This is of a piece with "Mamdani isn't left wing enough for me" / "AOC supports genocide" / Bernie is a Zionist" kind of glib one-liner reasons why left-wing people need to stop supporting left-wing things, because they're not really virtuous enough, and so we need to abandon them in pursuit of some kind of imaginary virtue solution instead of just having unity.
TL;DR: They took some funding from Marc Andresson long ago, they were willing to give blogs to everyone including Nazis (bc free speech) and the whole internet yelled at them, so they caved and removed the Nazis. IDK how this particular push notification happened, but I would bet that the blog will be removed. They are not wholly ideologically pure, I think Richard Spenser is the worst person they willingly host and he's pretty bad, but they don't allow Nazis anymore specifically because of the hue and cry it raised up the first time.
More conversation about it here, I don't have the patience right now to write up a full explanation. TL;DR someone who's panicked at you about the Substack Nazi problem is listening to something that's mostly designed to hurt a mostly left-wing platform.
kogasa@programming.dev 4 days ago
Content of the image is unrelated to this post FYI
MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It should have been blurred out or redacted, then. Because naturally, people will be more eager to discuss a Nazi problem than some fediverse bug.
PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 4 days ago
If I were in a conspiratorial frame of mind, I might think that there are people who are trying to push the "Substack = Nazis" narrative, by spreading it around in contexts where the "official" content of their message is actually something different, which is usually a lot more effective at spreading the gestalt you're trying to spread around than just spamming "Substack = Nazis" everywhere.
The whole framing of the underlying freakout, that if Substack sent you a push notification about somebody's blog, they're obviously endorsing it, and it's "being pushed algorithmically" by Substack, and look, here's this very visual-picture-friendly juxtaposition of the Nazi logo in a Substack notification, even if the actual accusation is being walked by to "I think they should ban Nazis and this shouldn't even be an issue" (which would be a fair thing to say) and "I'm alarmed that they took VC money from some pretty suspect people at different points in their history" (which would be a fair thing to say).
But, that's not what they lead with. What they lead with is "don’t take any action" (they did take action), "'oops, all nazis' notifications issue" (not even sure what that means, but Substack is overwhelmingly leftist obviously, not "oops all nazis")... you get the idea. There's some other innuendo stuff in there, implying that "free speech" is just a cover because Substack loves Nazis so much that they're hosting a ton of solid left-wing journalists and providing them funding, just so they can have a handy excuse to host this one Nazi blog with 768 followers, which is the real goal.
Ask me if I'm salty about this whole conversation lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy (I just learned about this one and since then I've been seeing it everywhere; Lemmy people love to do it it seems like)
MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Honestly, “OP did this on purpose” is an entirely reasonable stance on the issue. And either way, the blame might also fall on the instance moderators for allowing it (are there rules about off-topic posts? I’m too tired to check)
And yeah, you’re definitely right to be salty about this. The Internet is where nuance goes to be stabbed to death in a back alley.
As for the Substack discourse, I guess that Substack is at the very least being naive about the whole thing? Idk. I’m tired of all of this Intenet discourse and having a new hot topic issue every goddamn day.
All I know is that if a platform sent me a notification about an openly Nazi blog, swastika and all, I would have some second thoughts about using it.