this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb | The platform seeded its own content-moderation crisis (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb | The platform seeded its own content-moderation crisis::The platform seeded its own content-moderation crisis.

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[–] theluddite@lemmy.ml 39 points 10 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@lemmy.world 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

deleted

[–] 4am@lemm.ee 11 points 10 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@lemmy.world 8 points 10 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.

[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 2 points 10 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@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 6 points 10 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

[–] menthol@lemm.ee 32 points 10 months ago

Voat 2.0. If you go so hard on "free speech" that you let in the nazis pretty soon all you'll have left is nazis because everyone else will leave.

[–] Amphobet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 10 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@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Paywalled.

[–] enbee@compuverse.uk 1 points 10 months ago

wasn't paywalled for me...

[–] doylio@lemmy.ca 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Relevant Tom Scott presentation

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

[–] hansl@lemmy.world 3 points 10 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.

[–] doylio@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 10 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.

[–] ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 10 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.