Ask HN: Where to publish a critical work with potentially offensive content

I run brick.do, which lets anyone publish anything. It’s basically a WYSIWYG pastebin with support for subdomains, nested pages, CSS, and JS.

All your posts are disconnected from each other unless you explicitly decide to claim authorship — that is, by default nobody can discover than posts/sites A and B are by the same author. We also don’t divulge authorship information to anyone. We’ve been threatened with lawsuits already and we didn’t care.

Our policy is that we don’t censor anything (beyond what is actually illegal in Estonia, where we are based). No algorithmic banning either. Brick aims to be a (small) piece of internet infrastructure rather than a social network.

hey, thanks, that also looks pretty interesting.

The forced sign-in is an instant turn off. There is no way I'm going to sign in to a random website in 2022 before I tried the product and know its what I want. This will make most people leave and probably collect a bunch of trow-away email addresses at best, I dont think that is the goal.

Have a look at telegra.ph for how it probably should work, maybe require the login to publish to the public in the end.

Noted.

One thing to keep in mind here is that anything that allows anonymous publishing/uploading/etc will be used for malware delivery. This is what killed Firefox Send: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/up...

Even with forced sign-in, we see multiple phishing attempts per month. People sign up and create pages saying something like "You have a new IMPORTANT PDF FILE, click here to open". The links always lead to fake OneDrive pages. This hurts our users because then the whole domain is marked as suspicious.

My gut feeling is that without forced sign-in this could be done at scale. I don't know how Telegraph solves it.

This said, I think "maybe require the login to publish to the public in the end" could be a good workflow. No idea how many people feel the same way you do, though. Off the top of my head I can't remember any other mainstream SaaS things that do it.

Maybe allow for a preview of the editing process and before publishing you prompt for a sign-up with the explaining you gave above?

I expected maybe a couple of suggestions like ghost and substack, so thanks for all the suggestions.

I think I'm going with substack.

As to why I asked instead of doing all the research myself, I have a family,two kids, one teen and a son with advanced autism (5 years, functionality of 9 months old), a full time job, and trying to write to build audience following the algorithms for attention among various publishing platforms - which means it's easier to write a short couple of paragraphs asking HN and hoping for a pointer.

As to why I think it might happen, mainly paranoia, also I keep seeing articles on Medium about how you don't want to get banned by Medium so keep in line. For example - https://medium.com/feedium/how-to-not-getting-banned-on-medi...

Do I think I would get banned for writing about Huckelberry Finn and other works of Twain regarding Racism? I don't know! Frankly I've seen a lot of argument that Twain was a racist over the last few years and that Huckelberry Finn should be banned, ironic as I consider it one of the greatest anti-racist works in the English language and that he paid an African American student's way through Yale https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A... I'm going to have to stop regarding this matter here though, as I fear I would end up writing the bulk of the essay in a post on HN.

Considering the demands on my time, my own ADHD, and the fact that the way I managed to get this all set up and working was because I had a free month in between projects I worry that if things got shut down I would not be able to spend the time getting it open again. Risk aversiveness varies dependent on one's ability to handle risk, go figure.

I know you said you'd rather not self host, but it can be very easy if you stick to the mainstream stuff and don't modify it much, and you don't mind the cost.

DigitalOcean has a "1 click" setup for WordPress (and probably other blogging software). It's not actually 1 click, but it is super easy. The most tedious part was buying and configuring a domain, which has to be done away from DigitalOcean.

Lol. I know of your name for some reason, though it's not because of Medium or Twitter.

Anyways, others have already said it, but I'll say it again.

Substack. So long as you aren't calling for violence on others, insurrection, all that jazz; you should be fine. Besides, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is tame in comparison to other authors and even philosophers that people write/talk about. Probably smarter than some of them too.

Sure, he said some words that some people today don't like, but when one considers context of the times, it should be allowable. Especially when considering things like the creative license of authors and artists.

A few things though to consider before using Substack.

1. They say your posts can be as long as you want, but due to the nature of Gmail limitations, it's essentially artificially limited by gmail. So if you want people to be able to read your entire article in their email, make sure you don't use too many large data pictures, etc stuff like that.

2. The site is constantly saving your work in the event of a power outage, or network error. The latter happens somewhat often with them, due to the nature of the beast, and of humans. When cloudflare was getting some flak over Kiwifarms a few months ago, it ended up getting some sort of attack that took down Substack somewhat as well if I understand correctly. It only lasted a few hours though, tops. So pay attention to when the network error message pops up, and stop typing till it goes away.

