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We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

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Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#351

Post by klelatti »

awb wrote: post #79

My personal experience with consuming content on Substack is that it’s been mostly fringe opinion content with a biased agenda. For someone like me that feels wary every time I see a Substack URL, are there some quality independent journalists covering current events that don’t participate in conspiracy theories and partisan echo chambers that I can discover?

Adam Tooze is a history professor at Columbia University so definitely doesn't participate in conspiracy theories. His writing is mostly on current affairs but with history as context.

I don't agree with 100% of what he writes but it is always stimulating and challenging. Very strongly recommended.

https://adamtooze.substack.com

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#352

Post by teddyh »

ellegriffin wrote: post #204
alisonatwork wrote: post #198

Are there any plans to allow readers/subscribers to decouple identities between different newsletters? Or, asked a different way, will the app allow you to "subscribe" to newsletters anonymously? I find myself very reluctant to sign up for new newsletters on Substack now because my identity is shared across all newsletters, so I feel I can no longer keep my interests separated. To be clear: after commenting on one ne…

Honestly, I hope this doesn't change. As an author, I think the reason why the comments section of my newsletter is such a positive place is because all of the commenters are doxed and have a profile. In addition, that's how I find other writers to follow—you can see who follows what and follow that thread which is nice.

https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#353

Post by MadeThisToReply »

cma wrote: post #324
krapp wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2016, Trump won by 77,744 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In 2020, Biden won by 42,844 votes in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. I got my numbers here[0] so feel free to fact check me. I may have been imprecise in referring to electoral votes specifically, but I think I am correct about the margins of victory. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/did-biden-wi...

But you say only the electoral votes matter? Why does this weird three swing states that aren't even all the same so have different populations accross the elections margin matter?

I think what GP is saying is that even with large, multi-million margins in the popular vote, the result can still be "close" because many of those votes count for nothing in the electoral college. Hillary Clinton could have received four million fewer votes in California 2016 and she would still have won that state while losing the electoral college. But if she had merely won an extra ~100,00 votes in a few crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, America might have had its first female president.

I haven't checked the numbers but I think GP is arguing that the Biden-Trump result was "closer" in this sense than the Clinton-Trump result was; i.e. the margin in the electoral college and nationwide popular vote may have been wider, but 2020 was still a closer call in the small number of swing states that might have actually changed the overall result.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#354

Post by saagarjha »

shroompasta wrote: post #259
demosthenes714 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John here, one of the app engineers at Substack. Our team has lots of experience with Swift and values the level of polish you can achieve natively, so went with that. We try to avoid third-party dependencies so native implementation and customization of UIKit, URLSession, and CoreData are important to us. Cross platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, etc are super interesting but in our experience c…

I'm curious as I think I'll be making this decision in the near future. > it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs. Besides the custom UI stuff, as I think React Native has some decent animation support nowadays, what specific native APIs were needed in Substack's case that made React Native an ineligible choice? As text being…

Note that Discord's main conversation view is native UITableView for performance.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#356

Post by kevincox »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #243
cjbest wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading articles may be an almost perfect fit for web, but we see a really clear pattern among the 70% of our users that read in mobile: they discover stuff to read on the web through links that get shared, but once they sign up they overwhelmingly read in their email client. Email is actually pretty great for this, and email is especially powerful for giving writers direct connection to their readers. But there are…

By "read in their email client" (presumably on mobile) I will assume that people view but do not read. Attention spans on mobile are atrocious (notably, the fulcrum is screen size having a neurological impact on ability to pay attention - this is a biological fact) – very little real reading takes place. I can imagine Substack is more of an "aspires to read X" platform than a place for actually reading X. This argume…

This is a huge assumption. I do almost all of my reading in my email client (mostly RSS to email that gets sorted into a Reading folder). Whenever I have some downtime I slowly read through the articles that have accumulated. I have no problem finishing long articles or anything else.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#357

Post by stef25 »

isaacremuant wrote: post #336
bambax wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to mention just one example, "The Abbey of Misrule" ( https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com ) pushes antivaxx rhetoric. I don't know if that represents "50% of the population" (let's hope not) but it's abhorrent in any case.

