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Substack Notes Launched

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Re: Substack Notes Launched

#21

Post by claytonjy »

coldpie wrote: post #13

For me, it's just an empty login form, and I'm not going to register an account just to see what's there. I'm sympathetic to the idea of paying for content directly (I spend over $100/mo on Patreon), but I feel like Substack has cultivated a nasty branding issue for themselves. To me, and I know I'm not alone, Substack is where you go when you want to hear some 17-year-old who got high for the first time tell you wha…

On the hand I know exactly what you mean about Greenwald and Taibbi (and so many other neoreactionary media folks), but it's also where I get great content from economists (Noah Smith, Claudia Sahm, Doomberg) and technologists (our own Simon Willison, Gergely Orosz, Molly White).

The media folks are clearly escaping scrutiny and playing to their base, but there are many excellent Substackers in other fields!

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#22

Post by ugh0 »

drcongo wrote: post #17
coldpie wrote: post #13

For me, it's just an empty login form, and I'm not going to register an account just to see what's there. I'm sympathetic to the idea of paying for content directly (I spend over $100/mo on Patreon), but I feel like Substack has cultivated a nasty branding issue for themselves. To me, and I know I'm not alone, Substack is where you go when you want to hear some 17-year-old who got high for the first time tell you wha…

You're not alone. Substack is also where former journalists publish when those pesky editors decide to fact check them and find them wanting.

[dead]

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#23

Post by oldstrangers »

Curious how they plan to handle handles. Right now they're using full names for link text and having the URL as the unique identifier. Seems difficult to account for in the actual notes when you have multiple instances of the same name or full name (for example I'm @Zachary).

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#26

Post by LegitShady »

marcinzm wrote: post #19
LegitShady wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

prediction - substack goes nowhere, like they currently are. Suppressing substack when substack is trying to advertise for a twitter competitor is just common sense. There's no need for twitter to advertise for a competitor. That isn't censorship, thats just normal business. If substack was depending on twitter for free data and free advertising they were the ones who were weak and nervous.

As I see it if you have a significantly superior product then a competitor advertising on your platform is a positive since it just make you look even better in comparison. And a social media platform with 200 million daily users should be significantly superior to an identical clone with probably 1 million on a good day. Of course if you think you don't have a better product or that people hate your product that muc…

none of this has anything to do with substack making a business plan off of sucking down twitter data and advertising on twitter. There's no reason twitter has to put up with that.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#27

Post by ska »

claytonjy wrote: post #21
coldpie wrote: post #13

For me, it's just an empty login form, and I'm not going to register an account just to see what's there. I'm sympathetic to the idea of paying for content directly (I spend over $100/mo on Patreon), but I feel like Substack has cultivated a nasty branding issue for themselves. To me, and I know I'm not alone, Substack is where you go when you want to hear some 17-year-old who got high for the first time tell you wha…

On the hand I know exactly what you mean about Greenwald and Taibbi (and so many other neoreactionary media folks), but it's also where I get great content from economists (Noah Smith, Claudia Sahm, Doomberg) and technologists (our own Simon Willison, Gergely Orosz, Molly White). The media folks are clearly escaping scrutiny and playing to their base, but there are many excellent Substackers in other fields!

A branding problem doesn't mean all of the content is bad, no?

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#28

Post by pessimizer »

r053bud wrote: post #11
LegitShady wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

prediction - substack goes nowhere, like they currently are. Suppressing substack when substack is trying to advertise for a twitter competitor is just common sense. There's no need for twitter to advertise for a competitor. That isn't censorship, thats just normal business. If substack was depending on twitter for free data and free advertising they were the ones who were weak and nervous.

Twitter was supposed to be the "public square", even Elon said as much. Restricting which goods and services are sold or marketed in said square is a shift away from that mentality.

Twitter's another monopolist media company with a bunch of debt that needs to drown a potential competitor. I don't see Substack being able to become a direct competitor because the newsletter business is too good, and having closed twitter-like spaces that don't allow organized harassment is a good way for newsletters to build community and conversations. Twitter will remain the public version, where constant harassment from the ill and the covert has to be filtered out like spam.

That being said, maybe the important things will start being said in private spaces and only end up in "public squares" via screenshot ten or fifteen minutes later.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#29

Post by skybrian »

It’s a start. Hopefully they’ll improve the reader experience. Having a single general-purpose forum (a “firehose”) doesn’t really work for me since it’s so random, but with so little content, it’s probably necessary for now.

Subscribing needs improvement. Subscribing to a hashtag might make sense? It seems like subscribing to someone’s notes and their blog should be independent, because maybe someone has a good blog but you don’t care for their notes, or vice-versa. Having them tied together also doesn’t work for people like me who use RSS. I don’t usually want email from blogs I read, so I only subscribe to blogs where I’m interested in the paid content and usually turn the email off.

I think this loses what makes Substack interesting, though, which is keeping the community for each blog separate, so you don’t care what people are saying on other blogs that you don’t read. Putting everyone in one community, or an unclear blob of overlapping communities, seems likely to be bad for the same reasons Twitter can often be bad.

I guess blogs need discovery, though, and maybe external sites aren’t enough?

(I think I’ll repost this as a note, since they need the content.)

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#30

Post by xirdstl »

coldpie wrote: post #13

For me, it's just an empty login form, and I'm not going to register an account just to see what's there. I'm sympathetic to the idea of paying for content directly (I spend over $100/mo on Patreon), but I feel like Substack has cultivated a nasty branding issue for themselves. To me, and I know I'm not alone, Substack is where you go when you want to hear some 17-year-old who got high for the first time tell you wha…

On the other hand, I have a quite positive opinion of Substack given the articles I read there, and I know I'm not alone.

I don't like Twitter though, so I don't really care about Notes

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