721–730 of 789 posts
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Because no company would ever lie about their intentions, or at the very least pivot to the exact opposite of their original point without a second thought. Would they?
"Because no company would ever lie about their intentions, or at the very least pivot to the exact opposite of their original point without a second thought." No business would pivot to a dying monetization model unless it was their last option. Advertising is not a solution for Substack; but rather a Trojan Horse.
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Imagine spending only 30% of your net worth and getting to experiment with buying and growing one of the most used and talked about sites on the internet. If I spent 30% of my net worth I could buy a condo in the bay, possibly. Although odds are it would be worth close to that if I needed to sell it. But many people spend 30% of their net worth trying to start businesses with almost no traction. Musk spent 30% to buy…
Imagine spending only 30% of your net worth and getting to experiment with buying and growing one of the most used and talked about sites on the internet. That sounds like one of the least interesting things I could do with $44bn. With that sort of money I could fund 1000 Twitter rivals, and after a couple of years combine the successful and interesting ones into a single rival that would actually do something better…
You could fund The Manhattan Project ($21Bn).
And the Panama Canal ($13Bn).
And the Concorde project ($2.5Bn).
And the Hoover Dam ($0.8Bn).
And an Eiffel Tower, a Statue of Liberty, and a statue of Christ the Redeemer. ($100s of M)
Buy yourself a B52 Stealth Bomber (~$2Bn).
And a Hindenburg ($100M), and a Titanic ($400M).
And still have a couple of billion left over.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
One could argue that social media is technically all "blogging websites" Advertising works there because of the numbers. People will quickly consume enough bite sized content to drive traditional numbers. Medium broke the things that made them appealing in an attempt to sweeten the advertising sell, but this made the platform unappealing. It was a self inflicted wound.
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I wanted to be the default browser, ok. It wanted to import all my info.. no thanks there was other nastyness I don’t remember. Then it showed me so much junk and crappy news on new page, it was pure propaganda. That was the end of it. I know it’s possible to configure all those things, but the starting experience was soo bad I got away quickly.
It is classic microsoft behavior. They don't create apps, they create traps. The end goal is just to make people slaves of their software. The software they create is just "leverage" so they can trap more and more of you or your business.
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Elon showing the number of impressions a tweet or reply actually got was an eye-opener for me. Probably about 1-2% of "Followers" -- not just mine but most people's. Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers.
> Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers. It's always been very difficult to get people to leave Twitter. This is why their ad business is worth so little. Advertisers pay for clicks, and Twitter just doesn't deliver them very well.
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It is classic microsoft behavior. They don't create apps, they create traps. The end goal is just to make people slaves of their software. The software they create is just "leverage" so they can trap more and more of you or your business.
It seem to me that Google at first was focused on making the best products but ended up in a very similar place. Absolute power corrupt absolutely.