Cato the Elder 234–149 BC, better known as “Cato the Censor.” In Roman times, the job of the censor involved several tasks, including the authority to enforce public morality and maintain societal standards.
Thanks for this, I always enjoy your posts. I left FB years ago, when I first realized, to my great indignation (how innocent I was then), that they were playing around with the algorithms. If I took the trouble to post something and someone signed up to receive it, then they'd better receive it. This is the case with Substack, as far as I can tell— so far. Call me wary. Anyway, I'm old enough to remember the days before the Internet when people figured out ways to find things they really wanted to find without the help of search engines.
When we speak of filtering out anything and everything that contrasts with the "mainstream" views, the term "mainstream" often (perhaps even usually) refers to the narrative preferred by the power structure, which is not necessarily the view held by the public at large. Part of effective propaganda is making us believe that our view on a particular issue is a minority view.
I would be a bit surprised if your previous blog efforts started losing page views solely because of discrimination by the major search engines. I would have thought that once you built a readership, those people would account for the majority of your page views, and would be the primary channel in which new readers would discover it. Also surprising is the suggestion that the power structure would find your blog something they would want to censor. I would have guessed that discussions of possible collapse, climate change, and Club of Rome-type stuff would be narratives they would want to push, not suppress.
Because it is almost censorship-free, Substack has attracted more than the usual number of dissidents. That is one reason I spend so much of my browsing time here. It is a much more target-rich environment for those looking to read stuff that might actually be worth one's time. As Issac Asimov once said, "Any book worth censoring is a book worth reading." But the obvious risk here is that "the power structure" may decide one day to just pull the plug on the whole Substack enterprise and kill all these original voices in one fell swoop, a much uglier reprise of the "Parler" debacle a couple of years ago.
I agree with the commenter who points out the importance of subscriptions. Over 90% of what I read on line each day comes to me via RSS feeds or blog subscriptions like we have on Substack.
I never relied on FB, Instagram, or whatever pre-chewed media platform doing "my job" for me.
Building your own media feed is not something others can (or want) to do for you.
If you want a good news/media network, the only way is to build it with your own hard work.
You read an interesting article somewhere, with a link to another blog/site. You go visit the site and make a note of if. Then slowly but surely, after a few (a lot of) years of doing that you end up with a list of website that are interesting to you.
I now have a little under 100 websites/blogs/feeds that I check everyday using tools that are widely and freely available on the web: the RSS feed protocol and a news reader like Feedly.
So my daily news does not come from "fact-checked platform that knows better than I do what I'm supposed to read" but from my on collection of links collected over the years. And for the very few (a handful) sites that do not support the RSS protocol you can always use tools like https://politepol.com to build your own RSS feed.
Never used anything else and guess never will...
Especially during those fact-checking "dark ages" that we're in :(
That might be the reason why I had such a hard time believing in the COVID, global warming & clean energy, Russia is winning, etc crazes. (But I still enjoy every paper Ugo publishes here :)))
For the others, Google Translate does a very decent job of translating anything into your own language so you still should go and check what that economist (Charles Gave) has to say...
I agree you can find interesting ideas on substack that wouldn't find a platform elsewhere. Without any fact checkers or peer review it's up to the reader to figure out if what has been written makes sense. I suspect there is some nonsense and disinformation published on here but its preferable to letting someone else decide what I'm allowed to read.
It's been clear for a long time that anyone without his own platform is extremely vulnerable to de-ranking on Google or Farcebook, and also shadow banning...Vox Day has been making this point for years...Substack is doing a good job of avoiding these restrictions. so far, because it will collapse financially if it starts censoring...But I wouldn't count on it forever.....
Thanks for this, I always enjoy your posts. I left FB years ago, when I first realized, to my great indignation (how innocent I was then), that they were playing around with the algorithms. If I took the trouble to post something and someone signed up to receive it, then they'd better receive it. This is the case with Substack, as far as I can tell— so far. Call me wary. Anyway, I'm old enough to remember the days before the Internet when people figured out ways to find things they really wanted to find without the help of search engines.
