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dmurray 5y ago

> they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform" "Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days. It's close to being a dog whistle for the alt-right. I'm surprised this is a stance that would attract more "excellent writers".

lhnz 5y ago
It's not surprising if you think the non-mainstream intellectual community is large enough to contain excellent writers that were currently under-utilized and under-financed. Excellent writers could have been ignored by the mainstream market previously if they were outside of the norm and sometimes found in baskets with bad apples (e.g. "alt-right"). The non-mainstream is actually a collection of smaller minority groups -- it tends to be the mainstream that is more homogenous. It doesn't surprise me that Substack has found success by not treating the non-mainstream as equally worthy of scorn. It also won't surprise me when they start to attract more writers from the mainstream. The mainstream can sometimes appear to be totally homogenous in their hatred of liberal content policies but this is mostly due to the efforts of a small minority. If the offering is good, others will slowly come aboard. As another commentator noted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31084791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31084791), Substack's policy is politically more in line with neoliberal complaints of censorship than the complaints from those in the alt-right. (Their comment is better than mine since it is a more direct response to the core of your comment, which could be read as suggesting that use of Substack points towards sympathy for the "alt-right".)
slg 5y ago
People are pushing many indepedent flavors of "anti-censorship" at the moment. Some of them clearly are dog whistle's for the alt-right by people who just want to say bigoted things without repercussions. The Substack version is more inline with the neoliberal complaints of censorship. This letter from Harper's Magazine[1] from a couple years back is a great example of this thinking. Whether the signees of this letter are "excellent writers" is certainly up for debate, but most of these clearly aren't alt-right thinkers. [1] - https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
nokcha 5y ago
> "Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days. I'd disagree. It's unpopular with left-leaning mainstream audiences, but among intellectuals who write for a living, I imagine that extra assurances of not getting kicked off the platform are rather attractive.
- slg 5y ago
  >It's unpopular with left-leaning mainstream audiences It is truly wild how HN often frames censorship as something coming purely from the left while ignoring the laws coming out of conservative state legislatures across the country. There is a wide spectrum of people both pushing for censorship and pushing against it.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    Not to mention the censorship pressure exerted by family values groups’ complaints to the FCC. Those are generally very conservative groups who want to protect children from seeing a breast.
  - farmerstan 5y ago
    What is insane is when people frame anti-censorship as an alt-right value. That offends people like me who are staunchly liberal but completely anti-censorship to my core.
    - evandale 5y ago
      It's so pervasive that you can't even have an anti-censorship opinions on Reddit without getting lumped in with the alt-right and banned from subreddits. The nuance of "I disagree with you but defend your right to say it" is dying a painful death. Defend free speech and get accused of being alt-right or wanting to say the n-word. Another thing dying is the defense of protests. I made a couple comments in popular Canadian subreddits about the truckers and was banned from a few for saying "protest isn't meant to make people feel happy and if the protestors don't make you feel uncomfortable you either agree with them or they're not doing their job". I got banned from one with the reason being "be gone nazi scum go try parler".
      - HappySweeney 5y ago
        If you are talking about r/Ottawa, I can explain their reaction. What happened in downtown Ottawa was not a protest, but an occupation with heavy machinery in an attempt to make the PM look bad, and have to step down. There were many, many posters in that sub trying to paint the whole thing as a peaceful protest, but after a week of 150 air horns for ~18 hours a day, the benefit of the doubt was gone, and everyone repeating the same garbage was turfed. Additionally, the sub saw many multiples of normal traffic, so mods were quick to ban anyone posting anything resembling a Fox talking point.
saint_fiasco 5y ago
It's unpopular among people who consume the writings of the intellectual community. It's less popular among intellectuals themselves, and even the pro-censorship intellectuals only want other people to be censored, not themselves.
bigmealbigmeal 5y ago
Do you have any sources that indicate anti-censorship is “hugely unpopular” with the mainstream intellectual community? For example, esteemed scientists speaking out against it? It may be important here to separate journalists and political activists from the intellectual community. Not to say that they aren’t intellectuals, but the issue could be limited to that set of intellectuals in particular.
- kyrra 5y ago
  See NYT "hit" pieces on substack: * https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/11/business/media/substack-newsletter-competition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/11/business/media/substack-n... * https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/media/substack-growth-newsletters.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/media/substack-g... Along with one of Substack's founders responding to it: https://twitter.com/lulumeservey/status/1514318085083340807 https://twitter.com/lulumeservey/status/1514318085083340807
  - bigmealbigmeal 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing these. From what I can see, the criticism here is coming entirely from journalists/activists. It makes me wonder: how many of the opinions that we are exposed to originate from journalists/activists? How much are we mixing up the opinions of these people as representing the opinions of scientists, engineers and philosophers? How much are we mixing up the opinions of journalists/activists as representing those of your average person? I'm starting to see a deep issue with the preeminence of journalist/activist opinion.
sixo 5y ago
It's well-aligned with "writers own their audience" - together this positions substack as a platform for monetizing writing, not as more of a publisher.
temp8964 5y ago
> "Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days. I don’t know where did you get this idea? What did you mean “mainstream intellectual community”? Do you have any evidence like mass signatures supporting censorship from mainstream intellectuals? People consume too much Reddit / Twitter sometimes live in an alternative reality.
russellbeattie 5y ago
Totally agree. "Anti-censorship" is definitely a dog whistle call out to the right wing: "Feel free to lie and spread dangerous misinformation on our platform." I don't know if Substack actually allows "Fauci is the devil, all liberals are socialist pedophiles" writers on their site, but that's what they're promising to support.

