The Internet Cycle: A whitepaper

So today on the fediverse, I learned that Substack is literally doing what any other website that gets a lick of attention does, and that is banning the users who made them big, in this case anyone “branded” as a Nazi. Substack got big based on its lax moderation, but now that Substack wants to become Medium 2 down to it’s moderation policies, it’s now beginning to censor people online. Judging by the article, this is because it caught the attention of corporate whores (who began to wave their big corporate dicks around as a demand):

Last month, 247 Substack writers issued an open letter asking the company to clarify its policies. The company responded on December 21, when Substack co-founder published a blog post arguing that “censorship” of Nazi publications would only make extremism worse.

McKenzie also wrote that “we don’t like Nazis either” and said Substack wished “no-one held those views.” But “we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away,” he wrote. “In fact, it makes it worse. We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.”

The statement seemed to be at odds with Substack’s published content guidelines, which state that “Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.”

In its aftermath, several publications left the platform. Others, including Platformer, said they would leave if the company did not remove pro-Nazi publications.

Meanwhile, more than 100 other Substack writers, including prominent names like Bari Weiss and Richard Dawkins, signed a post from writer Elle Griffin calling on Substack to continue with its mostly hands-off approach to platform-level moderation.

From its inception, McKenzie and Substack co-founder Chris Best have touted freedom of speech as one of Substack’s core virtues. As a result, the platform has been embraced by fringe thinkers, who have built large businesses while promoting anti-vaccine pseudo-science, Covid conspiracy theories and other material that is generally restricted on mainstream social networks.

To translate this, the Ivory Tower is really mad right now that people have a centralized place to post, which means enough is enough. The problematic people have to go. Even worse, they’re not allowed to make money. So as a result, they have to go or the big names will go, and maybe even harass payment processors in the process as usual. Sure, they’re removing 5 blogs (without naming them of course), but anyone who saw CloudFlare censor sites because the CEO literally woke up in a bad mood only to say “we double pinkie swear we won’t do this again” before in fact doing it again remembers: they were lying. Substack is essentially on a death watch at this point, and anyone who didn’t have a plan B of wordpress is going to find themselves boned hard.

Do you want know who is completely untouched by this censorship? If you said “someone who self hosts their own blog”, congratulations, you won. In fact, many people who would fall under that branding have been hosting their own wordpress blogs for years to avoid any sort of Automattic and Google censorship. But I might as well prove my point by outlining what someone I knew on Discord years ago called the “internet cycle”. The Internet Cycle is something that every single tech company ends up falling into, but I’ll let him explain it first before I explain it again in more detail.

Stage 1: The creation (We’re not like the other guys)

So here’s the deal: you’re out of college or something and you want that VC money. After all, there’s plenty of VC money to go around, or so it seemed for a while before the rise of interest rates. Anyhow when interest rates are low, this money flows all over the place, and when you’re looking to raise money from the old school types, you just have to solve a problem nobody thinks exists. Or maybe you’re from a big tech company that has fallen victim to its own success and stagnated like Google, and you’re disillusioned with the state of things. You want to make things better, and you think you have an idea: Make something like XYZ but with hookers and blow.

It could be messaging like Discord, or it could be blogging like Substack and thousands of blogging sites, be it LiveJournal, Blogspot, WordPress.com (this site), and many more. Or it could be social networking, like with Bluesky and Nostr having Jack Dorsey around at some point. But here’s your goal, you’re going to be not like those other guys, you promise this time. So you go and launch this website and it’s going to be better than your previous website was.

Stage 2: Growth

You then launch this website, and you get users somewhere. How you advertise it comes down to varying tactics. You can pull a Discord, get streamers to use this program, and then everyone and their mom uses it. Maybe you can even advertise it with “we’re not like the other guys”. Discord famously did this early on.

While Discord was initially for gamers as it’s marketing would brag, what Discord did to get users in was to be as open as Goatse was. The same trend could be seen with other tech sites including Reddit, Substack, and even with copyright content such as with YouTube. These websites got big based on something you could host at one time, which led users in and then led to more people joining in to post on this website. That’s really cool.

But this is how a lot of these sites hook users, by being as lax as possible. Tumblr infamously did this too, by the time the porn ban happened the site was so popular as despite its community being the most hostile online, central moderation was asleep at the wheel.

Stage 3: The normiefication

So after something gets big enough, eventually someone will see something problematic, usually a journalist or Twitter activist. Or some people during a protest retroactively declared illegal will use it to plan or something, or post about it there. That’s when the normiefication of a website begins or hits critical mass. That’s when the payment processors who force you to follow 5 sets of rules to make money clamp down on you. Maybe you don’t want the journalists, or SPLC/ADL types on your back, or Twitter antifa activists (who hold cushy jobs) trying to make sure your business is in ruins, or 6am girl talk sessions, or your providers cutting you off, etc.

