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Substack Notes Launched

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Re: Substack Notes Launched

#371

Post by jononomo »

13years wrote: post #227

So, I gave it a try today. Was hopeful, because on Twitter all my posts go essentially into the void. However, Substack Notes seems to have no method for discovery. They add some random larger accounts to my feed. You can't search Notes to find people posting content in order to find others potentially interested in similar content. So, unless you already have a large following, seems like posting into another void.…

Perhaps they will have improved the product in a few months. I'm sure they're collecting a lot of feedback.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#372

Post by nacs »

nicenewtemp84 wrote: post #280
yifanl wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean consider also: Imagine being in a position where you can spend 40 billion and it doesn't wipe you out.

Imagine spending only 30% of your net worth and getting to experiment with buying and growing one of the most used and talked about sites on the internet. If I spent 30% of my net worth I could buy a condo in the bay, possibly. Although odds are it would be worth close to that if I needed to sell it. But many people spend 30% of their net worth trying to start businesses with almost no traction. Musk spent 30% to buy…

The condo you buy with 30% of your net is going to be worth 30% or more later. That's a good investment.

Musk spent 30% of his net worth on it then immediatly burned 90% of the already questionable value it had.

What Musk did was just bad business.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#373

Post by rodgerd »

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.

If you follow any artists or writers or similar on Twitter you'll note that the biggest reason most of them cite for being there is because they have a conversational community that feeds into support for their art.

Substack has a perfectly good mechanism for publishing (paid and unpaid) to support people, but that conversation is missing. It's a pretty obvious move if you are engaged with the overlapping users of Twitter and Substack, and has potential to peel a lot of people out of Twitter if they're primarily there to follow their favorite authors, showrunners, etc.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#374

Post by nkjnlknlk »

akira2501 wrote: post #323
austincassidy wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your email inbox isn't an echo chamber because it's not a social platform. According to this research study, these are the two main ingredients: 1) Homophily in the interaction networks 2) Bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023301118 Substack Notes is their way to venture into the social platform realm, which differs from the personal email inbox model, w…

> because it's not a social platform. Is that what people actually want? To be algorithmiclly fed content from strangers? Why is this the imputed ideal? > but ideally an algorithm based feed will promote discourse and dialogue about ideas. Is there any evidence that this is true or should be an expectation? Is that really why billions of dollars are spent on this space?

> Is there any evidence that this is true or should be an expectation? Is that really why billions of dollars are spent on this space?

Yes. If people only used social media to connect/follow people they know the industry would be making nothing.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#375

Post by andy_ppp »

gessha wrote: post #358
lenkite wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People here are praying very hard for Twitter to fail. Nearly any social media post nowadays has 50-100 comments predicting Twitter's failure and ranting about Musk. He is living rent-free in many heads now. Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever Twitter/Musk is mentioned.

Any publicity is good publicity it seems like. People don’t get that hating is not the opposite of love, it’s indifference. Mute and forget.

I just sent the second part of this to my friend WRT his ex-wife…

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#376

Post by reducesuffering »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #339
gimme_treefiddy wrote: post #109

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. Sorry to get off-topic, but is there a read/book to understand funding, VCs, etc., from a holistic POV. I totally didn't expect that consequence of having to raise a crowd sourced round due to initial high valuation.

Having been in/around the game for a good few years, I can assure you it's not nearly as complicated as they try to make it sound. The game works like this: the VCs want 100% of your company, and you want to give away 0% of your company. (Of course, 90%+ of companies will fail, so it doesn't really matter. But let's pretend we're all in that special 10%.) If you do end up choosing to play that particular game, then y…

> The twist is that this game isn't only for 1 round. Once you take your company into this game, you're stuck in it — you'll have to keep fundraising to keep fueling the growth that you've kickstarted using external capital.

Why? What stops you from raising a $15m series A and only burning it conservatively until you hit neutral profitability. Investors only have 15-25% of your cap table and can't strong-arm you.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#377

Post by davidw »

jacquesm wrote: post #181
capital_guy wrote: post #33

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.

I hope it doesn't. Because it essentially sets us up for a repeat. If Mastodon was 'just not the thing people were looking for' then at least it solves the problems that both Twitter and Substack have, which is that they are not federated. Better to fix Mastodon than to waste another decade on something that will ultimately blow up and with the way Substack has - in my head at least - been associated negatively with…

> Better to fix Mastodon

Is that possible? Seems kind of difficult due to its nature, but I admit I'm just a very casual user of it and don't know much.

Signed up for the Substack thing. Seems worth a look - it's very similar to Twitter.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#378

Post by TeMPOraL »

davidw wrote: post #369
tracker1 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatively happy to see it... though I do tend to lean towards the free speech side of the coin, and kind of miss the relative wild west that was IRC in the 90's. I feel like centralized social media is a blessing and a curse. What's old is new again.

> wild west that was IRC in the 90's. There was tons of /kick and /ban there too...

But there wasn't the equivalent of Mastodon culture of "hello server admin, nice instance you have here, it's a shame if it were to be defederated simply because you chose not to defederate the people we tell you to".

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#379

Post by chipgap98 »

Cardinal7167 wrote: post #141
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.

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.

I don't think Facebook really belongs in this conversation. As much as the VR stuff is silly their core business is still doing very well

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#380

Post by phtrivier »

russellbeattie wrote: post #262
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 thei…

> 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.

... or it's a vicious cycle when someone understand which kind of cheaply generated content games the recommandation system the best. If history has told us anything, it's that radical, divisive, tribal, infuriating, titilating, voyeuristic, trivial, scammy, stupid short form tends to works very well.

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