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We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

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Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#291

Post by Talanes »

briandear wrote: post #268
wpietri wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That philosophical stance is very common at the beginnings of a platform. E.g., Twitter being the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party". Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. But over time, tensions develop between the theory and the practice. So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support? From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that catego…

[flagged]

The CPUSA and SWP have been pretty irrelevant for the past couple decades. They're being left out because even hardcore leftist just aren't thinking about them at all. Modern leftists aren't flocking around the organizations that were the extreme left of the 20th Century.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#292

Post by coldtea »

chihuahua wrote: post #290

I'll never understand why Steven Sinofsky, who must have retired from Microsoft with hundreds of millions in the bank, feels the need to ask for a few bucks to read his writing on Substack.

Perhaps it keeps out the people who don't value it...

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#293

Post by uncertainquark »

If any of you guys at Substack can answer this, it would be great: I'm a huge fan and proponent of Substack as a professional space writer and "blogger" from the days of the old. But if there's one thing I think Substack does wrong it's the "Welcome page". Can we please get an option to disable showing the Welcome page" to people who haven't subscribed? I don't want to shove the email form in people's faces before they've read or browsed anything. I've personally seen the welcome page also being confusing to many readers, and it deters them from browsing at all—"Let me read first" isn't intuitive. It's also really annoying for people who choose to browse my articles from the Web and just don't prefer email.

The welcome page is my single biggest gripe with Substack. Sending people to the /about or /archive pages directly doesn't help because the moment people click on the logo or title to visit the homepage, the email form is shown again. If Substack is marketing the platform as being designed for "Bloggers" too (https://substack.com/for-bloggers), then you shouldn't treat publications as merely being newsletters with an email form. You acknowledge it yourself in this HN post intro that Substack is much more than a newsletter! And I agree, except it doesn't feel like it.

The new Substack app allows people to read and discover Substacks without being shown the welcome form, it only makes sense to have the Web version behave the same too. While I would understand not changing it by default but why not at least have it as an option for writers? Substack already lets writers toggle a bunch of major and minor settings to tweak their publication, why not this too?

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#294

Post by coldtea »

KerrAvon wrote: post #134
hihihihi1234 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a follow-up question to #3. Like the parent post I commend your stance on free speech, but recognise you host some controversial figures that other platforms have been happy to ban. The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower, and as Substack gets bigger it's naturally going to attract more attention, both from those who call for increased censorship, and from…

> The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower I'm not affiliated with Substack, but I'm having difficulty with your premise here. There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. What opinions is "Big Tech" "censoring" and why should one think there's any validity to your slippery slope a…

>There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.

Well, touting the fact that the App Store, in its benevolence, allows an app by an ex-POTUS, like it's some sort of triumph of free speech speaks volumes, doesn't it?

The ability of an ex-president to have such reach would go without saying in the past. Now it's up to the whims of Big Tech - and Twitter and others had already cancelled them.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#295

Post by coldtea »

edmundsauto wrote: post #264
scott_paul wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for starters Gab is banned from the App Store for their near-absolutist stance on free speech. More than that is the general culture of suppression of the "wrong" view of reality. Most people who were merely to the right of center moderates in the 00's are now accused of being absolute evil if they voice any opinions. I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything…

> I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired In fairness, there are multiple explanations that don’t involve this being objectively true, while also being how these people perceive their situation.

Yes, they're not persecuted. They're delluded. As Stalin would say.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#296

Post by rstarast »

throwaway_4ever wrote: post #286
awb wrote: post #79

My personal experience with consuming content on Substack is that it’s been mostly fringe opinion content with a biased agenda. For someone like me that feels wary every time I see a Substack URL, are there some quality independent journalists covering current events that don’t participate in conspiracy theories and partisan echo chambers that I can discover?

astralcodexten.substack.com isn’t a journalist (he’s a psychiatrist) but covers current events quite well, probably has as little bias as you can as a person, and is popular on HN.

No post body was provided.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#297

Post by Talanes »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #247
krapp wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump was always going to be the leading candidate. He could have won a second term if not for his fumbling over COVID and his meltdown over secret commies stealing his votes. No one was ever going to vote for Biden twice, the left only hates him less than they hate Trump and half the country never stopped drinking the Trump Kool-Aid. You can't beat a man who has a cult and started a revolution with... whatever the h…

Are you saying Trump could have won in 2020? I think the pandemic killed his presidency... it's like 1932 when Herbert Hoover got voted out because of the Great Depression, regardless of whose fault it was. It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts. It seems to me the Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of…

> It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts.

I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird. Who actively wants their life to be worse?

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#298

Post by throwaway1777 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #258
BurningFrog wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels weird to have to say this, but Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.

> Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist. He may be the leading candidate to be the republican nominee, but that's not the same as the leading candidate likely to win. Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.

Well, there are only 2 real candidates, so yes the likely republican nominee is a likely candidate to win. The polls all show democrats losing in a landslide in the midterms. That puts the republican nominee in very good position.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#299

Post by coldtea »

HWR_14 wrote: post #258
BurningFrog wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels weird to have to say this, but Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.

> Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist. He may be the leading candidate to be the republican nominee, but that's not the same as the leading candidate likely to win. Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.

>Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.

You keep using this word, "fringe". I don't think it means what you think it means...

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#300

Post by no_butterscotch »

BurningFrog wrote: post #222
no_butterscotch wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind. I'm interested in hearing more, I recently had a Substack recruiter reach out to me and was curious about this because I work at a tech company w/ some internal "activists" (I don't consider them to be activists). How would you talk about it with them while hiri…

Sounds like you need a new job with a more inclusive culture.

It was a well known company where the walkout made the news.

My main thing in stating this is just to say that at this point in time I'm looking for a Coinbase/37Signals style work environment where I don't have to take part in others activism or "be an ally" by doing as told.

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