Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Thanks for reminding me that Van Jones needs to be slapped.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Bark louder, little dog.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Tech News and Issues / “I’m a Brown Person. Do You think People on Substack Should Say I Should Get Kicked Out of the Country?”

“I’m a Brown Person. Do You think People on Substack Should Say I Should Get Kicked Out of the Country?”

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This post is in: ,

This is the most damning interview I have seen to date with a glibertarian techbro, and it is shocking:

Mike Masnick at TechDirt breaks it down:

I get it. I totally get it. Every tech dude comes along and has this thought: “hey, we’ll be the free speech social media site. We won’t do any moderation beyond what’s required.” Even Twitter initially thought this. But then everyone discovers reality. Some discover it faster than others, but everyone discovers it. First, you realize that there’s spam. Or illegal content such as child sexual abuse material. And if that doesn’t do it for you, the copyright police will.

But, then you realize that beyond spam and content that breaks the rules, you end up with malicious users who cause trouble. And trouble drives away users, advertisers, or both. And if you don’t deal with the malicious users, the malicious users define you. It’s the “oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now” problem.

And, look, sure, in the US, you can run the Nazi bar, thanks to the 1st Amendment. But running a Nazi bar is not winning any free speech awards. It’s not standing up for free speech. It’s building your own brand as the Nazi bar and abdicating your own free speech rights of association to kick Nazis out of your private property, and to craft a different kind of community. Let the Nazis build their own bar, or everyone will just assume you’re a Nazi too.

It was understandable a decade ago, before the idea of “trust & safety” was a thing, that not everyone would understand all this. But it is unacceptable for the CEO of a social media site today to not realize this.

Enter Substack CEO Chris Best.

***

And your reputation when you refuse to moderate is not “the grand enabler of free speech.” Because it’s the internet itself that is the grand enabler of free speech. When you’re a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you’re the Nazi bar.

Most companies that want to get large enough recognize that playing to the grifters and the nonsense peddlers works for a limited amount of time, before you get the Nazi bar reputation, and your growth is limited. And, in the US, you’re legally allowed to become the Nazi bar, but you should at least embrace that, and not pretend you have some grand principled strategy.

This is what Nilay was getting at. When you’re not the government, you can set whatever rules you want, and the rules you set are the rules that will define what you are as a service. Chris Best wants to pretend that Substack isn’t the Nazi bar, while he’s eagerly making it clear that it is.

It’s stupidly short-sighted, and no, it won’t support free speech. Because people who don’t want to hang out at the Nazi bar will just go elsewhere.

Personally, I would add that in addition to calling it the Nazi Bar, we should call it what it is- a safe space for hate speech.

Reader Interactions

139Comments

  6. 6.

    Another Scott

    It was understandable a decade ago, before the idea of “trust & safety” was a thing, that not everyone would understand all this. But it is unacceptable for the CEO of a social media site today to not realize this.

    What??!

    Anyone who wants to have a space on the Internet that allows comments who doesn’t understand the history of USENET newsgroups is incompetent. This stuff was around in 1994 – almost 30 years ago for crying out loud.

    “I’m brilliant. Give me zillions! I’ll make the exact same mistakes that people made 30 years ago! We’ll all be rich!!1”

    (groucho-roll-eyes.gif)

    [/get-off-my-lawn]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  7. 7.

    Medicine Man

    For added foolishness, the free-speech Nazis are themselves against the free speech of their targets.

  9. 9.

    kalakal

    For someone who wants to build a successful social media enterprise he is either

    1. Cool with Nazis
    2. Has no experience of social media
    3. Both

    So he’s evil, a fool, or an evil fool

  11. 11.

    kalakal

    @Another Scott: Heh, even earlier, CIX ( the main UK BBS) started up as a FidoNet service in the early 80s. Dodgy stuff from the word go.

    Nice stuff too, you could chat with Terry Pratchett about gardening and cats

  13. 13.

    Kay

    Honestly free speech absolutists were always insufferable and Substack just sort of branded that and sold it back to them.

    The antiwokesters poke fun at “virtue signaling” but no one does more virtue signaling than these people.

