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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

It appears that you can't even "like" a post containing the word "substack", which has the effect of suppressing discussion of the fact that substack is shadow-banned on twitter.

Edit: tedunangst correctly points out that the tweet in question also contained a link to substack (though to documentation, not a newsletter)

https://twitter.com/paulgb/status/1644336599914651649

So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce?

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Everyone who starts a social media site begins with the premise of "I'll allow all legal speech". Facebook, Twitter, reddit. They all started out unmoderated.

But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money.

Take reddit for example. Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. Most pornography is legal. But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. So it makes sense to block things that hurt the bottom line if you are running a business.

To 4chan's credit, they never cared about money, and so they were probably the freest platform out there that somehow didn't devolve into nothing but racist hate, which is usually how absolute free speech social media go (although they certainly have their fair share of it).

Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in -- "Why can't they just allow all legal speech??" And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why.

> Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in – “Why can’t they just allow all legal speech??” And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why.

Musk started new, though different, active moderation from very early on, and as he has escalated that it hasn’t been mostly in ways that contribute to Twitter profitability (it may be in his financial interest more indirectly, through currying favor with a particular political faction, but that’s not indicative of a discovery rather than his initial motivation for buying Twitter.)

> But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money

How do other networks survive? Gettr, Rumble, Truth.social? Locals? Is parler still around by the way? Arent these crowds sufficiently large to want to advertise to, or to monetize in some other way?

I use Rumble and Locals frequently. Basically they're large enough now that normal creators (and not just those banned for extreme content) will post there, so if someone has both a YouTube and a Rumble, I watch the Rumble to support competition to Google.

Locals has more of a Patreon-like model and isn't affected much by advertising. Gettr and Truth.social seem to be declining (IMO those two should merge because their user demographic is the same.)

They “survive” by lighting money on fire.

So same as twitter did for majority of its existence

They have lots of moderation, even if they tell you they don't.

Gettr: https://gettr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4833222621587-GE...

Rumble: https://corp.rumble.com/blog/rumble-proposes-an-open-source-...

Truth Social: https://help.truthsocial.com/moderation/moderation-faq

Locals: https://support.locals.com/en/article/how-to-moderate-posts-...

I've never heard of Locals before, but the other three networks remove far more content than just what is outlined in those policies. Also, they probably don't make money.

Indeed they do a lot of moderation all of them. My opinion is that misaligned economic incentives cause all of these services to be a bundle of smaller services. The wrong economic incentives discourage protocols from forming in the smaller services to be bundled afterwards to the whole, which is called social networking site.

The smaller services could be: UI <protocol> Algorithm (Cpu, Gpu) <protocol> Disk Space. If the whole service was designed like this using well defined protocols, then we could use, the UI of facebook, the algorithm of twitter, and the disk space of instagram, or any combination.

The same could be applied to cars. It could be defined like Engine <protocol> Hood (car shell) <protocol> Peripherals (lights etc). That way we would be able to use one's car engine into another car's hood etc.

I think eventually that's the way everything is going to be designed, alongside with cars, buses etc, using protocols (ISO etc), and software as well. It is just that, it takes a while for the right economic incentives to get established.

> But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that.

Naturally. If you're a business, why would you pay for advertising that makes those things part of your brand? If you're a consumer, what would be the motivation to pay for those things, unless you happen to agree with those values, rather than paying for a site that doesn't have them?

> But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. So it makes sense to block things that hurt the bottom line if you are running a business.

Sure, but this doesn't seem to explain why he would want to shut out Substack entirely. Is it because he considers it competition? But Substack is for longform blogging (and authors being able to monetize that) so it doesn't seem to compete at all with Twitter - it seems completely orthogonal.

Twitter blue has a long-form tweet option.

They were directly competing until recently: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/revue

Twitter Blue allows posts up to 4000 characters, and a lot of people use Twitter to "blog" with very long threads. Substack competes with that, even if it's so much better that it doesn't really feel like a competition. And now Substack is adding a short-form feature almost identical to Twitter, as the article explains.

