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Substack Notes Launched

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Re: Substack Notes Launched

#701

Post by hereme888 »

capital_guy wrote: post #33

I've just checked it out and it's much closer to a Twitter clone than I anticipated. Now it's clear why Elon made the drastic decision to mess with substack links on Twitter. The site is clean and simple. I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.

They were messing with Twitter by downloading massive amounts of data from them. Why wouldn't Elon do what he did?

I returned to Twitter recently due to great features like Community Notes. I don't see what people are complaining about.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#702

Post by wpietri »

brigandish wrote: post #638
wpietri wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically true. But Newman said it on the stand, under oath, an a case where DeSantis was being sued for firing a "woke" prosecutor. So I think that's as close to an official answer as we're going to get from DeSantis.

> Technically true. There's no technically true - there's what you wrote, which was untrue , and what I wrote, which was true. Technically is entirely unnecessary in that assessment, especially when you go on to admit that DeSantis hasn't actually given an answer .

I get your point. But politicians are not lone individuals; they are effectively teams. They have all sorts of people thinking and speaking for them. This is about a topic where most of the anti-"woke" crowd will absolutely never given an answer, because to answer accurately about it gives the game away. For example, consider the example of Bethany Mandel, a person who wrote a whole anti-"woke" book, who somehow can't define it when asked: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2023/03/16/anti-w...

But if we're being extremely precise, something you are apparently very excited about, you'll note that I didn't say that Ron DeSantis said those words. I said that DeSantis "defined" it that way. Given that this was one of his closest legal advisors speaking under oath to a judge, I think it is entirely correct to say that this is their true definition of "woke".

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#703

Post by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh »

prepend wrote: post #683
capital_guy wrote: post #33

I've just checked it out and it's much closer to a Twitter clone than I anticipated. Now it's clear why Elon made the drastic decision to mess with substack links on Twitter. The site is clean and simple. I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.

> I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. I’m happy with the destruction of Twitter. I think it’s a net negative for the world and we’ll be better off without it. This might be the only tech I’ve ever felt like this about (including atomic bombs). I think it amplifies and even creates hate and division. It will be funny if ten years from now we find out it…

I really like those "case study" books about our industry, too. Off the top of my head, two more:

  - "Hatching Twitter" by Nick Bilton (published in 2014, about the early days of Twitter)
  - "Super Pumped" by Mike Isaac (published in 2019, about the early days of Uber)
Neither of them go into great detail or nuance — they're made for popular consumption, so they simplify things and gloss over details. You won't find any extensive discussion of microservice architecture and organizational design. But they were still interesting reads.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#704

Post by cratermoon »

nkozyra wrote: post #680
quaintdev wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember there was a time when people were excited about medium. Then medium needed some money so they started blocking readers behind login dialog boxes. Then come substack and everyone got excited about it. Sooner or later it will be on same path that medium took. When will we realise that blogging websites (not personal blogs) are not sustainable in long run.

One could argue that social media is technically all "blogging websites" Advertising works there because of the numbers. People will quickly consume enough bite sized content to drive traditional numbers. Medium broke the things that made them appealing in an attempt to sweeten the advertising sell, but this made the platform unappealing. It was a self inflicted wound.

> Advertising works there because of the numbers. People will quickly consume enough bite sized content to drive traditional numbers.

To be more specific, advertising works there because of the feed algorithms. The platforms gather data about user interests and use that to tune what they choose to show the users, favoring things the algorithms suggest will get more "engagement". In turn, they sell ads on those favored items. On top of that, they charge both users and advertisers a premium to be featured on the favored topics.

Take away the algorithms that determine what content and ads to feature, and you get back to the basics of blogging websites. You get happier users, but no advertising money.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#705

Post by wpietri »

gordian-mind wrote: post #652
wpietri wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who used to do anti-abuse engineering for Twitter, maybe I'm biased here. But I don't think his politics are separable from his tolerance for hate speech. I think they're closely related. The tricky part here is, as you point to, not wanting to see people abused is turning out to be good business. That's why Twitter came around on hate speech, harassment, and the like. Claiming to be the "free speech wing…

> You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they like to harass. Nice rhetoric, but no you still do not get to censor people. > The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience On your "woke", "humane", "inclusive spaces", I hope that celebrating the "shrinking" of the black population of any country on Earth would put you in the catego…

That isn't rhetoric. It's an inescapable fact of running a platform. You have to choose. If you choose the maximalist free speech position, you get the Nazis. You lose the speech of the people they harass, because a lot of them will either leave or stay and shut up. So the maximalist no-moderation position also ends up with a lot of speech suppressed. Plus, as a business reality, a platform that is smaller and with much lower ad revenue.

