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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5398 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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How does substack moderate itself?

They seem able to walk the fine line where it's a mostly respected outlet yet allowing heterodox views, and while I've heard the occasional handwringer complain, I've not noticed any serious smear campaigns against it, or it having the 10000 witch issues.

Are any writers being cancelled or quietly deboosted?

There were plenty of smear campaigns against it, they just braved them.

The "7 zillion witches issue" was always mostly fiction, there aren't that many witches. If you can get a reasonable amount of normal people to hang out somewhere, they will be the ones eclipsing the witches, not the other way around. This was (and maybe still is being) done by sponsorship deals for authors with pretty big following (Greenwald, Taibi, deBoer, and lots of others that I don't follow).

Moderation is done on a per-author basis. It's like running your Youtube channel, or subreddit. The only thing I can think of that could have a moderating effect, is that there's something clunky about the website, that discourages high-frequency low-effort posting.

Isn't deBoer a pro-HBD leftist? Closer to witch than "normal people".

When people talk about witches, I tend to picture people who are single-mindedly obsessed with discussing issues that would get them booted from polite society, which is why they scare away the normies, which is why they are supposedly a problem for the formation of non-witchy pro free speech communities. De Boer mostly posts short stories, comments on media, and only every once in while talks about politics. I think I literally never read anything from him about HBD.

It certainly isn't his main topic, but he has posts like this or this that basically say the same thing in slightly different terms. In the first one he is quite clear that he thinks that the inability of education to close achievement gaps is due in large part due to genetics, but he also wishes for that aspect to be worked around and deemphasized.

I know they exist, the entire reason I'm following him is that he's a canceled lefty, so he had to be canceled for something.

My point is that he's not a witch, for that he would have to be obsessed with the subject, to the point he's turning everyone off except for people with similar obsessions.

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