  15. 15.

    planetjanet

    That interview was amazing.  How did the host keep his cool?  That is what fighting back looks like.  He just would not let the guy off of the subject.  The masterful touch was when the CEO was deflecting, he point blank  stated that you have to make these decisions, one way or the other.  There is no learning curve. You allow overt racism or you don’t.  Why is it so hard to say no?

  16. 16.

    The Moar You Know

    I set up my first blog in 2004.  It had comments.  Only my friends knew where it was.

    Took me one day to figure out it needed heavy-handed moderation.  And to realize some of my friends were idiots. It’s either that or no comments at all.

  17. 17.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Kay:

    But you see Kay, it’s not virtue signaling, when they do it. Only the evil leftists are NPCs and parrot talking points. The Right never ever does that, they’re all independent thinkers who love facts and logic. You can cut the hypocrisy with a knife

  18. 18.

    Kay

    @planetjanet:

    Why is it so hard to say no?

    Because his whole (insufferable) brand is “bravely standing up to the Speech Police”. Like all of them, he’s now tied himself in knots upon encounter with the real world and is completely incoherent.

  22. 22.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Baud:

    I’d love for a bunch of communists to dominate these spaces just to prove what hypocrites these people are.

    They pretty much already do that on cesspools like “Truth” Social and Parler

  24. 24.

    Starfish

    The framing in the long form of the interview was interesting. Nilay Patel’s premise was that as a platform that allows a bunch of writers to run their own writing businesses, Substack was able to skirt the moderation question. However, once they add the social elements through Substack Notes, they are then a social media company, and they have to treat moderation as a serious thing. The TikTok shows that Chris Best is not up to the task.

  25. 25.

    Kay

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    My favorite is when one of them says something obviously incorrect or incredibly dumb and they all have pretend to “see the value in this perspective”. It doesn’t matter how many times they get burned, either. Their ridiculous Elon Musk worship didn’t teach them a thing.

  26. 26.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Baud:

    Non-player character, a term from video games. From Know Your Meme:

    NPC Wojak is a depiction of the MS Paint character Wojak with a blank stare and facial expression, named after non-player characters within video games. The character is meant to represent people who do not think for themselves or are incapable of having an internal monologue, bearing many similarities to the terms “basic” and “normie.”

  30. 30.

    sukabi

    from that interview clip, it seems like Chris Best would be fine with building a Nazi Bar….he just doesn’t want to answer the question…. otherwise there’s no excuse for his evasions….cause it’s not like the last 10 years haven’t happened yet at all the other social media sites…

  32. 32.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Kay:

    Elon Musk even said he wants to “move past” the Twitter Files. It was a big wet fart and he wants it to go away. All of those RW idiots fell for it.

    And then when things don’t pan out, the silence is deafening from them and they move on to the next conservative outrage

  33. 33.

    Another Scott

    @planetjanet: Yup, it’s a good piece (I read the transcript).

    The CEO guy needed to figure out answers to questions like that before going on the show.  A “free speech” guy who won’t answer simple questions like do your terms of service mean anything? and you know Substack / Substack Notes will become a Nazi Bar if you don’t have and enforce standards, right? is in way over his head.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  34. 34.

    Kay

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    You’re maybe not old to remember this, but these are the same people who loftily announced we could no longer have campaign finance regulations of any kind without infringing on speech and backed the Citizens decision. Our politics is now a fucking corrupt cesspool because they’re idiots who told themselves fairy tales about how labor unions were as powerful as mega billionaires so “both sides” would be represented. They’re just not very bright.

  37. 37.

    Cameron

    So Mr. Best is cool with a site that allows Nazis and other free speakers?  I guess he’d also be cool owning a real-life bar where Nazis hung out and partied, right?

  42. 42.

    Eolirin

    @BruceJ: So, technically, before video games were popularized; Colossal Cave Adventure came out in 76, and Zork in 77. They were contemporaries of and heavily influenced by D&D.

    Pong was 72 and predated it.

  43. 43.

    BR

    Substack was funded in large part by Andreessen Horowitz, the now notorious crypto-bro VC firm that is led by two toxic founder/partners. The CEO of Substack knows who butters his bread, and knows he would be accused by his funders of succumbing to the “woke mind virus” if he said anything. He may also agree with them, but for sure he’s beholden to them. And the first big money Substackers who were *paid* by the platform were toxic dudes.

  44. 44.

