I may reach out to the author to learn more as suggested, but is there a particular reason someone would feeling strongly about 'boycotting' substack?

If you follow thinking like this to its logical conclusion you shouldn’t engage in ANY technology for ANY purpose.

While you’re at it, you should make your own clothes, grow your own food, and build your own home with materials you procured sustainably.

Taken to its extreme, this line of thinking is such a non-starter that I don’t even really know what to do with it.

I find YouTube consume a lot of my time, I blocked the url on my computer now I prefer to touch my phone more, it does help but I need to do more, and I willing to sacrifice some handy instructional knowledge. I am switching from music services to bandcamp (I hop in what people are currently buying to find better music, and bandcamp radio), also there is few internet radio stations like musicforprogramming, dublab, radiooooo and thelotradio etc, (looking for more internet radio stations!) I feel there is no need for explanation that human selection is better than "algorithm", I feel it.

I also "boycott" many such systems, and I completely empathize with the author on not really being sure why I'm doing it. It's, sadly, more for myself than it is in belief that anything will change, because many of these systems are ingrained, and it's not reasonable to expect that the others around me are also going to give them up.

Some examples:

I haven't ordered anything on Amazon since 2014. I hope the rationale is pretty obvious. I lean heavily into brick-and-mortar and especially local stores, where possible (I'm blessed with many local book and music stores). I do use eBay, and occasionally (maybe 1 in 10 purchases) I find out that the seller is actually just doing arbitrage from Amazon - they buy a $10 item on Amazon for $5, and have Amazon ship it to me using the "gift" feature. $5 profit for them; lots of bad feels for me.

I don't subscribe to any of the streaming platforms. I believe that I should have a tangible video that can't be clawed back, so that means buying a lot of DVDs and Blu-rays. Blu-rays, I know, are a tower of cards, since my ability to play them back indefinitely relies on leaked keys. If I want to watch a "Netflix exclusive", like Stranger Things, it means I'm organizing a watch party with friends who have subscriptions, where I'll provide food and beverages to at least attempt to offset that I'm benefiting from a streaming platform.

I listen to a local college radio station, instead of Spotify. I love that there are human DJs curating the playlists. They're creating community (the station actively engages the community), and since they're mostly college students, they're learning a valuable skill for their futures as well. Since laws around public radio prevent them from selling advertisements, I donate to the station in excess of what I'd pay for Spotify, since I value it. For buying music, my preference order is Bandcamp (DRM-free FLAC; the artists actually get a decent cut on the sale), followed by physical CDs (see the tangibility comment, above).

I run my own e-mail - both inbound and outbound. This is because I am stubborn, and have done it for twenty years now. I know Gmail and Outlook are on the receiving end of 90% of the e-mails I send, so they have a copy of most every message. The maintenance makes it a Pyrrhic victory.

I abstain from social media entirely. Hacker News comments are about as "social" as I get in the public sphere these days, as they capture the spirit of what I loved about the Usenet/forum days. I do participate in some professional Slack networks. Much as all of those networks would prefer _not_ to be on Slack, it'd be too hard to up and move the communities.

I could go on, but the gist is that I know these decisions are helping me, more or less exclusively - they don't even register in the overall trend.

> i've been off gmail before but fastmail started having flaky delivery both sending and receiving and i got too petrified and went skulking back.

Huh. Happy fastmail user for close to... 10 years now? Never had a problem of this sort.

I loathe this writing style where everything is in lowercase.