14 Comments
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exexpat's avatar

Good read, thank you. My own perspective on Substack is that it's basically a great platform BUT to me it's also a Profiling Platform that sucks in ever more participants to have dialogs in real time which in even the shortest of time will provide the entire substack community with a perfect profile of the participant. Hell they even provided me with a wordcount after a few weeks and encouraged me to WRITE something. This is like you take the old yellow pages and find every piece of dust on the person listed and I know where this leads to. My biggest concern is still Google and Microsoft because their profiling is going on in the back and not outright in front for everyone to exploit. I had some own experience with disqus.com which is similar to substack. Here i posted some comments in a european newspaper, RT and some other intl. News Websites that allowed comments. The result was that i was immediately targeted by the Zionist intl. Members and labelled as a Mysoginist, Antisemite and worse. The profile found on disqus was almost identical of that found on substack. My concerns directed at substack were ignored and simply not posted to the wider audience for obvious reasons.... being bad for their business. If substack manages to get thie piece of their product in order and make privacy of it's users a pillar of their product it would do well and help growing their site. I'm not sure this will be posted but lets hope.

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York Luethje's avatar

I find such one-word dismissals perfectly in order. Jim Acosta is/was on CNN for ages and CNN itself doesn’t even deserve scorn anymore. Mild revulsion perhaps. Spending the thought necessary on Acosta to formulate even a one-word response is more than this person deserves. It’s like lifting up a rock, exposing the slithering invertebrates underneath, thinking „ah, Acostas“ and then putting the rock back down.

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Willy's avatar

I think it’s just comes down to the numbers follow the left. All the people who denied this site for years as a right wing Nazi hell hole have decided the exposure is here because they failed on media that everybody all the time is exposed to.

Somehow they hit the ground running with numbers. Legacy attachments and institutional support still I guess.

But they are running the numbers for now.

so the Substack product team thinks it’s chasing numbers I suppose. Appealing to normies. It’s a big market. Far bigger atm than us “counter” normals.

But people like Taibbi absolutely put this thing in the map. If they hadn’t come here early and often it would be in the startup dumpster bin now.

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Timothy Andrew Staples/pop122's avatar

But I think MT has benefitted from Substack even more than conversely.

I might go so far as to say neither would not have nearly the following.

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Timothy Andrew Staples/pop122's avatar

Delete "not" in last sentence, please.

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Willy's avatar

Correct. I wasn’t making that side of the argument. I was focused on how Substack rose to relevance. I can’t multi task too much.

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Timothy Andrew Staples/pop122's avatar

Ha! Good on you for *not* multitasking. I always resist watering down my substance (it usually needs all the attention I can muster).

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Timothy Andrew Staples/pop122's avatar

Dang.

Your one word nailed it!

It's like (tease intended) Best and Hamish are most worried about their precious Substack being captured by...

us anti-woke normies!!

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Margaret Anna Alice's avatar

Thank you for the honor of suggesting me for an interview with Chris Best. I am far from a fan of Acosta but understand why Chris would want to interview him as his arrival is newsworthy, pun intended ;-) That said, I agree some counterbalancing is certainly in order, which I would be more than happy to oblige if Chris accepts your challenge 😁

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Peter Nayland Kust's avatar

If Substack really wanted to do something useful instead of interviewing "names" like Jim Acosta they'd promote a few roundtable discussions with the smaller creators on Substack, people who haven't yet been discovered by the wider audience (or, rather, haven't been pushed forward by the algorithm).

Not a randomized townhall but an actual discussion--about Substack, about content creation, about news and information, about what's trending and what's not, about...whatever.

Leverage the people who are making Substack what it is--and those people are not the names at the top of the leaderboard, but everyone else the leaderboard tends to ignore.

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elizabeth nickson's avatar

That is v interesting and some nice phrasing too. I tend to ignore company politics and activities because I find them boring. I also fear attention from the left snd the middle, they tend towards envy and retaliation, so am happy to be ignored. Writers are nasty people generally because competition is tough and the money so pathetic for 95% of us.

When I was in the fray of it working in the big cities, it was so unpleasant all my friends were musicians or in some way connected to music or design. Journalist scare me.

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elizabeth nickson's avatar

I bet $1000 that those jettisoned out the MSM will find it just as hard to get actual readers as they did previously which led to them bei g fired or made redundant. Excellence rises. If you look at actual engagement, real people discussing the issues, I bet theirs are just clapping seals. Nobody will care after a year. Or six months. Liars cant stop lying. And legacy media has failed because journalists were writing irrelevant falsities.

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Snezhanna's avatar

There’s a lot of great writing on Substack and a lot of very valid criticism of the platform, but this post ain’t it. I would even go as far as to call it “pathetic”.

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Zork (the) Hun's avatar

good one.... It put a smile on my face. Your daddy is definitely stronger than mine.

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