    Betty

    I was amused by his use of the word “ideals” as if free speech exists in some kind of vacuum. And his telltale blinking when he was boxed in.

  46. 46.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    While we were gone, I read “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin. The central characters are video game designers. There’s a lot about how games and life are alike or different and what they get from gaming. At one point, someone says there’s no more intimate act than playing together. I thought it was really well done

  47. 47.

    MisterDancer

    When Jude Doyle started calling out Substack years ago for hosting writers who engaged in harassment against Trans people, and not enforcing their TOS in those cases? That was a sign. I left Substack myself at that point, and have felt really uncomfortable with paying for subs of people I like still on the service.

    And this interview? Is a part of what I suspected was the thinking, why I personally stepped away from Substack. Not just to show support to Trans folx, but because I know thru painful experience that when some other group gets targeted AND the service hosting that shit  decides that’s cool, no need to interfere and protect Those Other People?

    My Big Black Ass is next.

    And the lesson of the 21st Century, so far, is that ANYONE not towing this toxic line, is a target, these days.

  48. 48.

    twbrandt

    @BR: I’ve always been saddened by Marc Andreesen. He was the co-author of Mosaic, one of the first web browsers and arguably responsible for popularizing the World Wide Web. That he became this toxic asshole is infuriating. Perhaps he was always a toxic asshole.

  50. 50.

    BR

    @twbrandt: I have wondered if he was always this way or whether making billions made him this way or if the culture has shifted to convert people like him into the authoritarian way of thinking or some combination.

  52. 52.

    MisterDancer

    @twbrandt: Perhaps he was always a toxic asshole.

    A lot of them were, and we just never knew because it never was in our face. More became so as the years wore on and radicalization efforts have grown.

    I think of Richard Stallman in this — I had to intervene when the guy set up to harass a friend at a con, of all the fucking things I never expected to see in my life. (For those unaware, the GNU license for so much of the internet’s software was created by him, and he and his crew built some of the fundamental software for our modern age.) Eric Raymond — the guy who coined the term “open source” — is another who turned out to be shite in his politics, if not personal life.

    Hell, there’s actions of mine that I will regret for the rest of my days, actions I try to remember and learn from. But folx like them ain’t up for learning, and are in fact disincentivized from course correcting, which is where the real issues begin.

  53. 53.

    Roger Moore

    @Kay:

    The antiwokesters poke fun at “virtue signaling” but no one does more virtue signaling than these people.

    For them, I think it’s more of vice signalling.

  54. 54.

    BR

    @Roger Moore: ​
      Not just vice signaling but power signaling. They want to show off the power they have over others, the harm they can do without consequence, and the fact that they can exploit rules that apply to others but not to them.

  55. 55.

    twbrandt

    @MisterDancer: I knew Stallman was a pretty awful person, but he was always rather strange in any case. I did not know about Raymond.

    I’m a software engineer, and most (although certainly not all) of the engineers I’ve worked over the years are decent people personally, and left-leaning politically. This is true both in the Midwest where I live and when I was working for a startup in San Francisco. It’s really upsetting when people in this field become (or reveal themselves to be) so awful. Maybe I’m just too naïve.

  56. 56.

    laura

    Nazi CEO Best, bent himself into quite the pretzel as he so very much wanted to say yes, Yes, HELL YES I will allow vile racist filth on this site because I am a vile racist filthy nazi. Fuck him, his fellow travelers and all who truck with that shite.

  57. 57.

    BR

    @twbrandt: ​
    I think there’s a labor struggle happening in tech as much as other parts of society. Tech was and is one of the few sectors where someone can get a job where one can fully support a family on a single income like was possible 50 years ago. That means it’s the last sector of workers where the powers that be haven’t successfully kept the labor pool in check.

    You see this dynamic in the comments made by Musk and lots of VCs, who crap all over tech workers as being infected by the “woke mind virus” and all the rest. They want to convert some tech workers (and they have, but not many) but more than anything they want to put them in their place and show that the VC bros and CEOs are in charge, as it always was in other sectors.

  59. 59.

    Redshift

    @MisterDancer:

    Eric Raymond — the guy who coined the term “open source” — is another who turned out to be shite in his politics, if not personal life.

    I knew Eric Raymond before all that, and he was an asshole in personal life too.

