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I was on Prodigy and Usenet back then. Thanks for running Prodigy! I liked it, but I also quit once they put a cap on emails. I also remember how Internet dialogue went from tolerable self-moderating to a complete all-caps troll mess after AOL users got access to the "real Internet" and not their own little unmoderated chatrooms. If Substack won't let you monetize porn, why should they profit off of Nazi recruitment? They've already set a precedent of rules on speech. So that Rubicon has been crossed.

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All my online preferred writers are older than me or hovering around middle age. What does this say about me?

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That you have mature and sophisticated taste of course. :-)

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Awesome and sounds like an interesting time! I remember the early BBS when I was in my first year of university in 1994.

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I guess this was prompted by some things seen here on Substack in the last couple of days? I've been having similar thoughts, though without the benefit of the experience you have. I fear that I'm just failing to wrap my head around the problem, as I've never come into contact with any of that nonsense. I honestly don't think I can imagine what a white supremacist newsletter looks like; and I'm definitely not going to look just for the purposes of educating myself. So for the moment, I'm leaning towards just using Substack until it becomes unusable. But I remain open to changing my mind on this: I'm quite keen on the idea that people do in fact *do things* with words; and any contribution to stopping racists doing racist things with their words is a good thing.

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You haven't come into contact with it because this place is designed so that you never will, not unless you deliberately search for it. And I would guess 99% of those up in arms about white supremacists never have either. It took an investigative journalist to dig hard to find them, then raise the alarm, and right on cue the debate became about content moderation. To my mind, going too far with that can lead nowhere good because it's bound to extend beyond a few actual Nazis/white supremacists. The more censorship there is, the more authoritarian our society becomes.

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Hahaha. You online helicopter parenting me Raven? But seriously, im not sure anyone i read on here is below 30. Where the youths at?

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