I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you.
So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, I’m a paying customer.”nd the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And I was like, oh, ok and he continues. “you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”
And I was like, “oh damn.”
And he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
This thread took off unexpectedly. Support your local antifa and black lives matter people. You know who they are.
Taken from a since deleted twitter thread by Michael B. Tager
It's official, Substack is a Nazi Bar.
If you don't get the metaphor, look at Mr. Tager's Twitter thread. It makes everything clear.
Substack is not feeding its users Nazi content:
Back in April 2023, when Substack CEO Chris Best refused to answer basic questions about whether his platform would allow racist content, I noted that his evasiveness was essentially hanging out a “Nazis Welcome” sign. By December, when the company doubled down and explicitly said they’d continue hosting and monetizing Nazi newsletters, they’d fully embraced their reputation as the Nazi bar.
Last week, we got a perfect demonstration of what happens when you build your platform’s reputation around welcoming Nazis: your recommendation algorithms start treating Nazi content as more than worth tolerating, to content worth promoting.
As Taylor Lorenz reported on User Mag’s Patreon account, Substack sent push notifications to users encouraging them to subscribe to “NatSocToday,” a newsletter that “describes itself as ‘a weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.'”
At this point in the article, there is a screen shot of what was sent.
Yep, a Swastika, and I ain't putting it on my blog.
………
But here’s the thing about algorithmic “errors”—they reveal the underlying patterns your system has learned. Recommendation algorithms don’t randomly select content to promote. They surface content based on engagement metrics: subscribers, likes, comments, and growth patterns. When Nazi content consistently hits those metrics, the algorithm learns to treat it as successful content worth promoting to similar users.
There may be some randomness involved, and algorithms aren’t perfectly instructive of how a system has been trained, but it at least raises some serious questions about what Substack thinks people will like based on its existing data.
As Lorenz notes, the Nazi newsletter that got promoted has “746 subscribers and hundreds of collective likes on Substack Notes.” More troubling, users who clicked through were recommended “related content from another Nazi newsletter called White Rabbit,” which has over 8,600 subscribers and “is also being recommended on the Substack app through its ‘rising’ leaderboard.”
This isn’t a bug.It’s a feature working exactly as designed. Substack’s recommendation systems are doing precisely what they’re built to do: identify content that performs well within the platform’s ecosystem and surface it to potentially interested users. The “error” isn’t that the algorithm malfunctioned—it’s that Substack created conditions where Nazi content could thrive well enough to trigger promotional systems in the first place.
(emphasis mine)
If you have a blog/newsletter, don't use Substack.
If you are subscribed to a Substack blog/newsletter, write management and tell that they are at a site that promotes Nazis.
If you see ads on Substack, write the advertisers.
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