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Substack Notes Launched

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Re: Substack Notes Launched

#471

Post by nemo44x »

timmytokyo wrote: post #179
leobg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I actually suspect that people who idolize Elon Musk are subscribers to the Just World Fallacy, believing that he represents the kind of person that they -- though in a temporarily diminished and embarrassing state -- can become. They can't wait for the time when they too have the consequence-free power to sneer at disabled people, spread lies about victims of violent attacks, and call people who mildly disagree with…

I could never accomplish what he has. He is so many standard deviations away from a regular person that it’s ridiculous to to feel anything but admiration. He’s human and imperfect like everyone and that’s ok. He was born with certain abilities and drive and he has made the world a better place by using those gifts. He is not beyond criticism either and some of his fans are too eager to dismiss them.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#472

Post by corobo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #378
davidw wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

Wasn't that literally how and why EFnet started?

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#473

Post by gen220 »

runako wrote: post #328
PaulHoule wrote: post #307

Substack really competes with creators leaving and setting up their own newsletter + payment gateway software. That’s like a $20,000 or so project from a web dev firm and for a creator who gets $200,000 a year from their newsletter it pays for itself in a year. The trouble is that substack makes almost all of its money from two handfuls of users who make more than that so if substack loses those creators it is left w…

This is similar to the "Amazon problem," where manufacturers can earn a higher margin by selling direct. >The question about any feature they add is “what does it do about that situation?” The answer is the same in the cases of Amazon & Substack: generating sales isn't free, and in all likelihood the platform can do it cheaper than you can. Take the $200k writer who pays $20k to Substack annually. Either Substack can…

I've seen people trying to compare Amazon to Substack, but it doesn't add up for me.

One Substack "generates" the sale, transferring the relationship to your own site feels cheap.

It's like if Amazon stopped selling New Yorker subscriptions. If I actually gave a crap about the NYer subscription I was paying for, I'd find some other way to pay for it. Amazon [Substack] is a commodity in this vertical.

Of course, the people who didn't care about your subscription because they never read it would disappear. But, they were going to churn eventually. I imagine if you amortize over a year, this marginal loss is less than the diff between Substack's take rate and operating your own blog + newsletter.

---

Acting rationally from an economic point of view, the only reason you'd want to stick around on Substack is that you think this equation holds true:

(Future subscriber base on Substack * (monthly rate - Substack fee)) > (Future subscriber base as an independent * (monthly rate - cc transaction fees)).

For "young" writers who don't yet have an audience, Substack helps a lot. But if you have a well-developed audience, IDK, I imagine Substack must view them as big flight risks (hence the advance payments).

Some substantial things Substack can do to make this equation more favorable:

- Give you free (or low-fee) marketing on substack properties (note this is a zero sum game over ad inventory, choosing to give you ad space means choosing to not give it to others. this is a hard game to solve, but they can probably do it).

- Reduce their take rate for mature audiences.

IMO, their current model doesn't make a lot of sense if you're somebody with a large audience. Especially now that we're out of ZIRP and they can't afford to sweeten the deal as much anymore.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#474

Post by throwaway5752 »

posharma wrote: post #160

May be I'm old, but I love long form content and twitter took that away. People write long tweet threads instead of thinking things through and writing it in long form. This gives rise to tons of twitter thread collapsing tools/startups that push the concatenation of these tweets to Notion or whatever. This seems utterly silly to me. It almost looks like tech for the sake of tech. It's unfortunate that substack is go…

Substack is great for subscription long form content already. It is reliant on Twitter on creating a network for information distribution and curation, though. I don't think Substack is attempting to be more like Twitter - I think Substack needs something like Twitter to sustain the long-form subscription content and this is a defensive move to make sure that Twitter's ongoing collapse doesn't take them out, too.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#475

Post by wvenable »

wordpad25 wrote: post #398
chipgap98 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

people treat facebook as if it were like their myspace, something dumb they did in their youth that's not longer relevant and is dying reality is pretty different, fb business is doing great despite all their missteps

I use Facebook more than ever these days but oddly for none of things I used to use it for. It's now got some obscure technical community groups that are too niche and too small for reddit or discord. Facebook Marketplace has replaced craigslist. My friend feed is totally incidental to my use of Facebook.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#476

Post by somsak2 »

dymk wrote: post #459
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.

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.

What is this "something else" that you refer to? In fact, this kind of short-form, global conversation wasn't happening before Twitter, at least not on their scale.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#477

Post by somsak2 »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #434
chipgap98 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of "legacy" companies had businesses that were doing very well but missed the boat one or more times as new things arrived. Microsoft is a good example. Windows and Office was absolutely, positively printing money. They whiffed on mobile so hard it was comical. Going back further in time, IBM got mauled in the PC business over time, even though mainframes and PCs were keeping the lights on for decades. I disagr…

Indeed. Really makes you respect the repositioning Microsoft has achieved with their cloud and AI businesses.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#478

Post by austincassidy »

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 that what people actually want? To be algorithmiclly fed content from strangers? Why is this the imputed ideal?

I never made the argument that it's the imputed ideal. Rather, my point is that in the context of a social platform, having an option for an algorithmic feed leads to other people with opposing views to discover the content and have dialogue about it/contest that viewpoint. Otherwise, it's a closed loop system that contains only like-minded viewpoints that can lead to an echo chamber. How do we prevent echo chambers from forming? Well, the most straightforward option is to introduce opposing viewpoints. How do we introduce opposing viewpoints? Well the people with opposing viewpoints need to be able to discover the content - so it needs to be shown to them somehow. The best way to do that (right now at least) is through an algorithmic recommendation engine.

> 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?

That's why I said "ideally". There's huge differences in algorithms for all the major social platforms. Algorithms can easily be used to make echo chambers worse, but algorithms can also be used to reduce echo chambers on a platform. To your point, that's why billions of dollars are spent on this because it's a complicated problem. One thing is a fact though, dissenting opinions create engagement and keeps people on the platform. If you responded to my comment and said "I agree with you", I wouldn't be commenting here right now and back on Hackernews. Most social platforms take advantage of this feature of our human psyche to get people to stay on the platform to then show them more ads and drive more ad revenue. That's why engagement is such a critical factor in social media algorithms and also has the unintended consequence of promoting controversial content - because it receives the most engagement. Which goes back to the need of having an algorithm that can balance reducing echo chambers by showing the content to others with dissenting opinions without unintentionally promoting only the most controversial content because it has the highest engagement. There's really no easy answer to this and again, that's why they spend billions like you said.

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