My work uses python and it hasn’t been bad for new code that has tests and types. Old code we inherited from contractors and “yolo startup” types is less good, but we’ve generally be improving that as we touch it.

One of the problems is selling out. Like Bandcamp was, so far as I know, a cool way to share and sell music. Musicians got a good cut, customers got drm free music. But then they sold out because a few guys at the top could walk away with a hundred million dollars, and now the site’s probably going to be enshittified or sold for parts.

Maybe we should rearrange our financial and tax incentives so long term earnings are better than short term, somehow.

Bandcamp is pretty good. They do writeups that I think are written by real people. When you look at a band you like, it tells you about stuff other people who like them have. I’ve found a lot of stuff there.

It is more about buying music than renting it, however. Most albums it will ask you to buy after a certain number of plays. I think the band can configure those details

If everyone would just stop looking at influencers, they would go away.

There is no clock in my head.

I’m a little confused what you mean by time management skills, now, too. Can you give an example of a scene that required them, and how it would look for someone with good skills and how it would look for someone with bad skills?

Like, I have a friend coming over around noon today. I need to shower and get dressed before they get here. That takes like half an hour. I might just set an alarm on my phone for like 11:15 so I remember. I’d set it to 11:15 to give myself some extra padding. I know I shouldn’t do anything that might take longer than the time available, like go for a long bike ride or start playing a video game that can’t be paused.

There’s not really any intrusive thoughts here.

It matters to the republican audience because now they can dismiss the whole thing as the fault of democrats. It doesn’t have to make sense beyond that. Seemingly bad thing happened -> Democrats caused it -> Don’t need to think about it anymore.

They’re stupid.

going to give ammunition to all the partisans who claim the whole thing is political.

Republicans are going to piss and moan and riot no matter what. We must not delay or suspend justice because we’re afraid of what they might do.

It’s also stupid because it ignores the part right before the camel metaphor

16Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

17“Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”

18“Which ones?” he inquired.

Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, 19honor your father and mother,’ c and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ d ”

20“All these I have kept,” the young man said. “What do I still lack?”

21Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

22When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

23Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

It just says sell your possessions and give to the poor.

Most Christians don’t really know the Bible very well. They think Paradise Lost or Dante’s Inferno are canon. They do all sorts of mental backflips to justify what they want to do anyway.

I don’t think this is true, or at least not true in all cases.

From what I’ve seen and talked about with friends who have poor time management skills, a big problem is they get distracted and don’t stay on task. Thinking about the clock doesn’t really enter into it in that case.

Do people really get their news and information from random YouTube channels?

YouTube is not a reliable source!

Would be pretty awful for any minority group.

Queer kid in Idaho is going to have an even worse time trying to find community and such on the Internet when their identity is publicly associated with their activities. People would die. They would be murdered by conservatives.

I’m reminded of a guy I knew (who wasn’t even white!) that had a sort of “racism is over” attitude. I was like, “Ok, let’s look at one very specific part of racism in the US. Do you know what redlining is?” He did not. I explained it, and generational wealth transfer. Then he was like, “Oh. Yeah, I guess that would still have an effect today.” Made a big crack in his world view with one twenty minute talk.

Of course conservative shitheads don’t want this stuff taught. They don’t want that kind of eye opening happening all over the place.

I feel like you feel this is a clever gotcha, but I don’t follow.

If substack (or most any private platform) decided not to host any pro-choice content, many people would probably say that’s a shit move. Some anti-abortion people might support it, maybe. What’s your point?

You shouldn’t evaluate the situation with a naive “did they remove content? Any content at all?” metric. You need to consider what was removed and why.

It’s also important to remember we’re not talking about the government silencing or compelling speech. We’re talking about private parties moderating their platform. It’s important that they retain the legal right to choose what to say. And then the public can jeer and refuse to associate with them if they use their rights badly.

But on the other, we can’t specifically pinpoint what censorship is valid and what isn’t.

