Glenn FleishmanPeople keep making new Substack newsletters. I keep pointing out politely that the founders are terrible enablers of transphobes, hate speech, vaccine denial, and more. They reap their reward from fear, hate, and disinformation.
It's a technically and economically great platform and a terrible moral choice to have to make.
John Gruber@glennf Do you feel the same way about WordPress? I feel like Substack is really just a CMS, not a publisher.
Jason Kottke@gruber @glennf They pay writers to write exclusively for their platform, sometimes in advance. They offer free legal services for writers. They promote their writers’ publications. They’re closer to Buzzfeed or HuffPo (or even NYT) than to WP. But they desperately want people to think they’re a platform, so they can get away with publishing profitable bigotry and dangerous misinformation and keep collecting their cut of the RW grift with minimal moderational effort.
@jkottke @glennf But are these right wingers among those Substack pays in advance? I recall reading about this a year or two back and it seemed like the answer was no.
I guess I do agree though that Substack occupies some heretofore new territory, somehow both publisher and platform. Much less of a top-down editorial structure than regular publishers, but much more of such structure than platforms like WP or Ghost, etc.
@gruber @jkottke it’s far closer to a publisher than an independent platform. But the real issue isn’t precisely whether it is a publisher, but whether he believes there is any limit to acceptable speech. The company's founders seem to think that there is no limit, and that they should also reap the financial reward from being a site that allows anything to be published, just about. Patreon was in this position several years ago, and they opted to be responsible.
@gruber @jkottke Patreon was on the verge of being a Nazi bar, and Jack wasn’t totally responsive to the criticism about it. However, he evolved, they developed the trust and safety department, they got rid of the Nazis and hate speech, they did not significantly suppress other people’s speech in the process, and they are a vibrant platform that’s been incredibly successful.
@gruber @jkottke for me, the question isn’t are there people with extreme opinions I disagree with using a platform to publish their words? It’s rather, when people engage in behavior that is openly harmful in a way that is easy to document and provable, should a site of any kind be promoting and supporting it, much less hosting it?
@gruber @jkottke So while I disagree with Bari Weiss, for instance, and think she’s an intellectual lightweight and opportunist, I would never say with her current writing that Substack or any platform should ban her. Graham Linehan, however, is actively engaged in harm directed against trans people. Joseph Mercola and Alex Berenson constantly promote disinformation that falls well outside of any vestige of reasonable discourse.
Ken Kinder 
@glennf @gruber @jkottke You draw the line between Bari Weiss and Graham Linehan. Someone else may draw it elsewhere. Ultimately I’m not entirely sold on the idea that big companies are ideal regulars for the whole world’s Overton window. And you could apply this argument all the way down to packet routing and peering agreements between networks, which is why CloudFlare is similarly disinterested in moderation.
@bouncing No. Bari Weiss doesn't invite people to violence.
@glennf That’s not just content moderation; it’s a police matter.