After years of being harassed and banned from social media by the puzzling minions of the Trust and Safety Brigade, it is now our turn to be deboosted by Elon Musk, for the pettiest of reasons.
Excellent piece… always great reporting. As an aside, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai(sp?) an MIT engineer, politician, etc. has revealed an “open back door portal between govt agencies and Twitter” that allowed govt control of content. Musk has not removed or closed down this portal! So the govt continues to censor and police content.
Your article title "Why crippling Substack links on Twitter is dumb, counter-productive and bad for everyone" brings me to this point... One thing the last 3 years has clearly shown us is that those in control of the media don't give a damn whether it is "bad for everyone". Twitter is obviously doing censorship and that is one of many reasons I never use it.
Musk told everyone he would do exactly what he's doing when he took over Twitter. He declared his support for free speech was conditional: freedom of speech isn't the same as freedom of reach. His words. Speak freely all you want. But it will be in an empty room if Twitter decides it doesn't deserve an audience. He explicitly said this. Shaddow-banning was always a part of his new and improved Twitter.
Y'all be acting surprised he's doing what he said. Expecting an abuser who's abused you, told you he will continue to abuse you, to stop abusing you is like a victim of domestic abuse going back to their abuser expecting they'll change, this time.
Walk away. Promote the heck out of your Substack content elsewhere. The custom url piece is important, because nothing and I mean nothing is assured that Substack is immune to these global pressures hostile to free speech. Just one look at the address for Substack stands out as a yellow flag: San Francisco. And it's not like the same authors of censorship at Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc don't know about it. And they follow it. Especially writers with large followings like eugyppius. And with all we've come to know about the authors of global censorship we can't dismiss the possibility that Substack is a honeypot to draw in free thinkers and the disobedient. For whatever purposes a honeypot might have. So there's that.
We reach who we can, however we can. Even if one day our only way to share information is low tech like the founders of the US, passing out booklets, like Paine's Common Sense, and meeting in pubs and coffeehouses. Because, freedom!
Common sense, Rights of man, and other essential writings of Thomas Paine
it's beta, small, needs feature work, etc. but looks like a basically good design.
it will be a good adjunct to substack, but a "twitter replacement"? no. it's a complement.
musk (as is often the case) has this wrong and is letting pettiness get in his way.
his claims about IP's etc are nonsense.
i spoke to someone who used to work with the twitter rate limiter and it would have done this automatically.
must appears to be making stuff up.
“After X actions of Y over Z minutes your request will no longer work (returning http 420, prob upgraded to 429 now). This prevents bots and DOS attacks.”
so, unless you have a license for the data, hard to see how this happened or how this would be the outcome.
this is war on a perceived competitor who is really a synergistic friend.
So Musk turns on Taibbi right after those hearings where the Democrats tried to scorch and smear Taibbi because there was no possible defense of the revealed collusion between Twitter and govt.
Like I been sayin'--a guy whose business model depends on close cordial cooperation with China ain't nobody's friend but governments. SpaceX contracts and EVs. Not exactly the type of genius I admire.
Substackers need to look at the big picture. Substack works because it's a direct pay model, there's no advertiser on the page who effectively controls content with their TOS. The risk here is not only banishment of links from outside (Twitter is just round 1), it's going to be the subscription money they will go after through the payment processors. "we don't allow people to say these things and you can keep your credit card processing". That's how they roll.
I was off Twitter for a week and I don't miss it. I joined in 2015 just for the 2016 election and it had a lot of value then, I think. There was "real content" and Trump was hilarious. But now endlessly scrolling for something interesting, but not stupid, irrelevant, anxiety-producing or offensive isn't worth the effort anymore. I'm afraid to comment on anything because my innocuous joke about a goose got me banned for 24 hours, and my appeal was rejected, but my reports of "I hope you die" type of comments are ignored. If I reply to any big accounts on any of the "hot topics," I get subjected to "You're an idiot" troll abuse from the anime "people." I'm convinced 90% of the accounts are just gov't spy bots trying to brainwash me into thinking Biden is the greatest President of all time or else trap me into liking "the wrong thing" for later prosecution or surveillance. And the remaining accounts are probably people currently incarcerated using their limited library time to shitpost from jail.
Musk's reaction to Substack is doubly odd coming from someone who is supposed to know a lot about business, as well as technology. Has the man never heard of cross-promotion? Anyone with even a tangential association with marketing is aware of this. It improves and increases the value of both brands.
There is definitely a pattern of Elon trying to refuse to “promote” competitive platforms on his own. So this particular block is intentional and like with Mastadon, may go away?
However, the overriding issue of censorship remains. Thank good ness you have our emails. My email platform Yahoo was even putting your posts and Igor’s in my spam folder during the heat of things and I’m thinking fo getting a proton account now.
Twitter is going to try and deboost you, particularly, for a variety of reasons. I watched all of this transpire with another website and blogger - The Conservative Treehouse. They deboosted and relegated him to never land on Twitter for ages. Then WordPress even forced him off their platform. He notices some patterns in the Uniparty that they don’t want people talking about.
