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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5894 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

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How does substack moderate itself?

They seem able to walk the fine line where it's a mostly respected outlet yet allowing heterodox views, and while I've heard the occasional handwringer complain, I've not noticed any serious smear campaigns against it, or it having the 10000 witch issues.

Are any writers being cancelled or quietly deboosted?

It's at core not a social media platform. This makes comparisons to Twitter/Reddit and their clones/subgroups somewhat tendentious. There is no really convenient way for a substack post or comment to "go viral" on the platform in the way a tweet or Reddit post will. As of yet, we also haven't seen substacks/comment sections that will rally the troops for raids on other substacks, which is generally the dynamic that leads to witch-covens becoming an issue.

It's just a different animal.

They have a "pass the buck" moderation system.

Substack's monetization is done using Square or Stripe. I don't recall which. I'll say Stripe for the rest of this post for simplicity.

But the important thing is Substack never holds the money. The readers pay the author using Stripe. Stripe takes the money and gives Substack its cut.

If an author ever says anything really bad then Stripe will kill their merchant account. Substack doesn't need to get involved.

As a result Substack doesn't need to hire a bunch of people in SF to police the tone of articles. That means that there's no one to push for quiet moderation like deboosting.

If a bunch of angry activists come at them on Twitter they can just point at Stripe.

There were plenty of smear campaigns against it, they just braved them.

The "7 zillion witches issue" was always mostly fiction, there aren't that many witches. If you can get a reasonable amount of normal people to hang out somewhere, they will be the ones eclipsing the witches, not the other way around. This was (and maybe still is being) done by sponsorship deals for authors with pretty big following (Greenwald, Taibi, deBoer, and lots of others that I don't follow).

Moderation is done on a per-author basis. It's like running your Youtube channel, or subreddit. The only thing I can think of that could have a moderating effect, is that there's something clunky about the website, that discourages high-frequency low-effort posting.

The witch issue is really easy to avoid, too, if you have a credible reason for your platform to be attractive to non-witches. Reddit could have ignored the moderation issue and not had a witch problem, voat couldn’t avoid the witch problem no matter how closely it’s moderated. You see a similar dynamic with twitter- it’s not a witch hive even after moderation was loosened, but mastodon and gab both are, albeit practicing very different kinds of witchcraft.

There were plenty of smear campaigns against it, they just braved them.

Yeah, I think OP may just not remember because it was ineffective but they did the usual "start a drumbeat about how 'concerning' this is". It just didn't work.

Probably because there really wasn't a hook for the average person to get up in arms about; people can pay or not for commentary from people they like. So what?

It came across as jealousy/turf-protection on the part of the mainstream media and Substack obviously had very little incentive to fold to claims that Matthew Yglesias was a witch.

Isn't deBoer a pro-HBD leftist? Closer to witch than "normal people".

He accepts that IQ is heritable, he also accepts that average IQ differs between self-identified racial groups, but not that the latter is explained by the former.

WTF you mean? It looks like you're describing mainstream academic anti-HBD where phenotypic IQ differs between racial groups but genotypic IQ is same.

Your point is unclear.

DeBoer elliptically acknowledges the HBD-IQ aspect of reality and then doubles down from a materialist-socialist (real Marxist, not trendy 'Marxist') perspective that he wants from each according to his abilities (HBD-IQ is here) to each according to his needs (not here).

He wrote a book called The Cult of Smart. This book has valuable insights about how charter schools can IQ poach out of normal public schools to make themselves look very impressive.

Does he also propose soon abolishing of capitalism (like classical Marxists do)?

When people talk about witches, I tend to picture people who are single-mindedly obsessed with discussing issues that would get them booted from polite society, which is why they scare away the normies, which is why they are supposedly a problem for the formation of non-witchy pro free speech communities. De Boer mostly posts short stories, comments on media, and only every once in while talks about politics. I think I literally never read anything from him about HBD.

It certainly isn't his main topic, but he has posts like this or this that basically say the same thing in slightly different terms. In the first one he is quite clear that he thinks that the inability of education to close achievement gaps is due in large part due to genetics, but he also wishes for that aspect to be worked around and deemphasized.

I know they exist, the entire reason I'm following him is that he's a canceled lefty, so he had to be canceled for something.

My point is that he's not a witch, for that he would have to be obsessed with the subject, to the point he's turning everyone off except for people with similar obsessions.

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