EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

who has better trolls?

i feel like yglesias is still sort of confused by irl

"from my reader" i mean

i must admit the truly sad number of typos were a big part of me ignoring his blog.

plus i figure the shit he talks about is so everywhere that other ppl will link to him if it's really worth it (see also: andrew sullivan)

both of these guys are nearly worthless on culture

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

haa i find the typos charming because a. its p 'internet' b. i am myself as you all know a masterful typo maker

see i figured you as an accomplished and rigorous stylist whereas our think tank opinion leader is just fucking lazy and/or dyslexic

shouldnt this be in ILM

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

― max, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:55 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that there is an offline culture of young dc bloggers and i know abt it is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, although i was unaware of this particular amazing roommates based nugget, would love to run into these guys at a bbq and get into a drunken political argument

see i figured you as an accomplished and rigorous stylist whereas our think tank opinion leader is just fucking lazy and/or dyslexic

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ty 4 yr support

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

i dont really read attackerman, his shtick grates

he's done with FDL if that helps

i dunno if i've come clean about this but i have a war-nerd streak so

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 1:01 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

me too but on the other hand did u know that ezra klein became a health care reform expert to impress simon schamas daughter chloe

no i was unaware. she must be pretty fine.

i think i find the stuff he covers interesting, but i guess i dont really, i read him occasionally at wired xp re ackerman

lol max whatre u talkin abt

haha i have been under the impression that i knew a lot of gossip abt these ppl but now that i am thinking about it the thing about chloe schama is the only gossip-y nugget i know, kind of disappointed in myself

http://grab.by/8b5N

anyway when i saw ezra klein on tv i was surprised his persona seemed more journalistic glory days upstart young reporter than coddled nerdface technocratic blogger - i liked him

he has an early 80s newspaper look and feel to him

Yglesias has been wrong many times.

Klein meanwhile is a duller writer but his steady crunching of numbers is ultimately educational.

yglesiases willingness to be ambitious and wrong is imo what makes him compelling - like i understand theres danger in utopian thinking but still reimagining the world and its institutions is def one of my hobbies

who has better trolls?

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 11:51 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

to answer my own q, i don't really know. klein's comments are pretty boring but i have noticed yglesias' "community" to be especially vicious and repetitive. neither of them seem to really care much but i think both have made gestures to get more involved. terrible drudgery, sounds like, to me.

as far as blogger gossip goes, can anyone verify that there are, in fact, paid trolls out there? i'd hate to think it was mere dedication causing the same people to say the same things in the same place every day

theres only one blog i can think of that has good comments, really feel like 'comments off' should be the default

TNC i assume?

your bløg has good comments joe

yah tnc and lol of course goes w/o saying my blog

btw how much does this trolling gig pay, who do i contact

i know, right

i saw an interview w/yglesias where he was like all my readers really hate me i have no idea why they come to my blog

he was k funny tbh

eh i've watched a few of his bloggingheads's and he comes off like a jerk imo, interrupting, going on and on

ha yeah ive never been able to bring myself to watch a blogginghead and in general id much rather read than watch any news type thing but for some reason i saw this it was a friendly interview at a like blogg convention where they we just joking around

anyway my head says klein but my heart goes yglesias, not sure what to do, prob follow my heart

yglesias is good on urban issues - not that he says anything new, but at least he's talking to relatively wide audience. but still...super annoying on a personal level. I like klein.

Yglesias is a philosophy major in every word he writes and this is awesome about him.

ugh this is gonna be like that week i read glenn greenwald isnt it

neither of these guys is much like glenn greenwald

unless you have some sort of distaste for american journalists, then yes it'll be like that lol

these guys are on the sensible/technocratic side of the great progressive blogger divide - greenwald exists on the polemic/activist shore - which is not to say hes any more or less otm, just that hes harder to take

nah, that was what i liked abt greenwald its just that in the end i was like "wtf this is not my country i dont care"

haha

yeah but usa is in charge of the rest of the countries iirc

when krugman is updating regularly i don't have much of a reason to follow klein too closely - i don't hate him or anything though

[Yglesias is] a shitty writer imo

Actually, typos aside, he's not. He's remarkably concise and clear even if he liberally sprinkles his posts with "negative externalities" this and "regulatory capture" that jargon.

yglesias is embarrassed about having been a socialist and will occasionally mix in some right wing tinted bullshit to try and build a bit of center cred. i have grown to hate him. klein is kind of a young dinner party blogger but i keep the feed there to flick thru. i enjoy greenwald's secular fire and brimstone and i get angry about the same things as him. his biases are so transparent that is is v easy to think critically about what he writes.

what a effin shit head

The conservative position on abortion is unpopular but the other thing Republicans need to accept is that the weirdly timed election gimmick now plays into the hands of Democrats’ highly educated neurotic base.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 9, 2023

still chatting with the nazi

https://i.imgur.com/FT2WdQj.png

Hmmmm wonder what the white nationalist's "theory of crime in American cities" consists of

It’s healthy to listen to different points of view!

