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Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

kevin-indig.com

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Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#61

Post by Isomorpheus »

jacamera wrote: post #56
Isomorpheus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also had the idea of creating a site which restricts users to having read the article. So, I'm excited about your project. Couple questions 1) You mention a paywall, but your video says that users who sign-up before paywall stay in forever. You honoring that (the video was posted 5 days ago)? I see that the median comment count on your site is about 3 so I should hope so 2) How exactly are you paying these autho…

Glad to hear you're excited about the idea! 1. Yes, we are honoring that! It's a reward for being an early adopter and it's important to keep the community "starter culture" intact as we move to a paid membership model. 2. We don't want you to have to trust us. That information will be transparent. Check out our current writers leaderboard [1] as a prototype of how that will look. Minutes reading to completion is our…

Ok, cool.

Why is there no tagging or other organization (besides per author)? Skimming through the frontpage I either have no idea what an article is about or it appears to be some lowest-common-denominator politics article. With reddit I can go read my niche subreddits with topics I actually care about (yeah, I know you don't have enough users to replace this quite yet, but still). With no other hooks for following my interests I feel like this is still abusable with clickbait titles.

Could you have like moderator-written abstracts for the AOTDs, at least? Even better would be an abstract for every article (not sure how you would accomplish this)

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#62

Post by Sachaniman »

The biggest thing for me is canonical URLs.

If I'm trying to BUILD an audience, I'm going to write content for free. If I already have a website I post content on, you bet I'm going to keep posting my free content there. Why am I competing with Substack on SEO for my own free content? That's just stupid.

Eventually, if I actually get an audience that's willing to pay, I would use Substack to offer that walled garden. Just like Youtube creators offer their free content on Youtube, and paid content through other means like Patreon.

Even Medium supports canonical URLs. I'm not sure why Substack isn't satisfied with being the distributor of my content, but also wants to be the home for it.

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#63

Post by jacamera »

oefrha wrote: post #57
jacamera wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a great first couple of impressions! 1. Safari uses a completely non-standard extension model and right now I'm the only developer so we're Chrome and Firefox only for the time being. Definitely sucks. 2. That's great feedback on that modal. Seriously, it never even crossed my mind that we don't explain why the extension is required before displaying it. Also that the "Add to Chrome" button makes it seem like it…

Thanks for the reply and glad the feedback is of some value. Re extension: I'm not clear on why an extension is needed for reading on readup.com (as opposed to on publishers' sites). Seems to me you can do all the tracking just fine with regular sandboxed JavaScript running on the web page? To be clear, when I'm not logged in or on an unsupported browser, I'm presented with two options: "Read it on Readup" (with a "G…

Re: "Read it on Readup" - Again, great point. It should be read with Readup. To clarify, you're always reading on the publisher's site. It would be a crazy violation of copyright if we copied the article text into our web app for you to read on readup.com. That's why we need the extension, to inject the tracker into the publisher's article pages. Can you tell it's just the two of us an neither of us are designers or UX experts?

> I guess your compromise may be okay, but it's certainly rather crude (not that I have a better idea).

Haha 100% agree. One day, maybe a reading speed calibration during new user onboarding? As you pointed out though, speed varies even for an individual depending on what kind of content they are reading.

> Btw, Safari 14 is adding WebExtension API support.[1] (You're probably already aware of this but doesn't hurt to share.)

Wow, I was not aware! This is awesome! Thank you for sharing.

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#64

Post by jacamera »

_b8r0 wrote: post #60
jacamera wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, writers do not opt in. The Readup extensions and mobile apps work on articles that are freely available on the internet. Writers do not have to share their premium subscription-only content with us or do anything differently. The Readup extensions and mobile apps work similarly to other "reader mode" utilities except that we track reading progress on a word-by-word level and we want to pay writers when users actu…

How do I block you from monetizing my content? "You can't" isn't the right answer.

I'm not sure I understand. If we had paying subscribers that were reading your content and we reached out to you and you didn't want anything to do with us we would certainly respect that and not bother you again.

The only way to prevent our users from reading your articles though would be to require some sort of authentication to access them. Same way you block anyone from accessing your content through any web browser or extension.