I’ve seen this come up a few times. My response has been “luckily our platforms aren’t run by an inscrutable god-machine nor an evil genie”.

For non government cases like this, we don’t need to solve the general case. We can just say “no Nazis allowed”, and "no hating on queer folks " and so on as needed. Web forums have had rules for more than 30 years and it hasn’t been a crisis.

I would consider working longer hours if I had a shit load of equity. Consider it. No promises. Otherwise, nah. There’s only ever going to be one 12/22/2023 5:00pm, and I’d rather spend that hanging out with family than making money for someone else.

Thank you for your detailed reply, again.

But yes, this is all just what I feel about it, and you’re free to disagree or say fuck Substack or organize a boycott or whatever you like. Ok but…

Once it gets into, we need to pressure their advertisers and try to force them to run their servers in a more Nazi-hostile way, I really don’t like that. It is legal, yes. But it’s coercive. It’s like a high-pressure salesman or a slimy romantic partner. All perfectly legal things. But I think that’s crossing a whole new line into something bad, much worse than Substack just doing something with their moderation I personally think they shouldn’t be doing.

Why do you find people using their limited economic power coercive? You say you like boycotts. Telling Tide that you saw their advertisement on a nazi blog so you’re not going to buy Tide until that’s remedied is a boycott.

I don’t think that simple removal of the post, or chasing people off the “main” shared network completely, and onto a Nazis-only network like Truth Social, is the answer. I’ll say this, it definitely didn’t make them less antivax when that happened, or make it at all difficult for them to find antivax propaganda.

You also have to account for the audience. While that person may have gotten mad and gone off to a right extremist website, removing their “Holocaust is a lie check out these posts [nazi propaganda link 1, 2, 3]” post up is a hazard. Many more people read forums than contribute, typically.

If you start saying only certain viewpoints are welcome, and dismiss the others not with open debate but with loud jeering or technical restrictions, it hurts the discourse on your server

There are some points of view that are so hashed out, it is unlikely to be worth our time to debate them again. Nazi ideology, for example, was pretty firmly settled as bad. The forum I mentioned before had a clear “We are not going to debate if gay people have rights” rule. Someone might want to make an argument that they don’t, but the belief that they do is so axiomatic for the locale it’s not worth entertaining the “debate”. I do not think it hurts the discourse on your server to disallow some topics like that. I say this with the assumption that the people running the forum are human, and it’s not a shitty algorithm trying to parse it, or some underpaid intern who barely speaks the language. There is a hypothetical bad case where an imaginary server prescribes the exact beliefs that are OK and enforces that with moderation powers, but that’s spherical friction-less cow levels removed from my lived experience. Maybe I’ve just been lucky where I’ve spent time on the internet. But also, if a forum sucks you can usually just leave. (Another argument for why the megalith sites like facebook and twitter aren’t great.)

But if someone’s just coming in and saying something you think is absolutely dead wrong (e.g. that the holocaust didn’t happen), I don’t think it’s your place to remove or ban them. I think you should allow that.

So we disagree on this point. I don’t see any good coming from platforming holocaust deniers or homophobes or whatever. If I’m running a bar, I don’t need to let the nazis have their meetup in the back booth. That’s just going to draw more nazis, and probably scare off the regular people. Likewise, if I’m running a forum, I don’t need to let them have their little soapbox in my figurative bar.

maybe seeing it first hand and dealing with child porn from angry MAGA people or bomb threats from Nazis and things like that would make me less sympathetic.

I’ve also never run a forum. I expect there’s a big “for me it was tuesday” experience. For the guy who wants to debate if queer couples really need to get married, it’s the first time he’s ever waded into this topic. For the moderation team, it’s tuesday, and the fourth time this has come up this week. I expect dealing with the worst sorts of people would take the shine off anyone’s idealism.

This sub-thread is very long and I’m starting to lose focus. I don’t think we agree on everything, but I appreciate that you’ve been civil.