Most of them change their minds when they realize their customers--viewers, subscribers, advertisers--don't want to see all legal speech.

It's amusing that Musk's incentive appears to be fear of what his viewers will see--namely, competitive services they might consider using instead of Twitter.

I do think that's fairly different than the incentives for Facebook and Reddit.

Substack is not a competitor to Twitter. Two completely different use cases. You can use Twitter to drive traffic to your substack. Doesn’t really work the other way around imho.

Elon's decision is dumb, but SubStack is expanding it's use case:

https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes

This is likely a bigger threat to Twitter than Mastodon is. Well played Substack.

I can't see them gaining traction. As one billionaire[1] opined:

> you can totally delete things from the Internet – that works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide

1: https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1644174878382215170#m

I don't understand what you mean. What does his ironic tweet have to do with you claiming it's unlikely they gain traction?

The claim might be ironic.

Now that you mention it, that makes sense.

If that were true, Mastodon wouldn't have been banned first ;)

This Substack feature was introduced 3 days ago.

Twitter is looking to offer subscription services, paid tweets, and longform content. Substack is a direct competitor in that regard.

Twitter owned a direct Substack competitor (Revue) - and Musk shut it down.

Probably to integrate it directly. Doesn't make sense to continue operating a competing service; that's only some idiocy Google would do.

I'd hesitate to bring in 4chan as a good example of anything. It's not technically "all" racist hate, but the number of users who don't engage it is probably an insignificant percentage.

Anything good you could find on 4chan is available elsewhere, without the deluge of shitty behavior.

> 4chan's credit, they never cared about money, and so they were probably the freest platform out there that somehow didn't devolve into nothing but racist hate

yeah, not "nothing but racist hate", just a lot of racist hate, good on 4chan for keeping it under 100%

There'd probably be a bit less of it on 4chan if the racists had other popular platforms to spend their time on. The more places they get chased away from, the more concentrated they'll be in the few places they have left. It sucks for 4chan, but at the same time it's kind of nice having them in easily to find/ignore places.

you mean, his 44 billion dollar (20,000 average lifetime american earnings) deficit was on the line.

you can totally start a social media company that doesn't require you to recoup 20,000 lifetimes worth of human labor and allow free speech.

There is a huge difference between.

> Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal.

And not allowing a competitor and then claiming to be “pro free speech”.

There is no societal good that comes out of the topics you cited.

Most of Musk's moves, like unbanning thousands of white supremacists or firing employees for asking simple questions, aren't being done to increase revenue. That fact that revenue has cratered so dramatically is further proof that spite and grievance are driving these decisions.

Online free speech is faceless. Which is different than in real life where you are more responsible for what you are actually say.

It's not about legality. It's more about responsibility that lacks in online conversations with anonymous avatars.

Online speech is also weirdly dangerous. A lot of people especially in the UK have been arrested for commenting things you’d say between friends without consequences. Even though they didn’t post under their real name.

I didn't mean responsibility oppressed by authorities. This leads to be even less responsible for yourself. Which is another topic.

I mean responsibility that naturally come from social connection between people in dialogue. Mimics, body language, relationships, word expression... All of it is eliminated in online chatting.

>Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal.

True but it's entirely reasonable for platforms to prevent themselves becoming a cesspool of hate and vile discussion.

It's very different to banning any and all discussion on things that may be commercially competitive.

Bait and switch, these platforms only got as big as they did because they allowed unmoderated content, and then once established they bit the hand that fed them, and now they are milking it for all it’s worth as the audiences move on to where they are allowed to speak.

> Take reddit for example. Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. Most pornography is legal.

Are they actually blocking speech like that though? I don't see much harassment of overweight people since FPH got banned but antisemitism and racism and similar bigotry (especially transphobia) is not uncommon at all and is a daily sight in any remotely politically bent discussion.

The hardest thing in the world is to get a stubborn person to admit they were wrong. They will double and triple and quadruple down on their stance even if they themselves are hurting because of it.

