> So the idea that society doesn't have a problem with communist extremism is unfortunately not quite accurate. It's still out there.
It doesn't seem like communist extremism is the problem we are dealing with today. Unless you'd like to argue Putin's GRU lackeys are communists (which they're not, but either were and are nationalists). What you are doing here is essentially a whataboutism. What about the COMMUNIST extremists?! Yeah, well, what about them? They're irrelevant in the current playing field. The danger is coming from the right: alt-right. But either way, we can just call all of them extremists. Just don't pretend its 50/50 extreme left/right cause that's not the world we are living in. Not anymore, anyway.
> 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 Tec…
I was just about to point out, there’s no great likelihood that all will survive the next election, either…
Firstly - love love love Substack. It's so simple but it's so rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few questions (mostly not about the app though, I'll have to wait for Android support to try that). 1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. T…
Well, the problem with your second point ("free speech") is that it tends to attract and retain a specific kind of writers: those who aren't accepted anywhere else. Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term. And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that t…
>Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term.
Probably very well, for the same reason that Joe Rogan's podcast is the most listened to podcast in the US: those views are widely accepted by about 50% of the population.
Despite your pejorative labelling you aren't actually finding extreme minority viewpoints on substack, you're finding modern-day mainstream conservative perspectives.
> [Biden] won with fewer electoral votes [than] Trump over in 2016. That's both not true and trivially checkable.
In 2016, Trump won by 77,744 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In 2020, Biden won by 42,844 votes in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. I got my numbers here[0] so feel free to fact check me. I may have been imprecise in referring to electoral votes specifically, but I think I am correct about the margins of victory. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/did-biden-wi...
But you say only the electoral votes matter? Why does this weird three swing states that aren't even all the same so have different populations accross the elections margin matter?
> But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot? As a subscriber to many Substack newsletters with different publishing schedules, I've found it to be a bit tedious and distracting to have my email inbox be inundated with new posts. I'd rather go to a reader app that has all the newsletters I've subscribed to in one place for when I have the time and the interest to spend a couple of hours reading. I'd l…
So you want an aggregate newsletter with the top posts of the last X days in your email and then a link to substack? What part of that experience isn't possible on the web?
Yes, I'd like an aggregate email notification, sent no more than once a week, containing only the titles of recent posts of all the newsletters I subscribe to that will allow me to go to one place, like an app, where I can read all these articles at once rather than piecemeal. Prior to the app, the only way to get notified of a new post was to get an email from the newsletter, which as I mentioned can start to become pretty tedious because of the constant stream of emails. Alternatively, one could bookmark all the newsletters one subscribes to on a web browser and keep checking them, which is also quite tedious. A reader app is a better solution.
Sorry, your comment doesn’t quite have enough Red Menace hysteria. Could you mind dialling it up a little? Ideally, extrapolating from zero people, since asserting “society has a problem” from the political leanings of exactly one person seems almost like rigourous thinking.
You’ve already nailed the misrepresentation of the composition and purpose of an advisory body, so you can leave that part alone; the overwrought hyperbole there is already evident after a cursory check of what SAGE is.
Will there ever be bundles? Or some kind of bulk discount? Pay-per-article? I'm a paid subscriber to a number of Substack writers, and I'd like to subscribe to more, but it can rapidly run into the hundreds of dollars per month - so I really have to pick and choose. I can imagine bundles aren't really your model, and maybe aren't in your authors interest either. But I'd love to get like an Economics bundle and a New…
> Or even a pay-per-article model - some of the free newsletters I'm on publish paywalled things I'm interested in, but I don't want to subscribe to the full deal. But I'd pre-load my account with $50 and pay a couple of dollars for a single article.
This is an excellent idea! Tracking individual articles for payment, rather than the whole publication/newsletter, would allow for bundling in a way that respects Substack's intentions of preserving/respecting the author and reader relationship.
Firstly - love love love Substack. It's so simple but it's so rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few questions (mostly not about the app though, I'll have to wait for Android support to try that). 1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. T…
Well, the problem with your second point ("free speech") is that it tends to attract and retain a specific kind of writers: those who aren't accepted anywhere else. Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term. And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that t…
Substack links go to the bottom of the reading pile for exactly this reason. It’s a dumpster fire of extremist ranting, and I don’t have the time or energy to sift it. I can’t imagine ever wanting to share a platform with their authors.
Well, the problem with your second point ("free speech") is that it tends to attract and retain a specific kind of writers: those who aren't accepted anywhere else. Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term. And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that t…
>Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term. Probably very well, for the same reason that Joe Rogan's podcast is the most listened to podcast in the US: those views are widely accepted by about 50% of the population. Despite your pejorative labelling you aren't actually finding extreme minority viewpoints on substack,…
Well, to mention just one example, "The Abbey of Misrule" (https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com) pushes antivaxx rhetoric. I don't know if that represents "50% of the population" (let's hope not) but it's abhorrent in any case.