So like I said, the whole thing is pointless, because Substack changed their minds and kicked out the Nazis about a year ago. Anyone who is attacking them for being a Nazi platform is looking for an excuse, because it isn’t true anymore.

That’s the point, right? Give public pressure to platforms so they will deplatform the Nazis? What sense does it make to fail to notice when they do, and pretend that are still hosting Nazis, and talk incessantly about it when some important non-Nazi is just trying to pursue the critically endangered act of journalism on this platform which has no Nazis?

Why would you do that?

Yeah, Ghost is great. I’m not trying to say any bad thing about it. I think they’re slightly different: Substack went to bat in a big way to foster a community where real journalists could do their journalism there, and get paid for it, and to a large extent it worked. That’s why there are so many high-profile lefties writing there. Ghost is trying to set up a FOSS-style platform that anyone can use. Ghost has monetization too, but they didn’t prime the pump with it nearly as much as Substack did.

They’re both great. I think it’s pretty likely that anyone who’s screaming about Nazis on Substack is just looking for reasons to scream, and the Nazis have very little to do with it except as an excuse.

Yeah. I get where the whole “we’re going to make a hard-and-fast universal rule” decision came from. But that’s just not how life works. You have to leave room for people to make decisions based on their own common sense and judgement, and resist the temptation to lay down a rule for them that they MUST ALWAYS FOLLOW OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES to make everything simple and conflict-free.

I have moved on from the whole debate, lest I get in trouble and cause pointless drama. But yes, that is exactly the crux of the matter.

absolutely not involved in any right wing conspiracy.

How do you know that? Do you know them personally, or audited them or something?

I don’t know that they are, and looking over their resume it does seem unlikely. But, also, I would have said that same thing looking at Taibbi’s or Greenwald’s resume in 2017. I just know that in this story, they are presenting things in this absolutely wildly inaccurate fashion that would be right at home in a right-wing conspiracy. Certainly, working at The Intercept for a long time isn’t some kind of bulwark against being infected with right-wing-propaganda-ism, with Greenwald himself as one absolutely interesting counterexample clearly on offer.

Lmao

Happy to help

Yeah, they have a paid+hosted option, or you can use the FOSS stuff it is based on and go it on your own. It’s a pretty good system I think.

Then they are being silly.

I actually don’t think that would be an issue in practice, given how alarmingly eager Fediverse instance operators are to get in bed with Cloudflare and AWS. But, if you are accepting payments, you are for the forseeable future going to be working with some kind of financial processor, and Stripe is far from the worse of the bunch as far as that is concerned.

Ghost is FOSS, that’s part of the whole point.

It’s very much as portrayed. If he’d been at all serious, he would have at least answered them after they spent weeks putting together a detailed plan for him about what could be done with the money and making one of the biggest humanitarian strides the world has ever seen. I don’t think any kind of theoretical distance between the plan and “ending world hunger” excuses that.

I do believe that he changed. He was always a narcissistic sociopath, but he was also invested in advancing humanity.

Watch the video I posted. I used to think that, but I now think that it was always just a shtick he was doing for self-aggrandizement. You’ll notice that he totally abandoned it, with prejudice, as soon as he could become more self-aggrandized by being a super-MAGA guy than he could be being a super-climate guy.

A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem.

What on Earth? They hosted like three Nazis, which is part of the overall commitment to letting people talk which leads them to host a ton of really good people. And then, when everyone on the internet yelled at them for it, raising a pretty reasonable counterpoint, they kicked the Nazis off. That all happened over a year ago.

It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them

I read the citation for this statement. What it says is very different from actively promoting the work of fascists and recruiting them. There is a whole fascinating conversation to be had about why some high-profile lefty journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald all of a sudden became Nazis, but it’s very misleading to assign 100% of the blame in this way to Substack, purely because they were working with those people before it really became completely clear to everyone that they for whatever bizarre reason had become Nazis. It’s a lot more complex situation that is being summarized in this extremely glib spin-soaked fashion.

And it’s funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen

Okay, fair enough. This is pretty interesting and I hadn’t known it.

On the other hand, Substack also hosts Sy Hersh, Tim Snyder, Salman Rushdie, and God knows who else. If they were planning to slant their coverage based on the fact that Andreesen’s company gave them $15 million in 2019 (which they then quickly turned around and gave big chunks of to working journalists), you’d think they would be making some kind of effort to downplay the leftist voices which they are currently hosting, outnumbering the “problematic” voices which might be there but which I have literally never run across there.

Elon Musk also, apparently, tried to buy Substack in 2023, and they told him to fuck off.

This whole article reads like a bad-faith hit piece aimed at one of the organizations that actually is trying to provide a space for good journalism including left-wing authors, and making sure that it’s sustainable and they can get paid. By trumping up some various things into much bigger deals than they need to be.

I wonder who would be interested in ginning up big bad-faith hit jobs against good news outlets, encouraging people on the left to savage and abandon them for various little misdemeanors until the only news outlets left are either bought and purchased by open fascists, or too small and scattered to make a difference?

