4 ms·

Incomprehensible is the polite version. 1) Substack links are blocked and restricted. I've personally confirmed this, as have countless others. In fact you can

by Lazare 4y ago

Incomprehensible is the polite version. 1) Substack links are blocked and restricted. I've personally confirmed this, as have countless others. In fact you can't even search for the word substack (or tweets made by Taibbi!) right now. Musk is either attempting some sort of deeply disenguous argument about the meaning of the word "blocked", or he's just mistaken. At best. 2) I can't even parse the nonsense about Substack scraping twitter. It makes no sense on multiple levels. There's no real way they're trying to download a "massive portion" of Twitter's content, there's no way they're "downloading the Twitter database", there's no way they only have a single IP address, and this block isn't about IP addresses, it's about domain names, or in the case of the search bans, actual words. And also, there's no reason why they'd want or need to do whatever he's accusing them of to start their Notes product. This is so garbled is hard to even call it wrong. 3) Taibbi isn't a Substack employee. Not that it'd particular matter if he was, but he's not. I'm honestly at a loss. This is so goofy and obviously wrong it's hard to figure out if Musk just believes his target audience will happily swallow nonsense and so has no need to make up plausible lies, or if Musk actually believes this stuff.

lapcat 4y ago
> if Musk just believes his target audience will happily swallow nonsense and so has no need to make up plausible lies Yes. See the replies/QTs/RTs from his fans, and see politics for other examples of this phenomenon. Also, the news media will dutifully repeat and spread lies even while "debunking" them.
d23 4y ago
I believe the lies are the point. The more his supporters swallow one lie, the more invested they get. The fabrication and fantasy of it all becomes part of the thrill of the narrative. Then he tells lies that are increasingly more absurd and obvious. The reality denying is the point and proof of unwavering fealty.
bambax 4y ago
> In fact you can't even search for the word substack I found this hard to believe so I tested it, and it's true... if you search for "substack" on Twitter you find instances of the word "newsletter". It's both hilarious and sad.
- praisewhitey 4y ago
  same result if you search for "@substackinc"
- Lazare 4y ago
  Even better, if you search for "substacc" or other mispellings of substack, the search actually autocorrects it to "substack" and works correctly.
plorg 4y ago
Hilariously, if you searched for "substack" but misspelled it you would get an autocorrected search with the correct results (that is, results containing "substack").
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pen2l 4y ago
When I see every new weekly imbroglio he's involved with, I'm reminded of the chat logs that were unveiled in court proceedings: https://jusgu.github.io/elon-musks-texts/ https://jusgu.github.io/elon-musks-texts/ Something very telling was his affectation when talking with Parag. Often with Parag he would use a line like "brb have to go work on rocket science", he wouldn't say any such thing with other people. Point is, the guy is being fake here and all of this hand-waving just betrays his insecurity and fear that he doesn't have a handle on twitter.
- prox 4y ago
  Does someone have an idea who is who in these conversations? They all seem to be of a certain type.
Uehreka 4y ago
> (or even tweets made by Taibbi!) And thus the whirlygig of time brings in his revenges…
user3939382 4y ago
To play devil's advocate, they could be scraping Twitter although I don't know why they would. IP address could be short for IP ranges belonging to them, and the domains are blocked according to DNS lookups that map to those ranges. Pretty clearly though this is just a major Streisand effect in the making.
- Lazare 4y ago
  I mean, yeah, they could be. Except: 1) Doing that wouldn't be fairly described as "downloading Twitters database". 2) Given the scale of Twitter, there's no way that would be fairly described as downloading a "massive portion" of Twitter. 3) As you say, there's no reason they would be doing that. It's certainly not needed (or even helpful) for launching something like Substack Notes. 4) Just as a matter of how networking and modern cloud architectures work, it would be a bit surprising if the IP ranges that scraping requests were made from would be the same as the ones serving up content on Substack's frontend. It could happen I suppose, but...it'd be weird, even if you weren't trying to make the requests from unrelated IPs (which...you probably would try and do). 5) Elements of the block have nothing to do with IP addresses or domain names at all, eg, the block on results when even searching for the word "substack" (but hilariously, not when searching for common mispellings), or the block on searching for posts authored by Taibbi. 6) Substack has denied doing any such thing, and frankly, their credibility is currently significantly higher than Musk's. It's certainly possible Substack was doing something akin to scraping which via a game of telephone ended up as Musk's claim, but... I wouldn't bet money on it.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    Agree 100%. There is a way to construe Musk’s statement into one that sort of makes technical sense, but only by creating a ridiculously unlikely scenario. Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that. If I were Musk and wanted to stop Substack I’d try some kind of long-game embrace, extend, extinguish strategy and pretend to support them at this stage.
    - 4y ago

