[SlinkyOnStairs]

> At the same time the poem is published on Substack, instead of a hand-crafted custom blog.

Look. I am a massive fan of the janky old manually created website. <marquee> will never die and it is hilarious that browsers will have to retain the feature for years to come.

But "the blog was generated by a machine" isn't the problem with Substack. "Machine Generated" blog sites have been around ever since blogs went big. Blogspot and Wordpress were practically a duopoly in the peak days of blogging. The problem with Substack is two (really, only the latter):

1) It's gotten the Post-Zuckerberg "everything must follow our company letterhead" disease. That's not a substack exclusive problem and designers need to be bullied harder for it.

2) It's the nazi bar where all the nazi blogs are. This one is the actual reason you should not be using substack.

[holistio]

I'm building something that aims to take on a bunch of the issues Substack has. I'm aware of what you refer to in (2), I see the results of all the "use our agent to write content in your voice, _totally_ human" tools, I'm fed up with everything needing a recurring subscription.

But I'm not entirely sure what you refer to in (1). Would you care to elaborate? I'd love to learn more.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> I'm aware of what you refer to in (2), I see the results of all the "use our agent to write content in your voice, _totally_ human" tools, I'm fed up with everything needing a recurring subscription.

I'm sorry but I think you're misunderstanding.

I do not mean "nazi" euphemistically. Not general right-wing politics, not even such hardcore opposition to immigration that it borders on Nazism. Not even crypto-fascists. (No not the bitcoin kind) I mean they're hosting blogs written by out and open nazis. The swastika-armband wearing kind that names their blog "NatSocToday".

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...

There's some contrived argument about net neutrality in all this, but the Substack people have been pretty clear about their support for these nazis beyond merely hosting them. (And no matter how you look at it, being on "The Site With All The Nazis" despite many better alternative existing, is going to be a bad look)

> (1). Would you care to elaborate? I'd love to learn more.

Look at any contemporary Facebook page. Look at any of the older MySpace pages that preceded it. (e.g. A 2008 news article with a screenshot attached https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24161656)

Spot the difference.

Early platforms up to and including MySpace included functionality to write custom CSS (and HTML)

While Zuckerberg is not solely to blame, Facebook has popularized the removal of those features in favour of a uniform website design.

(And congratulations to the smart readers, who at this point in the reply have put together that the "MySpace-era" sites died and were supplanted by the (post-)Facebook era sites right around the same time when smartphones became big and that removing user-CSS features means the pages look the same in-app as on the web as well as making mobile-web responsiveness significantly easier.)

The consequence of this is a significantly more uniform and boring web, which amplifies the "soulless" feel of many of these newer Medium/Substack/etc blogs, as compared to older platforms.

[holistio]

> I do not mean "nazi" euphemistically.

I get it. There was a comma after my "(2)", I meant I see the nazis _and_ the slop.

[frankest]

The point is that that an “impurity” for some is a tool that lets many more others speak up and show their humanity. AI abused as a sales tactic becomes slop. For others may be a tool they use to finally build things they would have never ever been able to build before due to lack of access to skilled people that would help them. The poem hopefully sticks in that people who could express themselves should do it instead of outsourcing to AI. Thus the emotion it triggers will hopefully mitigate some of the disrespectful slop.