  60. 60.

    twbrandt

    @BR: I think that is absolutely true and the real reason the FAANGs and other tech companies are laying off tens of thousands of employees.

  61. 61.

    BR

    @twbrandt: ​

    @twbrandt: ​
    Also as AI puts downward pressure on engineer salaries, because 75% of what junior engineers do is soon going to be automated by cost-cutting CEOs, I bet this fight will get more lively, with tech workers pushing for unions and CEOs using the usual tactics to make workers feel precarious while undercutting unionization.

  62. 62.

    Marc

    @BR: I was acquainted with Andreesen in his post-Mosaic pre-Netscape days.  I’d occasionally go out drinking with him and friends we had in common.  He was an asshole before becoming a billionaire.  Of course, that was true of many white dudes (which I’m not) I knew in Silicon Valley back in the 80s and 90s.  The SV VC/startup network pretty much self-selected for assholes.

  63. 63.

    Joey Maloney

    @MisterDancer: The main thing I remember about Eric Raymond, the one time I met him in person, was his terrible, and I mean TERRIBLE, breath. Growing up in fandom I’m well-used to guys with indifferent standards of hygiene but this was a league apart.

    Other than that he was a nice enough person to talk to, though as you say his politics are shite.

  64. 64.

    billcinsd

    @Eolirin: Technically D&D began to be developed in 1967-1970, it wasn’t published until 1974. Computer games go back to at least 1962 with Spacewar which was a fun game

  65. 65.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @twbrandt:

    “Nazi bar” is in reference to this post.

    Back in the glorious days of a misspent youth, punks would immediately beat the shit out of any Nazi punks who showed up at bars or clubs for exactly that reason. It was the only effective deterrent.

  66. 66.

    Redshift

    @Eolirin:

    So, technically, before video games were popularized; Colossal Cave Adventure came out in 76, and Zork in 77. They were contemporaries of and heavily influenced by D&D.

    Pong was 72 and predated it.

    I’ll give you Pong, but I don’t recall the non-graphic games being called video games. They were computer games (or for these specific ones, text adventures.)

  67. 67.

    way2blue

    Reminds me of a bar in Davis (years ago) that offered cheap beer to attract UCD students and instead became a biker bar…

  70. 70.

    twbrandt

    @BR: I’m skeptical that AI will replace very many engineers, even juniors, though VC/CEOs will certainly try. The rest of your comment is spot on I think.

  71. 71.

    Eolirin

    @twbrandt: FAANG was always weird, given that it left MS out when MS has always been bigger than Facebook.

    But I also think there’s a lot of group think in the C-suites of the industry and especially the shareholders. Once one of them starts widespread cutbacks because they’re concerned about a recession they all start making cutbacks. They parrot the same lines about some new trend, all try to push the same advances. No one wants to get left behind the others. Everyone’s looking for the next hype cycle. It’s a mess.

  72. 72.

    Eolirin

    @BR: Well, Microsoft won’t be doing that, given the agreement they signed with the CWA, and they’re the ones who are furtherest ahead on having the tech necessary to replace software engineers.

  73. 73.

    justawriter

    @kindness: I remember one newsgroup that had a function that removed a, e, i, o, u, and y from comments from certain participants and came with a warning that “trolls and nazis will be diemvoweled.”

  76. 76.

    dmsilev

    @twbrandt: One of the stories about Stallman that stuck with me was that (a) he had or perhaps still has an intense dislike or phobia about indoor plants and (b) he was and is a perpetual harasser of women in the workplace. Ergo, women who took jobs in places like the MIT AI lab where they might have to deal with him (this being before there was any semblance of institutional pushback against harassment) started cultivating indoor jungles basically just to keep him at a safe distance.

  80. 80.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @sab:

    Wasn’t that sort of the start of Antifa?

    Well, I’d say Antifa started in WWII, but there definitely was a resurgence in the late1970s/1980s after white power/Nazi skinheads starting use the punk scene for cover.* Enough so that in 1981 the seminal punk band, the Dead Kennedys released a song titled “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.”

    *The appropriation of fascist iconography had been common in punk for some time, often ironically, but the irony was not always clear to the extent that it began attracting the organized far-right to punk concerts.

  81. 81.

