I field a fair number of requests about joining Freethoughtblogs — usually, I just tell them the the procedure is spelled out right here. This time, though, I got an easily answered query.

Chased him right off with a friendly one-word answer, I did.

Once upon a time, when this blog was a simple little thing that I ran off a server in my lab, I was recruited to join ScienceBlogs. It was a great place — I shared the space with a lot of smart, interesting people, many of whom I still follow on social media. I was also enticed by the generous payments they made, with a significant sum based on traffic issued to the bloggers. Also great. I was making about $8000 month there.

Yes, I was stunned, too. I didn’t know how they were doing it: it was supposed to be ad-based revenue, but what it really was was massive investments by rich people with lots of money to throw around who were trying to promote a science-based perspective, and who hired popular writers to kick start the whole thing. Of course, the other people writing there will tell you they got nowhere near that amount — it was just the first wave who benefited most from all the publicity. And later, they started revising the fee structure, always downward, and then they sold it off to National Geographic who quickly ejected the old bloggers and brought in new ones who better fit their desired path. I had no ill will about the changes. I saw that first lucky wave as a windfall that I did not expect to last.

When Ed Brayton and I set up Freethoughtblogs, we also discovered that the game was up. We had no deep-pocket investors. We tried to make a go of it with entirely ad-based revenue, with a mistaken idea of how easy that would be, based on our experiences at Scienceblogs. It’s all a scam! You’re going to make peanuts off of ads, unless you want to play games with link farms and ludicrous SEO and other gimmicks. We just wanted a nice place to write and be read.

Then, of course, we were learning that the real winners at the ad game were…the ad services. Not us. We were supported by the Patheos ad machine, which was a horror. Inappropriate ads, and tons of them, and they also offered us extra pennies if we allowed them to try bizarre gimmicks. Anyone remember the sliding page ads? You’d log in, the whole page would jerk to the right, and an ad bar would slide in from the left, and fucking annoy everyone. Hated it. Hated it all. I finally gave up on ads altogether, and we run Freethoughtblogs at a loss — I figure I got rained on by the money tree a few years ago, I can coast on supporting this site for a good long while without the nuisance ads.

Now I hear, though, that there’s a hot new blog syndication site called Substack that’s all the rage — they’ve got some very well known people writing there, and apparently lured them in with big money.

Uh-oh, I thought. I’ve been there before. I can guess where this is going, and where it will end up in 10 years. Somebody is pumping money into another blogging enterprise, and they aren’t getting rich off ads. Someone wants to promote a certain set of authors.

Annalee Newitz spills the beans. They’re luring in lots of writers by paying a top tier “Pro” group large sums of money, and all the other people next to nothing, and sucking in lots of people to support them. Again, it’s almost a Ponzi scheme. If you aren’t in that first wave with the lucrative deals, you aren’t going to get rich. You can’t. The economics of blogging don’t support it.

Worse though, Substack has an agenda. (So did Scienceblogs, but their’s was just to promote science and tech. I think.)

It got worse when some of the Pro writers started to reveal themselves, because Substack’s secret paid elite all seemed to be cut from the same cloth.

As Jude Doyle explained in their newsletter:

Substack has become famous for giving massive advances — the kind that were never once offered to me or my colleagues, not up front and not after the platform took off — to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.

Glenn Greenwald started his Substack by inveighing against trans rights and/or ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, is currently using it to direct harassment at a female New York Times reporter, and has repeatedly used his platform to whitewash alleged rapists and domestic abusers. Freddie de Boer is an anti-“identity politics” crusader who became so infamous for harassing colleagues, particularly women, that he briefly promised to retire from the Internet to avoid causing any more harm; he’s currently using his “generous financial offer” from Substack to argue against “censoring” Nazis while pursuing a personal vendetta against the cis writer Sarah Jones. Matt Yglesias, who publicly cites polite pushback from a trans femme colleague as the Problem With Media Today — exposing the woman he named to massive harassment from Fox News and online TERFs alike — reportedly got a $250,000 advance from Substack. It’s become the preferred platform for men who can’t work in diverse environments without getting calls from HR.

