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Twitter Is Blocking Likes and Retweets that Mention Substack
- hirundo 3y agoI interpret this as damage and route around it. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/ Specifically I prefer to get my news from RSS feeds from lots of independent websites, to avoid such damage from centralized platforms. Any one of the sites I follow could start censoring without much effect. For this reason we need protocols for microblogging that allow for the same kind of positive fragmentation.
- guptaneil 3y agoThere are already a lot of protocols for microblogging (RSS, ActivityPub, JSON Feed, etc), we don’t need yet another. I’ve lately been a fan of hosting my own Beluga feed (https://beluga.social https://beluga.social) since it’s much more lightweight than a full mastodon instance, and I still rely on RSS feeds. But let’s be honest, very few people actually want fragmentation and ownership even if it’s better for the long-term health of the Internet. They prefer discoverability, reach, and usability, which will always be better on a centralized platform. It’s like asking people to eat boiled broccoli when there’s a pile of donuts next to it. Can we make broccoli donuts? Mastodon is doing pretty well these days, but given that email went from a fully federated and open ecosystem to mostly centralized over the last 2 decades, I’m not super optimistic.
- mlindner 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qbasic_forever 3y agoLmao what exactly are they "A/B testing" with a complete block of a company's name on the platform? Is Twitter rolling out a new censorship dashboard where you can pay to block your enemies?
- mlindner 3y agoI suggest not engaging in hyperbole.
- seba_dos1 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35482222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35482222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35490899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35496403
- qbasic_forever 3y agoFantastic work bringing free speech back to Twitter, Elon.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago> back to ?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mabbo 3y agoThese are not the moves of a company that is confident in itself and its product. Reminds me of Amazon banning the sale of Chromecast devices because they compete with FireTV.
- trollerator23 3y agoOh boy. Yeah Twitter is done if it's come to this.
- tinyhouse 3y agoTo be fair, Amazon and Google really didn't/don't like each other and were blocking each other's products.
- _thisdot 3y agoIf I’m remembering correctly, Google refused to support YouTube on Fire TV. They could’ve done a lot worse imo. They own Google Search and Play Store
- dazc 3y agoThat actually didn't work out too bad, did it?
- Retr0id 3y agoElon has made an utterly incomprehensible statement on the matter: > Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779
- andsoitis 3y ago> Elon has made an utterly incomprehensible statement delirium
- toomuchtodo 3y agoWine and Ambien evening. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/872260000491593728 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/872260000491593728
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- morkalork 3y agoAmbien is like crack for white middle class and up people.
- papito 3y agoHis actions and words also resemble those of a person dangerously sleep-deprived, but maybe it's just Elon being Elon.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoOh shit they wget'd twitter?? from the IP address?!?
- ffssffss 3y agoYeah, you know, the Substack IP address. You look it up in the Yellow Pages.
- ea550ff70a 3y agoFree speech king back at it
- qgin 3y agoIn December they tried to ban mentioning any non-Twitter usernames: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/18/twitter-wont-let-you-post-your-facebook-instagram-and-mastodon-handles/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/18/twitter-wont-let-you-post-...
- westurner 3y agoIsn't that completely contradictory to their supporting free speech mission? It sure looks like someone has hijacked Elon and Jack and run off with those operations. Maybe you have to add the year to the search query to find search results from before when Donny got kicked out fairly for serial disrespect. Become a more effective censorship apparatus.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- RF_Savage 3y agoOh yes it very much is. But as it often goes, free speech absolutists don't remain so when they get the power to censor.
- dingusdew 3y ago[dead]
- papito 3y agoIt's free speech alright - within "acceptable matrix parameters". I am entertained by how the "libertarians" on HN were shrieking "bloody murder censorship" at day-to-day moderation decisions, and now falling all over each other to defend this erratic, impulsive chaos as "Musk's right to make business decisions". Pick a lane.
- programmarchy 3y agoI thought the libertarians were saying “it’s a private company so they choose what to host”.
- evan_ 3y agoRemember early on in the Elon days they did the same thing with Mastodon. Real thin-skinned stuff.
- fundad 3y agoThey did this and undid this already.
- raydev 3y agoIt's undone? "substack" is still a censored/redirected term in Twitter search.
- barbariangrunge 3y agoSubstacks plan to add a newsfeed has me really unhappy. I’m on substack partially to avoid the problems that come with newsfeeds. The newsfeed ruined Facebook imho and kept anyone from visiting each others pages after that. It is clearly a play to capture disaffected Twitter users, or so it seems to me. But it feels so out of place for the platform
- criddell 3y agoDepends on the incentives. As long as they don’t try to monetize it via ads or some other method that rewards “engagement” they might do something interesting.
