Wtf even is substack anyways?
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Kinda like Medium or WordPress (the .com variant). Gives you your own subdomain and lets you blog. Their policy is that they absolutely will not editorialise anything. It's used by a lot of reputable good bloggers too
As a German it's completely mind boggling to me that some societies tolerate an ideology that is responsible for plunging the world into its biggest humane catastrophe (so far), for the sake of free speech. Nazi ideology wants to kill free speech. If you truly want to protect free speech, you have to at least limit it to all the things that do not threaten it.
Note that the largest Nazi groups today are in the "allied" nations that "won" WW2.
I read a piece (can't find the source now, sorry) that blamed this squarely on the lack of education and remorse given to the colonial backdrop in which WW2 was fought.
Most parts of the world view WW2 as very much a European war that was imposed on unwilling global participants. The axis powers lost and Germany has since tried its best to reinvent itself while acknowledging its chequered past (check out: Vergangenheitsbewältigung), but the allied powers failed to recognise their colonial atrocities. For example, British history textbooks will loosely allude to the British empire saying that they were once a dominating global entity, but will make absolutely no mention of the numerous massacres and genocides for which they were responsible.
When wars are framed as competitions rather than tragedies, you will see the emergence of false victors instead of acknowledging lost generations. This directly results in a poor public understanding of how bad ideas can fester and hollow out any society.
Over the decades since WW2, the popular culture of the allied countries has typically portrayed Nazis as caricatured crazy monsters. They are treated as strange, other, and non-human. This seems to have thoroughly undermined people's ability to recognize Nazism as a destructive force that lurks in people, whether they're German or American or any other nationality. Any society has the potential to fall into this. The unreflective complacency of the WW2 victors after defeating Nazis once has led to a complete lack of awareness that it's an ongoing job to keep your society from falling prey to fascists.
For a while the collective memory of those who lived through the war protected us, but when that generation died off the lessons were forgotten. Some fell into fascism without realizing it because they assumed they were by nature better than Nazis, while others failed to notice the threat until dangerously late.
It's amazing what you can accomplish when you successfully gut public education.
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if we are being completely honest with ourselves, most people believe in free speech only in moderation. nazism is most certainly not the only ideology that sharply reduces free speech.
And Nazis still get free public promotion via ARD Sommertalk 😔
Hey, at least the music was good.
Germans saying this while their government is one of the biggest advocates for the ongoing genocide in Gaza will never not look stupid.
My only cursory knowledge about substack is that if someone has one they're insufferable. Have yet to be wrong.
It's a shame there are some people I like on there. I can live perfectly fine without ettingermentum though.
There is a deep irony covering this by writing about it.. on Substack
In fairness, what better place is there for Substack users to see it and consider leaving the platform?
Funnily enough, they might also get censored on many other platforms if they linked or even pointed at an existing nazi blog/site/platform.
"I'm not a Nazi, but twenty bucks is twenty bucks."
--Substack, probably
"I'm also not not a Nazi"- Substack founders, definitely
I cringe everytime someone's like "subscribe to my Substack". No, fuck off with your substack, everyone knows they're nazi supporters, you're complicit.
No such thing as a Nazi supporter, my friend. That's just a Nazi.
Centrists: "Oh so everyone you disagree with is a nazi?"
Some of them, most are just assholes
if i had a nickel for every time substack promoted a nazi blog.......
... i'd have a shitload of nickels.
Enough to put them all in the toe of a sock and swing it at some Nazis.
I deleted substack back when I randomly got porn in a push notification. You'd think they would address this - I'm no expert, but this doesn't seem good for them.
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Substack just annoying as can be anyway, with the constant spammy pop-ups about subscribed to my newsletter and whatever the hell else. Absolutely atrocious blogging platform
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I see a pattern here...
what are the fine alternatives?
I ended the post with a link to Wired about alternatives
a blog
Hey look at that... actual bad socialists. (As if they're actual socialists)
Is there a substack self-hosted replacement
Ghost can be self-hosted. Even WordPress these days has newsletter and payment systems that sound fairly easy to drop in.
The main benefit of having a substack vs just running some blog software is that substack manages monetization/subscriptions for you. Hosting text-based content is very easy, but getting paid for it isn't.
Yeah, and you just have to sell your soul to the Nazi platform so you can get paid easy.
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