If you call someone's newsletter their "Substack" you are doing PR for a company that is fine with amplifying some of the most vicious extremists in our society -- and got its key funding from people who want Trump to be president and are spending millions to unseat a Democratic senator, thereby helping put the Senate into the hands of Trump cultists.
Substack sites should be called what they are -- newsletters -- exactly the same way WordPress blogs are blogs.
Others have said this, but the Internet Archive's appeals-court loss to Big Publishing is a disaster for everyone but the cartel of companies and a tiny number of A list authors.
The publishers will tolerate libraries only as long as they can control everything about how books can be loaned. If public libraries were being invented today, the cartel would make their core functions illegal.
"What we're seeing today isn't just a major fuckup, but the first of what will be many systematic failures — some small, some potentially larger — that are the natural byproduct of the growth-at-all-costs ecosystem where any attempt to save money by outsourcing major systems is one that simply must be taken to please the shareholder."
If you were waiting for proof that Joe Kahn, the top editor at the New York Times, doesn't even begin to appreciate the danger of a Trump 2 presidency, this is it, from an interview in the New Yorker:
Full quote in the screenshot and alt text there.
Excerpt: "And what we’ll do is we’ll show up and we’ll do our jobs."
(BTW it's also plain that the interviewer doesn't want to face the implications, either.)
Looks like Musk's deadbird site is up to some of its most vile political tricks, in this case sleazily discouraging people from looking at evidence relating to the Russian missile attack on a Ukraine children's hospital.
As @mmasnick points out, so-called "age verification" laws to participate in online activities amount to creating a license to read, and to speak. Anonymity would effectively be banned.
It's also a license for other people to know, in a granular way, what you are reading and saying -- and your personal information would be held by people who cannot be trusted in any way.
EU officials, who know nothing about how technology works but know what they want, are on the verge of ordering technology companies to make everyone much less safe by destroying strong encryption and eviscerating personal privacy.
As warned, Reddit has taken a bundle of money from "Open"AI and will use it to further monetize what you -- and the volunteers who moderate it all -- contributed for free.
It's the norm now, and particularly slimy in this case.
Bio and disclosures: dangillmor.com/about/ Boosts mean I think you should see this -- usually but not always an endorsement.California, Nara, Arizona etc. · dangillmor.com