- rchaud 3y agoThat is almost inevitable. Substack makes very little money for a company of its size. Taking a cut of 1:1 subscriptions isn't nearly as lucrative as advertising.
- andy_ppp 3y agoAre Substack releasing a Twitter clone, everyone will leave as soon as they can if they do!
- suddenclarity 3y agoThey have released it in beta and people won't just like everyone didn't go to Mastodon. Social media is only as valuable as their users and people won't start from zero when they have millions of followers on an existing platform. Especially not to a new platform that has to go through all the same issues with hate speech, censorship and other subjective issues that really difficult when you seriously think about them. Look at how Patreon randomly started banning users.
- Laaas 3y agoThe difference is Mastodon is a horrible product. The UX is horrendous, yet a noticeable amount of people still left! That's how bad Twitter is! If Substack has anywhere near a decent product, Twitter will hemorrhage. (FWIW, Mastodons issues aren't inherent, but due to very bad design decisions wrt. federation, crippling it.)
- nebula8804 3y agoMastodon is just following the long standing trend of open source software sucking from a consumer UX perspective. And as all open source trends go...all the techies adopt it but the rest of the mass market does not. Those are your "noticeable amount of people" ie, not really a long term indicator. The journalists/hollywood made a big stink about leaving Twitter but the majority slunk back and even got made fun of by the Elon stans. This network despite Twitters problems is still a huge risk preventing Substack's product from taking off.
- almost_usual 3y agoIf you search for ‘substack’ it will be replaced with ‘newsletter’. https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/1644708997981773825 https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/16447089979817738...
- dcow 3y agoThis of course sounds totally stupid to us and we are right to criticize Twitter for blocking crawlers because a request is a request is a request. But I’m pretty sure Twitter under any ownership would take measures to stop what they consider “api abuse”. Twitter is notoriously horrible when it comes to being reasonable about it’s api. Let’s not pretend Elon did this…
- philistine 3y agoSo explain the logic that API abuse leads to inability to like or retweet a discussion of the company at fault on the service.
- dcow 3y agoI have no idea what mental gymnastics they pulled, but off the cuff: if a company is a person, and the company is abusing my api, I feel like I have grounds to remove them from my platform or at least demonetize them. They are breaking the terms of service to which they agreed.
- webkike 3y agoWell, they didn’t up until Elon took charge, so yes, Elon did this
- w______roy 3y agoBut, he did. That's like saying "Hey, this company would have done this bad thing under any leadership, so let's not hold current leadership accountable." He bought it, all the shares, eliminated the board, eliminated leadership from many departments. He wanted it all, and now he has it, and so he's way more accountable for EVERY decision than the average CEO.
- ajross 3y agoIt's more "this bad thing isn't notable, it's just one of many events like it". Musk draws negative attention like no figure in the modern era. He is just too fun to hate. This story amounts to a mildly anticompetitive action by a middle tier social network. It's just not a big deal[1] in any reasonable context. It's a front page freakout on HN only because Musk was involved[2]. We're here for entertainment value, basically. For myself: the Taibbi angle here is absolutely hilarious, given the level of spin in the "Twitter Files" you really would have thought the guy would have bought some loyalty, but Musk's brain doesn't work that way. [1] But, of course, bad. [2] c.f. all the front page coverage here of Tesla foibles that would be 100% ignored on the cars of any other manufacturer.
- w______roy 3y agoI think Substack Notes is the most viable alternative to Twitter and stands to capture a lot of the userbase as Twitter continues to go down the drain. I mean, adding the doge meme thing to the UI is so cringey that I just haven't been logging on to avoid the pangs of cringe. But "Tweeting" sounds so natural now. What are we going to call posting on Substack Notes? "Noting"? "Subbing"? "Stacking"?
- pid-1 3y agoWell I didn't know about Substack Notes, now I do. Streisand Effect strikes again.
- softwaredoug 3y agoReally weird too, try searching for substack, only get matches on 'newsletter' https://twitter.com/search?q=substack&src=typed_query&f=live https://twitter.com/search?q=substack&src=typed_query&f=live Either this is a forced replacement of s/substack/newsletter or its a sign the term is banned or both.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- seydor 3y agoWhen facebook started doing things like this, first taking away subscribers (likes) from pages and making them pay-to-post, then blocking competitors, copying their ideas etc. etc. it was hailed as "business savvy". obviously it is just as bad when twitter does it, but how come they are not "savvy"?
- hsn915 3y agoWhat I found really aggregious is that Twitter is polluting searches for "substack" with results where "newsletter" is highlighted. This wasn't happening yesterday, but it started happening today. I tried a custom search where "substack" is on the must include list, and "newsletter" is in the excluded words list, but it didn't work: it still showed me mostly tweets with "newsletter".