A lot of the terrifying aspects of slinging money around that people are talking about in this thread actually do become terrifying, once Bitcoin and friends are your platform. Fraud? Refunds? Someone hacked your server and stole your wallet? All that stuff is now 100% your problem, there is absolutely no way to “undo” if something wrong happens, and no infrastructure in place to handle any of it or any professionals with already a simple system in place for it. Or, if there is an infrastructure, it is based on a shady company which is orders of magnitude more sketchy and predatory than the (already pretty sketchy and predatory) banking system.

I actually think 3% is roughly a fair fee for the processor to charge you, in exchange for agreeing to worry about all of that nonsense on your behalf so you can just collect the money. For in-person transactions, it’s mostly just a predatory rent payment, but for online transactions where the possibility for malfeasance is amplified, it makes sense to me.

Why do you hate fun

Yeah. I think a lot of the people in these comments are people just not experienced with business who assume that it is scary and impossible. There are certain aspects that are hairy if you don’t know what you’re getting into, but the whole system is designed to make it pretty easy. On the whole pie chart of “pain in the ass aspects,” there are some pretty big slices in places, but “I have to set up a Stripe account oh no” is not one of them lol. That one is a tiny tiny sliver.

Even if you decide to collect payments yourself and do payouts to merchants yourself, like a little Etsy or Amazon, dealing with the headaches involved with sending and receiving the cash will still be a minority of your problems. Although they will jump up to being significant.

I kind of want to express interest for getting involved with this thing with you, since I do think it’s a really good idea, but IDK if I really want to take it on. I do think it’s a really good idea, though. Basically add the “operated by actual humans” aspect to online e-commerce as it is being added for online social media.

I have run several businesses, some of them on this micro-scale. That’s how I know that part is trivial.

You can literally set it up for yourself for free, if you want to see: https://stripe.com/

Correct. Someone orders something, it doesn’t arrive, they dispute the charge with their CC company, their CC company and Stripe talk to one another and get the merchant’s side of the story, and basically unless there is some pretty massive indication that the buyer is lying or has a consistent pattern of this or something, the buyer gets their money back. If that happens a bunch, the seller loses their Stripe account.

The system is heavily biased in favor of the buyer, which for the most part works out, because most of the fraud exists on the seller end. And on the whole the fact that 99% of people on both sides are not cockheads trying to abuse the system, is what makes it all work reasonably well.

Accepting payments isn’t some kind of wild adventure that will inevitably doom your operation. People do it all the time, you can set up a Stripe account in a few minutes. You could, if you wanted (and you would probably want to go this route at least initially), require people to have a Stripe account or something and get paid directly from the buyer without you being involved. And then just charge a flat fee to the merchants or something, if you wanted to make the whole thing sustainable.

Stripe is well-equipped to deal with issues of taxes, fraud, refunds, and so on for micro-level businesses. Once you get into accepting payments and re-disbursing them to people, you’ve opened up a whole can of worms which probably means you should be spending a couple thousand dollars on lawyers and accountants to make sure it’s all on the up-and-up, but even then, it’s not unsolvable. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, that’s all. Jim Bob’s Towing with his 2 pillhead employees manages to do it every day. It’s how Jim Bob financed his boat. It’s fine.

I’m not even saying the specific details of what he wants are good (and, in fact, it’s now clear that they are not, and he likes saying super-ambitious stuff that is unrealistic because he thinks it makes him sound more visionary than the people who are trying to explain why it all won’t work.)

I’m just saying that wanting Mars used to put him a leg up in my mind over people who just wanted their stock price to go up and did not want Mars. I’m okay with my heroes being unrealistic, all other things being equal.

how to ship goods?

Part of their point was that Amazon doesn’t handle shipping for a lot of the things they sell. If you want to, they can store everything within their massively-optimized operation and ship it for you for a small-enough-to-be-compelling fee, but you don’t have to. You can also just list your stuff there and ship it to customers when they order it.

how to process payments?

This is trivial. The modern financial internet makes it extremely easy.

how to handle refunds? how to handle contestations?

This is a fair point, probably the biggest issue that could be a stumbling block. One fair counterpoint is that Amazon’s handling of these situations is often pure uncaring dogshit, so if you’re doing a bad job at it, you’re still no different than Amazon (and potentially better than, since it is hard to see how someone could be any worse.)

It’s not totally simple, and you have to do some real actual work to solve it, but it’s also not like going to the moon. It’s solvable.

Yeah. For a long time I defended Musk, for the simple reason that, yes, he’s weird and seems like a sociopath, but at least he’s trying. He wants electric cars. He wants Mars. That’s enough. Most billionaires just want an invite to Epstein’s island, or to displace a village somewhere to build a new factory.

Those days have ended, now that it’s become clear that Musk wants an entire Epstein’s-Island enclave just for himself and his “family,” and actively works to destroy people who are working on electric cars if they interfere with his quest to get all the credit for everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeRjVH66vdQ