this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
93 points (93.5% liked)

Technology

57423 readers
4077 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
enu
[email protected]
L4s
93
Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb | The platform seeded its own content-moderation crisis (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 7 months ago by L4s to c/technology
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb | The platform seeded its own content-moderation crisis::The platform seeded its own content-moderation crisis.

all 19 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 39 points 7 months ago (3 children)

When the writer Ryan Broderick joined Substack in 2020, it felt, he told me, like an “oasis.” The email-newsletter platform gave him a direct line to his readers.

Everyone is going to be so pumped when they learn about websites. The media has reported on substack this way since they began and it's so fucking stupid. It's a website with an email list as a service. Substack is nothing.

[–] Ragdoll_X 23 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I'd say the difference is convenience, brand recognition, and social media features.

You only need to sign up to Substack and you can already start publishing, so the vast majority of people who just want to write and not have to bother with building their own website will opt for the simpler option. Even if it takes only a handful more clicks to publish a personal website, the very idea of having to build something will be daunting enough to turn off most people.

Then there's the fact that while many people are willing to sign up to a well-known website like Substack, not that many are willing to enter their email into some random blog. I'm willing to bet that if some famous online personality made their own website+newsletter to publish their writings they'd get a lot of responses along the lines of "Who cares for antiquated personal blogs nowadays? What is this, 2005? Just make a Substack!"

And while the article presents Substack's social media features as a possible negative, the idea that anyone could see your post if it pops up in their frontpage, or that you might be the next lucky writer to get noticed by the algorithm and be recommended to thousands of people, will certainly be tempting to many.

[–] FishFace 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's like any number of blog hosts that have gone before it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

deleted

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The media loves shit like this because they don’t want media to be a passive choice. They want to feed it to you. They want to push it deep into your brain. They want flyers, they want certified mail, they want propaganda. Because it is profitable.

Websites are easy to leave, ignore, or forget. They’d have to work for your attention.

Email just shows up.

[–] Plopp 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I mean yeah but at the same time, every email list I've ever been on has ended up in the trash bin and eventually unsubbed. I don't know if I ever read a singe letter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I have read a number, but as you said, eventually they degrade, generally pretty quickly. It just becomes noise too quickly when the pushers saw (already knew) the opportunity to monetize (i.e. plain old marketing BS)

[–] andros_rex 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Why can’t we just go back to blogs and RSS? That worked lovely.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

That's not a monetizable platform on the scale that a locked in social media platform is. That and the average user doesn't seem to understand what websites are if they aren't individual apps on their phone

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240113233851/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/substack-exodus-social-media-moderation/677113/

In case you run into a paywall.

[–] RainfallSonata 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Paywalled.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

wasn't paywalled for me...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Relevant Tom Scott presentation

The extreme ends of content moderation is Echo Chambers or Nazi Bars

[–] hansl 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

At least echo chamber can be kind of solved. One example is Reddit’s suggestion feature. The Feddiverse could have something like Last.fm for communities, where it suggests to you things other people have looked into, but you haven’t, this broadening the chamber.

Once your community is a Nazi bar, you can get rid of the Nazis, but the regular people won’t come back by that point.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I hadn't thought about this, it's a good point. Thank you for broadening my perspective

I wonder how Lemmy can avoid becoming an echo chamber

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Relevant Tom Scott presentation

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I actually wanted to check out Substack to see whether it was better than Medium.

After hearing all the stuff about them allowing Nazi-content, I refuse to ever use that platform.

So hoping someone knows another platform similar to both.