Substack: How We Approach Moderation Decisions | Hacker News Reader

Substack: How We Approach Moderation Decisions

blog.substack.com

13 pointsundefined118 comments

I don't see how a corporate service can scale up the way substack wants to. If they editorialize , then they become the thing from which their users ran away in the first place. And they have to editorialize to survive, so really, there's no way to have the freedom they claim to offer in a corporate context. Only a public system (which is solely bounded by the legal limits on free speech) is able to offer that.

> And they have to editorialize to survive

I don't understand this part of your argument. Why do they need to editorialize to survive? They can make money off readers subscribing to authors. If someone doesn't want to read a certain author's content, they don't have to click it or subscribe to it. That's it.

I'm not sure why the thinking these days is that some platform can't survive unless it editorializes. Amazon operated for years without censoring books for instance, rebuffing calls for censorship and committing to a free speech stance. Now they've changed direction (example 1 https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/02/when-amaz... example 2 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/technology/amazon-hitler-...) and I am not sure why. They would have no impact to their bottom line if they just stuck to their neutral stance, and I imagine the same is true for Substack.

They already are editorializing to some degree with their program of paying writers large advances.

They needed to choose who they would recruit to the platform and then pay them and that's an editorial decision. The fact that it's _also_ an open platform for anyone to write on doesn't change that.

> Why do they need to editorialize to survive?

Can you name any company that did not editorialize and was not shut down / forced to close etc?

Amazon is books, substack is media, and it wants to potentially replace newspapers, all of them

I don't think editorializing is a simple on/off switch, and I think substack is trying to do "editorialize less" rather than "don't editorialize at all".

> Readers choose for themselves which writers to invite into their inboxes and their minds. And that’s why we have a hands-off philosophy when it comes to censorship.

If this is a PR piece, well and good. I do hope no one actually believes this.

Moderation is the product. If you succeed in scaling, then your platform will be used for everything from accounting to warfare logistics. How are you going to stop that without planning, researching and enforcing rules?

Free speech is a platonic ideal. This is, in my opinion, setting up expectations which are guaranteed to be disappointed.

> ... your platform will be used for everything from accounting to warfare logistics. How are you going to stop that without planning, researching and enforcing rules?

Is this not answered exactly by what you quoted?

> Readers choose for themselves which writers to invite into their inboxes and their minds.

No one is forced to read anything they don't choose to.

Yeah, but you know, the mob.

Twitter and just about any other platform is similar in that what you see is either indirectly or directly driven by you and your choices, yet people will go out of their way to find legal speech offensive.

So I guess it depends on how much they are willing to stick to their principles. I can only hope they do and don't suffer for people who seek out offense.

To me that seems like the difference I guess, the mob will always be there but it is individual writers rather than the chaotic mess of people and algo-amplified-words you are bombarded with on other platforms.

For example if you follow infosec twitter it's quite common to end up with a large amount of American political content whether you want it or not. Things like that don't really seem like a problem for substack where most have a single focus.

Not to say that a writer can't go rouge, turning from pacifist to war-monger overnight and angering a bunch of readers, but the fallout from that seems quite limited, it's far less the platform in such a case.

I've watched a few of my favourite journalists jump ship from big news companies with varying success, it's certainly not easy going full independent with your own site, even if you have a few decades of loyal readers behind you. Substack always comes across as a nice middle ground of independence with discoverability for professional writers along with less friction for readers.

> We do not allow hate, defined as publishing content or funding initiatives that call for violence, exclusion, or segregation based on protected classes. This does include serious attacks on people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, or medical condition. It does not include attacks on ideas, ideologies, organizations, or individuals for other reasons, even if those attacks are cruel or unfair.

So what does this mean when authors write about things like gender identity? Can Abigail Shrier (https://twitter.com/AbigailShrier/status/1277906221618487296) or Debra Soh (https://twitter.com/DrDebraSoh/status/1285649878308323328) or Ryan Anderson (https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/02/when-amaz...) expect to be allowed on this platform without being censored or deplatformed? What about the millions of parents of girls, who do not want transwomen (biological men) in women’s sports - would Substack label content pushing for such separation as “hateful”?

And to reverse the situation: what about proponents of affirmative action, which is a call for active racial discrimination against some races like Asians and Whites? Or those calling for segregated graduation ceremonies at colleges?

How do words like “exclusion” or “segregation” apply in all these instances? Why doesn’t Substack just let all legal non-spam speech operate on its platform instead of defining vague rules that will no doubt be abused in the future?

If Substack practices the same censorship we've seen elsewhere, it really is not useful to me as a platform. We already have a whole collection of tech companies that practice biased censorship.

> What about the millions of parents of girls, who do not want transwomen (biological men) in women’s sports

If that's an important issue to parents, I'd say we're doing pretty well.

It is – legitimately – a big issue for the parents of transgirls who do want transwomen (women) in women's sports.

> What about the millions of parents of girls, who do not want transwomen (biological men) in women’s sports

What about the millions of parents of whites that don't want blacks in their children's activities?

I'm not sure why being a parent somehow makes your desire to impose your bigotry on others more worthy of deference.

"millions of parents of girls" Why not just conjure up billions or even trillions?

Thanks for sharing these books, will buy them immediately.

Maybe they can bring some light on why the lunatics are running the asylum in the west.

It's amazing to me that a company that has been started so recently has put such little thought into editorial decisions and moderation.

> We do not allow hate,

Factually untrue. Substack is a welcome home for bigots that have been pushed off places like twitter (for exampl Graham Linehan)

Also for me, their speech on what they "tolerate" is worthless until they come clean about their editorial standards, ie, who do they pay to come write for them. Some people like Matty are honest, but it should be a requirement to disclocse that they're funded by the platfrom.

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