Yeah, I try to be patient with people. Sometimes they’re trolls, but sometimes they’re just people. And sometimes even when they are trolls, being patient gets better results, anyway. Thanks for you reply. It’s rare for someone on the internet to admit the other person’s argument had any traction at all. Good on you.

We probably agree on things more than our initial interaction would make it look. I’m also not a fan of government mandated “enter your ID to see porn online” rules. There are many reasons that’s a bad idea that we don’t need to go into right now. But I think a key difference between that topic and the substack-with-nazis thing we started on is the involvement of government. The porn-id thing is the government forcing an action. The substack thing is all private people.

If the government, backed with all the power that comes from the state, was going to enforce what you can and cannot write on your website I would be extremely skeptical of that policy. I’d consider it for hate-speech or literal nazism, but even then the devils are surely in the details.

The topic here though is a private organization. Substack, as a private organization, is choosing to allow nazis hang out on their platform. They could choose otherwise. They are not legally bound one way or the other, but people are 100% entitled to call them a bunch of assholes for letting the nazis in. People can cut business ties with substack, tell people who are using it that they’re not going to engage with them, either, until the situation changes, and so on. All of that is firmly in the free speech and free association camp.

The question isn’t really “Is substack breaking the law?” so much as “Is substack doing a good thing?” Moderation and choosing who can use your platform is a kind of speech. It’s not enforced by an inscrutable god-machine or malicious genie, either. Substack would choose to just not let nazis use their platform. But maybe we already agree on this point.

The nazis could go set up their own website with their own blog. They have that freedom (in most places - Germany might be an exception). But we’re not obligated to make it easy for them.

One of my best lessons in high school 25yrs ago was an English class where we read various newspaper articles and broke down the biases and language used. Another is my A-level politics class where we spent many lessons dissecting the history and realities of political ideologies.

Those sound like good classes. I mentioned somewhere else (possibly in this thread) about a class I took in college for journalism 101. We were assigned several websites to review, and had to determine which ones were legitimate and which ones weren’t. That kind of skill is probably something that should be taught more widely.

I feel those lessons inoculated me to a great degree from the effects of bullshit throughout life.

I’m glad you remember the lessons. Just don’t fall prey to hubris. My mother always was pretty reasonable, but in her old age she’s been slipping into some bad politics. She thinks she’s too smart to be fooled like those other idiots.

I think we’re both right. I see your point that if we normalise these dangerous ideologies we risk acting on them. But at the same time I feel complete prohibition results in making it worse.

I think we’re converging on agreement. I would be hesitant to back complete prohibition at the government level, but I will object if I see someone supporting nazis. Substack doesn’t have to host them. They can buy their own server.

Thank you for the detailed response.

Notably though, I think Substack should also be free to not ban Nazis, and no one should give them shit for it.

Substack can host nazis given the legal framework in the US. But why shouldn’t I speak up about their platforming of evil? Substack can do what they want, and I can tell them to fuck off. I can tell people who do business with them that I don’t approve, and I’m not going to do business with them while they’re engaged with this nazi loving platform. That’s just regular old freedom of speech and association.

Their speech is not more important than mine. There is no obligation for me to sit in silence when someone else is saying horrible things.

It feels like you’re arguing for free speech for the platform, but restricted speech for the audience. The platform is free to pick who can post there, but you don’t want the audience to speak back.

Let me say it this way: If what you’re doing or saying would be illegal, even if you weren’t a Nazi, it should be illegal. […] I realize there can be a good faith difference of opinion on that, but you asked me what I thought; that’s what I think. If it’s illegal to wear a Nazi uniform, or platforms kick you off for wearing one, then it can be illegal to wear a BLM shirt, and platforms can kick you off for saying #blacklivesmatter. Neither is acceptable. To me.

