EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

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.

maybe ill face the winner of this one off w/greenwald

can't wait

feel like klein is getting sold short here - he was hands down the best all around guy on health care reform

his coverage was comprehensive but his opinions were so milquetoast it was like reading a blog by that dude on gawker

feel like his opinions were pretty otm especially compared w/almost everyone elses which basically added up to OMG PUBLIC OPTION

they both kind of remind me of how a lot of people move to dc and get kind of absorbed into the weird political networky culture here at a pretty young age. dc is so conservative.

would love to run into these guys at a bbq and get into a drunken political argument

since the democratic primaries, even when drunk i try to sidestep political arguments. i ran into weigel at a bar one time but did not pick a fight. he is a good dude imo. that's actually one of the few blogs i regularly read - don't have time/energy to slog through a lot of content anymore.

yeah ive had v little exposure to it but dc political culture seen close up seems v strange

seems so unbearable. lotta people wearing new balances on the weekend and shit.

they r not sexy rip

never trust a libertarian

or a journalist

lol i own 2 pair of new balances

just sayin if u cannot figure how to dress how are u gonna run the country

daria i seen the shoes youre buying, you know what youre doing

new balance are great sneakers, just dont wear them on the weekend or max will shun u

you pride yourself on living in the mouth of the dragon but being fireproof, and then one day you realize it is saturday and you are in whole foods buying ingredients for a cool mac n cheese with a twist recipe you found online, wearing new balance sneakers

^^ gets it

i mean tbh i would rather live in boston than dc, at least some people there have accents

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