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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

#361

Post by tomaskafka »

moviewise wrote: post #327
vosper wrote: post #46

Will there ever be bundles? Or some kind of bulk discount? Pay-per-article? I'm a paid subscriber to a number of Substack writers, and I'd like to subscribe to more, but it can rapidly run into the hundreds of dollars per month - so I really have to pick and choose. I can imagine bundles aren't really your model, and maybe aren't in your authors interest either. But I'd love to get like an Economics bundle and a New…

> Or even a pay-per-article model - some of the free newsletters I'm on publish paywalled things I'm interested in, but I don't want to subscribe to the full deal. But I'd pre-load my account with $50 and pay a couple of dollars for a single article. This is an excellent idea! Tracking individual articles for payment, rather than the whole publication/newsletter, would allow for bundling in a way that respects Substa…

I have seen tens of attempts to do this in a past decade, and it never seems to work.

People say they want this, but in reality almost no article seems to be worthy of eg. $5, even though you would be absolutely ok subscribing for $5 to a newsletter with 2 posts per month, one of which you won't read ...

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

#362

Post by ubac »

klelatti wrote: post #349
ubac wrote: post #128

You continued taking your cut from my subscriptions after I'd left your platform (I think because you didn't really understand how Stripe Connect works) and just refused to pay the money back for over a year. What was the deal with that? It struck me as both deeply dishonourable and not even sensible as a business move. Why did you do that, and what does it say about Substack as a company that you did it?

Hello Uri. Love the browser! Did you get this sorted in the end and have you heard of others having this issue?

Oh thanks that means a lot to me!

I would say it was partially sorted -- I eventually dm'ed their PR person (once they hired one) and somehow she pretty quickly figured out how to pay back part of the money, but refused to send any documentation of what she was paying back or answer questions about various discrepancies, which made it a big hassle on the bookkeeping side. And I never got an explanation or apology from the Substack guys, or any thanks from them for giving them a chance to make it right for more than a year. Truly one of the weirdest life experiences to me -- aside from the moral aspect, I would have thought screwing over one of your biggest customers for no obvious reason is bad for business. But it seems to be working out for them so far, so, what do I know!

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

#363

Post by dash2 »

erikbye wrote: post #342
sachinmonga wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a user I don't mind an app from a technical perspective. It gives me more options! But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot? A simple but important one: being able to get a notification on your phone when a new post lands in your inbox. There are lots of subtle little things around readability, scroll performance, etc. too. There are also a decent number of Podcasts on Substack now, and listeni…

App notifications are not a feature but a detrimental annoyance. Also useless, because it is very likely you cannot read the article at the moment you receive the notification, because you are busy. I don't know what Substack is, but it seems similar to Medium, and as such an app is unnecessary. You don't need apps to display and read text, I already have a web browser. Distraction-free reading? Just make sure your p…

Some people like notifications. If you don’t want them, they are easy to turn off.

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

#364

Post by notafraudster »

krapp wrote: post #265
HWR_14 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Biden] won with fewer electoral votes [than] Trump over in 2016. That's both not true and trivially checkable.

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...

"Electoral votes" appears to be a term you've created to mean "the smallest number of votes it would be possible to flip to change the result of the election, if allocated perfectly", rather than what most people would assume you mean -- electoral college votes. Given your definition, you are basically correct.

Trump won 306-232 in 2016. With faithless electors, this became 304-227. He lost the popular vote. As you note, 77,000 votes in the three closest states could have flipped the election.

Biden won 306-232 in 2020 (the same margin, or better if you allow for the faithless electors). If he lost 42,000 votes it'd have been 269-269, which would have led to the House of Representative contingency, which might have elected either Biden or Trump (or ended in a different outcome, frankly). It'd take another 33,000 votes to give Trump an unambiguous win by flipping Nevada.

This is an interesting curiosity -- but for Aunt Maria getting the flu, the election could have been different! But we're in increasingly silly hypotheticals. Knowing what we know now, it's clear Clinton would have done more to target the states she narrowly lost. But the problem is that state votes are correlated with one another and so the number of hypotheticals you need to sustain to "flip" exactly those votes without turning out any additional votes or affecting the campaign strategies is pretty weird.

Even if you take the prototypical version of this question "Did Ralph Nader 'cost' Gore the 2000 presidential election by 'taking' at least 500 of his votes in Florida?" it's sort of a rabbit hole of absurdities. The answer is surely yes to the question, because the answer to any hypothetical is yes when the margin is that close. But beyond that not super productive.

In general I think most people would, collectively, analyze Biden's victory over Trump as somewhat more decisive than Trump's over Clinton or Bush's over Gore, though less decisive than either of Obama's or Bush 2004.

