on anything especially hard, but if it doesn’t stop after a couple of minutes, I basically just have to go somewhere else.

No idea why. I don’t think it is any subtle racism, because it’s every language. It’s like my brain won’t let go of trying to understand, and keeps wanting to notify me that it’s having trouble and needs my help with it.

Are you under the impression that a person at Substack manually reviews every notification about every newsletter that gets sent out? It would be surprising to me if that was how it worked.

The URL has a “1” at the end, which usually means someone lost their account the first time and is now making a new one. I can’t really make sense of how old the “1” version of the account is or if there used to be one without it. The blog hasn’t been deleted yet, which sure isn’t great, but I’m fairly sure that the people at Substack didn’t make this blog or deliberately take pains to make sure it exists in any way.

I mean, you do understand that when I get a gmail notification about herbal Viagra, that doesn’t mean Google has gone into the herbal supplements business, right? And in general how platforms generally work? As I understand it (and tell me if I’m wrong), their currently policy is to ban Nazis and this one should be gone soon. Maybe I’m wrong, I’ll check back in a couple days and see what happened with it.

Honestly, it makes infinitely more sense to think that this is a fuck-up that is being spun to sound like a deliberate decision by internet trolls, than to think that Substack has decided to start sending literal Nazi propaganda to their users on purpose.

Also, they just took more funding from Marc Andeerssen in their most recent $100 million funding round 13 days ago, so your TL;DR is also all fucked up.

I mean, not from him personally, any more than they did from Kim Kardashian or Skims, the apparel company. I do agree that lots of VC money flooding in is a significant problem, just because it’s usually (almost always) a corrupting influence in the long run. That doesn’t mean that “Substack has a Nazi problem” all of a sudden becomes validated.

seeing more nuance than “A16Z investment is a necessary, end of story! No discussion allowed!” does not make one a purity obsessed leftists

Aw, jeez, you’re right. I hate discussion and I hate nuance. You got me. That’s exactly a really good summary of what I was saying.

The piece about Substack making nazi blogs to stir up drama was not meant to be taken seriously

Ah, yes, Schroedinger’s leftist. “I was just joking! Unless…? Also, BTW, Substack’s got a Nazi problem.”

I am not American

Great, congratulations.

it is reasonable to be sceptical of Substack’s claims

What “claims”?

People in other countries get severally beaten up (or even killed) in an attempt to do real journalism

IDK if you’ve been paying attention, but they’ve been putting journalists here in ICE detention for doing real journalism. IDK why you are trying to frame pro-journalism as a thing that is somehow unique to non-America, or in any way related to Substack. That framing just makes literally 0 sense.

Journalists good. Beating up journalists bad. Hopefully we can agree on that.

Also, hosting journalists good. Hopefully we can agree on that. No? Or does the first thing mean the second one is bad somehow? This is the type of weird circuitous framing I always see when people are bringing in some kind of bullshit narrative. “Substack hosts Nazis, I don’t like that” makes perfect sense, I can dig it, we can talk about it. This is just some weird circuitous nonsense.

Where did I make any claims about how the A16Z money was used?

I mean, you sure brought it up as a bad thing. Which, yes, it’s pretty suspect. I would actually describe the centralization of Substack (which means it’s vulnerable to a single legal action or something torpedoing the whole thing or putting them in a position where they actually do have to skew their journalism in some sort of pro-fascist direction) as the biggest problem, but you didn’t touch on that, because it can’t be summed up in a bite-sized “What about the A16Z money!” nugget.

Sure, it likely was used to fund journalists on the platform, including people who do good work. It is a good thing that they are getting paid.

Great! Glad we finally agree on something. Yes, it is, and it’s why the centralization and VC money was maybe a necessary evil to some extent where something like Ghost will have a harder time sending bunches of money to journalists, which is why all these good left-wing journalists are on Substack right now. Which is a good thing. I mean, at least we’re getting somewhere on that part lol.

I just don’t buy the colourful story about “commitment to free speech”

Honestly, why not? If a platform is 80% left wing voices and raised money specifically to give to those left wing voices, and then also hosts a tiny minority (much less than 20%, just kind of the ones who show up who don’t cross certain objective lines, like being Nazis) of right-wing voices, why would “free speech” not be the most logical explanation for why they’re doing that?

I am aware that “free speech” is often used as a code-word to excuse Nazi platforms, but those ones are usually pretty easy to identify because they host majority Nazi voices, they kick the left-wing ones off instead of raising funding for them, and so on and so on. I get the instant suspicion of “free speech” at this point in the American media landscape, but I don’t get why someone who took more than a cursory look at what Substack’s doing would come to any other conclusion about why they’re doing it.

and the uncritical view of the A16Z investment.

Sounds good! If I find anyone taking an uncritical view of the A16Z investment, I’ll let you know, and you and they can hash it out.

There’s a good bit of fake voting on Lemmy, but after a quick glance at the votes I don’t think this is that, I think it’s just people legitimately believing the narrative that “Substack = Nazis” and upvoting it because they believe in it.

(it would be funny if they created the Nazis blog themselves to stir things up).

Jesus Christ, see this is what I was talking about. You’re making up nonsense. What they actually did was invested a bunch of money in paying actual journalism people to do actual journalism things, and then create a new way of doing things that invited a ton of qualified mostly leftist journalists to do real journalism on a platform that’s a little closer to how people actually consume media now, and get paid for it, and in a sustainable fashion now that all the previous media empires are either crashing down or getting replaced with explicit propaganda.

That’s where some of that A16Z money went: To journalists (some of it literally and directly, to get the ball rolling). That’s why there are all these people like Robert Reich and Tim Snyder on Substack right now, doing journalism and getting paid for it. It’s a good thing.

Of course, it’s super easy to pretend they created a bunch of Nazi blogs instead. They didn’t do that, but “it would be funny” is easy to say. Man, get lost.