can confirm https://boingboing.substack.com/feed worked in feedly app on my phone
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It’s disingenuous to claim Boing Boing ads aren’t disguised as posts just because they’re tagged as being from the shop. By appearing in the regular feed with article-sounding headlines, they’re clearly dark-patterned as regular content.
Substack? Really? I’d have thought a website as anti-Nazi and anti-Right Wing Crazies as Boing Boing would have made a better choice.
As for locking the community experience behind a paywall:
Good luck on your new path. I won’t be following.
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What happens to the long running topics like Pets, Food, Elections, Melizmatic’s Meme, and on and on?
Are those types of topics now gone? Because those are a big part of why a lot of us visit.
Why not a subscription fee right here?
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So long and thanks for all the fish.
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I think the answer to the last question is “Substack.” From what I see, they don’t offer any integration with Discourse or even have an API. Ghost does, but not Substack. And I assume Substack is offering some sort of incentive to BB as part of their ongoing efforts to left-wash their reputation without resorting to giving up all that sweet revenue from publishing Nazi newspapers.
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They all go the way of the dinosaur.
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I hate all of this. and a mighty fear this decision will eventually kill this amazing comunity.
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I think you may have answered your own question there.
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Indeed. A safe space for happy mutants where drive by troublemakers can no longer disrupt the community is one of the many benefits of going subscriber-only.
It’s also why we are offering everyone a free trial - so you can “try before you buy” at our new home.
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But why not sell Boing Boing memberships?
A quick search turns up this…
Discourse Subscriptions allows site owners to sell recurring and one-time purchase subscriptions that grant access to a group on a Discourse instance.
Now, admittedly, I know nothing about the nuts and bolts of Discourse so I maybe be all wrong and the people running BB know better than me why Substack is a better choice, I’m just thinking out loud and tossing in my unsolicited opinion.
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Yeah, I don’t know. I wish that ad-supported front page and ad-free BBS-on-Discourse (with a paid membership) was the route they had gone with. Being a part of the Substack ecosystem will probably help to drive new membership more than Discourse would, though.
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… Except that, as others have stated, Substack will not boot right-wing and hate spewing publications out.
Much as the UI for Discourse annoys me, it’s something I’m used to now, and would certainly pay for if given the option to do so. But not Substack.
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This. So. Much. This.
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Yeah, I get it. I stated it twice up-thread. My intent was not to provide an endorsment of Substack or the move to Substack, but just taking a guess at why it’s happening instead of charging for Discourse membership. I could be wrong.
But Substack publishing and financing hate groups is, unfortunately, just a hard fact.
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I recognize its easy for me as an end user to perhaps be unaware of the effort that goes into moderating things in the BBS, and perhaps that’s the prime motivator behind your comment.
But I feel compelled to say that this leaves a really really really bad taste in my mouth in a way I can’t quite put words to.
Being a long time BB reader and occasional poster, I was always of the opinion that dissent was desirable, and even somewhat encouraged. And most times, the community will at worst ignore trollies.
But at its best, the BB BBS community has (in my experience anyway) been able to open discourse with people who may have started off as troublemakers. And, frankly, sometimes some rabble rousing helps to bring in other viewpoints. I’ve found myself frequently enlightened by regulars and “drive by” posts alike --sometimes in the same thread.
The last thing I need in my life is another echo chamber.
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End of an era. I don’t really see myself making the leap to the next.
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Dissent is not the same as intentional agitation. That’s the problem – most people who come here aren’t interested in nuanced discussion about differing views on politics and such. They are here to come in, shit all over the floor, and watch the fallout from afar. Or there are cases where literal Nazis have come here to try to stir up the userbase. Many people here consider this community to be a safe space, and the moderators work very hard to keep it that way. Just because most tr*lls are quickly identified and dispatched doesn’t mean it doesn’t represent a Sysiphean effort on the part of the site mods (and that’s after adding several new moderators in recent months).
I have no doubt that going scorched Earth with a paid platform will greatly reduce the moderation and administration burden. Nobody aside from perhaps the most determined tr*lls will bother with a pay-to-play site with a savvy userbase when there’s far larger and easier to manipulate targets out there. On the flip side, the savvy userbase here seems unlikely to make the shift.
I didn’t know about the Nazi Bar aspects of Substack until recently, and now that I do I feel the same kind of ickiness as I would get when using Twitter or Hacker News. That makes me not want to go along for the ride.
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It’s been a year since my last post. I have always had my issues with this place, but from time to time I thought I might come back. I guess now I can rule that out. It will never be that urgent.
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If this is effectively announcing that the BBS is going away (still unsure if that’s the case with the language used btw [edit: I just read Orenwolf’s comment and yes it is]) it’s a pretty awful way to do it.
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