81–90 of 169 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably different audiences will prefer different writers, as they always have.
One of the dangers is that it turns out audiences actually prefer writers constrained and filtered and checked by editors. But by the time they realize that, editors won’t exist any more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably different audiences will prefer different writers, as they always have.
One of the dangers is that it turns out audiences actually prefer writers constrained and filtered and checked by editors. But by the time they realize that, editors won’t exist any more.
> [...] writers who can command a paying audience have heretofore been significantly underpaid. I don't know for sure, but I suspect the writer-paid-monthly model is straight up more effective at pulling money from readers' pockets than the magazine subscription model. I mean, I can pay £34 a year for a fortnightly magazine with quite a few writers doing quite a lot of investigative journalism, and even mailing a pap…
This is how online literature works in China: https://archive.is/uoOXS
Vaguely off topic, but why do so many programmers use substack and medium to write about programming? Why not use their own programming skills to create their own website, rather than consume a service? I used to love visiting programmers' websites, where programmer's would use their skills to not only write, but create. Now it's largely a drab stream of medium posts.
Network effects. Medium and Substack help discoverability. It's trivial to geta site online, but difficult to have people come across it.
I don't remember the exact numbers, but I had a popular article with something like 170k reads of which only 15% came from Medium itself.
"...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
"...it’s not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their *popular* writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the *popular* writers to discover their actual market value."
I've yet to read what I would consider high quality journalism on Substack. It's a lot of quick take opinion pieces.
On top of that, some may consider journalistic good writing a collective effort, in which an editor is usually necessary.
Substack’s business model doesn’t make sense. They are just using VC money to try and build social platform, but it’s a flawed one at best: - MOST people will not want to pay for articles. Especially in an ever increasing world of subscription payments across tv, music, SaaS, I really don’t see how email newsletters will be high on people’s lists - for the quality writers that people do want to pay, they will eventua…
I see these "I could build this in a weekend" type responses regularly on HN, and in my opinion it could not be more wrong. Substack isn't a CRUD app with a few features, it is man-years of work on the technical side. More importantly, they've had amazing execution on the business and product side. Building a business is really hard, and because you could replicate substack-the-app does not mean you would can build substack-the-business.
> It works to some degree, but I’m looking forward to the day that there are enough programming specialists that many solutions are done in house
What a waste this would be! Starting a business today is tractable because we build on the shoulders of giants. Tools like JIRA, Github, Sentry, Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoom, Slack, Notion, Stripe, GSuite, ... and many more are so much better and cheaper than anything you'd build in house.
I don't think I'll ever end up using Substack. In a world where information is virtually worthless, why should I pay you for your opinion?
Well formed opinions, ideas, curation, and coverage, and priceless to others. To some because they operate in fields where they can put to use such information, to others because they want to understand the world they live in better (even if they don't get something out of it).
Even more so "in a world where information is virtually worthless", in other words, in a world where good stuff is lost in the noise / signal ratio.
In any case, I'd rather pay for a few great newsletters than for wasting my time with the nth BS Netflix show.
(I pay for a couple of Substack subscriptions)