These are people for whom the Chapo guys are beyond the pale but actual Nazis have outside the box thinking

Holy shit my brother is sitting across for Matty right now at a cafe what should he ask him??????

I told him he should talk really loudly about how much sweatshops rule

one of the greats

https://i.imgur.com/L19661W.jpg

"Follow Megan McArdle's opinions" no i dont think i will

Fallow Megan McArdle's opinions

"Fellow! Megan McArdle's opinions!"

Seems like the best lace for this:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/jan/12/casey-newton-quits-substack-nazi-newsletter

Ganz isn't quitting:

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/an-issue-of-concern

"From a political point of view, if you consider yourself a leftist or progressive, I think the correct strategy would be to compete for reach on all platforms—within reason, of course."

What would within reason be though?

Of the newsletters I subscribe to that were on Substack, two have already left over this (Today in Tabs and Last Week's New Yorker Review), two have committed to leaving soon (Garbage Day and PJ Vogt), one hasn't committed yet but is exploring other options (s1ocki's Something Good), and two have addressed the issue but decided to stay for now (Fran Magazine and Alan Sepinwall).

A few others have spotlighted the issue but without saying anything about what they personally plan to do about it (Culture Study, The Reveal, The Present Age). And others still haven't mentioned it at all.

I guess Newton's decision to leave is notable because he's a leading tech journalist with a lot of subscribers.

yeah hes a guy they recruited and gave a special deal to

had also been pretty wishy washy in his coverage of the nazi newsletter situation up until announcing his departure

that is pretty weak sauce from ganz

I agree with Ganz. Fleeing Substack — which is a tool, not a website, and one of the best tools on the market — because people you disagree with politically also use that tool is typically self-defeating pseudo-leftist bullshit. Where you gonna run to? What blogging platform has explicitly promised that it will always agree with you politically, and will never welcome anyone with whom you disagree? Who could ever make a promise like that? Who would ever expect it to be kept? This whole "campaign" has been unserious and embarrassing from the beginning. And frankly, anybody who'd unsubscribe from a newsletter simply because of where it's hosted isn't a reader you want.

This whole "campaign" has been unserious and embarrassing from the beginning.

damn wow......

as to the question of what substack is, its a company, which profits from nazi newsletters, and its run by right wing shitheads, i dont personally care if people leave it or not, everyones got their own calculations to make, but the fact that there are people who are willing to put their livelihoods at risk in order to not just let nazi and right wing shithead schemes slide is an obvious good

its easy to be all "all the companies are bad" which is true to some extent, however what you cant say is "all the companies profit off explicitly nazi shit" because generally companies try very hard to not deal with nazis, for obvious reasons, except substack

xp is accessibility and availability dependent upon them using substack specifically? are they growing readership principally or even noticeably only because they exist on substack, and people only look for known writers there?

“self limiting” or “useless” ok, but is it really “self-defeating?”

also is this situation mere “political disagreement,” or something more? recruitment? activation? radicalization?

Ganz should be pricing in substack getting a lot worse. Understand he might want to keep the rent money rolling in for a bit but it's weak not to look to other platforms/pitch to other publications. The guy is fairly established...

what you cant say is "all the companies profit off explicitly nazi shit" because generally companies try very hard to not deal with nazis, for obvious reasons, except substack

True today. Not at all guaranteed to be true tomorrow, because capitalism...and particularly because techbro capitalism. Eventually Ghost and Buttondown are going to piss off the people currently pissed off at Substack. I guarantee it.

is accessibility and availability dependent upon them using substack specifically?

It's an email program. You're communicating directly with your subscribers. There is a "recommendations" homepage, but I never even looked at it until just now.

