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.
I assume Substack has some motive behind having a Twitter like messaging service, though I can't imagine it being a profit motive since Twitter was never very profitable and the odds of being bought out by an idiot billionaire are slim.. One big risk is that adding such a service could alienate people who have fled from elsewhere to Substack. A nice thing about Substack was that it is more like blogging where each author or group of authors maintains a community rather than a big public free for all as on Twitter or Facebook. No one complained about Nazis using Wordpress because only people who wanted Nazis even knew that there were Nazis using Wordpress. The problem with Twitter and the like is that they were unavoidable.
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.
I assume Substack has some motive behind having a Twitter like messaging service, though I can't imagine it being a profit motive since Twitter was never very profitable and the odds of being bought out by an idiot billionaire are slim.. One big risk is that adding such a service could alienate people who have fled from elsewhere to Substack. A nice thing about Substack was that it is more like blogging where each author or group of authors maintains a community rather than a big public free for all as on Twitter or Facebook. No one complained about Nazis using Wordpress because only people who wanted Nazis even knew that there were Nazis using Wordpress. The problem with Twitter and the like is that they were unavoidable.