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Substack Notes Launched

on.substack.com

41–50 of 789 posts

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#41
post #12

Is that basically like Twitter then? A micro-blogging feature? Maybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links containing to Substack.

It's admitting that managing infrastructure for email newsletters is not a viable business. After all, you can't serve people targeted third party ads with just email.

It depends what you mean by viable. Substack newsletters have a paid option, substack can take a cut of that and the infra costs of sending emails is tiny.

If you want to bethe next massive aquistion/IPO, then maybe not.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#42
post #34

I've just checked it out and it's much closer to a Twitter clone than I anticipated. Now it's clear why Elon made the drastic decision to mess with substack links on Twitter. The site is clean and simple. I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.

How is twitter ruined? My personal experience on the site has not changed much.

Counter anecdote: my personal experience is that the site is less entertaining. I've encountered technical bugs more, such as replies not loading without refreshing multiple times. The "for you" page doesn't show me anything I want to see. The checkmark thing remains super confusing to me. The quality of the ads I've been served have noticeably decreased/gotten more skuzzy.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twitter's freedom to do something doesn't prevent other people's freedom to react to those actions.

They can block whomever they want and I can say it highlights how fragile they view their own business position as.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links containing to Substack. That seems to have accelerated the shift for some to Substack [1] (imagine if Google blocked searches for Bing or Brave!). Suppressing Substack makes the Twitter brand look weak and nervous. 1. https://reason.com/2023/04/10/elon-musk-matt-taibbi-twitter-...

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.

They blocked any retweet or like of a tweet containing a substack link.

E.g. an author writes content, people who are not affiliated with substack try to like/share.

That is not advertising, and this from the apparent free speech absolutist Elon.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#45
post #38

Social network must be a protocol, not a platform. That's the only way to gurantee free speech and cencorship resistance. Nostr[1] is proving to be a good first step in this direction. [1] https://nostr.how/

No thanks. Social networks are non essential. Twitter and Substack Notes can go away tomorrow and no one will bat an eyelid. In these cases, people just want to go to a website or a mobile app, click around and have some foolish fun for sometime. Banking networks need protocols, not social media, which is intrinsically about dumb fun. That is why Mastodon and these things will never be as popular.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#46

I’m a little unclear on what subscribing means in the context of Notes + Newsletters. Does subscribing to someone in the Notes product mean I’m also subscribed to emails from the person? If so, that’s not a great dynamic — I’d like to follow 100s of people in Notes, but that doesn’t mean I want to subscribe to 100s of newsletters.

This appears to be correct based on my extremely limited experience thus far. It's pretty confusing. However, apparently the emails can be disabled: https://substack.com/profile/364398-judd-legum/note/c-144726...

> 1. Go to Settings on the web version of substack.com

> 2. Scroll down to you publications

> 3. Click into any publication you don’t want to get emails.

> 4. Deselect “Receive emails for new posts”

Hoping they improve the experience.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#47
post #34

I've just checked it out and it's much closer to a Twitter clone than I anticipated. Now it's clear why Elon made the drastic decision to mess with substack links on Twitter. The site is clean and simple. I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.

How is twitter ruined? My personal experience on the site has not changed much.

He keeps pushing the ‘for you’ page over the regular following tab that just shows tweets of people you follow

The content moderation is basically nil now so tons of racist content is propagated throughout the network.

Various technical bugs plaguing things - videos not playing, images not appearing, etc

The verification system has been destroyed which has allowed fake accounts to run rampant

The API has been wrecked, causing third party apps to stop working and massive amounts of research being done to be halted

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#48
I love Substack. But apart from to mess with Twitter I really don’t understand the point of this.

https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-1446... I’d a good summary. I don’t want to subscribe to hundreds of newsletters to see tweet (sorry, notes). But if you change that setup, it really is a Twitter clone with no upside to writers.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#50
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!

How are they escaping scrutiny? They hardly seem interested in hiding what they believe seeing as how they are both very active on Twitter. And whose scrutiny do you consider them anxious to avoid? Their opponents know very well what they are saying. This whole framing reeks of the kind of censoriousness which they both spend a lot of time railing against.
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