Great stuff!

Substack hosted some number of neo-Nazis which I think just barely cracked into the double digits (if that), for the sake of free speech. I actually agreed with their stance, but it’s a pretty unpopular one (for some pretty valid reasons), and after the entire internet started yelling at them, they caved just over a year ago, and removed all the Nazis.

Anyone who tells you that Substack “platforms” or “surfaces” or “promotes” any Nazis, present tense, is probably deliberately lying about the facts for the sake of spinning up a narrative. Anyone who is actually concerned about Nazis would be telling a totally different one: “We applied pressure to get them to deplatform Nazis, it worked, that’s how activist pressure is supposed to happen. Victory!”

I suspect that when challenged, a lot of this stuff is going to change radically. The accusation of “promoting” Nazis is going to turn out to depend on a kind of Ship of Theseus logic that turns out to mean, they let Matt Taibbi post there back before it was clear that he had turned to the dark side, or something like that.

I hesitated to even mention the thing here, for the same reason it’s bad for news programs to talk about the “debate” over global warming, but it’s an active narrative that’s in the Lemmy consciousness I guess, so we might as well talk about it even for the sake of actively debunking it.

If you think I am wrong about any of this, please point me to even one actual Nazi currently active on Substack. Actually, also, can you demonstrate for me how their “discovery” feature often programmatically surfaces and promotes pieces et cetera? I suspect that accusation is simply completely made up, although I’m happy to be proven wrong.

Edit: Expanded a little

Can you link me to them? I’ll give you $20 for each literal Nazi you can find hosted by Substack.

It’s been rumored to me that Substack “often programmatically surfaces and promotes pieces on the platform written by Nazis and their ilk” so they should be super-easy to find. I went looking, and I found one, and it was in the “and their ilk” category as opposed to the “literal Nazis” category, and I had to do a bit of looking to find them.

Yeah. That’s one thing I really like about Substack, that’s pretty unique in the current journalism ecosystem. However, the point is perfectly valid that putting everything in one centralized place and that being how people get paid is a big big flaw.