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Comment by maxander | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to speculate on the “extremely generous” offer from Substack. They’re obviously willing to devote a decent amount of dev time to making Scott comfortable, and I’m sure they have a good idea of how having SSC on board would promote their platform on its take-over-the-blog-market mission, so it could be generous indeed.

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It’ll probably get me to sign up for a Substack account and enter my cc details, at which point they can work out how to get me to pay for more shit. If they’re smart, there have to be some other “loss leader” authors who they can basically salary at $200,000 a year and it’s worth it

All we know is that Substack is willing to make a lot of promises to Scott. Scott probably lacks (as I do) the expertise to negotiate a contract that would actually hold Substack to those promises.

But maybe I am being too cynical.

Hard to believe Scott Alexander doesn't have the wherewithal to find the right representation for something like this.

I also don’t believe that a blogging platform like Substack would do anything to actively antagonize a superstar blogger like Scott, who obviously has a significant following of blog-readers independent of them.

It's not the promises that are problematic. The long term plans and interests of Substack are not so well aligned with Scott's.

Every future development has to either treat him as a special snowflake (so they have to implement a VIP tier) or eventually bulldoze every perk of his blog back into uniformity.

I don't understand why doesn't he goes full patreon.

If cancel culture is causing him problems, then Patreon is the last place he wants to be.

There is SubscribeStar instead.

Just to be clarify, he wasn't a victim of cancel culture, he voluntarily took his blog offline to avoid his real name being punished in the New York Times.

He had to leave his job due to the politically motivated attack, which the Times said they would continue even after he told them that it would screw up his job. Doxxing is definitely a part of cancel culture.

I mean, Scott himself says that there was no ill intent on NYT's part.

I don't consider this a part of cancel culture because there was no specific attempt to cancel him.

From the original article, "NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog" "Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me." "I’m not sure what happens next. In my ideal world, the New York Times realizes they screwed up, promises not to use my real name in the article, and promises to rethink their strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks."

So maybe he's saying that the Times doesn't realize they screwed up, so there's no "ill intent". But in my moral system, if you know you are causing serious harm to an innocent person for no good reason but are so callous that you don't even care, you are still responsible for that harm.

I don't want to split hairs over cultural terms. I will accept your definitions for you.

What you quote is of course the essence of the problem, but I don't think it's cancel culture (and also parent commenter doesn't think it is that either).

Because cancel culture seems to be when someone does something (discussing eugenetics, speaking Mandarin that sounds like a racial slur ... or blurts racists shit on live TV, sexually harasses others, and so on) and a mob attacks them and their host institution. Some of that is really justified some doesn't seem so.

In this case Scott wasn't attacked by any mob. He simply wanted to keep his relationship with his patients that, a strictly exclusively doctor-patient relationship, no need for a third channel (eg the NYT, and his blog linked by the NYT).

Why? He's not selling sex, and I haven't heard anything that they don't want to host.

Several Alt-righters have been kicked off Patreon.

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