Elon has made an utterly incomprehensible statement on the matter:
> Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
> Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
1) Substack links are blocked and restricted. I've personally confirmed this, as have countless others. In fact you can't even search for the word substack (or tweets made by Taibbi!) right now. Musk is either attempting some sort of deeply disenguous argument about the meaning of the word "blocked", or he's just mistaken. At best.
2) I can't even parse the nonsense about Substack scraping twitter. It makes no sense on multiple levels. There's no real way they're trying to download a "massive portion" of Twitter's content, there's no way they're "downloading the Twitter database", there's no way they only have a single IP address, and this block isn't about IP addresses, it's about domain names, or in the case of the search bans, actual words. And also, there's no reason why they'd want or need to do whatever he's accusing them of to start their Notes product. This is so garbled is hard to even call it wrong.
3) Taibbi isn't a Substack employee. Not that it'd particular matter if he was, but he's not.
I'm honestly at a loss. This is so goofy and obviously wrong it's hard to figure out if Musk just believes his target audience will happily swallow nonsense and so has no need to make up plausible lies, or if Musk actually believes this stuff.
Something very telling was his affectation when talking with Parag. Often with Parag he would use a line like "brb have to go work on rocket science", he wouldn't say any such thing with other people. Point is, the guy is being fake here and all of this hand-waving just betrays his insecurity and fear that he doesn't have a handle on twitter.
I found this hard to believe so I tested it, and it's true... if you search for "substack" on Twitter you find instances of the word "newsletter". It's both hilarious and sad.
Yes. See the replies/QTs/RTs from his fans, and see politics for other examples of this phenomenon.
Also, the news media will dutifully repeat and spread lies even while "debunking" them.
Pretty clearly though this is just a major Streisand effect in the making.
1) Doing that wouldn't be fairly described as "downloading Twitters database".
2) Given the scale of Twitter, there's no way that would be fairly described as downloading a "massive portion" of Twitter.
3) As you say, there's no reason they would be doing that. It's certainly not needed (or even helpful) for launching something like Substack Notes.
4) Just as a matter of how networking and modern cloud architectures work, it would be a bit surprising if the IP ranges that scraping requests were made from would be the same as the ones serving up content on Substack's frontend. It could happen I suppose, but...it'd be weird, even if you weren't trying to make the requests from unrelated IPs (which...you probably would try and do).
5) Elements of the block have nothing to do with IP addresses or domain names at all, eg, the block on results when even searching for the word "substack" (but hilariously, not when searching for common mispellings), or the block on searching for posts authored by Taibbi.
6) Substack has denied doing any such thing, and frankly, their credibility is currently significantly higher than Musk's.
It's certainly possible Substack was doing something akin to scraping which via a game of telephone ended up as Musk's claim, but... I wouldn't bet money on it.
Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that.
If I were Musk and wanted to stop Substack I’d try some kind of long-game embrace, extend, extinguish strategy and pretend to support them at this stage.
1) Musk has come out in favour of shadowbanning, or "freedom of speach, not freedom of reach", as he once put it. Twitter isn't stopping you from tweeting a link to Substack, it's just sharply limiting the ways people might see that tweet, and trying to scare people away from following it if they do see it. Which in the most technical sense is arguably not blocking links to Substack.
2) It's possible Substack was scraping Twitter. Or much more likely, they've said they were using the Twitter API to embed tweets into newsletters. That's a perfectly allowed and legitimate use of the API, but it's possible some bug on Substack's side may have made the requests look odd or happen at an unusually high rate. Or alternatively, Twitter has made major changes to how the API works recently, and we know they have a skeleton crew these days. Perhaps (due to bugs or lack of resources) they incorrectly flagged Substack's API usage as malicious. If Musk saw a report that (rightly or wrongly) suggested Substack was misuing the API to embed Tweets, he might have assumed that they were using the API to scrape Twitter.
3) Taibbi isn't an employee of Substack, but he has a Substack and paying subscribers, and thus has a very slight financial interest in the health of the Substack platform. (Only slight because Substack makes it quite easy to migrate off their platform, taking your paying subscribers with you.) But that's still more financial interest than people who aren't Musk have in the health of Twitter. So if you squint, Taibbi could almost be seen as biased against Twitter in any conflict with Substack?
So sure, I can almost find a way to imagine Musk's claims as "technically true but intentionally misleading", "almost certainly false but perhaps Musk wasn't intentionally lying", and "Musk had to know he was lying, but perhaps he was morally very slightly correct". But boy do you have to work hard to force his statements into even that ambiguously positive a frame. :)
> Occam’s razor would say he’s trying to stifle competition and picked basically the worst conceivable strategy to do that.
Totally agreed. There's been a flurry of Twitter competitors, but Musk's actions so far have catapulted Substack's Notes into the forefront, which is hilarious for a product from comparatively tiny company that hasn't even launched yet. Spoutible and Post.news have to consider this little spat an existential disaster for them.
And thus the whirlygig of time brings in his revenges…
This is the kind of explanation that sounds good when you give it to a close circle of yes-men who won’t dare disagree with you, but falls flat when posted somewhere that anybody can think about critically.
Also, the pandering replies from the social media grifters trying hard to break into Elon’s inner circle are just sad:
> Got it. Please DM so we can take this private.
Billionaires buy media companies and politicians for a reason.
Its the same reason, totalitarian govs control their media and politicians.
The playbook is the same:
1. Make an individual decision against an individual, group or organization (ie. target)
2. Make your plea to the masses using your platform of choice to stoke fear, hatred or worst (complacency) with your policy
3. Act violently, disingenuously towards your target
We have not evolved beyond lynching in America. We just do it differently now.
[0]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/jessi-slaughter-cyberb...
wget 8.8.8.8
How so?
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/LinkedIn-Wins-Latest-C...
> 1. Substack links were never blocked. Matt’s statement is false.
> 2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
> 3. Turns out Matt is/was an employee of Substack.
delirium
Who involved in Substack is a billionaire? Their CEO seems to be a youngish guy, maybe a millionaire.
Not company is perfect of course but Substack seems less bad for society than Twitter. I mean Twitter also started out as non-evil, so maybe Substack will get there eventually…
This gives the appearance of a quasi-religious belief. How would you ever refute it empirically?
Death and destruction and suffering are all part of God's plan, right? We mere mortals cannot understand it, we just have to take it on faith.