    Eolirin

    @Redshift: I’m not sure the distinction matters now, and I’m not sure it was anything other than the language not having fully settled even back then.

    The Atari 2600 was ’77. Home consoles were more or less contemporary with D&D.

  82. 82.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Ksmiami: I used to love Infocom games.

    Actually, the first all text video game I remember playing was Empire of the Overmind in 1981. I played it with my kid, who was 5 at the time and already a gamer. I had to explain why Jerry Lee Lewis should be singing Great Balls of Fire in hell.

  83. 83.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Eolirin:

    But I also think there’s a lot of group think in the C-suites of the industry and especially the shareholders. Once one of them starts widespread cutbacks because they’re concerned about a recession they all start making cutbacks. They parrot the same lines about some new trend, all try to push the same advances. No one wants to get left behind the others. Everyone’s looking for the next hype cycle. It’s a mess.

    Social contagion layoffs are also a way for CEOs/companies to hide the consequences of bad bets and bad decisions. If you’re the only coming doing layoffs, Wall Street is going to hammer you. If lots of companies are doing layoffs, you can always officially chalk it up to “economic uncertainties,” and unofficially Wall Street buys into the sort of group-think you described. So it’s not the Zuckerberg poured billions down a rathole, rather Meta is “pivoting” to new opportunities.

    That said, this year’s layoffs clearly have a punitive edge to them, intended to show who’s boss. The C-suite folks were not happy that workers were pushing back against things like mandatory back-to-office requirements. Plus many of the layoffs were incredibly abrupt and scattershot, including valuable, highly-skilled employees with extensive company experience — exactly the last people people you’d want to get rid of.

  84. 84.

    Redshift

    @BR:

    I bet this fight will get more lively, with tech workers pushing for unions and CEOs using the usual tactics to make workers feel precarious while undercutting unionization.

    Also because more senior engineers will realize that of you replace 75% of junior engineers with AI, in a few years you won’t have enough senior engineers who’ve learned on the job how to take the grunt work the AI can do and turn it into something complete.

  85. 85.

    Eolirin

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m much younger than you, so played the Infocom games well after they came out, and man, they held up really well.

    There has been some interesting modern work that harkens back to that era, but man do I wish there was more of it.

  86. 86.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Eolirin: Non-AI “low-code/no-code” business workflow automation solutions are also growing rapidly, and will also undoubted make a dent in basic programming jobs. While they do need specialists do some key work behind the scenes, the whole selling point is that employees can create their own apps (e.g. a safety issue reporting/resolution app) while having to wait for programmers to build one.

    While that’s good in some ways, I fear that having people with no experience in user interface/user experience design building these app will lead to internal enterprise app being even more user unfriendly than they are now. (Insert emergency #NotAllEnterpriseApps, but on the whole, they’ve got a reputation….)

  87. 87.

    Redshift

    @Joey Maloney: 

    The main thing I remember about Eric Raymond, the one time I met him in person, was his terrible, and I mean TERRIBLE, breath. Growing up in fandom I’m well-used to guys with indifferent standards of hygiene but this was a league apart.

    Reminds me of a story from a female friend of mine in fandom who he was pursuing unsuccessfully at one point. He said “you just don’t want to sleep with me because I’m handicapped!” and she replied, “no, Eric, I don’t want to sleep with you because you don’t bathe!”

  88. 88.

    Starfish

    @twbrandt: There are a lot of software engineers out there with very bad ideas or very simplistic views of society and politics.

    A lot of people were submitting talks titled “Make X Great Again” to various conferences during the Trump era.

    David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is pretty notorious, and Robert C. Martin has a bunch of terrible ideas.

    There was all the Curtis Yarvin mess some years back.

    A lot of software engineers think that they would win in some sort of capitalist dystopia because they are getting paid a lot in the society we have now, and they are just not very good at considering society and resource allocation. Some of them are learning now, after having lost their jobs.

  90. 90.

    Steeplejack

    @twbrandt:

    My memory, possibly faulty, is that FAANG was a Wall Street term for hot technology stocks, and Microsoft was already old, cold and boring.

    (For non-techie readers, FAANG = Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google.)

  91. 91.