farmerstan 5y ago

Everyone who is responding doesn’t understand the core benefit of Substack: the writer owns the relationship between them and their subscribers. Substack has no such ownership. Substack doesn’t take payments from the subscribers and then pay the writer. The subscribers directly pay the writer and the writer is charged a fee by Substack. It is VERY easy for writers to drop off Substack. They own their subscription lists and if they want to move to Patreon they can. But Substack’s incentive is to make their product so good that the writers stay. That is how the company is set up. They could have created a moat where Substack owns the subscribers but they chose to flip it so that it is very easy for writers to leave. Literally writers can leave Substack with the click of the button and they can take their subscribers with them, and that’s a core value of the company. I think the company values are amazing and new and something you don’t see anymore. I actually applied to the company last year but didn’t pass the interview which was very disappointing but I plan on trying again this year. It’s a company I firmly believe in and I love the mission.

infogulch 5y ago
THE business plan for every new company created in the last two decades is exploitative by design, and people are fed up with it. The problem is that the relationships between the person consuming, the person producing, and the business is organized wrong. The plan is for the business to insert itself between people and extract a tax on their interaction instead of collecting a fee for providing a service. Technology has accelerated this trend by reducing the cost of this automated relationship management. This is a gross inversion of normal relationships between people. I hope that Substack's model becomes more popular and people choose to eject exploitative mediators and force them to be third party service providers where they belong. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30420113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30420113

reducesuffering 5y ago
I think Alexander and I would agree wrt the floor. Saying "equally" was probably a mistake on Alexander's part. >'FDB wants to lower the dropout age to 12; Schools guarentee that kids get to have interactions with lots of other kids, even in very rural areas; Schools guarentee parents time to themselves, to not worry about keeping their kids safe. Aren't these important points?' Yes, but 5 - 12 is still a looong time for a kid. All those points are orthogonal to charters. >'I think FDB wants to shut down charters because he recognizes that they're immoral [citation needed], and public schools are simply what we're supposed to maintain for taking care of and educating our kids (at this moment in history.) It seems like Alexander is just saying "you're dreaming too big!"; in every era some people always exist to say this."' Personally, I'm very fond of Alexander's passage against public-schools-only near the end: "I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!"
- _bfhp 5y ago
  I guess I was reading between the lines: p174 : "There is no such thing as a 'public charter.' 'Public' does not just denote public money but also public accountability; most charter schools are not under the control of the parents and local citizens at all and thus cannot be called public." p177: "[T]he very competitive landscape that charters are meant to foster creates a structural bias toward dishonest practices." All public guarantees in this modern time are going to end up with a lot of shitty conditions and outcomes, when people in power don't care about them. Maybe that's a poor reply but it's my reply. The book indeed mixes "just overthrow the culture and machines of capitalism" and "here's some reforms I like, each of which may or may not be precluded by the overthrowy bit, at least a little." I think an unstated and reasonable assumption of FDB's is that if we enact these reforms, it will be because we've convinced the public that public schools and teachers are important. The ideas aren't just to put legal language on paper, they are cultural reforms advanced through appeals to compassion ("As a socialist, my interest lies in expanding the degree to which the community takes responsibility each all of its members, in deepening our societal commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of everyone.") Did the gay and lesbian community get marriage legalized by just crafting the most perfect bill texts? It's hard to deny that leftism is in a confused way right now. They (generally, not deBoer afaik) think prostitution is liberating!

Georgelemental 5y ago

Name a single such law passed in the past 4 years in the US? (Laws regulating the curricula of state-funded public schools don't count. Not using taxpayer money to support a view ≠ impinging on the right of private citizens and organizations to express that view with their own resources and funds)

slg 5y ago
I will ignore the bizarre exception you are making for "Laws regulating the curricula of state-funded public schools" because I can still point to other examples. Here is a law that passed this month in Florida that dictates what topics employers can discuss in diversity training programs.[1] [1] - https://www.natlawreview.com/article/florida-s-stop-woke-act-limits-topics-employers-can-discuss-di-training https://www.natlawreview.com/article/florida-s-stop-woke-act...
- temp8964 5y ago
  Why those reporting need to be intentionally biased? The bill is clearly about what the training programs can teach, not “discuss”. These two are clearly different. When a training program teaches white employees they are inherently racist, it’s totally different from a random person raises this idea from discussion.
  - slg 5y ago
    This is a continuation of the same problem I highlighted before because it pretends that self-censorship only happens on the right. I have been through over a dozen diversity training courses in my career. Not a single one has ever said "white employees are inherently racists". This law is written against strawmen examples. Their goal isn't to stop those extreme examples. It is supposed to make companies fearful enough of a lawsuit, remember a lawsuit doesn't have to win to be costly and damaging, that they either dumb down this training or stop it entirely. The problem with censorship is not just what is actively censored. There is a much broader chilling effect that ends up censoring more topics even if they aren't explicitly banned.
    - temp8964 5y ago
      If you never saw one then it does not exist. Good point.
      - slg 5y ago
        Speaking of strawmen... You could have at least tried to address the point I was making.
        temp8964 5y ago
        You don't have a point. You live in an alternative reality which claims things exist in reality do not exist.
- Georgelemental 5y ago
  It's not a bizarre exception, it's completely normal. If a math teacher tells their students that 2+2=5, it's not an assault on free speech to fire the teacher.
  - slg 5y ago
    I like how you challenged me to listed an example thinking none existed, I list an example, and then you completely ignored that I did. You didn't even try to weasel out of it by saying that example doesn't qualify, just fully 100% ignored that I proved you wrong.
    - Georgelemental 5y ago
      I didn't "weasel out" of anything, I didn't address a portion of your comment because I judged that another commenter had already said everything I would have said.