Sucks the similar sites ([for example](https://theoldreader.com/) which popped up werent enough. (Rss still works on a lot of places btw, because it is usually on by default in most blog software systems, some url manipulation often works).
Yeah I was a bit facetious. I actually believe Google when they said use of Reader had declined. When the shutdown was announced, reactions were all like "RSS?! I use Twitter to get my news!"
BTW I pay for Feedly still.
Is this a case where “the algorithm” directed the editors to pick
writers that generated a lot of clickable controversy, figuring that
would turn into subscriber revenue? Or is this a case where the editors
of Substack are anti-woke “cLaSsIcAl LiBeRaLs” spotlighting their
problematic faves?
The eternal social media platform dilemma: “is this shitty or evil,
and does the distinction matter?”
Almost certainly the latter.
You can certainly build an algorithm to select for reactionary types, ask FB, but you need a massive pile of pre-classified data in order to pull that off. Sub stack is too new to have that data, and probably also lacks the specialized personnel to even try. It’s much easier to just pick a bunch of people they like and sort by current levels of engagement on Twitter or whatever.
It’s a bit nit-picky, but no. Data ready for ML use is now so valuable that it’s generally not for sale. If you want the data that a company has, often the only route to getting it is to buy the company outright. This is why you see a lot of SV companies making some otherwise weird purchases, like Google buying Fitbit; it’s about getting access to their data.
Sub stack probably doesn’t have that much money laying around, and we would’ve noticed the acquisitions if they’d done any.
The reason people make up new words like this is (under *lumping or splitting* linguistic theory) a splitter tendency to clarify a broad term. Most everyone does it, not just rationalists.
it is 100% this
but given they're SV VC bros and backed by SV VC bros who think SSC is genius and definitely not any sort of problem, well
I wonder if they're paying Yarvin
I can’t imagine seeking psychiatric help from Mr Codex, a man who has
spent years of his life ’splaining that “thing-oriented people” are
better than “people-oriented people”
As well as "Untitled", read Elizabeth Sandifer's [dissection of it](http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method/) (second half).
If I was Scott, I would have at least tried to up my alliteration game. Something like:
"Vexing the Sex-Unexpecting"
Or
"Forsaking the Folks who Forcedly Forgo Fornication"
The way he talks about his patients, especially his gay patients, makes me feel awful for the ones that have no idea about his broken brain that's full of bad ideas. From experience, it is horrible to have psychiatrist that is patronizing, and I can't imagine having one that's a racial IQ phrenologist.
There's a big difference between mental illness and the brainrot caused by thinking ugly thoughts all day. I say this as a mentally ill person. But I see your point and a different choice of words is probably called for.
The jokes about nerds and pushing people into lockers come directly from Scott Aaronson's habit of categorizing himself as the hapless put upon nerd, and any of his detractors must therefore be meathead jocks who bully nerds. This is blatantly absurd, but some people have embraced his nonsense characterization as truth, so some here mock them for it.
I'm not particularly a huge fan of the nerd/jock jokes, I think they're rather obnoxious, but it's very much a response to a bad faith characterization by rationalists, and I don't think too much should be read into it.
> they are also coming from a place of speaking the truth of their experience in nerd marginalisation
I'd encourage you to think more critically about this view. First and foremost, I'd say that the vast majority of posters here know all about "nerd marginalization", since we are all by and large nerds ourselves. Scott Aarsonson might legitimately believe we're all nerd-bullying jocks, but that doesn't mean we owe him the time of day to consider it seriously. It's just hilariously biased and detached from reality, and should be treated as the nonsense it is.
Secondly, and probably more importantly, you do yourself a disservice by taking this particular characterization seriously. I don't doubt that Aaronson has had some awful experiences coming from "nerd marginalization". And that would be something truly relatable and pitiable, except that Aaronson uses his past experiences with bullying as a cudgel to attack detractors and other marginalized people. I'm not sure if you're familiar with his rather infamous "comment 171", but this is the most prominent example of him abusing this. For context, this came about when a female commenter on his blog related her experiences with sexual harassment and assault at the hands of nerdy guys. She was promptly attacked and dismissed by Aaronson citing his own past experiences.
So, when you try to characterize Aaronson and the rationalists speaking from a similar mindset as "speaking the truth of their nerd marginalization", you're actually legitimizing the fact that he uses these experiences as a weapon to attack anyone who challenges his views or his identity. Not just us, the "evil sneerclub jocks that know ourselves to be evil," but also other marginalized people within STEM/tech circles.
So, the tendency of some sneerclubbers to mock his nerd/jock characterization is meant to point out how absurd it is. Aaronson's overall use of his "nerd marginalization" is something he uses to attack marginalized people, and you legitimize these attack when you insist they should be taken seriously.
