PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

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1 yr. ago

Moderating

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The real launch was the flying pedestrians we created along the way

Also: We are lying about not wanting the front door.

Any reasoning that is mainly centered around giving people specific labels, and then making sweeping generalizations about what everyone with that label does and why it’s therefore okay to hate anyone you have chosen to apply that label to because of things some other people have done, is almost always some bullshit.

Also, yes, it’s ironic that you’re posting this under their specific meme.

It’s not clear why Grok decided to answer every question with information about “white genocide,”

Maybe not to you.

Some of the most authoritarian people I come into contact with on any kind of regular basis are “leftists” on Lemmy.

The ones in real life are not like that. I feel like Reddit’s moderation model really encourages it, and some of them started really taking it to heart when they came to Lemmy which copied that same model.

My money’s on wooosh but it could be either one tbh.

Kek

I am sorry to tell you that it's been sold to Unilever.

They are still semi-independent, but to a decent extent, they've gone to the dark side. The founders are still good 'uns though.

I think he could have done the same thing while still modeling the right way to deal with law enforcement.

If he wanted to provoke a confrontation in order to make a point / attract attention (usually a terrible idea but I guess maybe you could make the argument that in this case it would be worthwhile), he could have been extremely firm about his rights but still wanted to have a conversation about some of the other notable people they have detained, and ask their opinion on those people. Make arguments about abstract topics, but not deal in any respect with any questions about him and explain that he doesn't want to talk about that without a lawyer.

Even that is dangerous. The thing is that having long conversation with the cops and answering all the questions they have for you, even about just random topics, your own viewpoint, what you talk about on stream, all that stuff, ought to be a risk. It's not that you shouldn't engage in it because CBP is breaking the rules. It is that you simply should never do it with any law enforcement, good or bad, for any reason once you're in the crosshairs of being investigated for potential action against you.

I agree with the article author that it sounds like he was just operating from a position of an argument with someone who he wanted to make a point to, generating good content for his stream, that kind of thing. He wasn't violating the normal guidelines of how is safe to interact with cops on purpose for specific reasons, he was just clueless about what is a good way to do it. Maybe I'm wrong in that. But I agree with the article author that things like counting it as a win that he got them to start to agree with him on some things, things of that nature, is a sign that he's absolutely out of his depth and should stick with the simple safe guidelines and model the same for his followers.

Yeah. In retrospect, it's easy to pick out what stuff is just Elon Musk making up bullshit because it would be awesome. And, with the cybertruck, he finally got to inject that into the engineering process as a dominant factor as he'd been trying to do for so long with the cars. And look at the result...

Back before people knew all that much about it, back when Elon Musk was the guy who made Tesla and SpaceX and this super smart guy (as opposed to being the guy who bought them and then fucked up the engineering), I knew some people who were excited about it. It was supposed to be a working truck but electric, bring all the better-than-other-cars stuff that the Roadster and Model S had, it was supposed to have solar panels and electrical outlets and super-strong construction so you could use it to survive the zombie apocalypse.

I think that was before the inflection point, back when the genuine success Tesla had had made Musk's personal brand of bullshit believable. I remember when people started getting a good look at all the concept and actual prototypes, that made it look like a dumpster without the storage space, was when the shine came off the rose. But I definitely do remember people who were excited about it back in the beginning.

Haha all good

I wanted to make sure I sat down and really replied to you before because I generally like your takes and respect you as a person, and a quick reply from my phone would be impossible as a medium for replying to your thoughtful and well stated argument.

Yeah, all good. I mean maybe I am wrong, we can talk about it.

My issue with Substack isn’t that there’s Nazis on there, it’s that Substack’s owners made sure they were there, and made sure they got a cut of the revenue sharing scheme.

Okay so this is actually one of the issues that made me start to say that this is deliberate disinformation, not just people saying some stuff I don't agree with. The thing is: I don't think this is actually true. I saw a big article that made this claim, I dug into the details, and it turned out to be one of those "Ship of Theseus" things where, the people they invited were not the Nazis, just some random people with MAGA-type ideas, and they hadn't expressed those MAGA-type ideas until long after Substack's dealings with them had been and gone (pre-2017 Matt Taibbi I think was one). Basically, Substack in this aspect did nothing wrong at all. But people wrapped it up like they had sought out Richard Spenser and invited him to the platform and made sure to give him some money to get things started, which is false, and it was weird that people were trying so hard to say that that had happened. What they did was took millions of dollars from VCs and then gave it to good journalists.

