SocraticGadfly: A couple of things that suck about Substack

September 28, 2022

A couple of things that suck about Substack

And that's beyond their tilt toward wingnuts and disinformation.

Rather, it's about Substack as a medium.

The first, that I only realized a couple of weeks ago, is that you can't block people period. You can ban them from commenting on YOUR Substack blog (let's call it what it is) but you CANNOT do a generic ban, like if you're commenting on someone else's site and then some wingnut-squared asswipe makes a response to you that on Twitter, Medium or Disqus, would get an immediate block.

You can't do it at Substack.

One big thing brought this up.

I had an asswipe on a third party Substack. And, I didn't know this until after I said "bye, the normal social media way." Oops after I got six more responses from someone bigger into "owning the libs" than Trump himself.

The second is, contra Blogger and Wordpress, there's no advance content moderation controls, whether for asswipes or spammers, especially Indian or Chinese link spammers.

Those two right there devalue it as a medium. I mean, speaking of mediums, Medium lets you set up subscriber-only posts. So does Patreon. (It, too, has comment moderation IIRC; don't think Medium does.)

What brought THIS up is being banned from Jessica Wildfire's Substack blog.

And, in turn, that leads to something else that sucks.

After being banned, I hit the "unsub" button three times within the first four days, the second and third because I got additional OK Doomer fearmongering (for bucks?) posts after hitting "unsub" the first time.

That one may be on Google, though. The first, and I think, the second time, I was hitting an unsub button that popped up within my Gmail on browser. Thanks, Google.

Anyway, the fact that you can't block people across the board on Substack is, I'm sure, deliberate.

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