And, again, I'm not saying his experiences are false or he's lying. I truly believe he suffered a lot when he was younger and he would deserve sympathy for this. I don't wish him an ounce of ill will for him having suffered. But at the end of the day, he chooses to use these experiences not to uplift and support other marginalized people in his community who are suffering, but to attack and dismiss them. That's why you absolutely can not take his claims of "nerd marginalization" seriously: you just end up participating in the harm he's doing.
It’s amazing how far the whole postrat/rat movement is about actively
refusing to learn about things like in academia/work except
just enough to make half-assed rhetoric about it and gaining an
internet personality cult around doing that. In Unsong, Scooter
uses Kabbalah and alliterative coincidences in English but he actively
refuses to learn Hebrew
This is very incoherent. What’s the scam? They have her the exact
free service they said they would, while also giving advances to some
other people on their subscription income?
Newitz makes it pretty explicit:
>They claim to offer writers a level playing field for making a living, and instead they pay an elite, secret group of writers to be on the platform and make newsletter writing appear to be more lucrative than it is. They claim to be an app when they are a publication with an editorial policy. They claim in their terms of service that they will protect writers from abuse, but they don’t.
Well so there's the incorrect part of that, in that they're not paying people to write but instead giving them an advance on subscription income that will likely produce less total income for the writer in exchange for getting it early. And then there's what's left, which is... what? She wants them to release more info about who they give those to or how much they pay? Sounds nice, but not like we have that info for other publishers or employers. Clearly nothing remotely resembling a "scam"
> in that they're not paying people to write but instead giving them an advance on subscription income that will likely produce less total income for the writer in exchange for getting it early.
For every publisher in the world, this is called "payment".
> She wants them to release more info about who they give those to or how much they pay? Sounds nice, but not like we have that info for other publishers or employers.
It's not hard to find who's being paid to write for Vanity Fair or Gamespot or Outside Magazine. It is, at the moment, impossible to find a list of who's being paid to write for Substack. If the writers don't volunteer that information, nobody knows.
> Clearly nothing remotely resembling a "scam"
"Scam" is not the word I would have chosen, but I'm not a professional writer like Newitz is. And I think it's reasonable to conclude that Substack is not simply an "open forum" - it's a publisher, with an editorial viewpoint (if the writers it chooses to pay are indicative), and ought to represent itself as such.
The core assertion - that Substack is actually a publisher with a distinctly reactionary/libertarian viewpoint, masquerading as an open forum - could easily be rebutted if Substack published a list of who it was paying. Not how much, just who.
> For every publisher in the world, this is called "payment".
But do royalties an author receives for a book they didn't get an advance for not count as payment then? My point is there's no distinction between substackers getting paid via subscriptions and those who got some kind of advance - for example Glenn Greenwald who has probably the most controversial and most lucrative substack didn't get an advance.
>It's not hard to find who's being paid to write for Vanity Fair or Gamespot or Outside Magazine. It is, at the moment, impossible to find a list of who's being paid to write for Substack. If the writers don't volunteer that information, nobody knows.
Isn't the information we have exactly equivalent? We know which substackers are making money off substack by offering paid subscriptions, but not how much they make unless they reveal that information just like we can find lists of employees of media outlets but don't know how much they're paid.
>"Scam" is not the word I would have chosen, but I'm not a professional writer like Newitz is.
Haha so after all that you're conceding my core point that she's wrong to call it a scam? Presumably her being a professional writer makes that error less acceptable rather than more right?
>And I think it's reasonable to conclude that Substack is not simply an "open forum" - it's a publisher, with an editorial viewpoint (if the writers it chooses to pay are indicative), and ought to represent itself as such.
I mean it is in a literal sense an open forum in that anyone can start one and compete on a level playing field with everyone else who's started one / the rest of the internet. I think your comparison above to book publication is pretty much the right way to look at it - authors make an income based on book sales and can get advances proportional to how much income is expected, and publishers do not reveal what deals authors get. The difference of course being that publishers have a much more explicit gatekeeping process where you're either in with them or not, as opposed to substack which does the equivalent of allowing unlimited self-publishing services in exchange for a cut of the revenue.
>The core assertion - that Substack is actually a publisher with a distinctly reactionary/libertarian viewpoint, masquerading as an open forum - could easily be rebutted if Substack published a list of who it was paying. Not how much, just who.
Why do you say reactionary/libertarian? The big advances I'm aware of substack giving out are to Matt Yglesias and of course our friend Scott Siskind, who are both pretty firmly in the "liberal center left" category.