by Lazare 4y ago

lapcat 4y ago

> if Musk just believes his target audience will happily swallow nonsense and so has no need to make up plausible lies Yes. See the replies/QTs/RTs from his fans, and see politics for other examples of this phenomenon. Also, the news media will dutifully repeat and spread lies even while "debunking" them.

d23 4y ago

I believe the lies are the point. The more his supporters swallow one lie, the more invested they get. The fabrication and fantasy of it all becomes part of the thrill of the narrative. Then he tells lies that are increasingly more absurd and obvious. The reality denying is the point and proof of unwavering fealty.

bambax 4y ago

> In fact you can't even search for the word substack I found this hard to believe so I tested it, and it's true... if you search for "substack" on Twitter you find instances of the word "newsletter". It's both hilarious and sad.

praisewhitey 4y ago
same result if you search for "@substackinc"
Lazare 4y ago
Even better, if you search for "substacc" or other mispellings of substack, the search actually autocorrects it to "substack" and works correctly.

plorg 4y ago

Hilariously, if you searched for "substack" but misspelled it you would get an autocorrected search with the correct results (that is, results containing "substack").

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

pen2l 4y ago

When I see every new weekly imbroglio he's involved with, I'm reminded of the chat logs that were unveiled in court proceedings: https://jusgu.github.io/elon-musks-texts/ https://jusgu.github.io/elon-musks-texts/ Something very telling was his affectation when talking with Parag. Often with Parag he would use a line like "brb have to go work on rocket science", he wouldn't say any such thing with other people. Point is, the guy is being fake here and all of this hand-waving just betrays his insecurity and fear that he doesn't have a handle on twitter.

prox 4y ago
Does someone have an idea who is who in these conversations? They all seem to be of a certain type.

Uehreka 4y ago

> (or even tweets made by Taibbi!) And thus the whirlygig of time brings in his revenges…

user3939382 4y ago

To play devil's advocate, they could be scraping Twitter although I don't know why they would. IP address could be short for IP ranges belonging to them, and the domains are blocked according to DNS lookups that map to those ranges. Pretty clearly though this is just a major Streisand effect in the making.

Lazare 4y ago
I mean, yeah, they could be. Except: 1) Doing that wouldn't be fairly described as "downloading Twitters database". 2) Given the scale of Twitter, there's no way that would be fairly described as downloading a "massive portion" of Twitter. 3) As you say, there's no reason they would be doing that. It's certainly not needed (or even helpful) for launching something like Substack Notes. 4) Just as a matter of how networking and modern cloud architectures work, it would be a bit surprising if the IP ranges that scraping requests were made from would be the same as the ones serving up content on Substack's frontend. It could happen I suppose, but...it'd be weird, even if you weren't trying to make the requests from unrelated IPs (which...you probably would try and do). 5) Elements of the block have nothing to do with IP addresses or domain names at all, eg, the block on results when even searching for the word "substack" (but hilariously, not when searching for common mispellings), or the block on searching for posts authored by Taibbi. 6) Substack has denied doing any such thing, and frankly, their credibility is currently significantly higher than Musk's. It's certainly possible Substack was doing something akin to scraping which via a game of telephone ended up as Musk's claim, but... I wouldn't bet money on it.
- user3939382 4y ago
  Agree 100%. There is a way to construe Musk’s statement into one that sort of makes technical sense, but only by creating a ridiculously unlikely scenario. Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that. If I were Musk and wanted to stop Substack I’d try some kind of long-game embrace, extend, extinguish strategy and pretend to support them at this stage.
  - 4y ago