Sovereign writers and Substack
stratechery.com
Sovereign writers and Substack
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Re: Sovereign writers and Substack
#2"...it’s not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their best writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the best writers to discover their actual market value."
Thompson on point per usual
Re: Sovereign writers and Substack
#3Of course things aren’t so simple; Sullivan, like several of the other names on that leaderboard, are, to put it gently, controversial. That he along with other lightning-rod writers ended up on Substack is more a matter of where else would they go?
While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism as a whole. It often will just mean that successful writers are the most celebrity-like ones: writing controversial things because it gets more traffic and therefore more income.
I don't know about you, but I don't want the tactics of Kim Kardashian to be the model of a future journalist.
Re: Sovereign writers and Substack
#4A very elegant non-political article getting to the core of the issue - that yet again old business models are being disrupted and this pisses people off.
Shame these pissed off people have to get political though.
Re: Sovereign writers and Substack
#5Of course things aren’t so simple; Sullivan, like several of the other names on that leaderboard, are, to put it gently, controversial. That he along with other lightning-rod writers ended up on Substack is more a matter of where else would they go? While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism as a w…
My perception of old media is that they are doing exactly this, writing click bait things to get clicks and subs. This is true across the board from CNN to NYT to Fox.
At least with substack the incentives are not there for daily churn articles, the journalists have independence to publish when they want to, how they want to, worst case they lost subscribers. I think those incentives make them a lot less likely to make everything about clicks and controversy actually.
Re: Sovereign writers and Substack
#6"...it’s not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their best writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the best writers to discover their actual market value." Thompson on point per usual
And that raises a question. What will readers value? Will they value rigorous writers who may provide discomfort or engaging writers who write to choirs?
Re: Sovereign writers and Substack
#7Of course things aren’t so simple; Sullivan, like several of the other names on that leaderboard, are, to put it gently, controversial. That he along with other lightning-rod writers ended up on Substack is more a matter of where else would they go? While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism as a w…
> writing controversial things because it gets more traffic and therefore more income.
This is a danger but I'd rather have "controversial" than "if you deviate from the politics of the publication that pays your salary, you get fired".
Personally, I like Sullivan, Greenwald, Yglesias, Taibbi, etc.
I think Sullivan and Yglesias are not drama queens and that Geenwald and Tiabbi are. But I like all 4, I just think the latter two need a responsible editor to rein them in a bit.
Re: Sovereign writers and Substack
#8The writers aren't completely "sovereign" as long as they are using Stripe (and Visa and Mastercard) to process payments. It is basically inevitable that some entity in the payment system will eventually interfere with Substack even if Substack themselves hold the line.
Re: Sovereign writers and Substack
#9The writers aren't completely "sovereign" as long as they are using Stripe (and Visa and Mastercard) to process payments. It is basically inevitable that some entity in the payment system will eventually interfere with Substack even if Substack themselves hold the line.
This is kind of a use-case for Bitcoin, no?
Re: Sovereign writers and Substack
#10The writers aren't completely "sovereign" as long as they are using Stripe (and Visa and Mastercard) to process payments. It is basically inevitable that some entity in the payment system will eventually interfere with Substack even if Substack themselves hold the line.
This is kind of a use-case for Bitcoin, no?
It's the planned/future use-case for Bitcoin, yes. As of now, you cannot pay a lot of your daily expenses with Bitcoin so you still need a way of going from Bitcoin to USD/EUR/$LOCAL_CURRENCY so instead of Visa and Mastercard being the gatekeepers, the centralized exchange facilitating the fiat-trade is now the gatekeeper instead.