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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

#421

Post by kodah »

cudgy wrote: post #415
kodah wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind Parler being deplatformed as long as similar standards are held for others. Given that Facebook was also a major contributor to the organizing of January 6th I think it makes sense people were asking for their deplatforming as well. That never happened though, and goes unanswered w.r.t. the logic that you've shared.

Deplatform all of them, right? How about the telephone companies that transmitted their conversations? Or the hotels and AirBnb for housing them? And the restaurants that served them? And Uber and airlines that transported them? And the sporting goods store that supplied them? And …

I mean, I'd prefer deplatforming not being an option, but the momentum for it as a tool is far too strong. It's far more expedient that the folks that are championing that as an option also have to use it on institutions they're associated with or favor for similar actions.

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

#422

Post by legalcorrection »

NationalPark wrote: post #26
legalcorrection wrote: post #12

You have held firm so far on not acquiescing to cancel culture. But I imagine Apple will start demanding you censor content available through the Substack app, like they have with Parler and others. What will you do in response?

Harmful and illegal activities We don’t allow content that promotes harmful or illegal activities, including material that advocates, threatens, or shows you causing harm to yourself, other people, or animals. ... Nudity, porn, erotica We don’t allow porn or sexually exploitative content on Substack. We do allow depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature. Howeve…

I think we can make a meaningful distinction between not carrying smut and engaging in viewpoint discrimination. When it comes to government censorship,, First Amendment doctrine easily distinguishes between content neutrality and viewpoint neutrality. Content neutrality is the broader concept but applies in less circumstances than viewpoint neutrality, which pretty much applies anywhere. So there's plenty of venues where the government can ban nudity and pornography and such, but can't ban opposing viewpoints from being expressed.

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

#423

Post by deadpannini »

bishplsok wrote: post #406
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-hum…

Said emails are in the link I posted above! It is, hilariously enough, literally someone trying to defend Scott by just reposting his emails in their entirety -- "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" indeed. If it's a hit piece, it's Scott writing a hit piece on himself.

Thank you for pointing that out, I didn't even realize that was Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's blog, I thought you had linked Topher Brennan's piece directly.

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

#424

Post by native_samples »

bambax wrote: post #379
bambax wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can't edit the above comment anymore, but I would like to add this: my point isn't really about Substack specifically; it's about the fact that it's difficult (impossible?) to be "content neutral", and pretending otherwise is a fallacy. (And how is porn not speech? If you ban porn then you're not defending free speech in any meaningful manner.)

This can be defended in two ways:

1. Practical. Porn is banned because Stripe doesn't allow payment for porn. In turn Stripe doesn't allow that because the chargeback rate on such payments is very high, supposedly due to the number of people who buy porn because they want it and then get caught by their spouses and claim their card must have been stolen. At any rate, a blogging/newsletter platform is not exactly optimized for porn anyway. The people who want to buy and sell that are better served by other platforms.

2. Theoretical. Porn is not "speech" because speech encodes ideas or viewpoints. The reason freedom of speech is important is because ideas and viewpoints are important, as it's only through the competition of ideas that progress occurs. Defending free speech takes a lot of work, but can be justified by the benefits. Defending porn would take even more work, but wouldn't yield the same social benefits.

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

#425

Post by sheriffderek »

First impressions:

Will it be easy to switch between accounts? I have my own / and then I have a company account where I follow the students and leave comments with that. So far, looks like I can only sign-out / and then sign back in.

What if I want to follow that crazy political ranter guy in my email... but I don't want it in my feed in the app? It looks like there isn't a way to filter that besides unsubscribing - which will likely lead me to unsubscribe from people - that I normally wouldn't - to keep the app feed tidy.

What if I want notifications, but only for some of my favorite publications? Looks like it's just over-all so far.

Will I be able to edit a typo of mine / in the app? Doesn't look like it.

Will I have to add this app address to my Vimeo privacy/sharing so that my included videos can be embedded in it?

S the small box of files icon an archive button? As in / "here's your box of old files" - or as in "this will archive some amount of things when you press it." It's archive all. What is this bell - probably notification settings? No. It's "Activity" - of which I have none / and I do not understand. Seems like my inbox is the activity. So, maybe comments on my publication?

Again - already wishing for a filter because my inbox is showing the exact 3 publications I don't want to see on the app and nothing more.

What will pushing the substack icon do. Nothing? Seems like it should take me "home" - to what I would presume to be my inbox. Nope. But there is an icon of an incoming mail office box thing. That's the inbox. OK. Library icon - is not good. Doesn't read as a book at all. (to me) and - my list of publications - is not a "book." So - it's not a great icon to begin with / and it looks like spit pane anyway.

Still searching for a way to flip between my own accounts.

But overall - on part with Substack - and a positive move forward. However, I would have preferred to have a better signup module that we could style to match our sites / and other added features / over an iOS app.

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

#426

Post by jxramos »

cjbest wrote: post #76
native_samples wrote: post #19

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…

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…

Thank you for #2, I never knew these points

> Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions.

I think I'm going to start subscribing to two writers in particular and see how that goes. This is a great model.

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

#427

Post by saagarjha »

shroompasta wrote: post #419
saagarjha wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Discord's main conversation view is native UITableView for performance.

this article suggests otherwise. https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-achieves-native-ios-per... > At first, we felt that maybe doing it purely in JavaScript was futile. We spent some time trying to glue together UITableView with React Native, and while we made meaningful progress, it started feeling overly complicated. After stepping back and thinking about what else we could do — it hit us. We already solved this p…

> We’ve actually implemented our core chat view natively because lists don’t perform well for many dynamic rows.

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

#428

Post by Jereshroom »

throwaway_4ever wrote: post #418
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it doesn't exactly strike me as obviously 100% untrue. This is the wedge used to hoist their more radical ideas into the mainstream. The HBD crowd uses a common writing trick: They start with a low-risk scientific fact (genes influence traits) and then inflate it into misleading conclusions (race equals IQ). Depending on their audience and how much pushback they're receiving, they'll retreat further and further…

You’re misconstruing what he thinks. He has literally told everyone openly (not what you claim is open via Kolmogorov Complicity). “ This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's t…

No post body was provided.

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

#429

Post by Zababa »

krapp wrote: post #397
Zababa wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But that's not my point, 4chan has clear rules that are not about illegal content: https://4chan.org/rules. There are moderators/janitors enforcing thoses rules and a report system. The first rule is:

"1. You will not upload, post, discuss, request, or link to anything that violates local or United States law."

But that's only the first rule. There are 17 global rules, and each board has a few.

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

#430

Post by HWR_14 »

krapp wrote: post #265
HWR_14 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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...

Ah, you're talking about the fewest number of regular votes that would have to change so that the electoral college would flip. in that case I'd say 42k and 77k are essentially the same number, given the large number of voters we're talking about. But yes, Biden's victory was tighter than Trumps in that calculus.

Although, in the situation you propose, 2020 would actually be a 269-269 tie. Which means any unfaithful elector could refuse to vote for their candidate and throw it to the other party. And even if no one did, then Congress would break the tie in a pair votes that would presumably go for Trump and Pence if people voted on a party line.

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