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

#365

Post by ubac »

gonehome wrote: post #231
svnt wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of writers who have disclosed their “offers too good to refuse” from substack, including their first big name who they paid well into six figures to jump platforms.

ubac framed the question in a hostile way which is probably why he was ignored. What you're describing sounds like a cash advance/guarantee which Hamish mentioned about 'de-risking' offers. If you have good data that a writer could make X money, but they're afraid to leave their day job - it's easy to just say to them "we'll pay you your day job salary to de-risk this jump for you" if you know they'll make way more t…

hey! Sorry, there's a lot of history here, Hamish has been very unpleasant to me and many writers I love, as well as wrongly continuing to bill me after I left his platform -- I realise otherwise I might have sounded unduly hostile, sorry for that.

The benefits I'm talking about are not the advances or guarantees, there's basically a ton of secret programmes at Substack where they give favored publishers special in-kind benefits to effectively pay back some of the 10% fee. Hamish knows what I'm talking about, but can't mention it publicly because their business model is reliant on a pretense that every publisher is paying 10% and not a hodgpodge of subsidies and kickbacks. Does that make sense?

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

#366

Post by ubac »

LordAtlas wrote: post #131
ubac wrote: post #128

You continued taking your cut from my subscriptions after I'd left your platform (I think because you didn't really understand how Stripe Connect works) and just refused to pay the money back for over a year. What was the deal with that? It struck me as both deeply dishonourable and not even sensible as a business move. Why did you do that, and what does it say about Substack as a company that you did it?

I might attribute this to Hanlon's Razor. On the other hand, that's not very flattering to them either.

ha! Yes I definitely think the original overbilling was incompetence not malice, but not just saying "we're so sorry we overbilled you, we're not sure how much we took exactly but please let us give you $x to definitely cover it" was more like malice than incompetence (in practice my guess is something closer to pridefulness than malice, but I can't pretend to understand what's in their hearts etc)

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

#367

Post by dav_Oz »

bambax wrote: post #344
isaacremuant wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Okay! ;-) There you go. > the right to make their own risk analysis I really wonder where this comes from though. Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?

You can talk to "these" people. It's a number of factors. As with anything in social media the more extreme views get amplified.

I mean everyone talks about their "bubbles" but very few acknowledge how cognitively hard it is to be open. For that it is best to talk person to person without outright throwing facts around.

I once talked to someone who really believed Hillary Clinton is at some center of some devilsh things eating babies and shit. Well, it turned out it to be a more desperate emotional expression (a personal thing), of course she didn't directly admit it, but it was nonetheless very interesting and insightful. I wouldn't have found that out if I didn't go through the first uncomfortable and awkwards moments of actually leaving my bubble. Someone could dismiss that as only emotionally unstable, I didn't.

So, when a POV seems extreme to you and is held by seemingly 50% of the population: there is really something rotten in the state of Denmark: Leave your bubble form time to time, dude.

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

#368

Post by ubac »

cjbest wrote: post #98
vosper wrote: post #46

Will there ever be bundles? Or some kind of bulk discount? Pay-per-article? I'm a paid subscriber to a number of Substack writers, and I'd like to subscribe to more, but it can rapidly run into the hundreds of dollars per month - so I really have to pick and choose. I can imagine bundles aren't really your model, and maybe aren't in your authors interest either. But I'd love to get like an Economics bundle and a New…

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 want to get this prediction down in writing in as many venues as possible: Substack will eventually offer (opt-in) bundling for authors, where the customer pays $x per month and Substack distributes that to the authors in the bundle.

This will offer some genuine benefits to readers (one monthly payment, maybe a discount) and to writers (lower transaction fees, since Stripe has a fixed cost that eats into small payments), but it will also sever the thing that currently makes it possible for authors to leave Substack and take 100% of their paid subscribers with them: every single reader has a unique subscription object in each individual publisher's Stripe account, which can then be ported to any other platform using Stripe. So when writers leave Substack they won't be able to take with them any subscribers who arrived through a bundle.

I think writers won't realise the danger here, and that Substack will therefore be able to lock in writers, against their original promise.

I would be delighted if this didn't happen, and happy to retract this if Chris could just promise that Substack will never do this kind of bundling, even if it's opt-in for publishers.

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

#369

Post by mst »

bambax wrote: post #316
native_samples wrote: post #19

Firstly - love love love Substack. It's so simple but it's so rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few questions (mostly not about the app though, I'll have to wait for Android support to try that). 1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. T…

Well, the problem with your second point ("free speech") is that it tends to attract and retain a specific kind of writers: those who aren't accepted anywhere else. Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term. And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that t…

No post body was provided.

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

#370

Post by bambax »

dav_Oz wrote: post #367
bambax wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay! ;-) There you go. > the right to make their own risk analysis I really wonder where this comes from though. Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?

You can talk to "these" people. It's a number of factors. As with anything in social media the more extreme views get amplified. I mean everyone talks about their "bubbles" but very few acknowledge how cognitively hard it is to be open. For that it is best to talk person to person without outright throwing facts around. I once talked to someone who really believed Hillary Clinton is at some center of some devilsh thi…

I'm not in charge of the mental health of my fellow humans.

If someone I know and love believes that Hillary Clinton is eating babies, I will engage and try to find out more.

But if it's some random woman on the Internet, I'm really not interested.

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