Substack Notes Launched

>... essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms

I think it's a good thing in the long run.

Twitter was a gimmick in many ways. Here, throw a few words out into the ether and see who notices.

That simplicity attracted tons of people. Then it became THE place to reach a ton of people, even though it's format for such things is AWFUL for it. It's a TERRIBLE platform for meaningful information dispersal, but it's THE place to be, so you see a bunch of evidence of that.

Twitlonger, people chaining twitter posts, just about any conversation, etc. Worse it eliminated a lot of things that probably shouldn't have died. My personal pet peeve is the death of forums, most specifically for games. Pre twitter you could find old forum posts that were pinned about just about anything you wanted to get into seriously. Dustloop had character guides with a level of info that would justify a thesis on characters in games that were 8 years old and hardly ever played.

That level of information is still found now, but instead it's tied to a hashtag, and then vomited out...never consolidated. Right now i'm looking to mess with a new character in strive, and while the GGST_BE tag is nice for "oh that's neat" kind of tech discoveries, it's fucking awful for actually understanding how to play the character or what's useful from it.

To be fair, that's always the case with a brand new character, but in the old days it was somewhat easier to keep a running tally of what works and what doesn't in a forum discussion, while twitter just doesn't promote that, so picking someone up waaaay after the fact is miserable. Discord is the other spot these things are now heavily discussed (with similar issues to twitter, although the forum feature of discord has helped a bit) and the wiki's are in theory where the data is consolidated but it's just a much higher barrier to entry and thus often you have half completed pages with outdated information.

In short, i'm hoping the slow death of twitter (IF it dies. The number of people saying twitter is abhorrent...on twitter...is a sign to me it's not going anywhere) will finally lead to people realizing that we want a way to quickly spread information among those who want it, but we don't need it to be in this shallow, vapid, character limited style. Sure that works for "oh hey look at where I am today" but it drives me nuts every time i see some essay broken into 45 twitter posts.

RSS feeds are an alternative tech that's honestly quite close to being what most people want, but it lacks the discovery/aggregation effect of things like twitter in most cases (inoreader kind of has something like that), and thus mostly still relies on twitter for content (at least it did until they nuked the API).

Everyone likes the censors when they are on their side.

500M humans are not in Twitter looking to have pleasant, cordial, thoughtful interactions and consume high quality content in a highly moderated environment.

Actually that's exactly what we don't want.

So Substack will be successful in its own niche, doesn't need to eat Twitter's lunch for that.

The problem is at the current valuation of $650M and bleeding $25M per year, they will have to come up with a plan to generate revenue pretty soon, most likely in the form of ads and generally that's incompatible with high quality content.

Now if Substack's fan base put their wallets where their mouth is and pay say $30 per month, then maybe Substack wouldn't need ads, but we know that's not going to happen, not even at $5 per month.

Substack notes is an interesting reimagining of blog post comments to be presented in a more familiar social media style.

Personally in my circle I still use Facebook messenger service - my extended family has a group chat and some of my friend groups still use messenger chats (I'd say post pandemic discord is used more then messenger now) my parents use messenger to video chat with their grandkids. It's essentially become skype. The actual facebook.com friend feed etc. is essentially dead for me at least.