She was pretty emotional at times. She only really smiled the once. You can see that it fucked her up a little bit, she’s just got enough fire not to let it bother her on camera and mostly get on with what she feels like needs to be said. That is my read of it at least, from my uninformed perspective.

Matrix is an absolutely pale imitation of Discord.

Yes it is very upsetting that the most popular chat platform in the Western world is in league with Sauron, but Matrix as a replacement is a glorified ICQ client that regularly yells at you that your device is untrusted now and there’s no hope of fixing it, you loser.

Removed by mod

That’s why I used the specific phrasing “had it downloaded to their computer” instead of claiming that they were the ones to do it. You’ll notice that those users in your footprint also fall into a category of people which this won’t do a damn thing to influence.

Ding ding ding

Maybe so. But Chrome got there some way, their computer didn’t come with it. 100% of the computers in that sample came with Edge configured as the browser and nothing else installed, and 81.95% of them are currently accessing the internet using something else. That to me indicates some kind of decisive action to use something else, on somebody’s part, and also that Microsoft’s years-long endeavor to correct the “problem” by just continuing to ask like a drunk man at the bar in the hopes that the answer will change is not a winner for most people who use computers at this point.

Probably it’s only as low as 81.95% because they do stuff like this. Obviously those people do still exist in a big contingent. My feeling is though that it’s no longer 1998 and there’s no longer this supermajority of AOL users out there who are confused by the very concept of a browser. Those people are in old folks’ homes now, their kids who grew up programming are the middle-aged people of today who aren’t hip to apps and TikTok, but they do understand about browsers. That’s just my feeling and a narrative I produced out of my ass, sure, but it does seem to match the data.

Citation: It is known

How many of them? How do you know?

“Many. It is known.”

I also like how you put “users” in quotes for some reason. Anyway, good talk.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2025-q1

Check “Market Share by OS” and switch it to Windows. Every one of those 67.359% of people who is using Chrome had it downloaded to their computer on purpose instead of just clicking “Internet” and getting Edge. Obviously they feel strongly enough to do that, so I don’t see how they would be amenable to losing all their bookmarks and settings and just going with Edge when one day their OS tries to trick them into it.

I love how in their minds this is going to be a win. Like there are going to be all these people out there who just quietly accept that they’ll use Microsoft Edge from now on, and also in addition not form any kind of revision to their brand impression of Microsoft going forward.

I am sure there are some people who just kind of don’t give a fuck about computers who that will be accurate for, but I feel like it’s a much smaller minority than Microsoft seems to think that it is.

Sure. Show me the full context, where before saying that Clarence Thomas was a greater man than MLK Jr he says, “I’m going to list out a few examples of statements which, if you ever hear someone say after a blow to the head, mean they should go to the hospital right away. Number one:”.

Holy God man. I expected it to be bad and it was so much worse.

I do understand saying deliberately wrong things just to get attention, and I think assassinating anybody is a horrifying and wrong thing to do, but out of all the variety, the thing about Clarence Thomas being greater than MLK Jr makes me want to go punch his corpse in the face.

Yeah. There would be a way to do it that I feel like might potentially be useful. The described method (doing clustering instead of just having a similarity threshold to group tabs together, vectorizing the entire tab title through a whole fucking network instead of just tokenizing it and calling two tabs similar if they have uncommon tokens that are within a certain similarity level) really sounds to me like people who have no real idea what they’re doing, just being “ML experts” all over the codebase and fucking things up, and probably walking away very proud of themselves while helping themselves to bunches and bunches of the Mozilla Foundation’s Google-money.

Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money?

Spoken like someone who’s never interacted with Silicon Valley VCs… just imagine someone with tons of a money, a moderately competent business background, and very little understanding of even the basics of technology that you and I take for granted. And then make them stupid and greedy.

“AI? Yes please! Here’s some money, I’ve heard of Firefox so I know you’re good for it.” It’s not really any more complicated than that, I don’t think.

This is vital context. They didn’t disable his truck because he talked trash about it. He loves his Cybertruck. They disabled it because he’s black and dances around like a black person while he’s talking about it, and that means he’s not welcome at the party. If he was Tim Pool making a song about how much he loves his Cybertruck they’d have invited him to the next event to put it on stage.

It is hard to get account-banned from Reddit. Like mad hard. I mean, I’m not up on current events over there, maybe things have changed and they brand you as “antisemitic” and ban your account sometimes, but I feel like much more likely is that this is a you issue.

No, everyone doesn’t deserve a second chance. Certainly not everyone deserves a fourth chance, on the same platform.

If I were in a conspiratorial frame of mind, I might think that there are people who are trying to push the “Substack = Nazis” narrative, by spreading it around in contexts where the “official” content of their message is actually something different, which is usually a lot more effective at spreading the gestalt you’re trying to spread around than just spamming “Substack = Nazis” everywhere.

The whole framing of the underlying freakout, that if Substack sent you a push notification about somebody’s blog, they’re obviously endorsing it, and it’s “being pushed algorithmically” by Substack, and look, here’s this very visual-picture-friendly juxtaposition of the Nazi logo in a Substack notification, even if the actual accusation is being walked by to “I think they should ban Nazis and this shouldn’t even be an issue” (which would be a fair thing to say) and “I’m alarmed that they took VC money from some pretty suspect people at different points in their history” (which would be a fair thing to say).