Twitter will get censored like FB got censored in Europe. The german government will single you out Eugyppius, I hope you have all of your infrastructure in place the best you can. You spoke eloquently about Nordstream, Ukraine and the manufactured energy crisis and they won’t like that.
And there is a cycle on Twitter where as it gets closer to elections, the censorship gets much worse- see the Hunter laptop as one example. It starts ramping up about one year prior and at the 6 month mark it goes haywire with all sorts of accounts getting banned. They even did a trial run with Posobiec this last week- I’m sure they will block him too. With the DHS and FBI still having a back door access to Twitter to censor at will- this nonsense will continue until Elon finds a way to block that- I’m not even sure he can.
I'm also a bit nervous about Notes becoming subject to algorithmic manipulation. We'll need to wait and see on that one, I guess.
I think the pettiest aspect of the Twitter brouhaha is redirecting all searches for 'Substack' to 'newsletter'. Just ... why? From a purely selfish perspective this annoys me, as I periodically look to see what people sharing my posts are saying about them.
I like Twitter and pay to support it. It’s great for tech news, OK for medical news. I like Substack more, and pay for a lot of authors, many of whom represent alternate viewpoints, and well thought out rebuttals or considerations of events I wouldn’t have thought of. Of the two, Substack is better, because the authors are paid, more coherent, and would otherwise never be heard in today’s media. Twitter has no payment, branding, or real account security for authors.
So, how has Substack escaped the censorship demons but not anyone else? Is it simply too young or maybe the subscription platform silos things enough where it's hard for the censors to prune data for wrong think. They have similar sandards of service to other sites, but seem to apply hem as loosely as possible.
Veering towards the opinion that the censors are ultimately just lazy, and reading a long-form 1500 word essay on a bad-think concept is a lot harder than going after a 50 word tweet.
Unlike contributors to “Twitter and YouTube, authors at Substack have direct access to their own readers; their work is not filtered or selectively promoted by opaque recommendation algorithms, which have stifled a lot of engagement on Twitter recently. “ you hit nail on head here . The uncensorability of private emails!!!! This is the key to freedom.
Musk is trying to play all sides with Twitter which as a businessman I respect but it’s not really working. He does the same thing with his satellites, first saying he’s shutting down Ukraine from using them because he doesn’t want to promote death or whatever bs. Then the truth comes out that he wants to get paid. Now I see his new generation of satellites are falling out of the sky and China is getting a satellite network ready that will checkmate him. He should be Trump’s running mate. They both deal in a lot of snake oil to adoring fans.
Elon Musk must realise that Substack became the exile of those booted off Twitter, and thrived as a result.
A true savvy entrepeneurial streak in him, would see him want to do some sort of JV with Subtack Notes, rather than fight Substack.
Excellent piece… always great reporting. As an aside, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai(sp?) an MIT engineer, politician, etc. has revealed an “open back door portal between govt agencies and Twitter” that allowed govt control of content. Musk has not removed or closed down this portal! So the govt continues to censor and police content.
Your article title "Why crippling Substack links on Twitter is dumb, counter-productive and bad for everyone" brings me to this point... One thing the last 3 years has clearly shown us is that those in control of the media don't give a damn whether it is "bad for everyone". Twitter is obviously doing censorship and that is one of many reasons I never use it.
Musk told everyone he would do exactly what he's doing when he took over Twitter. He declared his support for free speech was conditional: freedom of speech isn't the same as freedom of reach. His words. Speak freely all you want. But it will be in an empty room if Twitter decides it doesn't deserve an audience. He explicitly said this. Shaddow-banning was always a part of his new and improved Twitter.
Y'all be acting surprised he's doing what he said. Expecting an abuser who's abused you, told you he will continue to abuse you, to stop abusing you is like a victim of domestic abuse going back to their abuser expecting they'll change, this time.
Walk away. Promote the heck out of your Substack content elsewhere. The custom url piece is important, because nothing and I mean nothing is assured that Substack is immune to these global pressures hostile to free speech. Just one look at the address for Substack stands out as a yellow flag: San Francisco. And it's not like the same authors of censorship at Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc don't know about it. And they follow it. Especially writers with large followings like eugyppius. And with all we've come to know about the authors of global censorship we can't dismiss the possibility that Substack is a honeypot to draw in free thinkers and the disobedient. For whatever purposes a honeypot might have. So there's that.
We reach who we can, however we can. Even if one day our only way to share information is low tech like the founders of the US, passing out booklets, like Paine's Common Sense, and meeting in pubs and coffeehouses. Because, freedom!
Common sense, Rights of man, and other essential writings of Thomas Paine
https://archive.org/details/commonsenseright0000pain/page/n3/mode/2up
i have started experimenting with notes.
it's beta, small, needs feature work, etc. but looks like a basically good design.
it will be a good adjunct to substack, but a "twitter replacement"? no. it's a complement.
musk (as is often the case) has this wrong and is letting pettiness get in his way.
his claims about IP's etc are nonsense.
i spoke to someone who used to work with the twitter rate limiter and it would have done this automatically.
must appears to be making stuff up.
