Why I’m skeptical of some puzzling polls

      • mosiacmango
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        9 months ago

        Its had some “nazi bar” issues, i.e “we dont like nazis, but its cool if they come to our bar with their nazi friends and spend their nazi money here. If more Nazis show up, the more the merrier!”

        They back tracked from the above a ways after outrage, but it’s soured people on the platform.

        • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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          9 months ago

          Except it’s not a bar, it’s a web site where you only interact with people you have affirmatively decided to interact with.

          It’s like if there is a Nazi living in your apartment building, and specifically forbidden by the laws of physics from doing anything physical to anyone or making any statement or posting any literature to anyone who hasn’t decided they want to hear from them. The risk of everyone in the apartment building deciding to become a Nazi in that situation is small.

          I actually agreed with their viewpoint, and the fact that they had to backtrack after a noisy section of the community blew up at them, and that noisy section of the community decided that they were still bad people even though they’d backtracked, and now are “soured,” is to me much more of an indictment of that section of the community than it is of Substack.

            • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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              9 months ago

              I think you and I are just not gonna see eye to eye on this.

              The one additional thing I’ll say is, the Nazis on Substack were absolutely undetectable to anyone who didn’t choose to interact with them, but a bunch of people absolutely freaked out about them, to the point that it did a bunch of damage to a platform that was absolutely a positive force for good, just because people would have had to share the platform with literally about 0.05% Nazis somewhere out of sight.

              Contrast with that, Lemmy clearly has some level of infestation of shills masquerading as real people with political opinions, and they impact the discourse every day. Some of them, if I had to guess, I would guess are actively funded by people who are actively in league with Nazis. You know the ones. Although, that’s pure speculation on my part with basically nothing at all behind it beyond guessing. The impact to the discourse is the only part I’m confident about.

              I haven’t seen any level of freakout about that. Just an occasional bleat of “yo it’s not cool that this is happening,” and then business as usual.

              • snooggums@midwest.social
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                9 months ago

                Me

                Being unaware is very different than knowingly accepting their company.

                You

                The one additional thing I’ll say is, the Nazis on Substack were absolutely undetectable to anyone who didn’t choose to interact with them, but a bunch of people absolutely freaked out about them, to the point that it did a bunch of damage to a platform that was absolutely a positive force for good, just because people would have had to share the platform with literally about 0.05% Nazis somewhere out of sight.

                It’s like you can’t read and understand a simple sentence. Or you just like defending nazis, that could be it too.

                • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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                  9 months ago

                  My point is that the Nazis were not “in my company” on Substack. I didn’t read them, I wouldn’t even have known where to find them or how to interact with them without putting some effort into finding out. The fact that I knew they were there somewhere doesn’t change that.

                  There’s no call to get insulting with me about that or pretend that I’m saying it because there’s something I can’t understand. It’s simply the truth. You have your viewpoint, which as best I understand it is that even using the same platform as an overt Nazi is unacceptable to you, which, okay, fine. But pretending I just can’t understand something or I like Nazis is why we’re disagreeing is just condescending and wrong.

                  Like I say, I think we’re just not gonna see eye to eye on that aspect. Just repeating ourselves at each other probably isn’t productive.

                  • snooggums@midwest.social
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                    9 months ago

                    Make up your mind.

                    I actually agreed with their viewpoint, and the fact that they had to backtrack after a noisy section of the community blew up at them,

                    You agreed with them that it was cool to have nazis on their website, and disliked the fact that they capitulated to noisy people who didn’t want nazis on their website.

                    You are defending nazis. That is what you are doing.

      • Navarian
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        9 months ago

        Yeah this is exactly what it is.

        The commenter above likely read something they disagree with on substack and has chosen to hate the entire platform because of it.

          • Navarian
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            9 months ago

            This is inaccurate. They backtracked pretty heavily on their earlier stance. Which by the way, was never ‘Nazis are welcome’

            Misinformation is wild these days.

            • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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              9 months ago

              They explicitly said they would not remove Nazi content.

              At the time, Substack CEO Hamish McKenzie addressed the mounting concerns about Substack’s aggressively hands-off approach in a note on the website, observing that while “we don’t like Nazis either,” Substack would break with content moderation norms by continuing to host extremist content, including newsletters by Nazis and other white supremacists.

              “We will continue to actively enforce those rules while offering tools that let readers curate their own experiences and opt in to their preferred communities,” McKenzie wrote. “Beyond that, we will stick to our decentralized approach to content moderation, which gives power to readers and writers.”

              Later, once people pointed out: that means Nazis are welcome, they removed a few especially blatant examples… and changed nothing else. They still won’t do any work, themselves, to stop taking money from fascists. They just wait until people complain loudly enough, and then maybe they’ll get around to it, on a case-by-case basis.

              They literally did not even change their rules. Or their reporting system, which sends reports to the writer, not to Substack. So even the ‘hey this guy’s a fucking Nazi’ feedback they’re supposedly listening to now has to reach them through Twitter or whatever.

              The admins of the platform demonstrably did not give a shit about Nazis on their platform. Effectively, they still don’t. Stop squirming.

              • Navarian
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                9 months ago

                As much as you have a point about the lacklustre response to literal fascism on the platform - Your point is a little tarnished by the fact that you’re currently complaining about said platform, on a separate platform that currently houses child pornography, anti-trans rhetoric, and Nazi sympathetic views, amongst a plethora of other disgusting things, arguably a worse situation than Substack currently finds itself in.

                Don’t mistake this for me defending Substack, that kind of shit should be rooted out at the stem and destroyed wherever it is, but let’s not sit up on our high horses here.

                • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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                  9 months ago

                  Pictured: squirming. Desperate grasping for some way to nuh-uh despite being proven dead fucking wrong about smug tutting. Not even relevant bullshit, because Lemmy is a protocol, not a a platform. Like you e-mailed me back to whine that some people e-mail death threats.

                  Substack is a centralized website run by exactly one group of people, and those people don’t care about Nazis. My instance is one of many Lemmy instances, and Nazis have been told to fuck off from day one.

                  You accused someone of stupid selfish reasons. You were corrected. Deal with it on your own terms.

                  • Navarian
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                    9 months ago

                    Damn dude, you didn’t have to start edgy role-playing at me…

      • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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        9 months ago

        They let like 2 Nazis on, taking the viewpoint basically (1) it’s in the spirit of the 1st amendment to allow even reprehensible speech (2) guys it’s like 2 of them and the number of people reading and being convinced by them is likely to be 0

        And the entirety of the knee-jerk fediverse politics community saw an opportunity to take a pointless stand on something, and in their eyes shone the promise of being able to make some smug self-important postings about how something good is actually really problematic and you’re just not enlightened enough if you don’t agree

        And now Substack is literally Hitler even though it was doing a whole bunch of great things, outside of the 2 Nazis

          • protist@mander.xyz
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            9 months ago

            2 Nazis walk in to a room of 1000 people and there are now 1002 Nazis in there, right?

            • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
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              9 months ago

              2 Nazis at the University

              OH NO FUCK IT’S LIKE 73,284 NAZIS NOW

              (Edit: In all seriousness, I know you already know this, but the problem with the “3 people at the table” analogy is that, A, there are 500,000 people involved, not 3, and if you aren’t talking to the people at the table, or hearing from them, but merely existing on the same electronic computer without any interaction unless you decide to pursue same, which obviously most people won’t do because they’re fucking Nazis, then the risk of becoming suddenly a Nazi because they are next to you on the hard drive is in most cases pretty slight.)