This really describes the entire American political climate right now.

It’s worse. The various cults of the American political landscape seem to almost delight in being stubbornly wrong as long as it angers the other side. The goal is to own the libs, offend the fundies, troll the MAGAts, trigger the boomers, whatever.

People just want to fight. The ideas seem like a side show. Maybe it’s all just a pressure valve for rage over rapid change and socioeconomic uncertainty.

I live in Italy a it’s more or less the same here.

People existing: ...

People mad certain people exist: We will directly violate your rights every chance we get!

People existing: You can't do that, we'll fight back.

People mad certain people exist: Help! We're being oppressed!

Some people want to fight, some people need to defend themselves from those people.

Yes BoTh SiDeS aRe SaMe!

contrary to the implications of your comment, elon musk doesn't seem to be doubling down on his stance favoring free speech

He’s doubling down on not being wrong to buy twitter for somewhat dodgy reasons?

Elon has never had a stance favoring free speech. His behavior has been consistent since the day he took over Twitter – anything he likes will be amplified, anything he does not will be removed.

Musk's behavior and what he claims his stance is are different things. And, in fact, we call this kind of diversion "hypocrisy".

Maybe Twitter users can learn from how Chinese netizens work around their microblogging censors.

Once you realize that a keyword like "substack" is banned, you start using similar-sounding standin words. "Stacksub", "sub stack", "scooby snack", and so on. Keep the censors busy, and the blocklists full of nonsense.

American TikTok users have been using the term "Mascara" as an alternate for discussing Sexual Assault which is deranked/censored/more-heavily-moderated.

I fear its a cat and mouse game. Once something goes viral enough the moderation team will notice it too.

One nice thing about democracy is that you can opt out of a service if you don't like its policies. This all seems a bit silly when you can move over to Mastodon or similar.

Sure, I can. But I can't force other people to, at least not without changing the definition of "opt".

If people insist on using it, they'd may as well be internet-y about it.

People who still support Musk at this point despite many scandals have had their head in the sand for months and won't be persuaded.

As someone who used to be a Musk fan, it's disheartening to see him become radicalized.

It's always baffled me that people seem so intent to need to take the whole person when evaluating anything they've done.

Some actions offer color for their current activities, most don't. Someone considered to be "bad" in whatever aspect still has good qualities, people that love them, and likely, kindness in their hearts. A good writer who is a bigot is still a good writer. Elon still has things he's smart about, and things he's dumb about.

But as it sits, if I'm a fan of the work Elon has done with SpaceX or Tesla, I have to qualify those things because the assumption is that I've just cosigned every dumb/negative thing he's ever said, when that isn't true.

I put a trans flag on my Model 3, just to try to make this point. But Tesla was just again found guilty of abhorrent racism to their workers so perhaps the greyness of Elon’s moral abilities is more pervasive than it seemed at first.

It isn't your fault, but when someone jumps on a soap box and cries for attention and generally acts mean, spiteful, and petty -- and refuses to admit that they are wrong about anything -- people tend to really dislike them. And you can claim that we should be able to remove actions from author but that is not human nature. When you call a genuinely good, self-sacrificing person a 'pedophile' because they refused to praise your showcase gimmick, people tend to look back at everything you have done previously in the light of 'is everything good I have heard about this person a forced narrative?'. You can't walk back from that.

This is why reputations are so important -- it doesn't matter if you solved world hunger -- when people find out you are a bully who takes credit for other people's work and refuses to acknowledge criticism and fires people because you are in a bad mood then they are going to associate you with that and doubt that you actually did all that much to solve hunger in the first place.

You can complain about human nature as much as you want, but a lot of the time there is a good reason for it. People who consistently lie probably didn't do all the good things you thought they did, for one.

