It's probably worth pointing out that the author is a founder of beehiiv, a Substack competitor.
Thanks for that. I knew something felt off with how much beehiiv was being plugged.
Very lame to not be transparent about that.
Substack just killed the creator economy
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Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#12Self hosting and using your payment processor of choice is always the best move. Own your own data or be prepared for the jig to be up at some point. This is what every platform that scales does.
Writers move to sites like Substack (or 15 years ago blogspot) funded by other people's money like a software developer gets into an AI startup (or 5 years ago crypto). You can make bank in the short term even if you should know it will not last. Substack subsidizes individual creators and markets their blog as cooler than old blogs, Google subsidized web ads and upranked blogs in search results. Yes, it is no fun if you like stability, and its not a game I play.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#13Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.
Yes. I think it is too hard for the average person. It is one reason why some of these other became popular
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#14Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.
Email deliverability is a nightmare. You need mega reputation to not end up in spam filters.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#15Do not bulid your castle in the middle of a swamp, or something like that.
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Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#16Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.
I've been wondering exacrtly this. Surely, its not hard to get setup with your own website. It's not like substack is giving you much distribution.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#17Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.
I think one problem people have is payment processing. There really needs to be a federal program to allow people to easily transfer money as payment. There are too many extractive middlemen with rentier economies and ethics.
There's no reason why Congress can make something like what Brazil has with Pix.
Having a public option for payment processing can do a tremendous amount of good.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
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Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#19Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.
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Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#20probably not coincidentally, Andresseen Horowitz newsletter just announced they are migrating to Substack (https://a16z.substack.com/)
(Not that I read their newsletter just was too lazy to cancel)