Elon has made an utterly incomprehensible statement on the matter:<p>> Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779</a>
In December they tried to ban mentioning any non-Twitter usernames:<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/18/twitter-wont-let-you-post-your-facebook-instagram-and-mastodon-handles/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/18/twitter-wont-let-you-post-...</a>
Substacks plan to add a newsfeed has me really unhappy. I’m on substack partially to avoid the problems that come with newsfeeds. The newsfeed ruined Facebook imho and kept anyone from visiting each others pages after that. It is clearly a play to capture disaffected Twitter users, or so it seems to me. But it feels so out of place for the platform
What I found really aggregious is that Twitter is polluting searches for "substack" with results where "newsletter" is highlighted.<p>This wasn't happening yesterday, but it started happening today.<p>I tried a custom search where "substack" is on the must include list, and "newsletter" is in the excluded words list, but it didn't work: it still showed me mostly tweets with "newsletter".
Everyone realised we are watching someone have an episode on social media right ?<p>He just happens to own the social media platform he’s having an episode on.<p>(If I had absolutely had to guess I’d say Musk has a “mild” version of bipolar disorder. I say this because I have it too and this is overly familiar).
I think Substack Notes is the most viable alternative to Twitter and stands to capture a lot of the userbase as Twitter continues to go down the drain. I mean, adding the doge meme thing to the UI is so cringey that I just haven't been logging on to avoid the pangs of cringe.<p>But "Tweeting" sounds so natural now. What are we going to call posting on Substack Notes? "Noting"? "Subbing"? "Stacking"?
If you search for ‘substack’ it will be replaced with ‘newsletter’.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/1644708997981773825" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/16447089979817738...</a>
Really weird too, try searching for substack, only get matches on 'newsletter'<p><a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=substack&src=typed_query&f=live" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/search?q=substack&src=typed_query&f=live</a><p>Either this is a forced replacement of s/substack/newsletter or its a sign the term is banned or both.
Such an odd decision to make from Twitters perspective.<p>On substack, it seems to me the quality of the content there is in part at least due to paying creators based on subscriptions, vs e.g. medium which I believe pays based on how many minutes people spend reading. It seems that business models that are subscription based, and models that promote low quality click bait like content are not mutually exclusive. I hope the short form of social media content doesn't lead to substack loosing what makes it great.<p>On a side note, I wonder how this post in particular made the front page, I have been expecting it for a few days but none of the posts so gained traction.
Substack now says:<p>"We’re glad to see that the suppression of Substack publications on Twitter appears to be over. This is the right move for writers, who deserve the freedom to share their work.<p>We believe that Twitter and Substack can continue to coexist and complement each other.<p>We look forward to making Substack Notes available soon, but we expect it to be a new kind of place within a subscription network, not a replacement for existing social networks."<p><a href="https://nitter.1d4.us/SubstackInc/status/1644897662255112192" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.1d4.us/SubstackInc/status/1644897662255112192</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/SubstackInc/status/1644897662255112192" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SubstackInc/status/1644897662255112192</a>
These are not the moves of a company that is confident in itself and its product.<p>Reminds me of Amazon banning the sale of Chromecast devices because they compete with FireTV.
I wonder what code-words or Unicode lookalike glyph substitutions people have started using so that they can continue to refer to "Substack" without the bots supressing them.<p>"Hypopile"?<p>"ʂυβʂταƈκ"?
I interpret this as damage and route around it.<p><a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/" rel="nofollow">https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/</a><p>Specifically I prefer to get my news from RSS feeds from lots of independent websites, to avoid such damage from centralized platforms. Any one of the sites I follow could start censoring without much effect.<p>For this reason we need protocols for microblogging that allow for the same kind of positive fragmentation.
Two things can be true at once:<p>1. Substack can be trying to mine the follower graph from Twitter in order to bootstrap its upcoming twitter-clone, and Twitter can object to this and try to block Substack from doing it whether by API or direct crawler<p>2. Twitter can be blocking people trying to link to <i>content</i> on Substack, to punish Substack for making a competitor and trying to port Twitter users over<p>The first is reasonable enough, outside of maybe some anti-competitive law questions that I think <i>probably</i>(?) don't actually apply (but I'm not a lawyer). The second point isn't <i>inherently</i> unreasonable in other circumstances... but it does fly completely in the face of all Musk's rhetoric about free speech, and things that have been said criticizing Twitter's former actions blocking discussion of e.g. the Hunter Biden laptop story. Particularly since the people it's directly hurting are the people publishing newsletters on Substack.<p>Seems particularly like an own-goal given that the immediate effect is driving off the people like Taibbi who've been giving Musk cover for his claims with the whole "Twitter files" thing.
When facebook started doing things like this, first taking away subscribers (likes) from pages and making them pay-to-post, then blocking competitors, copying their ideas etc. etc. it was hailed as "business savvy". obviously it is just as bad when twitter does it, but how come they are not "savvy"?
This of course sounds totally stupid to us and we are right to criticize Twitter for blocking crawlers because a request is a request is a request.<p>But I’m pretty sure Twitter under any ownership would take measures to stop what they consider “api abuse”. Twitter is notoriously horrible when it comes to being reasonable about it’s api. Let’s not pretend <i>Elon did this</i>…
Explanation: <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779</a><p>If a business launched a direct competitor to my product and engaged in obviously poor behavior (like scraping my entire site for content), this seems like very reasonable grounds to effectively ban that site from my platform.<p>I'm not really capturing why this is so controversial. Wasn't there a similar precedent a few years ago in a lawsuit involving third parties scraping LinkedIn profiles?