Ask HN: Where to publish a critical work with potentially offensive content
I have been pushing around writing a piece that might end up being quite long on Mark Twain and Racism, as it pertains to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, and Pudd'nhead Wilson.
And of course in writing this there are some well known racial slurs (and some antiquated, unfamiliar ones) that will have to be quoted and referred to, which I expect would probably end up getting my account automatically banned.
The article will be showing Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson as anti-racist works, so don't suggest any actually pro-racism sites.
I suppose this is an argument for hosting one's own blog, but I do have a lot on my plate already.
So just is there a platform for this kind of thing where one won't run into algorithmic banning - or moderation by people not overly familiar with American English literature who might misinterpret what they read?
52 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread[0] https://substack.com/content
[1] https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati...
Pastebin has had overly aggressive algorithmic deletions for a few years now, I wouldn't use it.
pastebin, BBSs, or even just uploading a file to a filehost like S3 would all work. but that doesn't put the content in front of anybody's eyes like the publishing platforms do. if you just upload a file somewhere, nobody is going to see it. and i assume that having other people read it is the point.
Hosting a simple static page is extremely easy nowadays. But if you really just want a pre-existing website where you can write some text with basic formatting and probably not have to worry about it being removed, try rentry.co
DigitalOcean has a "1 click" setup for WordPress (and probably other blogging software). It's not actually 1 click, but it is super easy. The most tedious part was buying and configuring a domain, which has to be done away from DigitalOcean.
(Or you could self-host an .onion, but this approach has someone else do all the fiddly technical bits for you.)
How is your analysis of Twain so spicy that you’re expecting to both A. get autobanned by Medium and B. not be able to get the ban reversed upon appeal?
Would you care to share a snippet of your literary analysis that you think might lead to you being kicked off your platform? Otherwise, this seems like a bit of an ad for your (edgy?) blog.
I can totally understand the worry about getting picked up by automated moderation and not being able to appeal successfully.
If Medium has an auto-ban policy on the n-word, the author could be deplatformed, or at the very least be at the mercy of a CS rep who is paid for volume of tickets solved, not for understanding the nuance of 19th century american literature.
Considering the fact that the theoretical chance of that happening has gotten a link to his blog to the front of HN, I would be fascinated to see Medium employees justify “No quoting literature with mean words no matter the context” to the posters on here if they chose that route.
So far I’ve only got a couple of pieces of information: a link to a blog and the promise of some groundbreaking new literary analysis that’s ~too critical and offensive to the algorithm to even try posting~. It kind of reads like an ad.
I am familiar with Twain’s work, I’ve read it, along with lots of critiques and articles (he is one of the most popular and analyzed authors in US history)
This is actually good, if more people chose not to use Medium because of issues like this, Medium would adapt or die.
I suppose Medium could request access to his hard drive, grep for documents containing slurs+”twain” and force-post them to alleviate his anxiety?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227936
All your posts are disconnected from each other unless you explicitly decide to claim authorship — that is, by default nobody can discover than posts/sites A and B are by the same author. We also don’t divulge authorship information to anyone. We’ve been threatened with lawsuits already and we didn’t care.
Our policy is that we don’t censor anything (beyond what is actually illegal in Estonia, where we are based). No algorithmic banning either. Brick aims to be a (small) piece of internet infrastructure rather than a social network.
Have a look at telegra.ph for how it probably should work, maybe require the login to publish to the public in the end.
One thing to keep in mind here is that anything that allows anonymous publishing/uploading/etc will be used for malware delivery. This is what killed Firefox Send: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/up...
Even with forced sign-in, we see multiple phishing attempts per month. People sign up and create pages saying something like "You have a new IMPORTANT PDF FILE, click here to open". The links always lead to fake OneDrive pages. This hurts our users because then the whole domain is marked as suspicious.
My gut feeling is that without forced sign-in this could be done at scale. I don't know how Telegraph solves it.
This said, I think "maybe require the login to publish to the public in the end" could be a good workflow. No idea how many people feel the same way you do, though. Off the top of my head I can't remember any other mainstream SaaS things that do it.
> The article will be showing Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson as anti-racist works, so don't suggest any actually pro-racism sites.
In today's culture wouldn't any site that permits posting racial slurs at all be considered "pro-racism", regardless of context?
I wouldn’t host any content I consider racist. If this is what OP describes, I would host it. I would want to review it first and discuss any concerns if they arise. And I also have a lot on my plate so it would take some coordination on expectations/requirements and time to set up. But “in today’s culture”, as an anti-racist myself I’d gladly support this piece as described.
Edit: Sorry should’ve made it explicit! OP if you want to be hosted by a rando human on HN who is interested in your piece, instead of a platform, I’m easy to contact.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs
edit: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018182453-Contr...
I don't see anything about offensive material here.
As for where to publish, that is a question best asked of people who are well versed in literary analysis or anti-racism. That is probably a bit off the beaten path for most of us on HN.
Anyways, others have already said it, but I'll say it again.
Substack. So long as you aren't calling for violence on others, insurrection, all that jazz; you should be fine. Besides, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is tame in comparison to other authors and even philosophers that people write/talk about. Probably smarter than some of them too.
Sure, he said some words that some people today don't like, but when one considers context of the times, it should be allowable. Especially when considering things like the creative license of authors and artists.
A few things though to consider before using Substack.
1. They say your posts can be as long as you want, but due to the nature of Gmail limitations, it's essentially artificially limited by gmail. So if you want people to be able to read your entire article in their email, make sure you don't use too many large data pictures, etc stuff like that.
2. The site is constantly saving your work in the event of a power outage, or network error. The latter happens somewhat often with them, due to the nature of the beast, and of humans. When cloudflare was getting some flak over Kiwifarms a few months ago, it ended up getting some sort of attack that took down Substack somewhat as well if I understand correctly. It only lasted a few hours though, tops. So pay attention to when the network error message pops up, and stop typing till it goes away.
3. Their setup is still being worked on and added to, so if you think it looks a little bland, don't worry you are not alone. But that sort of works for it as well, as it helps keep things low cost I bet.
And
4. You can monetize through Stripe.
How is this not an ad for your upcoming spicy post?
If it's a person who's reviewing keywords I'd have to think the context would be obvious, and could be specifically crafted to be so if needed.
But if I had reason to be worried about that I'd go set up an inexpensive server at DigitalOcean (etc) and just reference stuff from a medium post if that's where I had an audience I wanted to share it with.
Aside from that, "showing Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson as anti-racist works" is probably a worthwhile and necessary thing right now, and easy to do. Anyone who's read Twain knows he deliberately exposed the ignorance of racism and cruelty of slavery but apparently he's not read as much these days. If all you're looking for are "offensive words" by today's standards you'll find them there.
His "Joan of Arc" does the same for women's rights. She's tougher, smarter, and more courageous and moral than all the men in that story. I really cannot see how focusing on those attributes of Twain's works could get you booted off Medium, but I could be surprised to learn it can in these "interesting times" we're living in.
Since you are clearly already self-censoring for fear of algoritmic retaliation, you should consider the time impact of that as well as the impacts to the quality of your writing.
One approach is to self-publish, then "syndicate" to ephemeral places like medium, blogger, livejournal, GeoCities, or whatever the kids are using these days.
With a little effort, you can do this. Your own domain and NFSN (Nearly Free Speech) [1] for hosting is the combo I’d recommend. You need to handle the blog generation (and/or sFTP) part. You’ll get proper support from humans if there are any issues.
[1]: nearlyfreespeech.net