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Substack Notes Launched

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Re: Substack Notes Launched

#451

Post by bee_rider »

greyman wrote: post #397
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.

But is twitter really dying? The fields I watch (AI, software engineering, writers), all thought leaders are still there, still posting regularly.

My post will sound like a stupid gotcha but… what’s a thought leader, how do you measure them? Is it possible that the twitter crew skews more toward talking than doing?

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#452

Post by UncleOxidant »

Pxtl wrote: post #304
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.

I'm loving Mastodon myself (@pxtl@mastodon.social) but I worry that the UI stumbling blocks caused by the multi-server system and the far-poorer discoverability than what we're used to from Twitter will keep it from growing well -- twitter's algorithmic feed and relevant-to-the-user trending topics and features like that help make twitter feel lively even for a new user even with just a handful of follows. I don't kn…

> that help make twitter feel lively

But also that help make twitter feel like a constant outrage factory that impacts negatively on a lot of people's mental health. I got off of twitter a year ago (deleted my account after 14 years,even) and I'm really appreciating mastodon's less addictive, less "lively"ness.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#453

Post by notatoad »

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.

>I really don’t understand the point of this.

it certainly seemed to me like there was a good portion of twitter that was just people promoting their substack newsletters, and most of the people they interact with are doing the same. it makes perfect sense for substack to try to bring that under their roof.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#454

Post by AJ007 »

sleepybrett wrote: post #405
greyman wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is twitter really dying? The fields I watch (AI, software engineering, writers), all thought leaders are still there, still posting regularly.

In my communities most people are double posting on mastodon and twitter. So much so that I only check twitter every few days for the stragglers.

I have multiple communities I follow on Twitter and the ones that don't care about the elon stuff, they do now.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#455

Post by UncleOxidant »

greyman wrote: post #401
rodgerd wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can. He's completely pissed it away. The skills at finessing the demands of different regulatory regimes were some of the first he got rid of, no doubt deriding it as "wokism". Now he's got fines racking up for publishing Nazi shit in Germany, privacy breaches in the EU, and is globally censoring anything that Hindu extrem…

But if we look at the "mainstream" usage, like English-language thought leaders, they are still there, still posting regularly. Like for example in the AI field, all relevant people are on twitter.

I see plenty of AI thought leaders posting on LinkedIn.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#456

Post by AJ007 »

alfor wrote: post #283
markstos wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Bing today. I’m denting.

I tried Edge and bing, God awful. You just feel their desire to take control of your experience of the web. On the flip site, made me see how much Google own us all.

I've been using perplexity.ai for anything that's not a site/company/person name look up.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#457

Post by akitzmiller »

greyman wrote: post #401
rodgerd wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can. He's completely pissed it away. The skills at finessing the demands of different regulatory regimes were some of the first he got rid of, no doubt deriding it as "wokism". Now he's got fines racking up for publishing Nazi shit in Germany, privacy breaches in the EU, and is globally censoring anything that Hindu extrem…

But if we look at the "mainstream" usage, like English-language thought leaders, they are still there, still posting regularly. Like for example in the AI field, all relevant people are on twitter.

It's true that they are still there, but I think loyalty is really soft. Musk seems to make some antagonizing change at least once a month that results in defections, the whole Substack thing being the latest. I follow Rex Chapman who seems to be one of those people that just does not want to have to rebuild his following somewhere else. He just recently signed up at Spoutible.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#458

Post by sundarurfriend »

drexlspivey wrote: post #418
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. ChatGPT is very, very new, and habits change slowly 2. For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts 3. All of this will eventually change There is no more major growth for Google, which is all that matters to Wall Street. It will go down slowly, but it will go down.

> For non plus users, chatGPT UX is poor with slow responses, captchas and random logouts There are tons of free custom UIs to chatGPT by now, all vastly superior to OpenAI’s. No captchas or login screens, just paste your API token once and it gets stored in local storage.

Thanks for mentioning this. I'd assumed this was the case, but I'd been wary of using them because I wasn't sure which of them would be reliable and non-sketchy. Your comment made me take a second look, this time specifically for FOSS custom UIs, and https://chatwithgpt.netlify.app/ seems pretty decent (and is FOSS).

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#459

Post by dymk »

greyman wrote: post #397
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.

But is twitter really dying? The fields I watch (AI, software engineering, writers), all thought leaders are still there, still posting regularly.

That's fine and valuable, but it doesn't sound like much of a moat. Those thought leaders used something else before Twitter - even if it takes a while, it's not a crazy idea that they'd eventually move somewhere else if the grass is greener.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#460

Post by mikpanko »

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…

In my experience the reality is much more nuanced:

- VCs don’t want founders to own 0% of their company because founders need to be motivated to work hard to make it a success

- % of dilution usually goes down very significantly over funding rounds

- there is significant competition between VCs to fund good startups these days, which can translate to founder leverage

- there are early-stage VCs these days, which don’t pressure founders for quick growth

- founders talk to each other and a large portion of founders are serial entrepreneurs. Reputation among founders matters to VCs

- looking over the longer term of decades, typical funding terms are getting much more founder-friendly

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