What fresh hell is this?

If you are reading this, it means that my migration to a new newsletter platform has been a success. Huzzah!

Sharp-eyed readers will also observe that in addition to a new home, my blog has a new look, a new name [1], and hopefully a new lease on life. It will, however, continue to be written by the same cranky old sourpuss. Whether that’s a positive or a negative, I leave to you.

I’m sure there will be glitches along the way. For example, as I am typing this, an error message saying “Something went wrong” keeps appearing on my screen. (Come to think about it, that’s a very apt description of the last eight years. Something has gone very wrong in the world. I should’ve used that for my new blog name. Damn.)

Beehiiv is a different animal than Substack, hopefully in mostly good ways. The advantage of Substack is that is/was dead-simple easy to use. The disadvantage is that Substack’s bro-founders (Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi) have misplaced their moral compass, if they ever had one. Or maybe their moral compass only points to N, for Nazi.

(For those of you who aren’t up to speed on this issue, please read “Substackers against Nazis,” and “Hello Nazis, Goodbye Substack.” Basically, I am part of a small diaspora who fled Substack when it became clear that they didn’t give a rat’s ass about policing thinly veiled white supremacist demagogues, so long as these lovely people had paying subscribers.)

Must be the money

This has been framed as a debate between free speech absolutists and people who feel that the very rich owners of platforms which derive their wealth from user generated content have an obligation to ensure that said content is not harmful to its readers. But that’s not what this debate is really about. It’s really about money.

To paraphrase Mike Masnick, owner and chief rabblerouser at the Techdirt website for the last 297 years, “Content moderation at scale is impossible.” That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. The problem is not merely that content moderation is impossible to do well, it’s that it’s expensive. It’s much easier and much much cheaper to say, “We believe in the free exchange of ideas” or “We’ll ask our community of users to police content for us” than to hire a trust and safety team with dozens of employees.

Listen: Every website north of 4chan or 8kun or any of the other subhuman cesspools in the dark underbelly of the Internet does some form of content moderation. If they didn’t, they’d be a swarming pit of child pornography and crypto scammers within a week. Substack, for example, bans adult pornography in its content guidelines.

It also bans “credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.” But it doesn’t ban people who advocate for these things. [2]

So, as several commentators have pointed out, the three-headed dog from hell that is Substack’s brain trust have drawn a line in the sand: Nazis on one side, boobies on the other.

No cannibals allowed

I get the whole slippery slope argument. Once you start banning Nazis, where do you stop? What about cannibals? Flesh-eating zombies? People who fart in elevators? (The answers are yes, yes, and hell yes.)

You know what? All slopes are slippery. Your ability to stay upright indicates what kind of person you are. And nobody asked you, HamChrisJai, to get into the user-generated content/platform business, bros. That was your brilliant idea.

To quote Peter Parker’s uncle, with great power comes great responsibility. Even though Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 absolves online platforms of liability for what users post on their sites, it doesn’t really absolve them of responsibility.

It seems a lot of people want the freedom to say whatever the hell they feel like, without taking responsibility for what happens next. Well, guess what? Free speech ain’t free.

Some moderation decisions are difficult. Some are not. If you’re slandering someone whose political opinions you disagree with, or telling people that drinking Clorox is a really good way to clean out those intestinal worms, or advocating for the violent overthrow of a freely elected government because the guy you like lost, you should consider yourself lucky if a platform ban is the worst thing that happens to you.

Fasten your seatbelts

Fair warning. It’s gonna be messy for a while here. Links from old posts may not work, some images and videos just refuse to make the transition, and I haven’t even begun thinking about how to transfer paid subscribers without you being charged twice. So bear with me.

But hopefully, Beehiiv will work out better than The Other Place, and I won’t have to pack up and move again when the neighbors starting blaring “Deutschland Uber Alles” from their Blaupunkt speakers.

What do you think of my new digs? Share your thoughts (and let me know if you’re having any problems with it) at crankyolddan AT gmail DOT com.

[1] Kudos to the Bassman, longtime friend, colleague, and mensch (but not a gonif), for the winning suggestion. Thanks for all my readers who offered up their input. Your participation trophies are in the mail.

[2] To be fair, Beehiiv’s terms of service are not much different, if at all. But its founder Tyler Lenk has gone on record saying Beehiiv will not tolerate Nazis on the site, so I will take them at their word.