Ben Werdmuller, a founder, CTO, and VC, writes about tech, startups, ethics, journalism, open source, and the open web.
HN mostly links it as a source for his posts on unions and the open web, and as a personal site where he describes himself.
If Substack really wants to be the Nazi bar [1], then that is their prerogative. But if some of their writers don't wish to be patrons of the Nazi bar, then it is their prerogative to urge Substack's leadership to change their minds.
[1] The bartender: "You didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them... 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." https://werd.io/2023/leaving-the-nazi-bar
Finally, X hasn’t allowed researchers access to the platform for auditing purposes, violating a principle of transparency which is enshrined by the Digital Services Act. Following changes to the platform, access to data for research purposes has been severely curtailed:
Social media researchers have canceled, suspended or changed more than 100 studies about X, formerly Twitter, as a result of actions taken by Elon Musk that limit access to the social media platform, nearly a dozen interviews and a survey of planned projects show. […] A majority of survey respondents fear being sued by X over their findings or use of data. The worry follows X's July lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) after it published critical reports about the platform's content moderation.
https://werd.io/2023/x-and-the-digital-services-act
If it’s a matter of proof, these are all links already posted on this site:
https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/union-effect-in-california-1/
https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-decline-inequality-rises/
https://werd.io/unions-work/
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-13/unions-did-great-things-for-the-american-working-class
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/8/19/20727283/unions-good-income-inequality-wealth
Nice video. I've definitely heard this narrative before. There was a great blog post on HN a while back bemoaning feature lists but I couldn't find the one I am remembering on google. I found two other on-point articles of interest, though:
https://www.cmswire.com/information-management/everything-you-know-about-selecting-enterprise-software-is-wrong/
https://werd.io/2016/stop-writing-specs-start-finding-needs---what-ive-learned
https://werd.io
I've been a founder (2x), CTO / tech lead, engineer, product lead, VC, film reviewer, and writer. My site is about all of those things. Mostly I write about tech, startups, ethics, and journalism, interspersed with links I find interesting.
I also post a live view of my RSS subscriptions over at https://sources.werd.io/ - I'm excited to add some more from this thread. Thanks for starting it!
I like the idea of stating your communication preferences but it seems strange to put that right in your bio like he's done at http://werd.io as if where you keep your documents says a lot about you as a person.
Unrelated, this was difficult to read with that blog styling. "font-size: .9em" for body text seems like a bad idea. Raising the font-size and line-height makes this whole site look much cleaner.