But, that’s not what they lead with. What they lead with is “don’t take any action” (they did take action), “‘oops, all nazis’ notifications issue” (not even sure what that means, but Substack is overwhelmingly leftist obviously, not “oops all nazis”)… you get the idea. There’s some other innuendo stuff in there, implying that “free speech” is just a cover because Substack loves Nazis so much that they’re hosting a ton of solid left-wing journalists and providing them funding, just so they can have a handy excuse to host this one Nazi blog with 768 followers, which is the real goal.

Ask me if I’m salty about this whole conversation lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy (I just learned about this one and since then I’ve been seeing it everywhere; Lemmy people love to do it it seems like)

from content on their site, that they full control

They don’t. Or, rather, to exactly the degree that Google “controls” the mail servers that forwarded the spam email to you.

Anyway, you seem to be grasping the point I was making now, so great. Anyway, to me, the bottom line is: It’s better to let people talk. I federated with Hexbear and lemmy.ml, too (or did, back when I had a server of my own, sniff), for exactly the same reason. It’s not Substack’s fault that there are Nazis in the world, and in this particular case and framing, I don’t think moving them to some other segregated platform does anyone any good. I actually think it helps the Nazis a lot to separate them from the main flow of information exchange. I realize I’m in the minority in thinking all of this.

The best way to combat that is not having Nazi shit.

Banning Nazi shit, especially if you are now taking a ton of money from standard silicon valley VCs, is the first step towards banning all “antisemitic” shit. It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump away. I think I actually had this exact conversation specifically about Substack with someone, at great length, a few years ago, and they were pointing to Germany as an example of how it should work (banning Nazi shit), and I pointed out that the same laws could easily be used against pro-Palestinians, and they all told me I was crazy.

AND OH, LOOK WHAT HAPPENED IN GERMANY

We’re probably not going to see eye to eye on it. Whatever. Anyway: I’m not in favor of Nazis. I’m in favor of left-wing platforms. I’m noticing that you are not taking the standpoint “We need to get the Nazis off Substack, because it’s a good thing, but the Nazis are horrifying.” That would actually be totally reasonable to me even though it’s not my opinion. You’re taking the standpoint “Fuck Substack all the homies hate Substack,” apparently, which I have a problem with. Or that seems to be your stance. Am I wrong? Maybe so, if so tell me.

I don’t like policing people’s speech, even when literal Nazis are involved. I’m probably in the minority on that. But I just don’t like all the disingenuous ways of attacking Substack that all seem to boil down to some pretty dishonest framings… everything you’re saying now, I think is more or less reasonable, we just don’t agree on it. As long as you’re not saying “SUBSTACK IS PROMOTING NAZI BLOGS ON PURPOSE BECAUSE THEY’RE NAZIS,” as some people seem to be, I think we good.

Are you under the impression that someone at Substack manually reviews every notification that goes out, for every user-generated post / blog? I feel like you failed to grasp the essential point I was making. Yes, comparing it to “Google is sending me push notifications about herbal supplements!” is precisely the analogy I’m intending to make. You are aware that those email notifications are also push notifications, sent to you by Google, based on user-generated content, right?

I have no idea what youre on about with the URL

Seems pretty straightforward to me. Is there a better way I can explain it to you, do you have any questions about the explanation? What part doesn’t make sense?

I have no idea if Substack is planning to take this blog down (actually I kind of doubt it, now looking into it more). But it seems like you’re failing to grasp really incredibly simple things that I’m saying, which makes me kind of not trust your overall judgement about what the far more complex issue of what the right overall judgement and opinion to hold towards Substack is.

Are you under the impression that a person at Substack manually reviews every notification about every newsletter that gets sent out? It would be surprising to me if that was how it worked.

The URL has a “1” at the end, which usually means someone lost their account the first time and is now making a new one. I can’t really make sense of how old the “1” version of the account is or if there used to be one without it. The blog hasn’t been deleted yet, which sure isn’t great, but I’m fairly sure that the people at Substack didn’t make this blog or deliberately take pains to make sure it exists in any way.

I mean, you do understand that when I get a gmail notification about herbal Viagra, that doesn’t mean Google has gone into the herbal supplements business, right? And in general how platforms generally work? As I understand it (and tell me if I’m wrong), their currently policy is to ban Nazis and this one should be gone soon. Maybe I’m wrong, I’ll check back in a couple days and see what happened with it.

Honestly, it makes infinitely more sense to think that this is a fuck-up that is being spun to sound like a deliberate decision by internet trolls, than to think that Substack has decided to start sending literal Nazi propaganda to their users on purpose.

Also, they just took more funding from Marc Andeerssen in their most recent $100 million funding round 13 days ago, so your TL;DR is also all fucked up.

I mean, not from him personally, any more than they did from Kim Kardashian or Skims, the apparel company. I do agree that lots of VC money flooding in is a significant problem, just because it’s usually (almost always) a corrupting influence in the long run. That doesn’t mean that “Substack has a Nazi problem” all of a sudden becomes validated.