I like Substack because it's easy to use, and because it's free. Ghost and Buttondown would each charge me about $100 a month to reach the roughly 2700 subscribers I currently possess, and only about 60 of those people are paying me $50 a year for their subscriptions, so the math doesn't add up. The platform hasn't bought my loyalty; if it starts to suck in terms of functionality, I'll look for something else. But I will not give up a free tool with good features just because assholes get to use it, too. My list of assholes doesn't begin or end with Nazis; I would probably find the majority of Substack users boring, annoying, or offensive in some way if I bothered to check their shit out. But I haven't, and I won't.

I kinda agree with this guy. There's a difference between Nazis and assholes, and you need to be able to tell the difference and respond accordingly.

might want to reflect on the fact not wanting to bother leaving a newsletter has inspired you to defend nazis

I have done nothing of the kind.

I kinda agree with this guy. There's a difference between Nazis and assholes, and you need to be able to tell the difference and respond accordingly.

the newsletters at the centre of this discussion are pretty openly neo-nazis & white nationalists, they're not victims of the adl's bad faith smears against critics of israel nor are people simply exaggerating in relation to more minor transgressions

substack has long made a point of refusing to enforce their own terms of service in relation to transphobes who blatantly breached it, so the most surprising thing about this whole debacle is that they actually caved to pressure a little bit and have taken action against a few of the most egregious nazi substacks.

denying that nazis are nazis easily meets the definition of defending nazis

substack at the basic level isn’t a specific tool, it’s a vendor. by the way people are transitioning to others, it sounds like subscriptions are paid through stripe and you can just pop the customer id from one site into the other. it’s transparent to readers, unless they use the substack app

substack has that app, discovery services, charts, etc. and that’s their value add. that’s what makes them a platform and not just a turnkey software vendor. if it was all white label publishing and email delivery with your own domain, then they’d just be a tool among others. but that’s not what they’re selling

“i’m sure the other tools host bad stuff too” is a valid complaint but substack’s media angle is that they promote and even paid a premium to publish certain writers, signaling they care about content but they don’t care enough to curtail abuse

I’m old enough to know that I’m beholden to all kinds of institutions for my basic needs, sometimes my social ones, that also serve people who are ideologically repugnant to me, but their use isn’t in direct service of those beliefs.

If you were publishing a zine and the last guy, doing the same, is at the same copy shop and they keep flashing their swastika-heavy shit around the store and accidentally keep leaving gross stuff on the copier, maybe you tell the store what they’re doing or you find a new place to do your work if they don’t give a shit

sad subtext to this story re people relying on substack for their livelihoods is as a venture funded company it will prob not last very long, even tho charging for newsletters is a good idea and prob could be a good business we know that their investors wont be satisfied with a good business, you can already see it in how theyre grafting all this social stuff onto the core product

yeah that’s the wild thing, it’s a commodity service readily replicated

the other thing they risk is people actually deciding it’s a moral hazard and killing their ability to send the newsletters via email. not sure how many people read in email versus the app versus website, but getting added to an email blocklist is possible

not sure how many people read in email versus the app versus website

Speaking only for myself, my latest post was read 96% via email (and the open rate was 48%, which is a little below average; I usually get 50-53%), 3% via the app.

monetizing writing in any way is such a shitshow right now and I wouldn’t be surprised if substack’s got some goal of getting a subset of their approved work aggregated into something like the paid Apple News+ plan or whatever else some people pay for and they won’t get that if they have this problem

there are no real numbers but it looks like Apple News+ pulls somewhere near 5x the number of paying subscribers, presumably giving a cut to what people actually click on and read as opposed to the newsletter-specific substack opt-in model

xp yeah so you have next to zero incentive to use substack over something else

fwiw molly white rolled her own, although it is apparently quite technical: https://citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost

if theres nothing thats as easy and cheap to set up and use as substack im sure there will be soon

question is how valuable there other non email stuff is, social, growth things, ive heard conflicting reports

David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

But what substack did was something better - over the last few years it built a referral engine that worked pretty well. A network of blogs that built audience for each other. It was a good product. Attractive. Easy to manage. Interconnected. With growth from mid-list to significant possible. /2

https://bsky.app/profile/lollardfish.bsky.social/post/3kis24vxje32a

yeah it varies pretty wildly

I think every substack I’ve subscribed to, def the paid ones, have been from following someone on social media or a podcast to their newsletter. I might be a total outlier

Adding unperson to my spreadsheet

nice man

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:mgisghjyeuqzvb5l6kyurqma/bafkreiehofm3ctwtnmoncgtsvw3qptfqsvd6lf6lxijgvblcna2th4p5mq@jpeg

sez the guy who's his own boss

the ubermenschs drive to podcast