I have nor felt much response to the suggestion (not mine alone) that authors be permitted to sell single posts or small packages of posts. The problem with the subscription only method is that comments can come only from those that pay which means they will be biased toward some measure of agreement with the author's POV.
Is the situation with comments not more of a feature rather than a bug? If comments are only from people who have paid to join in, they’re surely more likely to be civil. If to be a troll you need to pay a substantial entry fee before going off to start a random flame war, you probably won’t get out the credit card. That said putting comments behind a paywall is not required. I don’t have a paywall on comments because I have just started and I haven’t any particular monetisation plans - or a large enough subscriber base to worry about it.
Best of luck to the Substack team --a solution would have positive externalities as a useful social technology-- but I suspect from experience and first principles that there's no healthy algorithmic discovery mechanism without strong, ideologically opinionated manual intervention, essentially because:
(1) Prosocial truth and poisonous bullshit can't be told apart through purely algorithmic means, so there's no algorithmic filtering out of the latter.
(2) Poisonous bullshit has more degrees of freedom than prosocial truth (ethical and epistemological constraints don't apply) so they have an inherent advantage in seeking and gaining algorithmic favor.
So far every large scale centralized platform that has attempted to figure this out has first failed and then given up. From what you say, there's no specific reason to think Substack will have better luck [happy to be proven wrong here] but also it doesn't look like they will limit themselves to the passive role they have figured out but it's not ambitious enough for who they are.
I do agree Substack has a positive replacement value over personal blogs when it comes to monetization (which can in turn help with long-term sustainability) but my cynical bet is that it'll fall into the same failure modes as every other large-enough centralized platform who has tried to implement discovery mechanisms, feeds, and so on.
What happened to "the myth of lock-in", which you teased in the intro, then said nothing about AFAICT? This is the big question, I think. Extrapolating from my own sample of one, Musk has shown the limits of lock-in. I left X for Bluesky and Mastodon and haven't looked back. OTOH, I'm still stuck on Facebook because my family, triathlon club etc use it, and once I'm there I interact a bit with political discussion, though I try not to.
And I feel somewhat locked in to Substack, even though there are reasonable alternatives. That would change if I was more exposed to the Nazi bar, which seems to be in a different part of the pub.
My apologies for commenting late; I'm behind on my Substack reading. Two comments:
First, Substack seems to want to be the 21st century equivalent of prestigious 20th century opinion journals: a place where smart people can go to read what other even smarter people are saying, with the added attraction that you (yes, you!) might be able to become one of those very smart people whom not-quite-as-smart people pay to read. But 1) those journals controlled what they published to ensure that articles generally conformed to the journal's editorial line, and 2) they were perennial money-losers and had to be subsidized by wealthy patrons. In this regard I think the idea that Substack is "not ... an investment so much as a public-relations reputation-washing effort" for its wealthy patrons has a great deal of truth to it, with the added point that Substack's wealthy patrons think that the upside of being considered champions of free speech outweighs the downside of having some of that speech come from Nazis.
Second, the $45M ARR figure is interesting because detailed information on Substack financials is not to be had. If you assume that Substack has 17,000 writers (the most recent figure I could find) then collectively they earn about $3.2M per month (assuming 86% of revenue goes to writers) or under $200 per month per writer on average. Somewhat coincidentally, this is close to the average monthly earnings for Patreon projects last time I looked. However median earnings on Patreon were (and presumably still are) an order of magnitude lower, and I would expect the same to be true of Substack if (as I hypothesize) earnings follow a similar log-normal distribution. So I would not be surprised if monthly earnings for the median Substack writer were as low as $25 or less or about $300 per year. This may be even lower if Substack's distribution of earnings is even more skewed than Patreon's, which seems plausible. (I've seen statements that the top 10 Substack writers collectively take home about $25M, which leaves less than $20M for the other 16,990.)
1) John Gruber is considerably less impressed by the financials, the need for another funding round, and the talk about "surfaces" and "pivots". Either Substack is a publishing platform, the next generation Blogspot with better author control over subscriptions, or it is something else. If so, what? An "everything app"?
2) the Nazi problem that Substack continues to have is glossed over very quickly. I am deeply conflicted by continuing to pay writers I respect (e.g. Prof DeLong) via a platform and executive team that is deeply intertwined with Nazis, fascists, and people who want to see me die in a work camp
Re the "growing demand for more interactive, community-driven formats...that existing technology does not yet fully support" -- does it support being able to view the N comments on a post without having to click N/8 times? (and, ideally, to filter the "well done, old chap" comments into their own corral)
I’m experiencing two issues with sub stack at this point:
One, discovery doesn’t work well. The algorithmic feed combines links to posts, re-stacks and Twitter style meta-commentary.
