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

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 51 points – Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb
theatlantic.com

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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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.

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.

Relevant Tom Scott presentation

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

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.

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

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.