But that's the thing -- reputations (and tangentially, gossip) are great ways to warn you away from potential conflicts you might encounter. If you're scared to date so and so because you know someone else who dated so and so and so and so was mean/abusive, well, you know better. If you're thinking of hiring someone, but they've rage-quit every previous employer they've worked for, then perhaps you know better than to take on that risk.

There is no logical reason for doing this with celebrities who are not in our lives, perhaps other than to maintain the habit of gossip? If I were going to work for a Musk-owned company, perhaps I'd think better of it knowing what I do, but if he wakes up tomorrow and gives ten million dollars to a charity I support, I will support that action, without having to adopt anything more than that action in my praise.

And for what it's worth, I wasn't complaining about human nature in the previous post, just pointing out that I don't understand it.

> There is no logical reason for doing this with celebrities who are not in our lives

I don't think we have figured out how to segregate these because psychology is what it is and technology brings people into our lives as if we know them even when we don't. There was never a way to hear about every thought someone had or what they said or did when you didn't know them until the advent of at least the printing press. Our feeble minds, which arguably don't even make most decisions consciously, haven't caught up yet.

Perfectly sussed.

Hard enough to fathom completely accurate information from items and people we have close access to, much less everyone and every thing.

Reputations aren't just signals of who to avoid, they're also signals of who to punish. Using game theory terminology: in a society of cooperators, defectors must be punished, otherwise other cooperators see defectors get away with bad behavior and think it's okay to defect as well. In this case, Elon is a "defector" who mistreats others and constantly lies.

Well, they sure have their heads in something...

Power corrupts, absolutely.

In musk's case, he was probably always a bit unhinged/POS.. but I used to believe he cared about the world. Ever since pedo guy I dropped him from altruistic status to probably egomaniac status, though.

Even Matt Taibbi has stopped defending Elon: https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/the-craziest-friday-e...

Incidentally, I started using Substack because of this. Talk about Streisand Effect.

"'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."

That tweet contains a link to substack, not just the word.

You're right, thanks. I've edited my comment.

> So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce?

Not that I want to defend Musk - I've heard of (not experienced directly; I am not a Twitter user) so many screw-ups and back-peddling that my opinion of him has dropped significantly - but presumably they regard Substack as a competitor, and they do not want to drive their traffic to the competitor (as before they tried to stop driving traffic to Mastodon). Is this really a free speech issue?

Twitter shut down its substack competitor

Substack just launched its Twitter competitor, called Notes: https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes

Yes? There is no business profit exception to free speech.

As we've heard millions of times before when the shoe was on the other foot, this is not a free speech issue. Even more so now that Twitter is a private company.

The issue isn't about the position itself, but who is claiming it. Or on whose behalf it is being claimed.

Musk pitched a $44 billion fit because Twitter wasn't "free speech enough" for a "free speech absolutist" like him. So he bought it and said he'd allow all legal speech on it.

All of these moves are directly counter to Musk's stated positions.

Furthermore, these moves are more capricious. You'll just never know what's not going to be allowed tomorrow. Or what decisions will be reversed the next day.

Before, who was making the moderation decisions at Twitter was opaque. But you knew their guidelines. Inciting an insurrection should be against Terms of Service in general.

Now, we know who is making the decisions, but we have no fucking clue as to why they're being made. Or, we know why. Because these entities have offended Musk in some way. But as to what will cause him offense on any given day, we have no idea.

So it's no different than it was before, so what's the problem?

Hypocrisy

It’s not a free speech issue in the same way it wasn’t a free speech issue when old Twitter did things like suppress the Hunter Biden story. Twitter is a private enterprise allowed to do what it wants with its own speech (it’s platform). It’s extremely hypocritical and furthers the notion that Musk and the rightwingers who took over the site are full of it, but it isn’t a free speech issue.

At a minimum, the Hunter Biden „story“ was controversial if not taken out of context or misinformation. What‘s controversial about Substack?

https://www.wired.com/story/substack-future-chris-best/

Take a look at the politics leaderboard and tell me that's not controversial. https://substack.com/leaderboard/politics/paid

Oh my God, "doctor" Mercola is one of the top authors on that list. Yikes.

