I’m staying at Substack, and will be moving to Substack Notes next week

The Streisand-Musk effect

Don’t know what’s that abnormal there aside from the overall cringe from the whole ordeal vOv

You'll find subsections of anything on any platform. This is a famous controversial person writing about a controversial topic. It will bring the worst of the worst. Even this site goes crazy whenever there's a thread on Twitter or Musk. Although more tame since here's an actual mod.

There are people paying bounties to farms to harass journalists and outspoken private citizens on twitter. They get paid if they can get the target to reply or block.

Additionally, David Brock moved from creating the vast right-wing conspiracies against the Clintons in the 90s to managing a huge budget for managing an organization of online trolls from 2016, to becoming an established part of the Democratic Party contractor pool also being used by the Biden admin. This involves a lot of fake accounts; most are silent retweeting accounts that exist to upvote any belligerent harassment of official enemies, usually slyly amplifying real accounts instead of leading from the front.

Lastly, intelligence agencies have invested billions and created entire new departments in order to monitor and manipulate social media by any means necessary. They have direct lines to all major social media companies, with the apparent current exception of twitter.

Introduced into the middle of all of this are LLMs, which are starting to make it very easy to fake accounts that reply in a vaguely relevant way (although they answer like LLMs, failing if the tweets they're replying to are too oblique and require context that everybody knows.) Still dominant are the endless fake replies from fake accounts that don't reference the tweets they're replying to at all, but just repeat from a list of four or five insults for years on end.

00s youtube comments were 1000x better. This is the actual rise of the Dead Internet.

This seems like the last straw for Taibbi. Musk hasn't had an effect on the harassment problem (and doesn't seem to have a plan) and now is making it harder for him to promote his own outlet. He doesn't need Twitter for visibility. I find it nuts that Musk didn't try to clear this decision with the journalists that he's been publicly associated with through the Twitter Files. Them turning on him would have an outsized effect on Musk's situation and none of them have any particular loyalty to him; they're not on his payroll.

edit: all that being said, I could see the Substack contingent turning on Musk, then him immediately announcing that he's hired a new twitter CEO, and eventually an announcement about one of Musk's business having very good luck with a regulation, a decision on the violation a regulation, and/or a new government contract/partnership.

So petty and counterproductive. I would have missed the whole Substack Notes announcement if it wasn't for Matt Taibbi (and for Twitter hostile approach).

Matt did a great job with the Twitter files, he has integrity and he's "incorruptible" whereas Elon is a petty tyrant who goes nuclear for the slightest disagreements, so I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this will end up with Matt's account removed.

Twitter is suppressing posts containing links to substack as well as at least one text post by substack itself explaining what’s going on.

The suppression takes the form of likes and retweets being disabled and presumably reach limited.

To add my personal opinion, it’s deeply pathetic.

As of today (or yesterday?) if a tweet includes a link to a substack.com URL the tweet cannot be liked, retweeted or replied to. Likes will appear to work and then disappear. They can still be "quote tweeted".

It's pretty funny because the individuals that Musk hand picked to give the "Twitter files" to all use Substack. They all embarrassed themselves by stretching what was mostly nothing into a huge story seemingly on his behalf before he turned his back on them.

What’s wrong with the Russian government having a voice? They represent millions of people. The ease with which our media just duped our whole country into hating Russia and supporting this war is very scary.

I was wondering why I had a sudden mass influx of Russian accounts into my For You.

No but it has been very supportive of the Chinese government.

Banning accounts of activists and increasing the reach of known propaganda accounts.

… or the Trotskyites in the Soviet revolution.

… or a whole bunch of very surprised fascists in the Nazi “Night of the Long Knives.”

… or almost everyone in Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Yes, the leopards will eat your face too. The loyalty in totalitarian societies only goes up the chain of command. Everyone down the chain is expendable.

The leopards are going to eat Elon’s face in the end. Just wait. Someone should tell him his new friends hate EVs and renewable energy and don’t give a damn about space.

Same for Peter Thiel. He’s gay, which means they think he’s a degenerate subhuman. They’re happy to take his money but if they gain power he’s gonna be cat food.

Just like the AI is not your friend, neither is Musk. Look how he did a reversal on Bitcoin, Doge. People who bought Doge coin a few days ago are down 13%. He pumped BTC in 2021 and Tesla dumped its position in 2022 at a small loss, but BTC investors who heeded Tesla were at one point down over 50%. You cannot trust that these people are looking out for your interests. It's all business in the end. You have to assume that these people are only looking after themselves, in the end.

Utterly confused about Robespiere reference. Like ... how, what?

A key Twitter Blue feature is the ability to post long-form content.

And Musk has been talking about using crypto to allow people to pay for premium long-form content within the app.

Substack Notes competes with this.

“Not your server, not your site.”

Yeah, that's definitely the problem here: Substack's overreaching!