Olivia Nuzzi tries to come up with the definitive story, wading into a world where lies and incompetence just layer on top of one another. As you search for your own understanding of this idiotic ending to the stupidest of all presidencies, remember one thing:

If you hit the Pentecostal church, you’ve gone too far.

Substack’s founders — Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi — wrote a thoughtful piece on how the company is approaching content moderation as their platform grows. Overall, it’s a solid post and it outlines how Substack is different from the big social media platforms. Namely, Substack’s business model is built on people paying for subscriptions, not advertising, which lets them focus on building a platform that centers writers (and their subscribers) not “engagement”.

When engagement is the holy metric, trustworthiness doesn’t matter. What matters more than anything else is whether or not the user is stirred. The content and behaviors that keep people coming back – the rage-clicks, the hate-reads, the pile-ons, the conspiracy theories – help sustain giant businesses. When we started Substack to build an alternative to this status quo, we realized that a tweak to an algorithm or a new regulation wouldn’t change things for the better. The only option was to change the entire business model.

We already know what happens when platforms optimize for engagement — President Donald J. Trump for one — but also how it twists the incentives for creators.

Overall, this is a good sign that Substack understands the fundamentals of what makes social media so toxic and has a plan in place to avoid those dynamics. Even as they push into that world with their Reader app, which will bring some discovery elements along with it, it seems like they’ve built a framework for guiding their product development.

Substack’s content guidelines are pretty much exactly what you’d expect from their values statement — no hate speech, no porn, no spam, no doxxing¹. They’ve said they’re dedicated to a small-l liberalism of free speech, but without the absolutist “free speech wing on the free speech party” rhetoric that sent social media off the rails a decade ago.

We are aware of the history here, of how initial hopes about the internet’s ability to promote healthy and productive discourse have been disappointed. Look around you: the internet is broken. But we are not convinced that the solution lies in more censorship; nor do we think the problem is that almost anyone can publish on the internet. The major issue, we think, is that business models based on engagement have created a class of wildly successful media products that distort online discourse. It is increasingly difficult to participate in reasonable discussions on these platforms.

Overall, I think this is a good framework for thinking about building a content platform on the internet today. The biggest piece that’s missing from Substack’s content guidelines is it doesn’t explicitly address disinformation or conspiracy theories — there’s nothing in there that would explicitly forbid QAnon, for example, or even Holocaust deniers (the later almost certainly qualifies as hate speech). What Substack has in its favor, though, is it creates just enough friction to keep the darker, more trollish sorts from showing up in the first place.

“HTML over the wire” sounds like a joke or a parody that managed to make the homepage of Hacker News — that’s how web pages have always worked! — but I think there’s something interesting going on here. If you were building HTML from scratch and wanted all of the features we take for granted today, particularly when it comes to fully dynamic and reactive web apps, I imagine this is what you’d come up with.

I remember making a note of this when Hey was announced¹, I certainly wouldn’t bet against this crew.

Eater looks into how King Arthur dealt with everyone baking through the pandemic.

The thing is, the great flour shortage wasn’t a flour shortage at all. Our national grain stockpile wasn’t depleted, and flour still flowed in train cars and trucks and pallets. For King Arthur, the impact in the early months was small. The virus hadn’t yet reached the mills it works with, clustered in breadbasket states; Heald says none of their mill partners had staff out sick with COVID-19 or waiting on test results until much later. In the spring and summer, everyday people couldn’t buy flour because of tight bottlenecks in a national logistics system built around the logic of consumerism. The problem wasn’t the flour. The problem was getting it into bags.

The solution King Arthur used: promise every mill they work with that they’d buy whatever they could produce. Even then, they quickly ran into the problem of how to source enough bags! All told, King Arthur sold a lot of flour this year.

In related, feel-good baking news is this wonderful profile of Sarah House, the in-house baker extraordinaire and recipe writer for Bob’s Red Mill.

