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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

#391

Post by Zababa »

wpietri wrote: post #135
cjbest wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2: We do have a strong philosophical stance on this. We think taking a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press is both the right thing to do, and critical to the success of our broader mission. We've written about this a few times, e.g. https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati... and https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more That is incidentally a big part of the answer for…

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…

> Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan.

4chan has never been about free speech, it had rules since the beginning which are constantly enforced.

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

#392

Post by native_samples »

Fnoord wrote: post #321
native_samples wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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…

How are they irrelevant? Maybe it feels that way in the USA but the UK just went through a period of time where the government was officially and formally manipulating the behaviour of the population on the say-so of an actual communist. That seems pretty damn relevant.

You also need to think a bit about this - why wasn't this extremist fired from her position? Well, not surprisingly, it's because a lot of her fellow academics are fellow travellers, as was often made clear by many of their comments. They aren't literally members of the communist party, but they are certainly sympathetic to that way of thinking. I've talked to them directly, the things they come out with are astonishing.

Meanwhile, nobody even remotely right wing has had any influence at all, especially not in recent years. The libertarian wing of the Conservative party, such that it is, was reduced to constantly voting against the government, which always failed because they were supported by Labour. The "opposition" primarily "opposed" the government by demanding it do whatever it was doing, but faster and harder.

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

#393

Post by native_samples »

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…

It doesn't posit the existence of a conspiracy anywhere. "Narratives" can be emergent phenomena, just like religion is. It doesn't require cigarette smoking men in back rooms.

You seem to be particularly triggered by the word narrative - ignore that word if you like, or mentally replace it with "what governments tell us" and which part of what was said above is false?

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

#395

Post by wpietri »

esperent wrote: post #275
briandear wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The keyword here is "extremism". Doesn't matter whether the extremists label themselves as left or right.

Exactly. I read his response and said, "Wait, did I say anything about the far right?" No, I didn't.

In the US, right now violent extremists are almost all from the far right. At points in our history, we have had violent far-left extremists, so it's not impossible. It's not even inconceivable; given spiking wealth inequality, in some ways I'm surprised I haven't seen any anti-billionaire violence. Ditto climate-change and eco-terrorism. But it's definitely the case that extremist threats here are mostly from the right.

But I do think it's telling that he saw me pointing out the KKK and the American Nazi Party as examples of current violent extremism and thought, "How dare you attack the right!"

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

#396

Post by native_samples »

bambax wrote: post #344
isaacremuant wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Antivaxx rethoric" is just more labeling to dismiss people for not complying with whatever the new authoritarian push is. Hell, all the labels get put together and people who opposed Lockdowns and hurtful covid policies got called racist far right anti vaxxers because it's easier than using actual data. Much of the "anti lockdown/mask/covid vaccine mandates" was and is slowly vindicated day by day no matter how much…

Okay! ;-) There you go. > the right to make their own risk analysis I really wonder where this comes from though. Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?

Depends which country and which airline, right, along with a whole pile of context.

Trust is earned. The airline industry has earned a lot of trust by having, amongst other things, extremely thorough accident investigations and extremely high safety standards. They also introduce new technology slowly and conservatively. People don't have to take the word of random 'experts' for this, because they can see with their own eyes that plane crashes are extremely rare. In the even rarer case where it's discovered to be due to genuine negligence or malign behaviour (see: Boeing 737 MAX fiasco), that is very widely discussed and executives are held to account via legal liability frameworks.

The COVID vaccine industry has not earned this trust:

1. Vaccine makers insist on blanket exemptions from legal liability of any kind in order to sell vaccines to a country, even if it is shown in a court that they were negligent. Check the leaked Pfizer contracts if you don't believe me. Governments have changed their laws in some cases to enable this (liability exemption pre-dates COVID).

2. People can see, with their own eyes, that vaccines have side effects they weren't told were possible. Now the law courts are forcing documents out of the FDA we can see that Pfizer knew about these side effects but didn't tell people about them (probably others too).

3. When something goes wrong and someone is injured by a vaccine, there is no crash-style investigation process. Instead it's swept under the rug, e.g. doctors will happily deny there's any connection between a vaccine and a severe reaction that happens just hours later.

