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Substack Notes Launched

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Re: Substack Notes Launched

#261

Post by dnissley »

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #203
m_ke wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just to mention one thing that isn't user facing (and therefore not so obvious): Social media companies dealing with user-generated content have to build their own enforcement mechanisms (abuse, copyright infringement, etc.), which is at least an order of magnitude harder than the user facing content engine itself.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#262

Post by russellbeattie »

phtrivier wrote: post #169

You can now start a timer until they announce that they're going to algorithmically organize the feed of "Notes" because "chronological order is too hard to follow." Then, they will let an Algo organize the feed of articles. Then the ads - no, wait, the "sponsored post - will start popping in, etc, etc... Maybe they won't. I enjoy substack as it is today, and maybe they'll pull it off. But I can't help seing this as…

This is exactly right. Because they will have to.

If you follow 100 people who post 3 times a day, that's 300 posts. You're awake 16 hours a day, so an average of ~18 posts per hour, or 1 every 3 minutes. Many users follow way more people and/or follow accounts which post much more often.

Having a non-algorithmic feed means that posters will see low levels of engagement and users will quickly be overwhelmed with their reading list, and miss most of the posts. It's a vicious circle which will cause both writers and readers to eventually give up.

If, on the other hand, posts are ranked based on user popularity and engagement and that rank affects its position in subscriber feeds, then it's a virtuous cycle where more people will be directed to interesting posts, and those posters will be incentivised to post more.

This is why Mastodon has seen its usage drop after their initial surge earlier this year. We don't have time to wade through a firehouse of random posts every day.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#263

Post by dang »

hobs wrote: post #195
g42gregory wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, he is definitely upsetting some (many) people. But, at the same time, he is getting the new set of people as users. In the last few years, I would not touch Twitter with a ten-foot pole. Mostly because, I could no longer assess the provenance of the posts and the authenticity of their rankings. Is this post popular/important or is this post was put into my stream by Twitter/other entities in order to influence…

That would make sense, if you had your pants and shirt on backward. Musk has introduced several high profile changes to corrupt "the authenticity of their rankings" - what on earth are you talking about regarding "authentic information" given the person running the place is a known and repeated liar, whose lied directly about his management decisions regarding the property you've mostly recently started liking? Serio…

Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Personal attacks and swipes are particularly unwelcome, so please make sure to edit those out of your comments if any do make it in.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#264

Post by [deleted] »

deanCommie wrote: post #229
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever someone criticizes Elon Musk I just remember he sent a car he drove, a car built by a company he leads, into heliocentric orbit using his own rockets via his own space launching tech company. I don't know how you can talk about the guy without that context. People talk about him like he's just another jerk on Twitter. His car is in space. He's also the wealthiest person on the planet. And his car is in space…

Whenever someone criticizes Elon Musk, it's not about his abilities to launch a car into space. In fact most of us would much prefer that he focused on his space launching abilities and electric-car making abilities (with the usual caveat that it's not clear how much of both are based on his contributions vs others, but I'm willing to give some benefit of doubt). He doesn't know anything about tunneling (boring compa…

[deleted]

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#266

Post by dmix »

jimsimmons wrote: post #221
Cardinal7167 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.

You should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent

People like to be predictors of doom before the hard evidence comes out.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#267

Post by graeme »

waboremo wrote: post #220
czbond wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Musk is the least of my concerns, I can ignore his account if I cared that much. I can't really ignore that a lot of higher quality accounts have been interacting less because Twitter has become a technical mess, fucking up their timelines and notifications. This sort of loss is quiet, and slow. You only really notice it when it's too late, when your feed is nothing but mindless ads and random accounts you never foll…

Indeed. Twitter recently killed off the apps and RSS feeds used by twitter power users. Those users who were likely to post widely viewed content on twitter or those who would embed tweets in news articles.

Very few people produce on any platform. Musk has the value relationship exactly backwards. The creators do get value from twitter, but they generate the bulk of the business value Twitter has and they can easily move to other platforms.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#268

Post by commoner »

rvz wrote: post #235
nemo44x wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/

He's right you know. Don't forget the noncery and loli culture that is going on some of the largest Mastodon instances such as pawoo.net, baraag.net, mstdn.jp. Totally illegal explicit content in the majority of countries, only found on Mastodon.

Twitter is the only mainstream social network that is absolutely inundated with hardcore pornography. Also, Twitter has no shortage of child sexual abuse material:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/technology/twitter-child-...

On Mastodon, each instance is able to restrict other instances based on their own policies. Unless you specifically choose to join a Mastodon instance that does not restrict pornography, your instance will not synchronize content from the porn-focused instances.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#269

Post by cfeduke »

jimsimmons wrote: post #221
Cardinal7167 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.

You should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent

> There’s no dent

By the time there is a dent, it's too late.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#270

Post by markstos »

jimsimmons wrote: post #221
Cardinal7167 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.

You should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent

I used Bing today. I’m denting.
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