"Antivaxx rethoric" is just more labeling to dismiss people for not complying with whatever the new authoritarian push is. Hell, all the labels get put together and people who opposed Lockdowns and hurtful covid policies got called racist far right anti vaxxers because it's easier than using actual data. Much of the "anti lockdown/mask/covid vaccine mandates" was and is slowly vindicated day by day no matter how much…

> The Pfizer publications https://youtu.be/7YOD9drZasM are definitely being ignored by most media but are just one more nugget that those you called anti vaxxers that wanted the right to make their own risk analysis were right and those who sold you a lie did it knowingly.

Nobody doesn't have the right to make their own risk analysis. That's assuming they're capable of it and we both know that's not the case.

It really serves no purpose to link to these kind of videos, the ones with an official sounding title and authored by "a retired nurse teacher" who nonetheless calls himself "doctor".

If people don't waste 20+ min of their day sitting through the entire video and then picking it apart to have an endless back and forth of "ok but what about this other 90 page garbage pdf report I found" then it's like you've won the argument that nobody wants to have in the first place. This kind of stuff is rotting the internet from within like there's no tomorrow.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#358

Post by kevincox »

moviewise wrote: post #262
klabb3 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developing for email is still a pretty big pain. I hear you, it's a shit show! I'm gonna have to do that myself soon and I don't look forward to it. > But there are limits to what you can do [in email] But email will still be a very common entry point for readers (unless you expect to change the behavior of your users), so you still need to link to the app or website from the email. As a user I don't mind an app fr…

> But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot? As a subscriber to many Substack newsletters with different publishing schedules, I've found it to be a bit tedious and distracting to have my email inbox be inundated with new posts. I'd rather go to a reader app that has all the newsletters I've subscribed to in one place for when I have the time and the interest to spend a couple of hours reading. I'd l…

Sounds like you need to set up a quick filter that moves these interesting but low urgency items into a "Read it Later" folder.

This is one of my favourite thins about email, it is a way to deliver something to me, but imposes no limitations on my workflow. I can customize however I want.

This is one reason I would never use a substack app. I don't want a different app for substack, medium, WordPress, blogger and have to check them all and learn their imposed workflows. I just want everything sent to my email then I can use the workflow that I want for all of the content.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#359

Post by tomaskafka »

wczekalski wrote: post #348
cjbest wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for subscribing! The bundle question is interesting. The model right now is really an unbundling. The direct relationship between writers and readers is what makes Substack work: as a writer, your incentive is to earn and keep the trust of the audience who deeply values your work. That's not just a good way to get paid for work you're already doing. It's a model that allows and rewards a fundamentally diffe…

I just thought about writers being able to share things they find interesting from other writers with their audience as an interesting lead. Also an emergence of a "curator" class, people who could assemble "newspapers" out of the newsletters could be interesting, too.

This!

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#360

Post by ubac »

retsibsi wrote: post #273
ubac wrote: post #108

Hi Hamish -- how much of your success do you attribute to the secret benefits you offer certain writers to prevent them from leaving? And is it sustainable in the long run (or does that not really matter to you?)

> the secret benefits you offer certain writers to prevent them from leaving Can you elaborate? I know some people were paid big $ up front to make the move, but it didn't seem very secret -- the ones I'm thinking of were pretty open about the deals they'd taken, so presumably Substack wasn't pressuring them to keep quiet. And as far as I know they were paid up front for the first year, before moving to an ordinary r…

Yeah I'm not talking about the advances, although way more writers than people realise have been given advances. Basically Substack has been forced to offer pretty hefty benefits to (try) to stop writers from leaving, there's a ton of "special programs" with various kinds of disguised cash that they offer to writers they want to keep (To my knowledge they've never given discounts on the 10% fee, but they give in-kind benefits to skirt around that). Hamish knows exactly what I'm talking about, if he wants to chime in!
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