Who are you talking about when you say the Substack owners made sure there were Nazis? I want to dig into this a little bit more and where you heard that from.

There's a whole separate issue of them allowing for real neo-Nazis. I'm probably in the vast minority, but I actually think that was fine. It's the same like I think Hasan Piker can say whatever the fuck he wants, it's the same like I think nutomic can have transphobic views if he wants. I think it is fine.

Like I say, I'm probably the minority there.

considered it important to Substack’s future that those Nazis be present and paid.

The question I find myself asking is what views do they hold, what do they tolerate, and how long until they find a new way to promote those views or allow someone to co-opt their waveforms to broadcast their message to us.

Just to be clear: Are you saying that they're in any way promoting or in favor of Nazis? Or just that they allow them on the platform and that's the huge problem?

I've seen the first thing, and I think that's what you're saying, but if you are saying the second thing it's a different conversation.

I guess ultimately, what I’m driving at, is that it is my view that Substack, like Medium, is a captured outlet. It can only ever show you a distorted version of the truth that serves its holders of power, who are ultimately aligned with the techbroligarchs that are strangling all of us.

I don't think any of this is true. I haven't seen any indication at all that they're distorting anything about the blogs that are hosted there, and the very nature of them (as far as I'm aware) makes it pretty difficult for them to start rigging the algorithm to promote one instead of another, or anything like that.

I do think it's a problem that Substack is a centralized platform. That I will 100% agree with you on. The point being that regardless of whether the current owners are up to anything, there's the strong likelihood in the future that it will succumb to the inevitable like so many before it.

I think Ghost is probably a much better model, to be honest. On the other hand, because Substack is centralized, they were able to subsidize good journalism to get the ball rolling, and I think that was a really good thing. And, of course, it's absolutely impossible to keep Nazis off of Ghost either. Actually, even the purge of Nazis that Substack eventually did, would be impossible on Ghost, because its decentralized nature means they would be there to stay if they chose Ghost. It's more or less impossible to stop, generally speaking. (Which is part of why I agree with Substack's original stance on it.)

Does this make sense?

Haha I completely missed it. I should have seen it though, yes.

They've actually been doing this for a while. There is a whole ecosystem of engagement and publicity, what type of content draws reward financial and social, and it has collided several times with the legal system and it usually is not pretty.

The only real recent examples that come to mind are Johnny Somali and Ruby Franke, but I know there are more. Caution, if you decide to look into Ruby Franke be aware that it's real fucked up (child abuse motivated by religion and the can-do-no-wrong star power of the influencer.) Johnny's fucked up, too, but for the most part he was mostly hurting himself.

No water for you, you gotta be able to fit the grooves. As is known.

No, he had to bunch his fingers up because the number of grooves wasn’t right, and only then did it perfectly match. Weren’t you paying attention?

The equation "Substack = Nazis" is textbook political misinformation: A thing with a technical grain of truth, entirely missing the point and then dishonestly presented, for the purpose of splintering and confusing the left and getting them to attack each other. I suspect it is deliberately promoted by enemies, because while it has a technical little fig-leaf of truthfulness, it bears so little resemblance to anything real or relevant and is a convenient way to shit on one of the chief leftist platforms for thought and journalism, and leftists love nothing more than a contest of "I am so pure that I hate this thing that everyone else likes because it's actually evil and I'm super clever and informed so I can see that and you can't and I'm the first one."

I guess it is possible that people came up with this all on their own as a purity-test (actually I do think that the original campaign which persuaded Substack to get rid of most of the Nazis, was that), and it's just a general leftist self-own because of that tendency. I do feel like it's pretty likely that it has started coming in in some way from outside though. When this argument is presented in print form, it often has so many hallmarks of propaganda or slanty dishonest framings associated with it that it's hard for me to think that it is entirely self-created organic purity testing gone awry.

Here was my conversation about the details of the underlying Substack Nazi issue the last time it came up. I don't have a lot to add to it: https://ponder.cat/post/1721638/1949850

Hey, look, I found some.

See my other comment; I think the same user contingent that likes VPNs tends to also want maximum convenience, which isn't Tor. Of course they frame convenience as the only relevant factor, instead of acknowledging that being the tradeoff they're making.