And so on, and so on.

The problem with people who hate "anti-vaxxers" (they usually aren't actually anti-vaxx in general), is that they don't seem able to handle nuance or complexity. Even the derogatory label anti-vaxxer is like this, it strips all the complexity from people's positions. Comparisons between airlines (massively trusted, earned) and Pfizer (recipient of the biggest corporate fine in history, not massively trusted, earned) are in no way useful because not all institutions are the same.

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

#397

Post by krapp »

Zababa wrote: post #391
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…

> Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. 4chan has never been about free speech, it had rules since the beginning which are constantly enforced.

If your definition of free speech requires that a platform have no rules whatsoever, then there has never been a free speech platform anywhere on the internet, because such a platform would have to accept illegal content and spam, and could never moderate anything.

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

#398

Post by rchaud »

ellegriffin wrote: post #204
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…

Honestly, I hope this doesn't change. As an author, I think the reason why the comments section of my newsletter is such a positive place is because all of the commenters are doxed and have a profile. In addition, that's how I find other writers to follow—you can see who follows what and follow that thread which is nice.

Are commenters doxed? You can signup with a throwaway email.

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

#399

Post by z2h-a6n »

deadpannini wrote: post #371
bambax wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay! ;-) There you go. > the right to make their own risk analysis I really wonder where this comes from though. Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?

> Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator? To push that analogy a little farther, consider how people would have reacted if, in 1905, months after the Wright Brother's successful flight tests, the United States had made air travel mandatory and suppressed discussion of its attendant…

To start with, I agree with this:

  > I think the mRNA vaccines are a tremendous marvel and our best tool for defending ourselves from COVID. But they are not a panacea, and we cannot build trust in them by demanding it.
But I think the aviation analogy has to be pushed a lot farther for it to be relevant to COVID vaccines, and the analogy stops making sense well before that. The main differences would seem to be:

  - Unlike heavier-than-air powered aircraft in 1905, COVID vaccines in 2021/2022 are effective, and probably crucial at fighting a pandemic which has killed a very large number of people and otherwise impacted many more.
  - The mechanisms by which mRNA vaccines work are basically mRNA translation (making proteins) which has been known about for 50 years or so and is well understood (I think, though I'm not an expert), and protein subunit vaccination, which is also well understood, and in fact already in widespread use.
  - Vaccination is (if I understand correctly), not only useful for an individual, but also useful for the population if vaccination rates are sufficiently high. There is therefore a valid public health reason to encourage high vaccination rates.
  - The United States government has not made vaccination mandatory in general, it has made it mandatory in certain (admitedly quite broad) circumstances. More importantly perhaps, mRNA vaccination in particular has never been mandated (as far as I know), so people who would rather get a different type of vaccine (e.g. an adenovirus vector vaccine) can do so, to the extent that supplies are available.
  - I don't believe that the US government has suppressed discussion of the risks of mRNA vaccination (which are pretty clearly much lower than the risks of not being vaccinated in nearly all cases). Depending on which online/social echo chambers one prefers to inhabit, there has likely been some suppression of discussion due to groupthink or something similar.
I don't believe that there is an analogy with aviation that captures all of these, or even just the important ones, but it seems pretty clear that using airplane airworthiness as en example of how most people are happy to outsource most risk analysis to experts most of the time is reasonable, but using early aviation technology as a detailed analogy to mRNA vaccine development and application in response to COVID is not likely to be useful.

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

#400

Post by gonehome »

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?

Yascha Mounk and Persuasion is really great. I tend to like writers that have more of a scout mindset.

Bari Weiss’ Common Sense, Scott Alexander (the comments here trashing him are wrong, easy to tell by reading him), The Diff by Byrne Hobart is one of the best finance blogs online, Noahpinion by Noah Smith, Zvi Mowshowitz has had good writing about Covid.

Andrew Sullivan’s the weekly dish has different politics than I do, but he’s also a good writer with a scout mindset imo.

Outside of substack, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Sam Harris, Ben Thompson of Stratechery, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Julia Galef are all great.

Sam Harris in particular is a really good, smart, interviewer.

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