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Why social media can’t keep moderating content in the shadows

Mar. 3, 2020

The Tyranny of Terrazzo

Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?

By Molly Fischer

Illustration by Fala Atelier

Illustration: Fala Atelier

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

You walk beneath a white molded archway. You’ve entered a white room.

A bask... See more

Molly Fischer • Will the Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?

To understand how we got here, it’s important to know Roan’s perilous journey, encompassing all big three major labels. Born in Missouri and raised in a conservative Christian household, she was signed to Warner’s Atlantic Records and positioned as the next Lorde after a video of her 2017 single “Die Young” went viral, and moved to L.A. to pursue h... See more

Not Just ‘Luck’: Why Queer Pop Star Chappell Roan Broke Through to the Hot 100, And Why It Matters

These titles weren’t made for the intended viewer or even their parents. These were made for algorithms—for machines to scrape and absorb.

Mark Bergen • Like, Comment, Subscribe

And you have to wrestle with the paywall and its very unfortunate trade-off. You want to share your work with the widest audience possible. But to any publication that’s too small for ads, free readers are simply not that valuable. For these reasons, I’ve always struggled with the paywall. Asking people to pay for writing is not a great way to make... See more

Substack become a haven for writers who find, for one reason or another, that traditional media no longer works for them. Substack will never be able to offer the deep institutional backing and editorial muscle that comes with working at a place like The New York Times. But it’s able to provide limited assistance with editing, legal, design, photo ... See more

Joe Pompeo • “There Has to Be a Line”: Substack’s Founders Dive Headfirst Into the Culture Wars

“The solution to helping support a healthy ecosystem for writers and journalists is not a beautiful CMS or the blockchain or any other gimmicky thing,” he said. “It’s the entire support structure.”

cjr.org • The Substackerati

Direct, unfiltered exposure to said flumes—the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gaz

Neal Stephenson • Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel

Once Facebook was shown—in plain language, by their own people—what they were doing, how did the company’s executives respond? According to the Journal’s in-depth reporting, they mocked the research, calling it an “Eat Your Veggies” approach. They introduced some minor tweaks, but dismissed most of the recommendations.