3. Their setup is still being worked on and added to, so if you think it looks a little bland, don't worry you are not alone. But that sort of works for it as well, as it helps keep things low cost I bet.

And

4. You can monetize through Stripe.

There was a site linked here yesterday, https://www.thc.org/segfault, that lets you set up disposable root servers - and they also have persistent Tor hidden service (.onion) hosting built in. You could host your essay on there and use one of the clearnet onion proxies, such as .onion.ws, to host it publicly.

(Or you could self-host an .onion, but this approach has someone else do all the fiddly technical bits for you.)

Maybe Substack? https://substack.com/

Maybe - but Substack is pretty big, do they algorithmically ban? I didn't find anything saying specifically that they didn't. I guess it's not too big of a problem if I get banned and it's the only content I have there, but I would have wasted time.

I think substack is a safe bet for your case, the only prohibition is on porn and credible threats, and promoting illegal activities. See their content guidelines [0] and a blog on their philosophy of hands-off moderation, letting readers choose who they follow [1]. They don't algorithmically recommend articles, so they don't have to place the same filters and automated "shadow banning" that other platforms perform.

[0] https://substack.com/content

[1] https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati...

Contact Substack and ask. They're small enough still, they'll likely respond to requests around this. Then you'll have someone to contact. Include an example of your work.

> I suppose this is an argument for hosting one's own blog, but I do have a lot on my plate already.

Hosting a simple static page is extremely easy nowadays. But if you really just want a pre-existing website where you can write some text with basic formatting and probably not have to worry about it being removed, try rentry.co

This is the kind of writing I might be interested in putting out on my site, substack, and in print. See my about section.

I'm curious, does Medium have a reputation for algorithmic banning with no review process?

If it's a person who's reviewing keywords I'd have to think the context would be obvious, and could be specifically crafted to be so if needed.

But if I had reason to be worried about that I'd go set up an inexpensive server at DigitalOcean (etc) and just reference stuff from a medium post if that's where I had an audience I wanted to share it with.

Aside from that, "showing Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson as anti-racist works" is probably a worthwhile and necessary thing right now, and easy to do. Anyone who's read Twain knows he deliberately exposed the ignorance of racism and cruelty of slavery but apparently he's not read as much these days. If all you're looking for are "offensive words" by today's standards you'll find them there.

His "Joan of Arc" does the same for women's rights. She's tougher, smarter, and more courageous and moral than all the men in that story. I really cannot see how focusing on those attributes of Twain's works could get you booted off Medium, but I could be surprised to learn it can in these "interesting times" we're living in.

Have you tried posting it on your existing blog?

How is your analysis of Twain so spicy that you’re expecting to both A. get autobanned by Medium and B. not be able to get the ban reversed upon appeal?

Would you care to share a snippet of your literary analysis that you think might lead to you being kicked off your platform? Otherwise, this seems like a bit of an ad for your (edgy?) blog.

The author already explained that the issue is that he is planning on quoting offensive language from Mark Twain's Huck Finn. If you aren't familiar, the text contains gratuitous use of the n-word.

I can totally understand the worry about getting picked up by automated moderation and not being able to appeal successfully.

If Medium has an auto-ban policy on the n-word, the author could be deplatformed, or at the very least be at the mercy of a CS rep who is paid for volume of tickets solved, not for understanding the nuance of 19th century american literature.

The author thinks that quoting Mark Twain will get him permabanned from Medium without the ability to appeal successfully? On what factual grounds?

Considering the fact that the theoretical chance of that happening has gotten a link to his blog to the front of HN, I would be fascinated to see Medium employees justify “No quoting literature with mean words no matter the context” to the posters on here if they chose that route.

So far I’ve only got a couple of pieces of information: a link to a blog and the promise of some groundbreaking new literary analysis that’s ~too critical and offensive to the algorithm to even try posting~. It kind of reads like an ad.

I am familiar with Twain’s work, I’ve read it, along with lots of critiques and articles (he is one of the most popular and analyzed authors in US history)

I'm guessing they don't want to deal with it.

This is actually good, if more people chose not to use Medium because of issues like this, Medium would adapt or die.

Deal with what exactly? How is Medium supposed to “adapt” to someone’s theoretical issue with critiquing Mark Twain? Right now OP is… choosing not to post something.

I suppose Medium could request access to his hard drive, grep for documents containing slurs+”twain” and force-post them to alleviate his anxiety?

This is at Medium’s expense. Not very good.