I'm old enough to remember when we were told Twitter isn't the government so this isn't a free speech issue and if people don't like it they can build their own platform and blah blah blah..

Does that still hold now?

Yes, that still holds. Nobody is forcing Twitter to be a free speech platform. It was Elon's claim that it would become one under him, and he garnered a lot of support on the basis of that idea, only to repeatedly make fools of people who fell for it.

So, the people who were defending Musk before now finally "see" the difference between moderation and free speech, and even point it out. So, was that "free speech absolutism" even argued in good faith, I wonder, or was it at all performative outrage at nothing, to own the libs?

I think most people against censorship are still against it. I just find it ironic that the people who supported censorship before are now up in arms.

I’d like to hear more about this kind of thing. Has Twitter censored brands like this in the past?

No. Not before Musk took over.

For one, it’s the kind of thing likely to get you sued for anti-competitive practices.

They banned NY Post for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and the contents showing "10% for the big guy" in reference to his father getting kickbacks on some shady Ukrainian and Chinese deals that Hunter facilitated.

Wrong. They suspended linking to the story for 24 hours - a story that had very shady sourcing and which the New York Post did not even put an author's name on.

Shady sourcing = the actual laptop and the contents which later proved to be 100% correct. Also, Zerohedge was banned for quite awhile for the same thing.

Case in point, using "moderation" and government censorship as if they were the same. This is not a good faith argument.

We are "up in arms" about the hypocrisy and dishonesty, not the decision itself. It's Musk's company - no one cares. But let's not call it "moderation", ok? Taking away the NYT blue check is petty revenge, but whatever.

Talk about a bad faith argument. Nobody took away NY Times blue check except themselves when they refused to pay for the subscription like everyone else. Just like they won't let me view their articles without a subscription, so they should understand how that works as well as anybody.

Only when it's on my team.

No one says Musk can’t do these things. He has that right.

People are pointing out he promised not to, and that that makes him an enormous hypocrite.

>So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce?

This is absolutely consistent with what he's said over and over before the twitter takeover. He said he has no problem with limiting the exposure of distasteful tweets, but he doesn't want to ban people or PREVENT people from posting.

His answer to "can people post hateful things" has always been "up to a point yes, we'll let them but we will also take measures to prevent it from being amplified in any way".

He has not only banned from the platform but openly fired employees who said critical things of him on it.

He has absolutely no problem silencing people.

I've...never heard that he banned people who were critical of him. Do you have a link or an example?

Well he just silenced the competitor substack, which is the article you're commenting on

Holy shit have you even followed the thread you are commenting on? We just talked about how he did not silence substack, what he did was refuse to amplify it.

Do you have any evidence he silenced it or are you changing the definition mid conversation?

Preventing people from interacting with tweets effectively silences the conversation

So you’ve redefined silence. You can respond to the tweet, or tweet your own substack link. You can’t like it. That is not the traditional definition of “silence” by any means, and it is consistent with what he has said should be allowed.

No problem. It was worse than even this, he also fired people for criticism they made in private.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/15/23460729/elon-musk-fire-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/technology/elon-musk-twit...

that's...not at all what i'm talking about. If you're publicly rude to your boss you can expect to be fired from most companies. Where is the link showing he BANNED someone from Twitter (the application) for being critical?

> that's...not at all what i'm talking about. If you're publicly rude to your boss you can expect to be fired from most companies.

That's fine, but you can't do that and claim to be a free speech warrior at the same time.

I'll defend "freedom of speech includes speech I don't like."

I'm unsure of the promise you refer to.

I approve of Twitter's recent improvements on free speech. I don't approve of shadowbanning a competitor, though I understand why.

Best of luck!

We would have to start a little further back wouldn't we? Those who are demanding free speech on Twitter all of the sudden, I thought it was a private platform, what happened?

What happened to Elon claiming he wanted free speech? That stopped pretty quickly after he took over twitter

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