Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become the Nazi Bar | Hacker News Reader

Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become the Nazi Bar

techdirt.com

27 pointslehi19 comments

That was a weird interview. The CEO should have answered with a simple – yes, people will be able to say "more brown people should not be let into the country" on Substack. His responses were instead a cop out that aren't satisfying anyone.

This more than anything tells me he doesn’t get how difficult of a problem it is.

I’m always surprised when I see an actual respectable journalist on substack as opposed to yet another crank hawking gold/crypto/etc with literal-minded horse-blinder rhetoric only based on internal logic and not the real world.

It was astonishing how unprepared he was to receive a question on content moderation a day after launching a social network being compared to twitter.

Cheers to Nilay for pressing him for a real answer and not letting him shrug off the Q. If we’re gonna spend time letting these CEOs shill their platforms let’s make them answer the hard Qs.

Someone should make a social media site where any one individual can delete any post. Would be a fascinating experiment to see if any information exchange gets allowed beyond a certain user base size.

Is anyone aware of anyone being banned from Substack?

My admittedly distant impression is that because it is more a publishing portal than social media is that anything pretty much goes. They have removed people, but to give the handle they had to others/back to themselves.

> My admittedly distant impression is that because it is more a publishing portal than social media is that anything pretty much goes.

I think the idea is that the recent release of substack notes represents movement from publishing into social media.

Yes this is addressed in the post and interview

> As Nilay notes in his commentary on the transcript, he feels that there should be much less moderation the closer you get to being an infrastructure provider [...]. Substack has long argued that its more hands-off approach in providing its platform to writers is because it’s more like infrastructure.

So sick of various liberals saying "if you do not fully agree to our censorship regime, you are enabling Nazis".

There are other ways to moderate a community. But critical thought doesn't get as many clicks as wild accusations.

I mean if you allow Nazis to use your product to support and recruit Nazis you are indeed enabling Nazis. Based on the interview it seems like Chris Best wouldn’t even say they would prevent literal Nazis from using the platform to further their goals.

Lol of course the hypothetical Nazis swarming all over Substack. Next thing you'll tell me Matt Taibbi is one.

I don’t know or really care who Matt Taibbi is. Not sure how they are relevant.

The whole scenario Nilay laid out is hypothetical. The product (Substack Notes) is brand new so yea, the Nazis are also hypothetical. Not sure what your point is.

So Germany enables Nazis because some Nazis exist there and they use their public transportation services (for recruitment)?

Sure? At least germany attempts otherwise. But regardless there is a pretty important difference between a government and a company.

> There are other ways to moderate a community.

Substack CEO could not provide this when asked in an interview. Giving a confident 2012-era redit answer of "we are a free speech platform, we will follow the law" would have sufficed, yet he was flummoxed that he was asked whether legal-but-hateful content is allowed on his website.

It was a softball question that he answered in the worst possible way.

You've missed the point of the metaphor. "Nazi bar" is just colorful language for "shitty people who end up pushing the non-shitty people out simply by being who they are." Any hate group of any political stripes can qualify.

This is a well-studied phenomenon by now:

- New social media site becomes popular.

- Lots of people, including shitty-group people, join up en masse.

- Shitty-group people do their shitty stuff and piss the rest of the people off.

- Site management does nothing.

- Non-shitty people start to leave because they don't want to deal with this shit.

- Eventually, your population is now mostly shitty-group people.

- You as the site owner are branded as part of that shitty-group (regardless of whether you really are or not).

- Advertisers flee because they don't want their reputations tarnished.

- Your site loses money and popularity and becomes irrelevant.

This isn't some podcaster sounding off to grind his own axe about moderation; this is an interviewer trying to get through to an inexperienced CEO about the major cliff he's about to fall over, driven by market forces because he doesn't understand his customers or the industry.

What is free speech, what should be protected, and what is hate speech - I don't see a way forward to address these, as long as the first amendment is interpreted in its current form.

US Americans love quoting the first amendment to validate any and all arguments. Even political contributions are considered exercising of first amendment rights, making it impossible to regulate them.

How do we even expect growth driven social media tech bros to actually come up with a solution for this?

>US Americans love quoting the first amendment to validate any and all arguments. Even political contributions are considered exercising of first amendment rights, making it impossible to regulate them.

The US has numerous regulations on freedom of speech, and political contributions. We're not some sort of laissez-faire minarchy.

>How do we even expect growth driven social media tech bros to actually come up with a solution for this?

We had - and have - a perfectly effective solution that worked until around 2016, when for some reason people decided banning Nazis from the internet was a hate crime. To wit: if you don't want Nazis, racists or cranks on your platform, ban them.

"BuT wHo DeCIdEs WhAt iS hAtE SPeEcH oR wHat EvEN iS A 'NAZI'" I can hear the keyboards begin to clatter in their indignant chorus. The person who owns the platform decides the rules.

...or you choose to become the Nazi bar and you accept that consequence. There really is no third option where you have "unlimited" freedom of speech without moderation and the Nazis don't show up and drive everyone else off.

It's that simple.

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