Time To Cancel, But Then What?
Apparently Substack is another big site with all sorts of emerging issues. Shitty owners running it poorly, a population of Nazis that are free to publish and profit from the site, and business practices that will ultimately harm their writers as the site owners gain more control over their content and subscription base. There are a number of good threads on social media detailing what is wrong with the place and they seem pretty convincing that it is probably not a great place to depend on long term. But the problem with cancelling your Substack, which has also been a problem for the past few years when it comes to cancelling your New York Times subscription, or cancelling your Twitter or Threads account, or cancelling your car mechanic who turned out to be a racist MAGA asshole, is that you still need SOMEONE or SOMETHING to replace it with. You still need a place to write, you still need a publication to get your news and up to the date information from, and you still need a guy to fix your muffler or change your oil.
One reason why the right wing media sphere is successful is that when they cancel something, they have a lot of other (incredibly shitty) places to go to. So in an effort to help folks cut ties with those destructive and corrupted forces in the world, we have attempted to come up with some better options to replace some of these places.
Twitter! I mean seriously, what the fuck? What was once a great place where you could follow almost every interesting thing happening in the world in real time, slowly deteriorated until all of a sudden it’s enshittification accelerated at Mach speed once Elon took over (aka Elonshittification?) and before anyone knew what was happening it was a Nazi bar. It got so bad so fast it even seemed to skip right past being a Klan rally directly into becoming a full on Nuremberg Rally. So where do we go from there? I’ll keep this short and sweet because I will have more thoughts on this switch later… But ultimately, it looks like after Threads took an early lead, most reasonable, decent people have landed at BlueSky. Things look promising there so until further notice, that could be the answer.
As for Substack, the recognition that it may not be a place reasonable people want to be only began to really break through recently, so the other options are still establishing themselves and being discovered. But so far Ghost seems to be a good option (which is the one I am using now), but Beehiv is also getting a lot of good chatter around it. There are others out there but those two seem to be the ones most folks are enthusiastic about.
Then there is the good old New York Times. And lately even the Washington Post, and definitely the LA Times whose owner has really revealed himself as a pro-trump butt-licker in the past few days. Then of course the networks. CNN has been turning into Fox-Lite for a few years and even MSNBC is eagerly pushing for even more Republicans on their airwaves.
The good thing about news is there are a LOT of sources and the internet gives access to everything. Foreign newspapers are always pretty good and relatively dependable like The Guardian UK. The Philadelphia Enquirer recently got some love as a solid source. Strangely enough, in the US some of the best journalism is happening at Rolling Stone Magazine and Teen Vogue!
As for television, the BBC can usually be trusted and of course there are a number of news related shows on Comedy Central that can still inform such as Last Week Tonight. But also, Substack/Ghost-style newsletters, BlueSky, Threads still to some degree, and various other social media outlets all deliver varying degrees of solid and up to date information and can also point you towards dependable sources.
As for a new mechanic, I can’t help you there. Maybe get a bike!