Kim Barker, Michael H. Keller and Steve Eder, reporting in The New York Times, on the history of police unions and how they continue to fail the citizens they are meant to protect:

The riots — among the worst in the nation’s history — gave the city’s fledgling police union leverage. The Detroit Police Officers Association was negotiating the country’s first comprehensive police contract, seeking a raise and a new disciplinary process to replace one it considered arbitrary. In what became a blueprint for union negotiations across the country, police officers promised to restore order but demanded something in return.

One feature of the reactionary nature of conservative politics is the way they take liberal or progressive culture and institutions and turn them into avatars for their own ends. Trump in many ways was the latest culmination of American conservatives finally embracing the full-throated culture war they’ve long accused the left of, but in a sad spectacle cult-of-personality built around the ego of a very broken and corrupt individual.

Police unions have the imprint of social progress but ultimately want to maintain the status quo, even as it means oppression. Reforming police departments should start with unions and holding every officer accountable.

It’s far from the worst thing, but the rise of influencer culture is certainly a lamentable part of today’s internet. This post, by a college student and artist who uses Instagram to promote her online store, details how the algorithms actually work to force influencers to maximize what platforms want from them.

They like it when you post a combination of normal posts, reels, IGTV, stories, shoppable posts, etc etc. You know those little events they do in stories like the “I Voted” sticker? participate in that school spirit kinda junk. The algorithm likes it when you use the in app camera and filters, geolocation tagging, messaging, story buttons, all that stuff. use app more. have many different thing to offer you :) sell your soul :)

The influencer game certainly works for some once they hit a certain threshold, but it’s also clearly a set of shifting goal posts for the vast majority of people. It’s clear that Instagram has optimized their discovery/recommendation algorithm for people who treat Instagram like a full time job — even if that’s only a fraction of a percent, that’s still hundreds of thousands if not millions of people!

Adam “Apeland” Koford — a brilliant, hilarious, and genuinely unique cartoonist — reminds us big tech doesn’t really love you. And Jeff Eaton on the lie that algorithms were ever helpful arbiters.

Taylor Lorenz, who writes about internet culture for The New York Times, is almost certainly the definitive source of further reporting from this world.

Mike Fannin, the president and editor of The Kansas City Star, in a letter from the editor about a six-part package on the paper reporting on its own history of racism:

Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong.

For 140 years, it has been one of the most influential forces in shaping Kansas City and the region. And yet for much of its early history — through sins of both commission and omission — it disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians. It reinforced Jim Crow laws and redlining. Decade after early decade it robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.

That business is The Kansas City Star.

That is one hell of a lede. Reporters and editors dug through their own archives, looking head on at their reporting, and comparing their coverage to the same stories in Black-owned papers. Obviously, an institution like The Star can’t change the past but owning up to it is crucial for making progress going forward. I hope more publications will do this kind of work.

In a similar vein, in 2018 The New York Times began publishing the obituaries of women who’d been forgotten in their Overlooked section.

A wonderful meditation on the “living, temporal spaces” of the web, by Laurel Schwulst:

My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.

Schwulst captures a lot of the modern web, the complexity, the imperfect metaphors we use for this liminal space, the tensions presented by tech platforms, the possibility for building new worlds.

Jeremy Keith considers the possibility of a website as a forever project.

Following up the recent release of their non-tracking analytics tool, Cloudflare Pages is a new hosting platform for building websites that doesn’t require having to fuss with all of the particulars of cloud hosting.

I use (and am quite happy with!) Netlify to host Flicker Fusion and dig the JAMstack approach. Once your site is in a git repo, deploying it is simple, and you get all of the built-in benefits of using git. I spent the last few months chipping away at a site redesign and when I was ready to deploy, it was a matter of merging the beta branch to main and pushing. And because everything is a static file that lives on a global CDN, I don’t have to worry about getting Fireballed.

Like I said, I’m very happy with Netlify and have no intention of moving over to Cloudflare but I’m happy to see more providers embracing the approach. Cloudflare is also integrating their serverless functions framework, which will make fully dynamic web apps possible. There’s never been a better time to build a website that doesn’t rely on the perverse incentives of the big platforms.

Ken laid the foundation for a lot of what we know as internet media today and then turned his back on it to self produce a magazine and a radio show in the desert.