And Another Social Media company suppresses free speech.
I recently had nine posts deleted from Reddit by an algorithm. The reason given:
Thank you for submitting. Unfortunately, your combined karma (your comment karma added to your post karma) is negative, common in spam bots, and as such your post/comment was deleted. If you're not a spam bot, contact the moderators!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
This is ludicrous beyond belief. A bot deleted my posts because my “karma” indicated that I was a bot. You can’t make this shit up. The topic was carried over from yet another social media platform, the community advice section of Upwork, the best of a bad breed of online freelance job brokers. The original post came from someone who has been virtue signaling for years. She knows the platform in and out and considers herself not merely the Queen of Upwork but the Queen of All Freelancing. She has missed the fact that she is a small fish in a drop of water.
She recommended I do things I tried to do but the platform would not cooperate. She knows Upwork inside out, thus considers herself the Queen of All Freelancing. She can answer any question about “Where do I find xyz?” because she has memorized the entire Terms of Compliance and Help Articles. She considers herself infallible, does no work other than through Upwork, and her favored currency has been to defend her position, because not only is she infallible, but the platform is infallible.
While being the best of a bad breed, the platform occasionally goes batshit crazy. When it does, it creates a firestorm. That occurred with a job posting, and I indicated that. I tried to do everything she told me I should have done, and the platform refused to cooperate. That’s impossible because both she and the platform are infallible.
The only thing she told me I should have done that I did not do is simply delete all responders I didn’t want to hire. They are never informed of the action. That is cruel and contributes to Upwork’s reputation as freelancer-hostile. I try to reply to every application in the hope that the freelancer will consider my critique and try to improve. That can only help everyone in the community. But helping people is far less important than self-defense.
The global freelancing market is measured in the trillions. Some call themselves contractors, some consultants, and don’t know the difference. The difference is in what they owe the client. A contractor owes the client what he wants; the consultant owes the client what he needs. It may not be what he wants; if the issue cannot be resolved, the ethical thing to do is to provide the client with a list of other qualified firms and individuals and walk away. Refund any retainer paid, regardless of work done or delivered.
The thread includes psychiatric diagnoses from a long list of graduates from the Instagram College of Medicine. There are accusations of me lying, without any proof. In fact, basic due diligence was skipped in all cases. I obviously am a nightmare client, except no one bothered reading my reviews as a client.
I am a retired issue-based consultant. We are a tiny number, and few qualify. The primary qualification is breadth, not depth. It requires identifying the real underlying issue, which is more than half of the value ever delivered, in order to talk with the client in a competitive situation. Since my health ruled out travel in 2014, I have been unable to work anything except with existing clients or through online brokers. Finally, I gave up trying to be a provider. I am still a client because I continue writing fiction. Now I have to go with people off-platform only, because anyone reading that thread and accepting the lies without proof will continue criticizing me as unfit and a monster.
The disappearance of skepticism in the press has led to a disappearance of skepticism in the public. How one maintains a Western liberal democracy in the absence of skepticism is a mystery to me. Perhaps one doesn’t. Ours has been replaced by authoritarianism.
You can create a free account at the Way back machine and upload files from your Substack. Their webcrawler is hit and miss. Yes, this is on you (or me or anyone who writes there). You ahve to make it inot a word document, tho.
https://archive.org/
As you know I do a lot of posts about fairly innocuous topics (library history). I have found that about 50% of online sources gone even tho cited. Link rot. While clay tablets (the best!) are not suitable for you, longevity means books. That you write books gives you permanence.
When Dostoyevsky wrote most of the population was illiterate. He found an audience in spite of that.
BTW, I tried to use some of my older Substack posts in a class and when I went to check them they weren't on the platform. And also, search engines don't find Substack posts unless you do some very difficult coding which hasn't worked for me. "How I got my Substack to be Google searchable" :https://rsilt.substack.com/p/how-i-got-my-substack-to-be-google