When we speak of filtering out anything and everything that contrasts with the "mainstream" views, the term "mainstream" often (perhaps even usually) refers to the narrative preferred by the power structure, which is not necessarily the view held by the public at large. Part of effective propaganda is making us believe that our view on a particular issue is a minority view.
I would be a bit surprised if your previous blog efforts started losing page views solely because of discrimination by the major search engines. I would have thought that once you built a readership, those people would account for the majority of your page views, and would be the primary channel in which new readers would discover it. Also surprising is the suggestion that the power structure would find your blog something they would want to censor. I would have guessed that discussions of possible collapse, climate change, and Club of Rome-type stuff would be narratives they would want to push, not suppress.
Because it is almost censorship-free, Substack has attracted more than the usual number of dissidents. That is one reason I spend so much of my browsing time here. It is a much more target-rich environment for those looking to read stuff that might actually be worth one's time. As Issac Asimov once said, "Any book worth censoring is a book worth reading." But the obvious risk here is that "the power structure" may decide one day to just pull the plug on the whole Substack enterprise and kill all these original voices in one fell swoop, a much uglier reprise of the "Parler" debacle a couple of years ago.
I agree with the commenter who points out the importance of subscriptions. Over 90% of what I read on line each day comes to me via RSS feeds or blog subscriptions like we have on Substack.
I feel your pain, and share your hopes. I came here to Substack precisely because forced by search engines and social media that deliberately make "normal" blogging invisible: https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/i-just-started-a-newsletter-and-its
and today, I just saw this other proof of how search engines have become a liability for the whole web, a tool to make it unusable and meaningless:
https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032639402037610
I never relied on FB, Instagram, or whatever pre-chewed media platform doing "my job" for me.
Building your own media feed is not something others can (or want) to do for you.
If you want a good news/media network, the only way is to build it with your own hard work.
You read an interesting article somewhere, with a link to another blog/site. You go visit the site and make a note of if. Then slowly but surely, after a few (a lot of) years of doing that you end up with a list of website that are interesting to you.
I now have a little under 100 websites/blogs/feeds that I check everyday using tools that are widely and freely available on the web: the RSS feed protocol and a news reader like Feedly.
So my daily news does not come from "fact-checked platform that knows better than I do what I'm supposed to read" but from my on collection of links collected over the years. And for the very few (a handful) sites that do not support the RSS protocol you can always use tools like https://politepol.com to build your own RSS feed.
Never used anything else and guess never will...
Especially during those fact-checking "dark ages" that we're in :(
That might be the reason why I had such a hard time believing in the COVID, global warming & clean energy, Russia is winning, etc crazes. (But I still enjoy every paper Ugo publishes here :)))
PS: for those who read french and want to start their own list, here's the first "must read" article/website I urge you to visit: https://institutdeslibertes.org/entre-le-fort-et-le-faible-entre-le-riche-et-le-pauvre-entre-le-maitre-et-le-serviteur-cest-la-liberte-qui-opprime-et-la-loi-qui-affranchit
(https://institutdeslibertes.org/)
For the others, Google Translate does a very decent job of translating anything into your own language so you still should go and check what that economist (Charles Gave) has to say...
I agree you can find interesting ideas on substack that wouldn't find a platform elsewhere. Without any fact checkers or peer review it's up to the reader to figure out if what has been written makes sense. I suspect there is some nonsense and disinformation published on here but its preferable to letting someone else decide what I'm allowed to read.
It's been clear for a long time that anyone without his own platform is extremely vulnerable to de-ranking on Google or Farcebook, and also shadow banning...Vox Day has been making this point for years...Substack is doing a good job of avoiding these restrictions. so far, because it will collapse financially if it starts censoring...But I wouldn't count on it forever.....