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Substack Notes Launched

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Re: Substack Notes Launched

#201

Post by obblekk »

This is a case where an algorithmic feed would make this into a truly amazing product.

I don't want email spam from every follower, but do want to see the best snippets on substack.

Super easy to create a for you page, given text content:

Step 1: embed every article I ever read, or note I liked/comment/share and stuff it in a DB.

Step 2: every time a new note is posted (by anyone anywhere), embed it, search the db for my last 100 embedded items, and see if new note has relevance > 50%. If so, add it to my feed inventory. Resort my feed inventory by semantic relevance every hour. Remove items older than 7 days from feed inventory every hour.

Step 3: On page load, move everything in my feed inventory to my feed archive - never rerank again. (Bonus points for tracking note level views rather than assuming all were viewed, but small detail).

Bonus Step 4: Every 4th item in my feed inventory, intersperse something that's solely there based on popularity/top liked note of all notes visible to all of my followings. i.e., show me something possibly irrelevant but viral.

That'll get you pretty far, each step can be endlessly optimized over time.

I want to see the results of this so bad that I'll volunteer to build v1 this weekend if you really don't have time to do it internally. Tiktok for text... could be amazing.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#202

Post by dexterdog »

mlindner wrote: post #116
i_cannot_hack wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good reason to want self-absorbed bullies to publicly fail rather than publicly succeed is to discourage others from adopting similar attitude and methods.

If Elon was self-absorbed he'd be buying private yachts or private islands or massive mansions. He wouldn't be constantly talking about existential risks to humanity and trying to come up with ways of fixing them. Is Bill Gates self-absorbed? Much of what Elon Musk does is in a similar vein as the Gates Foundation, though often through for-profit companies.

Are there people who think Bill Gates is not self-absorbed?

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#203

Post by rosywoozlechan »

m_ke wrote: post #58
ghiculescu wrote: post #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.

They raised a ton of money on a high valuation, spent 25mil to make 1 mil last year and are now scrambling to raise a new crowd sourced round because they don't want to get wiped out in a down round. This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an advertising based business model and I'm guessing they think they have "influencers" on their platform to bring in a decent audience.

What did they spend their $25 million on? What's the tech they have that costs this much to build? Their hard problems are a building a CMS or are otherwise solved by using fastly and sendgrid?

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#204

Post by DanHulton »

...and his actions. He's not just a nebulous political creature, thinking thoughts but not acting upon them. He's actually _doing_ things that people might rightly not agree with.

Not to mention, a good chunk of those actual actions have resulted in Twitter being a legitimately worse place for a great number of people to spend time on/engage with, and thus they... leave.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#205

Post by [deleted] »

w______roy wrote: post #124
0xDEF wrote: post #72

Substack is an "absolute free speech" app. They have gotten away with it so far because nobody could see the highly offensive content unless they actively sought after it and subscribed. However now that Substack is becoming more like a conventional social media platform they will have a harder time being an "absolute free speech" app.

It's a good thing, I think. "Absolute free speech" is most often championed by people who want to build society around pure logic rather than empirical evidence. The slippery slope bogeyman they gesture to is laughably dated in a time when misinformation and misdirection are so much easier.

[deleted]

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#206

Post by jazzyjackson »

austincassidy wrote: post #183
charlierguo wrote: post #166

I've been checking out Notes all morning (I write a jargon-free, FOMO-free, AI newsletter). It's kind of a weird product launch? My feed is primarily content that the people I subscribe to post or comment on, but I don't subscribe to that many people. I'm not sure what the average number of subscriptions a Substack user has, but it seems like a very echo-chambery setup right now. As an author there are definitely thi…

Completely agree with this. This is basically the perfect formula for creating mini echo-chambers. If Substack wants to make this a real competitor to Twitter, it needs to have the "two feed" set up that both TikTok and Twitter have: a feed for algorithm-based recommendations and a feed solely for people that the user follows. They also need to make it so that you can follow someone's notes without also following the…

Since when did "ignoring-shit-I-didn't-subscribe-to" become a "formula for creating mini echo-chambers"

Is my email inbox an echo chamber because I don't get random newsletters from political activists?

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#207

Post by rvz »

leobg wrote: post #131
mlindner wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? It's hard to imagine him doing anything at this point that would offset the good he's done for society. He upset and tore down the military-industrial complex launch monopoly saving the collective US tax payers billions through starting SpaceX (and could soon revolutionize access to space for the average person within the next decade). (Also note that without SpaceX, we'd still be paying money to Russia to se…

You said it well. I actually suspect that many people hate him not in spite of what he has done, but because of it: They think if they acknowledge what people like Elon Musk have done in their lives, they'd have to loathe themselves, their own choices, values and weaknesses. Which is, of course, quite silly. Each human being has their own path in life. Comparing yourself to anyone, no matter who, is going to cause mi…

Precisely put. I wouldn't attempt to ignore his work on SpaceX, Tesla, etc since those companies have kickstarted their own revolution(s); electric vehicles and Starlink, even though I think Tesla FSD is a dangerous scam. Without it, the cars are fine.

Before, almost all the techies here were dreaming and begging to work for Elon Musk. Then the blue bird happened, got bought out and gave them 'emotional distress' and Elon immediately became public enemy number 1.

> So, hate and schadenfreude are the easy way out. "He, too, makes mistakes. So I'm not that worthless after all".

Hence that, the same techies who loved him are now eternally desperate for Twitter to be Elon's biggest failure as much as possible, giving 24/7 over-coverage about Twitter schadenfreude.

The manipulation of human psychology due to over-coverage and creating villains every month or year is just too easy to create a story out of that is guaranteed to attract eyeballs and clicks. It is an symptom of obsession.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#208

Post by kritiko »

jacquesm wrote: post #185
kritiko wrote: post #77

Looking at Notes, I get why Elon is so mad about it. They totally ripped off the Twitter UI. I follow Ed Zitron's Substack, and he is also a prolific Tweeter. He seems to be using Notes the same way he uses Twitter, for shitposting. I'm not sure that's really in line with the tone of Substack.

> they totally ripped off the Twitter UI I wasn't aware of any IP protection of Twitter's UI, which in one form or another has been done 100's of times.

I didn't claim there was IP infringement. IG & lots of other companies stole the stories format from Snap. Makes it easier for users who recognize the ui, but it's still got to be galling.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#209

Post by sundaeofshock »

czbond wrote: post #175
jpmattia wrote: post #115

It wasn't like Twitter's business had a large technical barrier-to-entry. And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can. Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch! Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@jpmattia@mastodon.mit.edu) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.

Twitter's barrier wasn't that it was technically hard - it was that it was free and had critical mass. There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views

You are ignoring the whole Verification process. It was the only platform where users could have interactions with prominent people in a variety of fields and know the interaction was legitimate. That mattered! Killing the verification system chased away many blue checks, who happened to generate a huge amount of traffic for the site.

Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#210

Post by exizt88 »

Looks very good. I wonder how the product team is thinking about user retention. I caught myself thinking "Huh, there's a lot of interesting content here — I hope I don't forget to look at it tomorrow". Not sure how to solve that without being annoying, TBH.
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