Don't Call It a Substack

It's been a while since I've read Anil's musings.

I miss the old Internet and have looked for pieces of it online. I can't speak to the political motivations of Substack but something changed around 2014 and the Internet largely gave into capitalism.

There was a time prior to that when it wasn't so rampant. I would give back the conveniences that have come along with the technological advancements since 2014 in exchange for the simpler and more magical version prior.

It makes me wonder, if vested capital interests strategically squash grassroots communities and products which threaten their place of power and control. I always just chalked it up to "poor UX" and "decentralization is too hard for normies to understand". But maybe there's more...

I write through substack and agree with the main point here: substack’s primary interest is creating a walled garden at the expense of writers. I also agree their main hold over writers is convenience, even considering the alternatives.

It won’t change, and for that reason I’ll eventually switch.

>Substack's CEO explicitly said they won't ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down... four of the Nazis. Four.

Dash annoyingly doesn't cite his source on this claim, but I think he's referring to Casey Newton reporting offensive content to Substack in January 2024.[0]

Newton made it seem like he reported dozens of blogs, but Jesse Singal's reporting indicated that Newton could only find six Substack blogs he believed violated Substack's rules, and Substack removed five of them.[1] The details are hazy because Newton refused to answer Singal's questions about his reporting.

So, Dash's presentation is very skewed. A more accurate telling would be "when confronted with six blogs that a reporter believed violated Substack's rules, Substack removed five of them."

[0] https://www.platformer.news/substack-says-it-will-remove-naz...

[1] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/platformers-reporting-on-...