µblog - archive for 2022-01

Grym musikmelange i kvällens På Spåret: Rebecka Törnqvist sjunger Paul Simon med Sahara Hotnights som band!

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substack is a toxic brand

This post on Wonkette articulates a lot of what I’ve been seeing regarding Substack lately

• Anti-Vaxxers: There’s Gold In Them Thar Substacks!

Substack.com links submitted to Hacker News are usually flagged within minutes (which is significant, because Substack are a YC-backed company and have been aggressively recruiting on HN). They are full of anti-vax articles and general right-wing culture war trash. Seeing ‘substack.com’ in the URL is a good indicator that the content will be alt-right or worse.

I won’t pay for anything on substack, and I will actively try to flag / delete links to it on social media. There are plenty of competing services for blogging+newsletter. Use them instead of supporting VC-funded alt-right Freeze Peach extremists.

Edit: Wed 23 Feb 2022

Sadly user ‘ykevinator2 got flagged to death for this comment but I think it’s quite apt

I still don’t know what substack is but it seems like a place for intelligent nutcases to explain why they’re victims.

• flagged dead comment on HN

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🤬 IRC vs its enemies

Services like Slack, Discord and Teams have proven IRC right - group chat is an important collaboration tool. IRC apologists constantly complain that these services are winning despite IRC being better because it’s “open” and “decentralized”.

If IRC is as good as people say, I would have expected a turnkey solution be available for organizations. This would include:

• server/service with backup and management options
• integration into access systems such as ADFS, Okta etc
• client config to enable logging (mandatory in some businesses)
• full-text searching

Even for a nominal fee this could have been competitive, probably.

But it never appeared. In fact, during the Freenode debacle, the FSF explicitely stated that they as an organization did not have the resources to be running a public IRC server.

The fact is that the IRC ecosystem is immature, inconsistent, hard to manage, and not really business-friendly. And that’s fine. But it also means that Slack et al solved a problem IRC wasn’t interested in solving.

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