- kranke155 3y agoEveryone realised we are watching someone have an episode on social media right ? He just happens to own the social media platform he’s having an episode on. (If I had absolutely had to guess I’d say Musk has a “mild” version of bipolar disorder. I say this because I have it too and this is overly familiar).
- d23 3y agoNot sure I can call it an episode. It seems more likely the emperor is revealing himself to have no clothes.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoThis is by no means a big reveal. This another day of "nude man farts while sitting on leather couch".
- a4isms 3y agoLate to this, but in the spirit of C.A.R. Hoare’s Turing Award acceptance speech, I’d say that we’ve peeled back layer after layer of robes and discovered that the clothes have no emperor. https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/courses/COP4610/hoare.pdf https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/courses/COP4610/hoare.pdf
- troymc 3y agoI wonder what code-words or Unicode lookalike glyph substitutions people have started using so that they can continue to refer to "Substack" without the bots supressing them. "Hypopile"? "ʂυβʂταƈκ"?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chasing 3y agoI’m glad comedy is now allowed again on Twitter, because this is all pretty funny.
- 650REDHAIR 3y agoIf you enjoy Twitter comedy you’ll love https://www.Twitter.com/650REDHAIR https://www.Twitter.com/650REDHAIR (Jk. Elon banned me)
- 650REDHAIR 3y agoI turned my account into an Elon parody so that I could effectively park it via ban. I encourage everyone else to do the same.
- kemayo 3y agoTwo things can be true at once: 1. Substack can be trying to mine the follower graph from Twitter in order to bootstrap its upcoming twitter-clone, and Twitter can object to this and try to block Substack from doing it whether by API or direct crawler 2. Twitter can be blocking people trying to link to content on Substack, to punish Substack for making a competitor and trying to port Twitter users over The first is reasonable enough, outside of maybe some anti-competitive law questions that I think probably(?) don't actually apply (but I'm not a lawyer). The second point isn't inherently unreasonable in other circumstances... but it does fly completely in the face of all Musk's rhetoric about free speech, and things that have been said criticizing Twitter's former actions blocking discussion of e.g. the Hunter Biden laptop story. Particularly since the people it's directly hurting are the people publishing newsletters on Substack. Seems particularly like an own-goal given that the immediate effect is driving off the people like Taibbi who've been giving Musk cover for his claims with the whole "Twitter files" thing.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoExplanation: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779 If a business launched a direct competitor to my product and engaged in obviously poor behavior (like scraping my entire site for content), this seems like very reasonable grounds to effectively ban that site from my platform. I'm not really capturing why this is so controversial. Wasn't there a similar precedent a few years ago in a lawsuit involving third parties scraping LinkedIn profiles?
- likeafox 3y ago> (like scraping my entire site for content) Seems unlikely. Anyone other than Elon saying this happened?
- yunohn 3y agoAlso, I’m not sure how they are scraping Twitter using /the/ Substack IP? Not even clear what that means tbh - the website is running on one IP and simultaneously running scrapers?
- theusus 3y agoA few days ago I tweeted a complain to Elon that tweet was soon deleted. So, no wonder
- jabradoodle 3y agoSuch an odd decision to make from Twitters perspective. On substack, it seems to me the quality of the content there is in part at least due to paying creators based on subscriptions, vs e.g. medium which I believe pays based on how many minutes people spend reading. It seems that business models that are subscription based, and models that promote low quality click bait like content are not mutually exclusive. I hope the short form of social media content doesn't lead to substack loosing what makes it great. On a side note, I wonder how this post in particular made the front page, I have been expecting it for a few days but none of the posts so gained traction.
- lapcat 3y ago> I wonder how this post in particular made the front page, I have been expecting it for a few days but none of the posts so gained traction. It's already been kicked off.
- rchaud 3y agothere were previous posts on the frontpage this week, didn't last very long. I get the feeling posts related to Musk are weighted down due to how polarizing the comment section becomes.
- d23 3y agoConsider that in this thread there are people defending the blocking of substack while the guy who did it claims he didn’t do it at all.
- clowd 3y ago[flagged]
- bewaretheirs 3y agoSubstack now says: "We’re glad to see that the suppression of Substack publications on Twitter appears to be over. This is the right move for writers, who deserve the freedom to share their work. We believe that Twitter and Substack can continue to coexist and complement each other. We look forward to making Substack Notes available soon, but we expect it to be a new kind of place within a subscription network, not a replacement for existing social networks." https://nitter.1d4.us/SubstackInc/status/1644897662255112192 https://nitter.1d4.us/SubstackInc/status/1644897662255112192 https://twitter.com/SubstackInc/status/1644897662255112192 https://twitter.com/SubstackInc/status/1644897662255112192