> Scott Siskind [...] pretty firmly in the "liberal center left" category
Jesus tapdancing Christ, you could have led with this and saved me from wasting my time. Does it say r/TheMotte in your browser? Because that's not where you are.
Is it controversial that he is basically a boring establishment center leftist? Not a position I share I hasten to add! Where else would you place his politics?
dude, he's an ardent advocate of eugenics and scientific racism who actively wanted to attract neoreactionaries to SSC. This is not "center left" of anything. We've read the leaked email. Do you think we're as fucking dense, and bad with object permanence, as rationalists or something.
The user has an interesting stupidpol/slatestarcodex posting history. It's kinda of an unexpected combination, given Scott's outright disdain for any actual Leftist thought, but it also kinda makes perfect sense.
What is with this hyper-aggressive tone? I guess I've just read the blog content and am not a super-regular sneerclub reader. Is there somewhere that he's advocated for scientific racism? And what leaked email?
Well, the pinned thread at the top of this subreddit is literally about the leaked emails, also archived [here](https://imgur.com/a/gWeIK6c). Therein he talks about how he wants to improve neoreactionary thought. [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/i05rtm/that_time_scott_alexander_squid314_donated_money/) is a classic thread where he talks about how he wants to donate to sterilize "undesirables". Here's some fun [homophobia](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/ll99n5/scott_siskind_admitted_fan_of_eugenics_and/gnpb83o/). There are innumerable threads on /r/sneerclub documenting this shit, if you care to search for them. I'm just tossing out a few of my favorites. The hostility is because you're, unwittingly or not, defending a scientific racist and general chud, and the emails are literally a pinned thread, and as such should be assumed to be common knowledge to posters on here.
Haha take it down a notch, neither you nor Siskind are the center of the universe - I don't really come to this subreddit specifically as opposed to just seeing it as I scroll.
> Isn't the information we have exactly equivalent
Yes, and that's exactly the problem, because New York Times admits to being a publication, while Substack does not.
If you get an offer to be part of "Substack Pro", you're more likely to drop your day job and get on Substack to spread your word. This is where Substack can inject editorial input: by deciding who gets to be in "Substack Pro".
EDIT: I edited my comment to better address your points up the thread.
You're saying the problem is that substack doesn't give more information about people who have blogs there than the Times gives about it's employees?
Yes it's possible that substack could slightly encourage a particular ideology by offering more and better pro deals to people with that ideology... but so what? It wouldn't accomplish much, we don't have any evidence they're doing so, and even if they were it wouldn't be anything unusual or particularly problematic. I approve of transparency and am of course in favor of substack releasing as much info as possible, but this whole attempt to hold them to standards nowhere else is held to is silly.
Jude Doyle is a nonbinary trans peep currently leading the claims of transphobia against substack, referenced from his piece [here](https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-pay). I haven't really followed them, so I'm not sure what specifically our former fellow sneerer is referring to. Although, given the fact that they post in redscarepod, it could just be the fact that Doyle is trans, who knows.
Edit: Our former fellow sneerer also goes around repeating literal stormfront racist canards, as seen [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/gsbbc3/for_the_magatards_lurking/fs47so1/?context=3) dindu nothin'ing their little heart out. What the fuck
Edit2: our former fellow sneerer is [so mad](http://imgur.com/a/PZTrZpG)
FFS I'm so sick of those guys. I can't seem to parse what their political project is supposed to be. It's like "mensrights" all over again -- they claim to be one thing (i.e. class solidarity), but their subreddit makes it **abundantly clear** that they are another thing entirely (i.e. they're pissed off about not being able to use slurs).
Yet I cannot get away from them since I frequent leftist spaces, and they seem to fancy themselves leftists. And every asshole troll I encounter comes from stupidpol. I honestly do not get the appeal. They remind me of the "fiscally socialist, socially nazi" types that have popped up recently, and I would very much bet that there is an overlap.
What I don't get is why those kinds of "leftists" then don't opt for one of the plethora of leftie theories that aren't idpol but also aren't slur performance white grievance idiocy. Oh wait. I lied I get that they just want to be assholes
My experiences in Balkans had the opposite effect, it made me much more sympathetic to Albanian (and Bosnian) political violence during the break-up of Yugoslavia than I was before
In addition recent events in the UK have radicalised me against not-so-creeping authoritarianism to the point of fantasising about hanging out with a rifle around Tory villas (“I don’t need to tell you things are bad” - the movie Network)
When you talk to people from Croatia they’ll tell you they’ve buried the hatchet to some extent - well not always - but when you talk to anyone in Kosovo the scars are incredibly raw, and I think that’s a motivation for serious talk about justifying revolution or violence beyond the bounds of ordinary norms
If you really wish, you can make a point about Kosovo-Albanians and Bosniaks using political violence defensively against ethnic cleansing and similar things, in a sense you cannot make for Croatian and Serbian Freikorps/semi-official armies. (Unless you are referring to the 1997 Albanian rebellion / civil war / whatever you want to call it, which I don't know nearly enough about to make a salient point except saying that it ironically ended with a snap election, not a proper revolution.)
