691–700 of 789 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did they spend their $25 million on? What's the tech they have that costs this much to build? Their hard problems are a building a CMS or are otherwise solved by using fastly and sendgrid?
For most startups that raise money, tech is hardly a big cost. Most of the money goes towards fueling growth through paid marketing and so on.
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.
"a Twitter clone with no upside to writers" Notes linking to Substack Newsletters should convert better . Notes are networked "post summaries" that represent an improvement over the traditional blog homepage format. I see a play that could improve what they're cloning while also benefiting their core offering. It has potential but the likeness of the clone is a bit off-putting for me.
That said, Substack showing writers adjacent to your subscriptions in Notes makes if feel more Twitter-like in a way that I'm not sure I like.
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. This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an advertising based business model and I'm guessing they think they have "influencers" on their platform to bring in a decent audience.
I remember there was a time when people were excited about medium. Then medium needed some money so they started blocking readers behind login dialog boxes. Then come substack and everyone got excited about it. Sooner or later it will be on same path that medium took. When will we realise that blogging websites (not personal blogs) are not sustainable in long run.
This is a classic case of VCs corrupting an industry with money that’s really not needed at valuations that really can’t be supported.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"a Twitter clone with no upside to writers" Notes linking to Substack Newsletters should convert better . Notes are networked "post summaries" that represent an improvement over the traditional blog homepage format. I see a play that could improve what they're cloning while also benefiting their core offering. It has potential but the likeness of the clone is a bit off-putting for me.
Your post clarified my thinking on this. If I think of Notes as a Twitter clone then I'm upset because, like the parent poster, I want a much narrower subscription-base for long form content than I do short form content. However, if I think of this as merely a short form update from accounts I follow then it's fine. That said, Substack showing writers adjacent to your subscriptions in Notes makes if feel more Twitter…
Substack will need to decide if they view Notes as a search engine with an RSS feed or a standalone social network.
Edit: I don't think their positioning is obvious yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That 'censorship regime' (your words, not mine) was doing a very good job compared to the clown running it today.
Everyone likes the censors when they are on their side.
The people that see this differently are typically the same people who believe that 'the Twitter files' were revelatory, when in fact they weren't. Strong overlap there with eternal Trump supporters and various complot theory proponents, I'm not sure what degree of evidence would be able to convince people like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ZIRP picking off its victims one by one
You are not a victim in any real sense if they cut you a fat cheque first then take away the toys.
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.
How is twitter ruined? My personal experience on the site has not changed much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Musk is the least of my concerns, I can ignore his account if I cared that much. I can't really ignore that a lot of higher quality accounts have been interacting less because Twitter has become a technical mess, fucking up their timelines and notifications. This sort of loss is quiet, and slow. You only really notice it when it's too late, when your feed is nothing but mindless ads and random accounts you never foll…
> higher quality accounts have been interacting less any source / concrete examples of this? I've asked for this before but all I ever hear are general, sweeping claims without any actual data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon paid 44 billion for twitter's existing users and wanting to overthrow the censorship regime that was defacto the standard before Elon bought twitter. Thank god Elon bought twitter and made it possible for other social media sites to be more open to free-speech.
That 'censorship regime' (your words, not mine) was doing a very good job compared to the clown running it today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter now has daily outages where parts of it just don’t function and no one knows when we’ll experience a more serious one. It serves the daily/hourly whims and mood swings of a single person who has proven to be petty, vindictive (to his employees), and devoid of integrity. That lack of stability in my opinion accumulates. Sooner or later it will balance out the momentum.
You'll need a citation for this. I've been using it for years and haven't noticed any difference or outages.