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Substack just killed the creator economy

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Re: Substack just killed the creator economy

#21

Post by xeonmc »

azemetre wrote: post #17
famahar wrote: post #7

Is 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.

I wonder how accessible would it be to put article source on Patreon and make a static site that fetches and displays them via Javascript?

Re: Substack just killed the creator economy

#22

Post by jpereira »

disclosure: building a substack competitor on atproto

I'm really excited for ATProto as a way to build applications that let you have the benefits of substack (a unified network, recommendations, social features like comments, etc) without the eventual path to lock in.

It's particularly exciting because the incentive is actually there to build an application this way. Whether Bluesky is growing or not, there are currently 30M accounts that you can reach (with one of the best auth systems I've interacted with), AND atproto gives you the building blocks for others to build on your work. Both these things make the bootstrapping problem for any social application way down.

There's still a lot of stuff missing, payments being a big (and gnarly one), notification management being another, but both the bluesky team and the overall ecosystem has been moving at a solid pace, and things are getting more viable by the day.

Re: Substack just killed the creator economy

#23

Post by tombert »

VirgilShelton wrote: post #6

Self 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.

I don't use Substack [1], but isn't part of the appeal of Substack discoverability?

Like that's part of the reason that a lot of these platforms get popular. Most software engineers could write something to upload, transcode, and host videos in an afternoon or two, but that only gets you 10% of YouTube's value. The thing that keeps YouTube on top is it's hyper-addictive recommendation system.

I assume that Substack offers something like that? Again I don't actually use it so I'm kind of speaking out of my ass.

[1] No one read my blog anyway so there's no pretense of charging for it.

Re: Substack just killed the creator economy

#24

Post by VanTheBrand »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #5

Don't usually like Apple, but (the inevitable but), Creators should be happy they're passing the cost to customers. We know they didn't choose to write on substack out of altruism. If someone thinks you are worth enough to pay 30% more they'll pay. That's always been the case.

So if they will always still pay at 30% higher then why not set the price another 30% higher after that and keep going again and again?

Re: Substack just killed the creator economy

#25

Post by ChrisArchitect »

Related/unrelated:

anyone notice the seemingly big uptick in Substack submissions around here? Like ones reaching the front page, often submitted by newer-ish accounts. What's that about? Did (1) alot of bloggers switch to Substack recently? and (2) is there a concerted effort to take advantage of HN traffic bumps here?

Re: Substack just killed the creator economy

#28

Post by tombert »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #5

Don't usually like Apple, but (the inevitable but), Creators should be happy they're passing the cost to customers. We know they didn't choose to write on substack out of altruism. If someone thinks you are worth enough to pay 30% more they'll pay. That's always been the case.

It's still insane that Apple thinks it deserves 30% of your entire subscription cost for simply processing the transaction.

I'm not saying that managing subscription billing has no value, but it's not like what Apple is doing has no comparison; PayPal offers similar subscription services and their cut is less than 10%.

Re: Substack just killed the creator economy

#29

Post by adithyassekhar »

VanTheBrand wrote: post #24
adithyassekhar wrote: post #5

Don't usually like Apple, but (the inevitable but), Creators should be happy they're passing the cost to customers. We know they didn't choose to write on substack out of altruism. If someone thinks you are worth enough to pay 30% more they'll pay. That's always been the case.

So if they will always still pay at 30% higher then why not set the price another 30% higher after that and keep going again and again?

They can and it's not wrong. The authors gave it to substack, substack can choose their pricing. That was the deal though, not sure what's the issue here. This is just an ad for a competitor.

Re: Substack just killed the creator economy

#30

Post by adithyassekhar »

tombert wrote: post #28
adithyassekhar wrote: post #5

Don't usually like Apple, but (the inevitable but), Creators should be happy they're passing the cost to customers. We know they didn't choose to write on substack out of altruism. If someone thinks you are worth enough to pay 30% more they'll pay. That's always been the case.

It's still insane that Apple thinks it deserves 30% of your entire subscription cost for simply processing the transaction. I'm not saying that managing subscription billing has no value, but it's not like what Apple is doing has no comparison; PayPal offers similar subscription services and their cut is less than 10%.

That's the only insane part about this. But they can't go back because numbers must go up.
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