    Eolirin

    @Sister Golden Bear: I think it’s likely that those tools will evolve in a way that improves the baseline UX, even if they get worse in the short term. One of the benefits of good app building frameworks is that you can build a lot of good UX practices in. And the AI may eventually get good at understanding UX best practices.

    My bigger concern is that people might start building apps with really bad logic that returns bad output without catching it before using it for decision making. Though we have that problem already with people using data in very wrong ways.

  92. 92.

    Marc

    @Redshift:I’ll give you Pong, but I don’t recall the non-graphic games being called video games. They were computer games (or for these specific ones, text adventures.)

    We did call them text adventure games when I was in college during the early-70s, as they were originally programmed  and played on Teletypes and video terminals that emulated Teletypes.  Colossal Cave Adventure (which we simply called Adventure) was not the first of these games, I’d argue that was Hamurabi (aka King of Sumeria) which dates back to 1962.

  97. 97.

    Roger Moore

    @Eolirin:

    My understanding from some of the stuff that’s been published recently is that Facebook, at least, was hiring like crazy even when they didn’t have any jobs for the people they were hiring.  They wanted to hire everyone so their potential competitors would be able to hire them.  It was stupid and unsustainable.  It never really made sense to hire those people in the first place, so it made all kinds of sense to lay them off.

    That’s not to say the tech sector doesn’t have a terrible labor record.  There was a big antitrust case not that long ago in which it came out that the FAANG companies had agreed not to try to hire anyone away from each other in an attempt to suppress wages.  They’re just awful.

  98. 98.

    H.E.Wolf

    @justawriter: I remember one newsgroup that had a function that removed a, e, i, o, u, and y from comments from certain participants and came with a warning that “trolls and nazis will be diemvoweled.”

     Yes; and a woman (Teresa Nielsen Hayden) invented it!
    https://www.techdirt.com/2021/08/18/content-moderation-case-study-boingboing-begins-disemvoweling-trolls-2007/

    Teresa Nielsen Hayden is quoted here, in more detail: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2005/03/dealing_with_tr.html

  99. 99.

    PST

    @sukabi:

    from that interview clip, it seems like Chris Best would be fine with building a Nazi Bar….he just doesn’t want to answer the question….

    That makes him the Tim Scott of social media.

  100. 100.

    Dangerman

    I just drove by a Trump Table inna random parking lot in CA. They looked very lonely. Do they not get that Trump will lose by roughly a billion votes in CA? Sure, they are there to sell a few shirts, but, cmon, you’ll do better picking up aluminum cans on the street here. Losers.

  103. 103.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Eolirin:

    I think it’s likely that those tools will evolve in a way that improves the baseline UX, even if they get worse in the short term. One of the benefits of good app building frameworks is that you can build a lot of good UX practices in. And the AI may eventually get good at understanding UX best practices.

    I agree that it could happen. But that requires the business workflow automation companies to recognize the value of incorporating good user experience into their app building frameworks (used by employees within client companies), and be willing to hire the right people and put resources into making it happen. But currently they’ve still got an extremely engineering-centric mindset. Ask me how I know.

  105. 105.

    Eolirin

    @Sister Golden Bear: It just requires one of them to. I have some hope that someone will realize there’s a big competitive advantage in doing it, eventually at least.

    And let’s be honest, the bar they need to get over for it to be an improvement over the current state of the art is pretty low.

  107. 107.

    Ruckus

    @Baud:

    Free speech for me but not for thee.

    That’s what most people really mean.

    @MisterDancer:

    Hell, there’s actions of mine that I will regret for the rest of my days, actions I try to remember and learn from. But folx like them ain’t up for learning, and are in fact disincentivized from course correcting, which is where the real issues begin.

    I don’t believe you’d be human if you didn’t have those actions/words. Mistakes/missteps are how we learn. Or don’t. The better of us actually learn better from not or decent from not or good from bad. Whatever you call it life is a learning adventure or it isn’t. But it is far better when one actually learns, especially from the mistakes and or asinine actions/words that we all do.

  108. 108.

    Dangerman

    @Sister Golden Bear: I just hope they’re not so fucking stupid as to the buy all those shirts and shit up front without an unbreakable  guarantee for complete returns on that frontloading.

    Else ….. suckerzzzzzzzzz.

  109. 109.

    Subsole

     

     

    @BR: The way neofascism spreads really, really does make me question if there isn’t something to the idea of social contagion/toxic memes.

