MICROBLOGGING: How to Put Sand in þe Gears of Outrage Clickbait?; & Þe Potential Failure Mode of Substack Notes
Starting 2023-04-17...
Substack Note: How to Put Sand in the Gears of Outrage Clickbait?:
“There’s money to be made from thoughtful engagement, but no money to be made from revving-up the outrage-clickbait-attention machine” is a good thing to focus on. But the fact that the outrage-clickbait-attention machine has been the best-working business model for all of social media suggests that you should be putting more sand in its gears here than you are…
2023-04-21 Fr
Substack Note: THE POTENTIAL FAILURE MODE OF SUBSTACK NOTES:
SubStack Notes can succeed only if people who adopt this mood of discourse on it do not find audiences and are not rewarded for trying to stoke the outrage-attention-clickbait machine.
I wish Chris and Hamish well in trying to figure out a process and a mechanism by which that happens. The big problem is that microblogging is very vulnerable to this failure mode. I do not know how they might be able to solve it.
2023-04-17 Mo
I'm not sure why Substack Notes would be immune to the ills that have affected Twitter. In fact, I think it could be even worse, since there's a direct monetary incentive for writers to offer outrageous takes in order to persuade people to subscribe to their substacks and be candidates for conversion to paid subscriptions. This seems especially true for writers just starting out with few or no subscribers, since their own notes are going to get little or no traction. The alternative is to be a perpetual "reply guy" butting in on other writers notes' and (again) stirring up controversy.
The other problem I have with Notes (as a would-be writer myself) is that it seems to intensify the feeling of having orders of magnitude gaps between myself and popular Substackers. It takes the (most likely) log-normal distribution of readers' attention to writers and makes it much more visceral if you're at the wrong end of the distribution. I have an alternative place to write that is deliberately designed to discourage virality and exponential growth, and I find it much more congenial -- better a few dozen readers there, and gaining one or two more every month or so, than the (almost certainly unrealizable) potential of attracting hundreds or even thousands of readers on Substack.
I have paid substack subscriptions to avoid the clickbait garbage. I will cancel them and leave the platform if authors can not do better tham F@#^ Off.
One can choose advertising supported media that provide pyschological comforts. I enjoy learning different views and thoughts. Substack can not have it both ways.