> hope that celebrating the "shrinking"

I'm not celebrating it. Again, it's just a business reality. In the Jim Crow era, businesses could ignore the non-white market, even be hostile to it. See, e.g., the Negro Motorist's Green Book. But most national-scale businesses can no longer do that, because the non-white market is much larger, as is the chunk of the white market that is reluctant to associate with open bigotry. And that part, I'm happy to celebrate.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#706

Post by 4ggr0 »

Nathanba wrote: post #531
inpdx wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and is successful at it." Overpaying, creating a mass exodus, destabilizing the platform, and losing tons of advertisers is "successful?"

The Twitter thing is still in progress and probably his first project where you could say that he has a problem

What are your thoughts about The Boring Company?

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#707

Post by [deleted] »

boplicity wrote: post #523
AlbertCory wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon showing the number of impressions a tweet or reply actually got was an eye-opener for me. Probably about 1-2% of "Followers" -- not just mine but most people's. Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers.

> Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers. It's always been very difficult to get people to leave Twitter. This is why their ad business is worth so little. Advertisers pay for clicks, and Twitter just doesn't deliver them very well.

[deleted]

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#708

Post by wpietri »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #599
wpietri wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, every platform develops its culture and attracts the people who enjoy that culture. If it's not for you, nothing wrong with that. But I think "insular" is a funny word to use here, in that it being one giant space meant that self-segregation was a much harder choice to make than on, say, HN or a given subreddit. The thing that always kept me using it was the great variety of voices there. Some of my favorite…

Twitter is indeed a place with a lot of interests and topics but after the initial period it built up a pretty unique culture. As you say, it's just an aspect of platforms. But there was something unique about how Twitter folks really felt like their network was the "global conversation" that I never felt elsewhere, even though it felt just as self-selecting as the other networks. Early Reddit definitely attracted a…

Sorry, I'm not getting what you're not getting. IRC channels and subreddits are defined around special interests. There is a thing that unifies people. Sometimes that topic can have a well-distributed membership, but there is always a selection bias that comes from the chosen topic bias.

Twitter is unique in that it had both wide international reach and no topic structure. Reddit is an engine for shutting you off from 99.9% of the Reddit discussion. Twitter, for better and for worse, didn't and couldn't do that.

As you say, the journalists were definitely part of that. To the extent a global conversation existed previously, it was among journalists and the people they covered, like major politicians, NGO heads, and the like. Twitter expanded and disintermediated that. Suddenly you could hear from all those media subjects directly. And even more unusually, you could try to join in, speaking directly to people previously unreachable, maybe even getting replies. One major motivator for people joining Twitter was exactly that, as the Waiting for Bieber art piece demonstrated: https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/waiting-for-bieber

The only platform with anything like that reach was email. And although email has global reach, it isn't a global stage like Twitter was. No other platform has that, and I doubt one ever will.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#709

Post by [deleted] »

japhyr wrote: post #86
runjake wrote: post #74

As far as I can tell, there's no Substack app (at least for iOS) that allows posting? If so, I don't really see this taking a notable chunk out of Twitter until this happens. I see a Substack Reader app, but it's more or less read-only.

I think you have to update the app today to get access to Notes.

[deleted]

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#710

Post by nr2x »

mlindner wrote: post #669
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He found out Twitter would need to pay him 100M. That is a big incentive to backpedal.

There's no evidence to support that statement. Given he continues to talk with the man at times (he replied to one of his tweets the a few days ago) and there's no evidence to support the idea that he did it for monetary reasons, other explanations are much more reasonable. Namely that it was a simple mistake.

Honest question: why do you see it as your job to defend Elon Musk online? I see a lot of people doing it and I find it strange. Why do you care?
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