Thread by @Chronotope

I have some concerns about Post that are only getting deeper.

So people are asking for more detail and the answer is hard to put into solid points because it is more Vibes than facts but some things:

...

Issues include, in no particular order:

- The points system and how it pushes interactions.
- The founder's last company and statements about his opposition to privacy work at Google.
- The policy around prerolled video
- The apparent lack of alt text options...

- It's incredibly constant pushing of itself as a platform for "independent journalism" but no visible staff experience or employment at any journalism or media cos but plenty of experience at aggregation platforms...

- The prioritization of pricing & payment over safety controls.
- Forcing of content to live on-platform to use those tools instead of giving or supporting publishers w/an interest in controlling their own platform.
- The above and other similarities to Medium...

- Comments are not native to the platform but are powered by OpenWeb... which--for all the founders talk about payment-based journalism and how important it is--is a advertising company that happens to also do comments and has some troublesome events in its past.

- It does not appear that authors can moderate their own comments
- Their content moderation rules are rather loose
- They do not appear to have a clear appeals process for incorrectly moderated content
- Individual Post pages all appear to have OpenNews's privacy policy linked

Now... the OpenNews stuff is particularly troubling considering the founder's rhetoric about subscription/payment based journalism. But all of this *could* be startup jitters. I'm not here to tell you the platform is bad or canceled or anything like that...

But I'm extremely wary of how it is set up and the business that is running it. I will try it out because I'll try everything, but also, I am not yet interested in promoting it or me on there without a better handle on what is going on there. So yeah... I have concerns.

Also, just like the whole... vibe of the main feed is a little weird and it feels very unfinished even in the features that are presumably the focus of its launch? ...

If you want people to do full-length articles like Medium (which I think they do) they need to be able to edit

Also, for the sake of trying the platform on its own terms I put up a Post that I pay-walled for 1 "pt" and uhhh... I can't read my own post. Seems like that would be a thing basic QA would have caught?

If you are not familiar with the issues with OpenWeb, you can start here:

*OpenWeb

I'm pretty concerned that signing up for Post means that you are also implicitly agreeing to OpenWeb's privacy policy and terms, all things considered.

Also... uhhh... don't do this. This is obnoxious.

*OpenWeb

(I said OpenNews a few times in this thread and meant OpenWeb every time, sorry about that)

Just realized... there's no way to see if someone replied to your Post, "@"ed you, or "RePosted" one of your posts that I can see? Starting to wonder if the pitch for this platform was "what if Medium had a bad commenting system".

Uhhh

I have more concerns about Post now.

For those curious about the founder's statements about why he left Google that were troubling me, those are archived here - web.archive.org/web/2021062214…

The CEO edited his welcome post so it no longer says that you are endowed with unalienable rights that are protected based on a set of categories including "net worth". New version has removed that specific phrase. Archived version here: web.archive.org/web/2022111919…