Nvm, this whole post is just whipping up attention before he posts. It is factually untrue that the usage of slurs results in an automatic and incontestable ban, and I would be surprised if OP did not bother to do any basic searching before inventing this boogeyman.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227936

Response partially in here as to why I worry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33230225

What makes you think that you can't just post it to your Medium blog?

edit: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018182453-Contr...

I don't see anything about offensive material here.

It sounds like you are looking to self-publish, but it sounds like the article should be submitted to sites where there is some form of editorial review. This will make it more challenging to get your article published and you will probably have to compromise on how you handle sensitive issues. The latter is a good thing, since it will make readers more receptive to what is being said rather than how it is said. It also diminishes the concerns over algorithmic banning or being banned due to reviews by non-domain experts.

As for where to publish, that is a question best asked of people who are well versed in literary analysis or anti-racism. That is probably a bit off the beaten path for most of us on HN.

I just hosted my own website where I can publish whatever I want. It's static. I guess if I ever get banned by my provider I will flip to a new one. If my domain goes down - I'll find another registrar. All static, so it's easy to port.

If you google search “site:medium.com twain (your choice of whatever slurs that you find relevant)” there are multiple articles that pop up. Some even include the n word in the title!

How is this not an ad for your upcoming spicy post?

Self publishing on your own server is probably simpler than understanding the terms of service of a third party host.

Since you are clearly already self-censoring for fear of algoritmic retaliation, you should consider the time impact of that as well as the impacts to the quality of your writing.

One approach is to self-publish, then "syndicate" to ephemeral places like medium, blogger, livejournal, GeoCities, or whatever the kids are using these days.

> I suppose this is an argument for hosting one's own blog, but I do have a lot on my plate already.

With a little effort, you can do this. Your own domain and NFSN (Nearly Free Speech) [1] for hosting is the combo I’d recommend. You need to handle the blog generation (and/or sFTP) part. You’ll get proper support from humans if there are any issues.

[1]: nearlyfreespeech.net

> I suppose this is an argument for hosting one's own blog, but I do have a lot on my plate already.

You can try https://blot.im/ or https://mataroa.blog/

Super easy to setup.

Your personal blog. Static blog generating tools are quite nice these days. Put links and short descriptions on your twitter. There could also be mastodon and (ick) gab

Why not accept and moderrnize the censorship Twain did? G--d-----, if its good enough for Samuel Clemens, it should be good enough for you!

Aren't there journals for those sorts of things?

As someone trained in literary studies, I'd say the answer is technically yes, but in practice no. There are journals for these topics, but relatively fewer interested in publishing something relatively accessible from a layperson.

Kiwifarms?

Now I recall https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/7p4zte/anon_wrote_a_...

Hell, that is abominable.

On the internet

This is not meant to be a 'cute' humorous response, but a serious one: trying to think of places that likely have next to no algorithmic banning, I wonder if Pastebin is a solution. Perhaps I think of this because my earliest Internet experiences were with days of BBSs, with directories of text files and newsgroup postings.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/nag_hammadi_library

I don't get what you mean here, but thanks since I had totally forgotten this existed and it is actually useful to me for some other projects.

>I wonder if Pastebin is a solution

Pastebin has had overly aggressive algorithmic deletions for a few years now, I wouldn't use it.

i think this is the difference between hosting and publishing.

pastebin, BBSs, or even just uploading a file to a filehost like S3 would all work. but that doesn't put the content in front of anybody's eyes like the publishing platforms do. if you just upload a file somewhere, nobody is going to see it. and i assume that having other people read it is the point.

> And of course in writing this there are some well known racial slurs (and some antiquated, unfamiliar ones) that will have to be quoted and referred to, which I expect would probably end up getting my account automatically banned.

> The article will be showing Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson as anti-racist works, so don't suggest any actually pro-racism sites.

In today's culture wouldn't any site that permits posting racial slurs at all be considered "pro-racism", regardless of context?

Then the culture of pretty much fucked up.

No. I agree with OP’s interpretation and I agree with representing the work as written in expressing that interpretation.

I wouldn’t host any content I consider racist. If this is what OP describes, I would host it. I would want to review it first and discuss any concerns if they arise. And I also have a lot on my plate so it would take some coordination on expectations/requirements and time to set up. But “in today’s culture”, as an anti-racist myself I’d gladly support this piece as described.

Edit: Sorry should’ve made it explicit! OP if you want to be hosted by a rando human on HN who is interested in your piece, instead of a platform, I’m easy to contact.

Nope. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs

I don't think so. Every major literary magazine (including online ones) publishes articles and stories with racial language in them; readers generally understand the distinction between replication for the purposes of analysis, literary use, and gratuitous use.