Doyle notes that Substack also seems to have a secret list of writers who are allowed to violate the company’s terms of service. These people dish out hate speech, but remain on the platform with paid subscribers. Among them is Graham Linehan, who was already booted from Twitter for hate speech against trans people, and whose Substack is entirely devoted to the idea that trans women are a danger to cis women and should be stopped.

So all the ‘little people’ on Substack are there to provide an illusion of popular support to an ‘elite’ that consists of people like Greenwald, Yglesias, and Linehan. Charming. I shouldn’t be surprised, though.

I got called in to our local pharmacy since there were some cancellations.

Best news: Mary got the shot, too!

This is a plug for family. My niece-in-law, Audriauna, is doing quite well at turning a hobby into money — she blings stuff. You can see her work on TikTok (kids these days & their weird social media!), Instagram, and, of course, on Etsy. If you are a member of the cult of Starbucks, why are you drinking out of cardboard?

For better or worse, I live in a Starbucks desert. This is Caribou Coffee country! She doesn’t seem to have cups for my kind, but as she lives out there in the Seattle/Tacoma area I guess that’s to be expected.

Failed scandal-mongerer and outrage-generator Milo Yiannopoulos (remember him? He used to be in the news all the time) is in the midst of a major rebranding effort, but it’s really just more of the same: embracing the worst possible takes on everything, following along behind any fleeting trend and straining to amplify it even more. So what is he up to now?

Professional right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos has declared himself no longer homosexual. In an interview with the right-wing LifeSite, Yiannopoulos claims he is “ex-gay” and will direct his future endeavors to St. Joseph: “I treat it like an addiction. You never stop being an alcoholic… I hope people will support and pray for me, if for no other reason than they share my delight at the prospect of Milo Yiannopoulos furiously and indignantly railing against homosexuals for sins of the flesh.” He announced a new vocation as well, a dedication to the discredited and widely banned practice of forcibly subduing homosexuality: “Over the next decade, I would like to help rehabilitate what the media calls ‘conversion therapy.’” It is unclear whether Yiannopoulos remains legally married: “The guy I live with has been demoted to housemate.” And he took some time during the interview to indulge in transphobia as well, claiming “trannies are demonic.”

The key phrase in that statement is the hope that people will “support” him…he’s always on the grift, this is just his newest angle.

Man, he is desperate to recover some relevance, yet all he knows how to do is this clown-like capering for the most hateful audience he can find. What a sad pathetic wreck of a life he has — I guess if he really wants attention, he is going to get some pity out of this latest maneuver.

There were presents. Mary got me some ultrabright portable work lights that will come in handy when spider-hunting season finally gets here. But mainly what she did was spend a big chunk of yesterday calling all over the state trying to get me scheduled for a vaccination. There is an utterly insane website under our freaking insane American health care system that lists all the pharmacies/clinics that have a few slots open, and like some kind of goddamn video game you have to click on to book the appointment, and if you aren’t quick enough someone else might click on it before you. Then, if you do succeed in being the first to click, you better be prepared, because you will be confronted with a complicated form demanding all kinds of information about your insurance. PCN? Bin? Group? What the hell?

Anyway, Mary spent most of yesterday evening locked to her phone, punching the screen in the worst and most stupid video game ever. End result: I have a vacccination appointment for Monday evening at a site 3 hours away, to which I must arrive within a 17 minute window to get my injection.

Those of you living outside the US may now begin laughing at the idiocy of our healthcare and the havoc the insurance system wreaks on our lives. I remember as a young man that a staple of American news was propaganda mocking the Soviet bureaucracy — ha ha, they have to stand in line for groceries, and they don’t have 50 brands of toothpaste to choose from! — and I wish people here would have the self-awareness to recognize how foolish our system is, and fix it.

I regret to report that I did not complete my grading yesterday. I was up late slogging through it all, but it was a long exam and a lot of students and a couple of the questions involved careful calculations that I had to trace through, and so I only got halfway through the stack. Today, I try to finish it.

Unfortunately, on Tuesdays I have a long morning class starting shortly, and I have a lab most of the afternoon, and I have to attend two senior seminars, so I’m going to be working late again.

I estimate that maybe I can spare a half hour around noon. So, lunch. Which because of my advanced age and feeble condition will probably consist of a lump of fiber.

Yay. Birthday. They just get better every year.