PhilipTheBucket

You are saying “the bad is a necessary evil to protect free speech,” and not at all addressing the fact that the “bad” doesn’t appear to exist on modern Substack. If you have seen it, where have you seen it?

I literally linked an example.

Okay, so you're in favor of removing any content which is dishonest and anti-gay from Substack. Fair enough, I get it.

I actually do agree with Substack’s original moderation stance, precisely for reasons of free speech. We can talk about that if you want, although it’s a more complex conversation and we probably won’t come to agree on it.

I had a feeling, and maybe this reply isn’t outright confirmation, but it’s enough. I think you tunnel visioned so hard on defending poor Substack and free speech that you’re not even properly reading what you’re replying to. You’re going up and down this thread, finger on the trigger, and the moment you see the word Nazi you just fire.

You’re right, we probably wouldn’t agree, and if my read on you is any good, I’d rather not waste time on that conversion.

Sounds good. What do you think should be done about Substack's hosting of anti-gay content? Do you think it should impact me posting Tim Snyder articles from Substack? Do you think it's accurate to summarize it as "Nazi" content?

I'm an admin on a different instance. I have no power there.

That part, not realizing the person is a problem, I get. I'm talking about banning the users arguing with them and deleting the requests for them to stop spamming, and leaving in place the spam and the cockeyed defenses of their spam.

A super-charitable reading could maybe say that this is an instance of lemmy.world mods believing that their role is "dictating to the community what's right and wrong" instead of "getting a read of the community's judgement of right and wrong, and implementing it." And then, on top of that wrong interpretation of even why they're in the role in the first place, they didn't bother to take even a glance at the claims that were made about this user, just "herp derp it is 100% impossible that they might be spamming, therefore they're not spamming, therefore this user complaining about spam is trying to break the Fediverse. Ban them! I fixed it now, I made things better." But that just sounds like an insane conclusion for anyone who's genuinely trying to help, ever to come to. Maybe I should be more generous to the volunteers but it just sounds really bizarre.

Makes perfect sense. Yeah, some people told me about them and I kind of left it alone, for overly long I guess in retrospect. They weren't as bad the last time I had looked at them.

The more interesting question is, why are the lemmy.world mods coming out swinging for this user?

A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem.

It is moral and correct to censor Nazis.

Nazis love that argument, and they’re a threat to much more than just free speech. They shouldn’t get to block attempts at censoring them, and they specially shouldn’t get support to do so, because they’re one of the reasons it’s necessary in the first place.

Got it.

If you think my problem with Substack is “Nazis are there right now,” then you didn’t get it.

At no point do I claim there are Nazis there. To reiterate: bad is not specifically and exclusively Nazis.

Got it.

Anyway, the core of my point is that anyone who's talking about this type of free speech argument on Substack, particular if it's specifically applied in the context of Nazis, is largely living in a fantasy-land.

You are commenting under an article that says "A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem," and then saying that you're not talking about Nazis.

You are saying "the bad is a necessary evil to protect free speech," and not at all addressing the fact that the "bad" doesn't appear to exist on modern Substack. If you have seen it, where have you seen it?

Substack may not be Nazi-central, but it’s surely a product of broligarchy.

There's a lot of this type of innuendo in the OP article and in your response. I'm dealing only with your factual arguments, sort of leaving aside things like this "many innocent ideas turn out to be dog-whistles" "it’s always the same shit" and things. If you want me to try to mount some kind of counterargument for the broligarchy claim, I can I guess. How would you define the broligarchy?

If you're upset that I am mischaracterizing your argument as being about Nazis (because in some crazy fashion I got that idea), tell me what ideas you are in favor of removing from Substack. Where are they on Substack, right now?

I actually do agree with Substack's original moderation stance, precisely for reasons of free speech. We can talk about that if you want, although it's a more complex conversation and we probably won't come to agree on it. But that whole side of things is completely moot at this point, because they caved to the pressure and removed all the Nazis, quite a while ago.

So why are you still upset at them? Wasn't that the goal, to mount public pressure, and deplatform the Nazis?

Edit:

At no point do I say people shouldn’t listen to good journalists because of their platform of choice.

I should answer this, also. What are you saying the solution should be, if not to avoid Substack?

I don't agree with your characterization of the "problem" with Substack, in terms of there being Nazi-adjacent content they are not moderating. But if there does turn out to be that content, what should you and I be doing about it?

The sheer volume of it (again, 58 posts per day) and the sort of indiscriminate nature. I could make a bot that would repost random stuff out of the RSS feeds into other people's communities, that doesn't mean that it's "more content" and good for those communities.

There were also some propaganda sources in there, RT.com among them.

• Ban spam: Normal
• Fail to ban spam: Understandable, maybe not ideal but people get busy
• Get mad at the people who don't want spam: Okay? Maybe someone's having a bad day
• Ban the people who don't want spam, delete their comments leaving the spam alone: ???

Holy shit! Genocide, banning, censoring, trolling, and worst of all, brigading.

I didn't realize you'd written my name down. Oh shit. Well, that pretty much settles it, I withdraw entirely my request for some sort of proof of these things you're accusing me of.

A lot of it seems to be one particular moderator.

Most of the big-name lemmy.world communities have moderation that in my opinion is just kind of clueless, but that might be just a product of having to deal with a neverending flood of hundreds of different issues (not being able to devote any amount of attention to each one of them beyond the most basic possible glance at it.) There is one specific moderator who seems to be consistently at the root of these totally backwards-land decisions though. What the reason for that is, I have no idea.

That was actually what inspired me to post this here. We'd been talking about it in the comments over there.

I’ve seen people defend Substack saying it’s not so bad

Surely "there are not actually any Nazis on Substack" is a fair counterargument to "Substack has a Nazi problem and no one should listen to all of these good journalists who are on it now that even the tiny minority of Nazis have been ejected" is different from "not so bad."

, or the bad is a necessary evil to protect free speech.

Surely "there are excellent journalists saying excellent things on Substack, and no Nazis" is different from "necessary evil to protect free speech."

You're living in opposite world, man.

They deleted their account.