You’re conflating laws and government with private stuff. The bulk of this conversation is about what can private organizations do to moderate their platforms. Legality is only tangentially related. (Also it doesn’t necessarily follow that banning nazi uniforms would ban BLM t-shirts. Germany has some heavy bans on nazi imagery and to my knowledge have not slid enthusiastically down that slope)

A web forum I used to frequent banned pro-trump and pro-ice posts. The world didn’t end. They didn’t ban BLM. It helps that it was a forum run by people, and not an inscrutable god-machine or malicious genie running the place.

I’m also not sure I understood your answer to my question. Is there a line other than “technically legal” that you don’t want crossed? Is the law actually a good arbiter?

Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter have been trying to take responsibility for antivax stuff and election denialism for years now, and banned it in some cases and tried to limit its reach with simple blacklisting. Has that approach worked?

I don’t think they’ve actually been trying very hard. They make a lot of money by not doing much. Google’s also internally incompetent (see: their many, many, canceled projects), Facebook is evil (see: that time they tried to make people sad to see if they could), and twitter has always had a child’s understanding of free speech.

I do think responsibility by the platforms is an important thing. I talked about that in terms of combatting organized disinformation, which is usually a lot more sophisticated and a lot more subtle than Nazi newsletters. I just don’t think banning the content is a good answer. Also, I suspect that the same people who want the Nazis off Substack also want lots of other non-Nazi content to be “forbidden” in the same way that, e.g. Dave Chappelle or Joe Rogan should be “forbidden” from their chosen platforms. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s part of why I make a big deal about the Nazi content.

A related problem here is probably the consolidation of platforms. Twitter and Facebook as so big that banning someone from it is a bigger deal than it probably should be. But they are free to move to a more permissive platform if their content is getting them kicked out of popular places. We’re not talking about a nationwide, government backed-by-force content ban.

I’m not sure what to do about coordinated disinformation. Platforms banning or refusing to host some of it is probably one part of the remedy, though.

For all of his fans, he also has a lot of anti-fans. I’m surprised none of them have thrown him out the window of the twitter HQ or whatever. I guess he’s paying his security team a lot.

Fine.

It’s weird to say that you can’t have a newsletter that has a literal swastika on it, because people will be able to read it but unable to realize that what it’s saying is dangerous violence. Apparently we have to have someone “in charge” of making sure only the good stuff is allowed to be published, and keeping away the bad stuff, so people won’t be influenced by bad stuff. This is a weird viewpoint.

How is “can’t” happening, here? It’s not the government. Are you arguing against private entities having editorial freedom? Should private entities not be in charge of their own publications and platforms? And if they do choose to publish nazi stuff, shouldn’t the rest of us be free to say “Fuck off, nazi scum” ?

As I said to someone else, there is presumably a line that’s too much to cross. Is it “live stream of grinding up live babies and puppies and snorting them”? If there is no line, I don’t even know where to begin. That’s a whole other conversation. If there is a line, I think nazi content should be on the far side of it. Don’t you? And if the line is something like “whatever’s technically legal”, well that’s just punting responsibility to a slower, less responsive, ruleset run by the government.

Personally, I do think that there’s a place for organized opposition to slick internet propaganda which pulls people down the right-wing rabbit hole, because that’s a huge problem right now.

Platforms taking some responsibility for what they allow would go a long way without requiring a heavy handed government solution. Substack could just say “nah, we’re not letting nazis post stuff.”

But if a platform is making a lot of money with nazi content, they’re probably going to be reluctant to deal with it. So if you still don’t want heavy government involvement (which can be a reasonable position, probably), you fall back to individuals saying “Fuck you. I’m not going to use your service while you serve nazis.”

But then you have several related problems. Something that’s a hugely dominant player in a market is hard to avoid. YouTube doesn’t have a lot of major competitors, for example, and is pretty ubiquitous. AWS is basically impossible to avoid. And on top of that, many people are apathetic or too busy trying to survive to spend a lot of time curating things.

I agree with the spirit of it in addition to the letter, though

What even is the spirit of it?