While I’m linking to the transcript of the interview, you should totally take the time to listen to it. It’s just wild. The part about content moderation on Substack is particularly troubling.

Nilay: Wow. I mean, I just want to be clear, if somebody shows up on Substack and says “all brown people are animals and they shouldn’t be allowed in America,” you’re going to censor that. That’s just flatly against your terms of service.

Chris: So, we do have a terms of service that have narrowly prescribed things that are not allowed.

Nilay: That one I’m pretty sure is just flatly against your terms of service. You would not allow that one. That’s why I picked it.

Chris: So there are extreme cases, and I’m not going to get into the–

Nilay: Wait. Hold on. In America in 2023, that is not so extreme, right? “We should not allow as many brown people in the country.” Not so extreme. Do you allow that on Substack? Would you allow that on Substack Notes?

Chris: I think the way that we think about this is we want to put the writers and the readers in charge–

Nilay: No, I really want you to answer that question. Is that allowed on Substack Notes? “We should not allow brown people in the country.”

Chris: I’m not going to get into gotcha content moderation.

Nilay: This is not a gotcha… I’m a brown person. Do you think people on Substack should say I should get kicked out of the country?

Chris: I’m not going to engage in content moderation, “Would you or won’t you this or that?”

(There’s a clip of this on TikTok and wooooof.)

He never answered the question, and Nilay went as far as to give Chris a way out during the interview. Between this and Substack’s financial situation, I would not want to be building a business atop its platform.

I came across this link to an article on The Guardian via Justin Blanton’s blog, and got a kick out of it. Emma Beddington wrote back in October:

There’s a new buzz on TikTok – well, not a buzz exactly. It’s more of a hum, maybe waves crashing, a purring fan or steady, heavy rain. To me, it sounds like an empty aeroplane, cruising peacefully at altitude. It’s brown noise, a close cousin of the better-known white noise, and TikTok users, particularly the platform’s ADHD community, are all over it: there are 85.3m views for the #brownnoise hashtag.

The “brown” in brown noise is not a colour, but a reference to sound that mimics Brownian motion, the movement pollen makes in water, identified by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827. In essence, brown noise is the familiar, staticky sound of white noise (that is, all the audible frequencies simultaneously) but with the low frequency notes augmented and the less pleasant high frequency notes turned down, counteracting the human ear’s natural tendency to hear higher frequencies louder.

Like Justin, I’m a huge fan of brown noise, using it often as I fall asleep. I usually mix in a little “rain” noise for the perfect sleepy-time sound via the excellent Dark Noise.