    Oh, hey. The people rolling around on the floor in the middle of WallyMart screeching about woke mind virii seem to have succumbed to a thought pattern/worldview that acts like an infectious agent.

     

    Every accusation really IS a confession.

  111. 111.

    Subsole

    @BR:

    This is all just fascism with a new coat of paint.

    These guys are what Southern Planters would have been if we’d let the South go back when.

  112. 112.

    Benw

    I was going to punch a Nazi. But holy crap they have pretty scary tats and are also way buffer than me so maybe I’ll just keep my head down

  114. 114.

    Steve in the ATL

    Friendly reminder: jump in the lake to wash off your sweat. Otherwise, the bear will be attracted to the salt and eat you.

  117. 117.

    El Muneco

    @Eolirin: The thing is, tabletop RPG NPCs are played by the GM, and often are even better drawn and portrayed than the PCs themselves. Whereas NPCs in video games tend to be ciphers with limited, fixed dialogue, very simple scripting, and any lore beyond that is either an afterthought or undiscoverable by the player.

    It’s this kind of NPC that the term of dismissal is echoing – they’re saying that people they disagree with have a limited set of thought patterns and their responses are entirely scripted. It goes along with the “Orange Man Bad” libel.

  118. 118.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Eolirin: Agreed, but as someone who was brought into one of these companies specifically because I’ve got extensive B2C experience in order bring a “consumer-grade experience” it’s definitely an uphill battle — and I’m working on something that’s public-facing.

    The great thing about programmers (and other engineering types) is they think differently than 95% of the population. The unfortunate thing is that most of them — including C-suite folks with engineering backgrounds — is that they don’t realize that they think differently than 95% of the population. “Whatya mean a command-line prompt interface is hard for people to use?!” I exaggerate, but sadly not necessarily that much. The rare programmer who truly gets user experience is someone I definitely professionally shower with love and affection — and donuts, etc. back when I worked in an office.

    @Dangerman: [narrator voice] They were in fact, so fucking stupid.

  119. 119.

    Another Scott

    @Steve in the ATL: Ah.

    I don’t think I ever played Zork.  Adventure, yes.

    “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike…”

    And there was some Star Trek game on the time-shared computer at the University of Dayton around 1978 or so that we played in high school.  Quite limited.  Some god would kill you if you went to the edge of the “universe”.  I might still have a printout of the source around here somewhere…

    :-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  120. 120.

    Rand Careaga

    @MisterDancer:

    I think of Richard Stallman in this — I had to intervene when the guy set up to harass a friend at a con, of all the fucking things I never expected to see in my life.

    In the mid-eighties, Stallman was briefly putting the make on my then-wife. At one point I answered the telephone, and it was Stallman himself (visiting town, I think) who, on being told that she wasn’t in at the moment, asked me to inquire of her whether she was available to have dinner with him that evening. “I’ll certainly pass that on,” I told him, with pardonable coolness (having previously identified my own status).

    This I did. She was horrified. “That guy? Oh my god. If he calls back, tell him I’ve had to go out of town. Tell him I’ve left the country. Ick! He’s repellant!”

    Oddly enough, she did leave the country a few years later, settling in Germany, after another, presumably more presentable tech luminary (he, like Stallman, has a Wikipedia entry), nicked her in 1986.

  121. 121.

    GibberJack

    @twbrandt: I believe it will.

    This is on the last 30 years of software engineers.

    They have refused to become a profession like physicians or lawyers or CPAs or real (licensed) engineers. It’s a trade not a professional practice.

    The part that is extremely difficult to be replaced by AI is exactly what many software engineers have refused to make a part of their work.

    And what exactly is a software engineer? It’s a made-up title, one bestowed by a company.

    Can one obtain a degree in “SE”? Is there even a software engineering school? What about licensure? Professional insurance and legal accountability with a defined standard of practice? Can such an engineer suffer legal consequences for negligence, or failing to meet a standard of care? Can they be barred from practicing software engineering? Well, one would need to have established software engineering as a professional practice first, no?

    None of these things exist for “software engineers”. There is no standard or obligation to the public or to a client. The state licensure exams for architects have nothing to do with aesthetics.