If you’re a big tech company, you have lawyers and crisis management, so you can just say that you’ll ban the bad people and maybe even work with the mafia. It’s a great way to rehab your image, while Discord’s reputation has gone from being where “the darn edgy alt right posts” to the service seemingly having a groomer server exposed every other week (and don’t get me started on amber alerts), groups that care about kids online don’t seem to have as much pull as groups trying to track down a teen who said a gamer word. Imagine if you went with a time machine and told the guy who ran Perverted Justice (the group who found pedos for Chris Hansen to humiliate on TV) that Discord, VRChat, and the like would be a thing in a few years. But at least there’s no Nazis, just men trying to groom minors and sell kids drugs and entire infrastructures set up to defend this.

But also on Discord, there was a rebranding. While Discord’s reputation would go from being a “gamer chat service” to groomer paradise by the people they drove out of it, the marketing would shift around the time of the forced lockdowns to be marketing the platform for normies, to have your own personal group.

This was the moment when Discord was no longer some niche gamer app, but rather as mainstream as WhatsApp is, where every wagie at your job who is under 28 has it installed on his phone.

This didn’t just happen to Discord of course; it’s happened to other websites that used to have vibrant communities and have now become sterile propaganda. Reddit and YouTube also used to have vibrant communities, and now they are so sterilized that you could literally use gpt2 to simulate a convincing Reddit conversation, and don’t get me started on the slop on YouTube.

Sometimes it happens out of order as well, like Tumblr banning porn as the site was massive, essentially dealing a huge blow to the site it has never been able to recover from. Now Tumblr is like MySpace, where the only people who want to use it are people who want to relive some glory days chasing the eternal dragon of the past.

Stage 3 (Bad Ending):

The other alternative to the website getting too big and then normiefied is the website ends up on life support like Odysee is today, or killed off like vidme was, or killed off completely like many of the smaller streaming sites were back in the day. Everyone goes back to the mainstream site and just gets defeated until the cycle repeats and this time it won’t be like the last time I promise. This doesn’t seem to happen to established sites as Skype is like a cockroach that won’t die for some reason.

The Alternative

Discord right now is known to be a very sterile dumpster fire, a shell of its former self compared to how it was nearly 10 years ago. But the people who made the site big have moved onto greener pastures. I’m talking websites with much less censorship like Telegram, or most importantly self-hosted platforms such as Matrix or XMPP. Here’s the thing, self hosted websites always win in the end for multiple reasons.

The first is that using a single major platform is one big weakpoint, be it for censorship or hacking. Every single website branded as alt-tech has faced this issue. GiveSendGo was hacked, Gab had provider issues and hacking, Parler was hacked, Epik was hacked, Kiwi Farms has had the great troon war, the Daily Stormer was censored too many times, the list goes on and on. It’s a great source to attack if you want to censor people who never learn online. But having something spread out over numerous VPSes, cpanel shithosts, and colocated servers across the USA means there’s far more points to take down and not just one. This also means only people who want to see you will find you as a result, as being jacked into a big social media network is risking that some mentally unstable shut in who wants to fight people online will discover you, which means it’s over. Keep in mind, Kiwi Farms has the issues it does because of one ex-Google employee.

The second is simpler. It’s that you’re not chained to the whims of whatever company is pulling the strings. When Discord purged servers starting in August 2017, so many people were caught in the crossfire. While I was not banned, Discord did force me to add and verify my phone number on my account at the time, which in the years since has been regarded as one such social media punishment to force users to “self dox”. Others I knew were not so lucky and had their accounts banned.

The third is that every company that seems to be lax moderation wise either ends up being forced to clamp down the second they get slightly popular, or can’t find enough money and closes down. They will sell their users out to have a seal of approval from the big tech companies and journalist caste. Sites like Omegle end up having to shut down because of predators using them, but Discord gets to stay up.

So while big tech corporations are too busy playing games to please people who can never be pleased, let’s be honest here. The future is to self host your own site, be it wordpress or whatever flashy new web blogging service with limp bizkit MP3s. The trick is to get powerful enough away from a big tech company or on your own that you can literally do whatever you want and nobody can stop you. That is, if you’re not so big that the minute you’re canned from your TV under pressure from a network, another website picks you up right then, and you can take selfies of yourself laughing at all the stuff people are writing about you.

Because let’s be real, if you’re in this part of the internet, you already know the truth. No matter what you do to please someone online, it’s never going to be enough. Just laugh in their face, maybe do what the zoomers called “dab on the haters”.

But at the same time, learn from the past. Don’t join the next walled garden. Join the decentralized internet, and never worry about a walled garden clamping down on its users ever again.