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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

#381

Post by Gareth321 »

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.

This is happening the most "inclusive" workplaces, and it's spreading. Count yourself lucky if you haven't encountered it yet.

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

#382

Post by Gareth321 »

bambax wrote: post #330
Lascaille wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I don't find any of this offensive or extreme. Easily within the mainstream conservative spread. I think you need to broaden your news sources.

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

#383

Post by bambax »

Gareth321 wrote: post #382
bambax wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't find any of this offensive or extreme. Easily within the mainstream conservative spread. I think you need to broaden your news sources.

> Internment. Mandatory medication. Segregation of whole sections of society. Mass sackings. A drumbeat media consensus. The systematic censoring of dissent. The deliberate creation by the state and the press of a climate of fear and suspicion. What could possibly justify this? Perhaps the combination of a terrible pandemic which killed or maimed large percentages of those it infected, and the existence of a safe and reliable medicine which was proven to prevent its spread. This, of course, is what we are said to be living through. This is the Narrative.

> But it is clear enough by now that the Narrative is not true. Covid-19 is a nasty illness which should be taken seriously, especially by those who are especially vulnerable to it. But it is nowhere near dangerous enough - if anything could be - to justify the creation of a global police state. [1]

If you don't see the conspiracy theory in this, then I can't help you.

(Me, all I need is the capital N at "Narrative".)

[1] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-vaccine-moment-par...

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

#384

Post by Fnoord »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #332
Fnoord wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ex…

(The alt-right is also irrelevant in the current playing field.)

Wishful thinking. The only people who are supporting Putin in The Netherlands, is the alt-right FvD and PVV. We had an alt-right president in USA, who tried to undermine NATO. Finally, it -along with nationalism- is on the rise in general throughout Europe as well as the world, including during the COVID pandemic.

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

#385

Post by gonehome »

ubac wrote: post #365
gonehome wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ubac framed the question in a hostile way which is probably why he was ignored. What you're describing sounds like a cash advance/guarantee which Hamish mentioned about 'de-risking' offers. If you have good data that a writer could make X money, but they're afraid to leave their day job - it's easy to just say to them "we'll pay you your day job salary to de-risk this jump for you" if you know they'll make way more t…

hey! Sorry, there's a lot of history here, Hamish has been very unpleasant to me and many writers I love, as well as wrongly continuing to bill me after I left his platform -- I realise otherwise I might have sounded unduly hostile, sorry for that. The benefits I'm talking about are not the advances or guarantees, there's basically a ton of secret programmes at Substack where they give favored publishers special in-k…

Sure, I didn’t know this but I’m also not surprised big fish that bring in massive revenue and readership get better negotiated rates (or some value equivalent) that are not publicized. They provide more value and have more negotiation leverage. Their use of the platform is basically marketing for substack.

It’s also possible to directly discuss this openly/honestly like you did in this reply (thanks for clarification) vs. indirectly via disingenuous hostile snark in your first comment.

Also looks like there might be some sort of conflict of interest based on the work you do in your bio which could be having a possibly unintended influence.

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

#386

Post by cheeseomlit »

bambax wrote: post #383
Gareth321 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find any of this offensive or extreme. Easily within the mainstream conservative spread. I think you need to broaden your news sources.

> Internment. Mandatory medication. Segregation of whole sections of society. Mass sackings. A drumbeat media consensus. The systematic censoring of dissent. The deliberate creation by the state and the press of a climate of fear and suspicion. What could possibly justify this? Perhaps the combination of a terrible pandemic which killed or maimed large percentages of those it infected, and the existence of a safe and…

That all sounds pretty accurate and reasonable to me. I guess we can't help each other.

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

#387

Post by PragmaticPulp »

deadpannini wrote: post #375
bishplsok wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Ironically, a brief passage by Scott Alexander (from the hit piece targeting him linked above) describes a very good reason to read content you disagree with, almost making the parent comment germane to the overall discussion. > Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially ed…

For more context, look up the leaked e-mails where Scott is caught admitting that he writes about neoreactionaries because it drives more clicks.

Writing about it once or twice could have been interesting, but constantly returning to neoreactionary content over and over again to mine what he calls “nuggets of absolute gold” starts to become an endorsement.

Scott’s entire writing style is based on tricks like faux-humbleness and pretending to present an unbiased “both sides” overview of a topic while planting seeds that lead the reader to a specific conclusion.

To understand it, re-read his “Kolmogorov Complicity” essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...

He’s been telegraphing his intentions and strategies out in the open for anyone who’s been paying attention.

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

#388

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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.

> probably has as little bias as you can as a person

Yesterday he wrote an article about being “anti-woke” on a college campus. It included recommendations such as what he called the “berserker strategy” which was to pick as many fights as possible on every social justice topic.

Scott is anything but unbiased. He writes with flowery language that elicits a sense of faux humbleness and “both sides” journalism while subtlety pushing the reader to his desired conclusions on things like race and IQ.

He’s famous for leaked e-mails where he admitted writing a lot about neoreactionaries because it gets more clicks, which has made him somewhat of a hero among those circles. He also admitted that he believes in “HBD” which is an alt-right euphemism for racist views on IQ.

He may feel unbiased and objective due to his writing style, but he’s far from it if you’ve been following him and reading closely.

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

#389

Post by alisonatwork »

sachinmonga wrote: post #253
alisonatwork wrote: post #198

Are there any plans to allow readers/subscribers to decouple identities between different newsletters? Or, asked a different way, will the app allow you to "subscribe" to newsletters anonymously? I find myself very reluctant to sign up for new newsletters on Substack now because my identity is shared across all newsletters, so I feel I can no longer keep my interests separated. To be clear: after commenting on one ne…

> after commenting on one newsletter, it becomes impossible to comment on any other newsletter without compromising my privacy. We tried to build reader profiles in a way that can handle this nicely - you can choose on a per-subscription basis which publications to display on your profile and which you'd like to keep hidden. This is almost like an anonymous subscription although it doesn't quite support a fully anony…

Thanks for the response. Your example of someone recognizing you from different comment sections is exactly the thing that concerns me.

I do think giving writers the choice to enable anonymous commenting would help to improve things, although it's a little bit closing the barn door after the horse bolted, since we can't go back and anonymize comments that we already made. If allowing different pseudonyms (including avatar) for different newsletters isn't on the cards, I think the idea mentioned elsewhere of allowing the app to compile multiple logins into a single client-side feed could make the existing workaround of creating multiple accounts a bit less painful.

Either way, despite my frustrations with the identity behavior, I do appreciate the platform you have built, and how it seems to have revitalized the blogosphere. I also very much like the focus on email, since it allows me to read whenever I want instead of just when my device is online. So thanks for helping shift the culture of online writing in this way.

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

#390

Post by krapp »

Talanes wrote: post #297
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird.

Trump knew that mail-in votes would favor the Democrats, so he spread a conspiracy theory that mail-in voting was rampant with Democratic ballot fraud (it wasn't,) going so far as to attempt to defund the Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting altogether[0].

Of course, this meant Republicans avoided mail-in voting en masse, so when the (primarily Democratic) mail-in ballots came in after the initial numbers appeared to favor Trump, and the tide turned against him, the cries of fraud only became louder.

That's what Trump does, he poisons any well he can to harm his opponents, even if he has to drink from it afterwards. It's political because he made it political, the way he made masks and vaccination political because he thought COVID would distract from his narrative of a "roaring economy" and because he thought wearing a mask would make him look weak in front of the press, who he considered his enemy.

[0]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/24/why-trumps-...

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