[wpietri]

That philosophical stance is very common at the beginnings of a platform. E.g., Twitter being the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party". Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. But over time, tensions develop between the theory and the practice.

So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support?

From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that category. What about, say, open antisemitism? Will you host and help fund the American Nazi Party or the KKK? How about more borderline actors, like people who promote racist conspiracy theories and ethnic cleansing, but stop short of direct calls for violence?

[Zababa]

> Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan.

4chan has never been about free speech, it had rules since the beginning which are constantly enforced.

[krapp]

If your definition of free speech requires that a platform have no rules whatsoever, then there has never been a free speech platform anywhere on the internet, because such a platform would have to accept illegal content and spam, and could never moderate anything.

[Zababa]

But that's not my point, 4chan has clear rules that are not about illegal content: https://4chan.org/rules. There are moderators/janitors enforcing thoses rules and a report system. The first rule is:

"1. You will not upload, post, discuss, request, or link to anything that violates local or United States law."

But that's only the first rule. There are 17 global rules, and each board has a few.

[wpietri]

Exactly. My point with Poole is that he started a platform that was much more accepting than competitor sites. Eventually he wasn't happy with how it turned out and walked away from it. Easy enough to do when it's a small operation. But with a larger operation like Twitter staff are invested enough that they won't just say "fuck it". So you see stronger TOSes build up over time.

[zozbot234]

Why would these actors want to publish on Substack in the first place? They have their own platforms already. Alt-right content is highly "meme" based (e.g. the whole thing with frogs and 'Kekistan', or the Qanon LARPing), it doesn't do well on a platform focused on long-form texts with serious intellectual interest.

[meowface]

I'm not trying to promote their blog and am not a fan of it and won't link it, but I know of at least one Substack blog by one such actor who indeed makes their blog highly meme-based. The fact that you can insert arbitrary inline images in blog posts and write whatever text you want near them is pretty much all you need.

[wpietri]

One obvious answer is revenue. Getting money in is a real struggle for extremists, who tend to get banned from traditional platforms. Think of it as like paying membership dues.