    The ethics are missing. The personal legal consequences for failing to protect the public or meet a standard of practice are missing.

    The hard part of a profession, the judgement calls, the ethics, the grey areas that may result in harm are not going to be accomplished by AI. But that’s the part software engineers have eschewed.

    It’s the lack of these aspects in software engineering that lends itself more to being replaced by AI than, say, driving a car.

  123. 123.

    Ivan X

    Did anyone here ever play the Infocom adventure A Mind Forever Voyaging? It’s not especially good as an adventure or puzzle solving game, but it’s possibly the best example of interactive fiction, and the political story it tells is right in line with the way most of us here see things — a prosperous (if flawed) future US elects a right wing demagogue promising “national renewal,” and despite things seeming ok at first, over decades society descends into authoritarianism, oligarchy, corruption, theocracy, and finally barbarism.

    (Your goal as the protagonist is to project, with the aid of a computer, these future years before they happen, research them, and ultimately subvert them before these policies can take place in real life.)

    Really a great, overlooked work of using the medium to tell a story; it was also a commercial failure, which I do sort of understand — there was nothing like it, and it was a lot, without having much of the puzzle solving fun people expected from adventures. It’s too bad it was never novelized, but maybe it wouldn’t have worked as well.

    The author wrote it in 1985 as a response to Reaganism.

  127. 127.

    different-church-lady

    “Why do all these Nazis I allow to hang out in my bar keep trying to turn the place into a Nazi bar?”

  128. 128.

    EthylEster

    Late to the thread so maybe someone else pointed this out: CEO says basically “We just released this product and soon we will figure out terms of service”. Wrong! Figure this out before you go public, asshole. And I really liked the interviewer saying to CEO “You know this is the wrong answer, right?” Clearly this was news to CEO.

  130. 130.

    Another Scott

    @H.E.Wolf: Speaking of DeLong, here’s his response to the Nazi Bar thought experiment:

    […]

    Then, of course, there is the question of whether Chris, Hamish, and company actually want to get into the algorithmic-feed business at all. I understand that they very much want people to find more SubStacks that they will enjoy, that they will find inform them, and those that they will be willing to pay for. But accomplishing that, without going over the line into the outrage-engagement-clickbait destructive vicious circle will be very, very difficult. Quite possibly they should direct their energy in other directions.

    Josh Barro’s recommendation that only those paying for the SubStack service infrastructure should be allowed to post or reply seems to me too have a great deal of potential wisdom in it…

    DeLong has experimented with just about every “new communications thing” as it appears on the Internet, to see how suitable it is for enhancing his teaching (among other things). The folks who are blinded by dollar signs would be wise to step back and think about what they’re doing and read more DeLong.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  131. 131.

    cain

    @Eolirin: ​
     
    Here is something that should frighten them. If AI can do junior and evolve to senior engineer anyone can be a CEO.
    Disruption will be a company that is unpredictable.

  133. 133.

    cain

    Such great stories on rms and esr. I’ve met both of them and they are terrible. As part of a free software project we run into all kinds. The desktop projects like gnome and kde tend to be progressive although they have their issues.

  134. 134.

    strange visitor (from another planet)

    probably a dead thread but it was always pretty simple: white laces= white power/ neo nazi, red laces= commie punk or anarchist skinhead

  135. 135.

    LiminalOwl

    @justawriter: Hurrah for Teresa Nielsen Hayden! And it looks like Making Light has returned, or at least the process of resurrection is under way.

    (Dead thread, no doubt, but if anybody besides me goes back to read…)

  137. 137.

    RobertS

    A shout-out to Nilay, who has put his finger right on it: “Content Moderation is the Product”:

    https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation

    Nilay has articulated something that like all great insights is obvious when you look back on it – Right wingers and other associated assholes will ruin social spaces if you let them.

    That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes.

    As others have pointed out, we learned this on USENET way back when.     These same assholes are often misogynists, so Women of the Internet(TM) learned this first hand way before men figured it out.

    The modern Republican party is just a larger embodiment of this same struggle – the assholes have injected themselves into public life, and are even making laws to foist their toxic worldview onto the rest of us.    The “Nazi Bar” analogy is perfect.   Once you let these people in, they are very hard to get out.

    I guess I’m not going to check out substack after all…  This doesn’t bode well.

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