“After X actions of Y over Z minutes your request will no longer work (returning http 420, prob upgraded to 429 now). This prevents bots and DOS attacks.”
so, unless you have a license for the data, hard to see how this happened or how this would be the outcome.
this is war on a perceived competitor who is really a synergistic friend.
there is no future in walled gardens.
So Musk turns on Taibbi right after those hearings where the Democrats tried to scorch and smear Taibbi because there was no possible defense of the revealed collusion between Twitter and govt.
Like I been sayin'--a guy whose business model depends on close cordial cooperation with China ain't nobody's friend but governments. SpaceX contracts and EVs. Not exactly the type of genius I admire.
Substackers need to look at the big picture. Substack works because it's a direct pay model, there's no advertiser on the page who effectively controls content with their TOS. The risk here is not only banishment of links from outside (Twitter is just round 1), it's going to be the subscription money they will go after through the payment processors. "we don't allow people to say these things and you can keep your credit card processing". That's how they roll.
I was off Twitter for a week and I don't miss it. I joined in 2015 just for the 2016 election and it had a lot of value then, I think. There was "real content" and Trump was hilarious. But now endlessly scrolling for something interesting, but not stupid, irrelevant, anxiety-producing or offensive isn't worth the effort anymore. I'm afraid to comment on anything because my innocuous joke about a goose got me banned for 24 hours, and my appeal was rejected, but my reports of "I hope you die" type of comments are ignored. If I reply to any big accounts on any of the "hot topics," I get subjected to "You're an idiot" troll abuse from the anime "people." I'm convinced 90% of the accounts are just gov't spy bots trying to brainwash me into thinking Biden is the greatest President of all time or else trap me into liking "the wrong thing" for later prosecution or surveillance. And the remaining accounts are probably people currently incarcerated using their limited library time to shitpost from jail.
Musk's reaction to Substack is doubly odd coming from someone who is supposed to know a lot about business, as well as technology. Has the man never heard of cross-promotion? Anyone with even a tangential association with marketing is aware of this. It improves and increases the value of both brands.
There is definitely a pattern of Elon trying to refuse to “promote” competitive platforms on his own. So this particular block is intentional and like with Mastadon, may go away?
However, the overriding issue of censorship remains. Thank good ness you have our emails. My email platform Yahoo was even putting your posts and Igor’s in my spam folder during the heat of things and I’m thinking fo getting a proton account now.
Twitter is going to try and deboost you, particularly, for a variety of reasons. I watched all of this transpire with another website and blogger - The Conservative Treehouse. They deboosted and relegated him to never land on Twitter for ages. Then WordPress even forced him off their platform. He notices some patterns in the Uniparty that they don’t want people talking about.
Twitter will get censored like FB got censored in Europe. The german government will single you out Eugyppius, I hope you have all of your infrastructure in place the best you can. You spoke eloquently about Nordstream, Ukraine and the manufactured energy crisis and they won’t like that.
And there is a cycle on Twitter where as it gets closer to elections, the censorship gets much worse- see the Hunter laptop as one example. It starts ramping up about one year prior and at the 6 month mark it goes haywire with all sorts of accounts getting banned. They even did a trial run with Posobiec this last week- I’m sure they will block him too. With the DHS and FBI still having a back door access to Twitter to censor at will- this nonsense will continue until Elon finds a way to block that- I’m not even sure he can.
I'm also a bit nervous about Notes becoming subject to algorithmic manipulation. We'll need to wait and see on that one, I guess.
I think the pettiest aspect of the Twitter brouhaha is redirecting all searches for 'Substack' to 'newsletter'. Just ... why? From a purely selfish perspective this annoys me, as I periodically look to see what people sharing my posts are saying about them.
I like Twitter and pay to support it. It’s great for tech news, OK for medical news. I like Substack more, and pay for a lot of authors, many of whom represent alternate viewpoints, and well thought out rebuttals or considerations of events I wouldn’t have thought of. Of the two, Substack is better, because the authors are paid, more coherent, and would otherwise never be heard in today’s media. Twitter has no payment, branding, or real account security for authors.
So, how has Substack escaped the censorship demons but not anyone else? Is it simply too young or maybe the subscription platform silos things enough where it's hard for the censors to prune data for wrong think. They have similar sandards of service to other sites, but seem to apply hem as loosely as possible.
Veering towards the opinion that the censors are ultimately just lazy, and reading a long-form 1500 word essay on a bad-think concept is a lot harder than going after a 50 word tweet.
Unlike contributors to “Twitter and YouTube, authors at Substack have direct access to their own readers; their work is not filtered or selectively promoted by opaque recommendation algorithms, which have stifled a lot of engagement on Twitter recently. “ you hit nail on head here . The uncensorability of private emails!!!! This is the key to freedom.
I need to thank Elon for alerting me to the upcoming Notes. I was unaware of it.
Musk is trying to play all sides with Twitter which as a businessman I respect but it’s not really working. He does the same thing with his satellites, first saying he’s shutting down Ukraine from using them because he doesn’t want to promote death or whatever bs. Then the truth comes out that he wants to get paid. Now I see his new generation of satellites are falling out of the sky and China is getting a satellite network ready that will checkmate him. He should be Trump’s running mate. They both deal in a lot of snake oil to adoring fans.