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#65

Post by criddell »

jacamera wrote: post #59
criddell wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> writers do not opt in That doesn't feel great. Telling creators that people are paying you for their work but they have to create an account to get paid feels shady. Do you make it clear when something I read is from a creator who has signed up and therefore will be paid? If one of your users were to read something I published, would they see it exactly as they would if they visited directly? Same ads, same layout?…

> That doesn't feel great. Telling creators that people are paying you for their work but they have to create an account to get paid feels shady. I get that, but isn't it better than paying for a utility like Pocket or Instapaper that strips ads from writers' articles and doesn't offer them any compensation? Those companies aren't asking writers to opt-in to that. We're trying to do the right thing in a financially s…

> We'd love to eventually partner with publishers but especially larger ones probably won't want to talk to us until we have millions of paying users and can offer them a significant revenue share.

So until then, is the revenue share that you owe to them a permanent liability on your balance sheet?

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#66

Post by jacamera »

Isomorpheus wrote: post #61
jacamera wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear you're excited about the idea! 1. Yes, we are honoring that! It's a reward for being an early adopter and it's important to keep the community "starter culture" intact as we move to a paid membership model. 2. We don't want you to have to trust us. That information will be transparent. Check out our current writers leaderboard [1] as a prototype of how that will look. Minutes reading to completion is our…

Ok, cool. Why is there no tagging or other organization (besides per author)? Skimming through the frontpage I either have no idea what an article is about or it appears to be some lowest-common-denominator politics article. With reddit I can go read my niche subreddits with topics I actually care about (yeah, I know you don't have enough users to replace this quite yet, but still). With no other hooks for following…

> Why is there no tagging or other organization (besides per author)?

The only reason is because I'm the only developer and simply haven't had time to build it yet! In fact right now I'm working on a new "Discover" screen that will allow filtering by publisher and topic. We gather "tag" and "description" metadata for articles even though it isn't currently displayed in the UI.

> With no other hooks for following my interests I feel like this is still abusable with clickbait titles.

It's not a perfect filter by any means, but keep in mind that even if an article title looks like clickbait it will only rank highly if users are finishing it so the real garbage usually doesn't float up since people chose to abandon those articles. Again, not perfect by any means but it is something to consider if an article is more than a few minutes long and has a lot of reads on it.

> Could you have like moderator-written abstracts for the AOTDs, at least?

Yes! When the AOTD email goes out (midnight PST every night) it includes the "description" metadata provided by the publisher if present (seems to be available about 90% of the time). We should definitely show that in the UI on the web app too for the AOTD at least (and maybe have some expandable toggle to show it for other articles).

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#67

Post by Isomorpheus »

jacamera wrote: post #66
Isomorpheus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, cool. Why is there no tagging or other organization (besides per author)? Skimming through the frontpage I either have no idea what an article is about or it appears to be some lowest-common-denominator politics article. With reddit I can go read my niche subreddits with topics I actually care about (yeah, I know you don't have enough users to replace this quite yet, but still). With no other hooks for following…

> Why is there no tagging or other organization (besides per author)? The only reason is because I'm the only developer and simply haven't had time to build it yet! In fact right now I'm working on a new "Discover" screen that will allow filtering by publisher and topic. We gather "tag" and "description" metadata for articles even though it isn't currently displayed in the UI. > With no other hooks for following my i…

> The only reason is because I'm the only developer and simply haven't had time to build it yet!

I see you're using React on the frontend. And, you only have an iOS app but not (yet) an Android app. Are you not using React Native? In that case it's fairly easy to target both platforms. I know RN is a bit of a shitshow but not supporting the biggest mobile platform in the world is arguably worse

> We gather "tag" and "description" metadata for articles even though it isn't currently displayed in the UI.

If you're taking this metadata directly from the articles I'm skeptical about the accuracy/completeness. Anyway, it's better than nothing I guess

> It's not a perfect filter by any means, but keep in mind that even if an article title looks like clickbait it will only rank highly if users are finishing it

This is something, but still high-quality articles with clickbait titles will outcompete high-quality articles without clickbait titles. Incentive still being: write clickbait titles. Anyway, if someone is 0.25x as likely to finish a bad article having clicked it, but 10x more likely to click a clickbait article, you still have a major problem beyond "not perfect", imo

I know it's a big ask for you to solve every single problem with online reading/discussion but this one is so tangled with the rest it's kinda hard to ignore.

