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Notes -
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.
Yeah, I think OP may just not remember because it was ineffective but they did the usual "start a drumbeat about how 'concerning' this is". It just didn't work.
Probably because there really wasn't a hook for the average person to get up in arms about; people can pay or not for commentary from people they like. So what?
It came across as jealousy/turf-protection on the part of the mainstream media and Substack obviously had very little incentive to fold to claims that Matthew Yglesias was a witch.
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