I'm not sure it's helpful to make a point this way, but if you would do it this way, it becomes immediately obvious that nothing about the exprience justifies political violence at large.
You make a number of good points, but fail to account for the fact that I am 24/7 furious at my own and other people’s state, and that I even dream about it
Yeah but with all due respect, then maybe don't use ethnic cleansing defenses as justifications for revolutionary violence, especially ones that made countless numbers of people suffer in a myriad of ways. If I may suggest this, maybe read some Rosa Luxemburg because while she is not strictly speaking against violence, she puts it into a lot of context, favoring mass uprisings and all that while also being for a pluralistic socialism instead of some avantguard leninist bullshit (not that you are a Leninist, as far as I can tell, but rather as a much better and more directed alternative)
Luxemburg seems like a weird example here (and I’m not a Leninist by any means), because while you’re correct that she advocates mass uprisings as part of her theoretical programme for international revolution, her practical programme emphasised local organisation where possible
My view on the inter-ethnic issues in Balkans draws on the red flag ideas of people like Garibaldi *and* Luxemburg *and* Emma Goldman
I don’t consider the Kosovo situation - the KLA and so on - to be a strictly an example of ethnic conflict so much as a localised class struggle within former Yugoslavia
Darkly funny that a sub ostensibly created for "Marxist critiques of identity politics," and that tries to tell itself that it's there to push back against a top-down attempt to divide workers through race, devolved into a white grievance sub. If I was a conspiratorial kinda dude, I might even think: *damn, this place looks like it was intended to divide the working class through race*.
On my old account, I tried interacting with a user who had the "Racecraft" flair and was spouting off some purely reactionary nonsense, and asked if he had actually read the book, and just got a "what are you talking about." I'm guessing maybe a dozen regular users actually know who the Fields sisters are.
My take on this is basically media crit
The shallow podcaster class who think their opinionating is just *so important it needs to be said* have an audience who don’t read or think that work themselves up about “idpol” and end up at the end of that rabbithole
The whole complaint is so lazy you have to be a lazy person to think it’s a clever cultural critique, and I say that as someone who thinks class critique is important in and of itself
Every now and then a stupidpol regular tries popping off in r/CriticalTheory, and it's always satisfying to see one of the regulars who's actually trained in and well-read enough to intelligently discuss neoliberalism and identity politics from a left-wing pov shut them down.
I have friends who are non binary from both sides of the “assigned at birth” spectrum and don’t mind being called “dude”, but I’ve also been rightly called out for casually referring to *other* friends by that term, so it’s something I try to be aware of
Dude has tended to shift around as both a gendered and non-gendered term. It’s one of those words that’s a bit slippery.
I tend to avoid it, mostly because I’m a child of the 90s and I was not cool then, so it feels strange for me to use.
Yeah, fair push back. I’m certainly not trying to excuse anyone purposefully misgendering anyone, and accidentally doing so is _not great_.
My point is just that newish words tend to have more vague definitions compared to older words. There was certainly a point in my lifetime where I understood “dudes” to be an ungendered plural, as compared to older terms like “guys”, which is unambiguously gendered.
But that ambiguity is a great reason to avoid it, as the harm caused by misgendering someone is real, even if that wasn’t the intent.
Google kills Reader and 8 years later the world goes to shit, figures.
Is this a case where “the algorithm” directed the editors to pick writers that generated a lot of clickable controversy, figuring that would turn into subscriber revenue? Or is this a case where the editors of Substack are anti-woke “cLaSsIcAl LiBeRaLs” spotlighting their problematic faves?
The eternal social media platform dilemma: “is this shitty or evil, and does the distinction matter?”
I can’t imagine seeking psychiatric help from Mr Codex, a man who has spent years of his life ’splaining that “thing-oriented people” are better than “people-oriented people”
It’s amazing how far the whole postrat/rat movement is about actively refusing to learn about things like in academia/work except just enough to make half-assed rhetoric about it and gaining an internet personality cult around doing that. In Unsong, Scooter uses Kabbalah and alliterative coincidences in English but he actively refuses to learn Hebrew
This is very incoherent. What’s the scam? They have her the exact free service they said they would, while also giving advances to some other people on their subscription income?
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