Today's AOTD: "If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You're Not Rich?"

From the past few weeks, some selections:

- "Meet the social media echo chamber that is radicalizing you & your friends. - Alexa Rohn" - "Racism Is Terrible. Blackness Is Not." - "A White Woman, Racism and a Poodle" - "The American Press Is Destroying Itself" - "Dear Fuck Up: How Do I Figure Out What I Want in Life When Every Day Feels the Same?" - "You Should Be Feeling Miserable" - "Tom Cotton: Send In the Military" - "The Sickness in Our Food Supply"

I'm sure some of these are great, but be honest: did the title have anything to do with people clicking through?

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#68

Post by jacamera »

criddell wrote: post #65
jacamera wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That doesn't feel great. Telling creators that people are paying you for their work but they have to create an account to get paid feels shady. I get that, but isn't it better than paying for a utility like Pocket or Instapaper that strips ads from writers' articles and doesn't offer them any compensation? Those companies aren't asking writers to opt-in to that. We're trying to do the right thing in a financially s…

> We'd love to eventually partner with publishers but especially larger ones probably won't want to talk to us until we have millions of paying users and can offer them a significant revenue share. So until then, is the revenue share that you owe to them a permanent liability on your balance sheet?

Possibly! I'm not sure if writers who write for a publisher like The Atlantic would be able to claim any sort of compensation for something that I imagine the publisher owns the rights to. But on the other hand, it's kind of like a tip from the readers to the writer for writing a good article so would that be allowed?

Lots of questions here, but as I stated in another answer on the topic we're committed to keeping all payments open and transparent. This can only work if everyone has insight into who's getting money for what.

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#69

Post by kevin_indig »

jacamera wrote: post #53
kevin_indig wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're sharing our revenue with you, not the other way around! Gotcha. So, what's the value I'd get as a creator, i.e. why should I not charge through another platform?

You should charge through another platform! There's nothing exclusive about the relationship that we want to have with writers. As long as you're producing any content that is a) freely available and b) worth reading we want it surfaced to our community of readers and we want to compensate you on a per-read basis for it. The writer compensation is both a value prop for our users (it's the #1 reason that users say the…

Got it. What's the incentive for readers? Discovery of better content?

Re: Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

#70

Post by jacamera »

Isomorpheus wrote: post #67
jacamera wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is there no tagging or other organization (besides per author)? The only reason is because I'm the only developer and simply haven't had time to build it yet! In fact right now I'm working on a new "Discover" screen that will allow filtering by publisher and topic. We gather "tag" and "description" metadata for articles even though it isn't currently displayed in the UI. > With no other hooks for following my i…

> The only reason is because I'm the only developer and simply haven't had time to build it yet! I see you're using React on the frontend. And, you only have an iOS app but not (yet) an Android app. Are you not using React Native? In that case it's fairly easy to target both platforms. I know RN is a bit of a shitshow but not supporting the biggest mobile platform in the world is arguably worse > We gather "tag" and…

You weren't kidding about being dialed in on this space!

> Are you not using React Native?

Not even! Our iOS app just uses WKWebViews for the main UI so yes it would be pretty trivial to do the same thing on Android. Only excuse is that it's in our backlog with 100 other things that we also really want to build.

> If you're taking this metadata directly from the articles I'm skeptical about the accuracy/completeness.

Haha yes, it's an absolute clusterfuck that I'm currently trying to clean up enough to make useful. The descriptions are usually actually pretty solid, but there is so much noise in the tags/topics.

> This is something, but still high-quality articles with clickbait titles will outcompete high-quality articles without clickbait titles.

Yes, yes, yes! I think providing more context in the way of the description could help to cut down on this, but you're very right that there is no easy or complete fix (at least not that I can imagine!). Something else to think about would be looking at the ratio of clicks to completions instead of just the sum of completions alone. That way in your example the 10x likelihood of a click could be cancelled out by the low 0.25x completion rate.

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