Two, related to the “Nazi bar“ problem, is that it’s way too easy to find yourself unwillingly seated in the Klan section of SubStack — plenty of overtly hate-filled Notes and innocuous-sounding Posts that are full of n-bombs.
Ken White compared SubStack to a neighborhood bar which has Nazi Night every Tuesday — but that presumes some level of containment.
Thanks for the summary; I'm torn between finding a lot value in Substack and also feeling like the more substack grows the harder it is to find connections that feel organic and the easier it is to repeatedly see big accounts.
A disappointment for me has been the section of (unknown) people swearing that this post by this unknown person is an absolute must-read, only to find uniformly that it is a meh.
"To the extent that there are ideas and thoughts behind these, they are the thoughts of the people who wrote the words on which the models have been trained, perhaps in a way similar to the way in which the motions of the character Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies are distorted reflections of the underlying motions of the actor Andy Serkis."
Yes! (insert Guinness "brilliant" gif)
Whose artifice?
That will always and forever be the key question in AI.
"The process of migrating, unfortunately, is daunting. Every newsletter is different, every destination is different, and there is no unified how-to guide that covered what I was trying to do. So, for the benefit of anyone out there who might be trying to do what I did — that is, migrate from Substack to a self-hosted instance of the open source Ghost blogging software — here is my version of the guide I wish I had."
I have nor felt much response to the suggestion (not mine alone) that authors be permitted to sell single posts or small packages of posts. The problem with the subscription only method is that comments can come only from those that pay which means they will be biased toward some measure of agreement with the author's POV.
Is the situation with comments not more of a feature rather than a bug? If comments are only from people who have paid to join in, they’re surely more likely to be civil. If to be a troll you need to pay a substantial entry fee before going off to start a random flame war, you probably won’t get out the credit card. That said putting comments behind a paywall is not required. I don’t have a paywall on comments because I have just started and I haven’t any particular monetisation plans - or a large enough subscriber base to worry about it.
Well one issue is the value of nib-troll "non-payer" comments vs troll non-payer comments.
And aren't there diseconomies of scale in trolling. The troll buying in occasionally to troll might not be much of a problem
Best of luck to the Substack team --a solution would have positive externalities as a useful social technology-- but I suspect from experience and first principles that there's no healthy algorithmic discovery mechanism without strong, ideologically opinionated manual intervention, essentially because:
(1) Prosocial truth and poisonous bullshit can't be told apart through purely algorithmic means, so there's no algorithmic filtering out of the latter.
(2) Poisonous bullshit has more degrees of freedom than prosocial truth (ethical and epistemological constraints don't apply) so they have an inherent advantage in seeking and gaining algorithmic favor.
So far every large scale centralized platform that has attempted to figure this out has first failed and then given up. From what you say, there's no specific reason to think Substack will have better luck [happy to be proven wrong here] but also it doesn't look like they will limit themselves to the passive role they have figured out but it's not ambitious enough for who they are.
I do agree Substack has a positive replacement value over personal blogs when it comes to monetization (which can in turn help with long-term sustainability) but my cynical bet is that it'll fall into the same failure modes as every other large-enough centralized platform who has tried to implement discovery mechanisms, feeds, and so on.
What happened to "the myth of lock-in", which you teased in the intro, then said nothing about AFAICT? This is the big question, I think. Extrapolating from my own sample of one, Musk has shown the limits of lock-in. I left X for Bluesky and Mastodon and haven't looked back. OTOH, I'm still stuck on Facebook because my family, triathlon club etc use it, and once I'm there I interact a bit with political discussion, though I try not to.
And I feel somewhat locked in to Substack, even though there are reasonable alternatives. That would change if I was more exposed to the Nazi bar, which seems to be in a different part of the pub.
My apologies for commenting late; I'm behind on my Substack reading. Two comments:
First, Substack seems to want to be the 21st century equivalent of prestigious 20th century opinion journals: a place where smart people can go to read what other even smarter people are saying, with the added attraction that you (yes, you!) might be able to become one of those very smart people whom not-quite-as-smart people pay to read. But 1) those journals controlled what they published to ensure that articles generally conformed to the journal's editorial line, and 2) they were perennial money-losers and had to be subsidized by wealthy patrons. In this regard I think the idea that Substack is "not ... an investment so much as a public-relations reputation-washing effort" for its wealthy patrons has a great deal of truth to it, with the added point that Substack's wealthy patrons think that the upside of being considered champions of free speech outweighs the downside of having some of that speech come from Nazis.
Second, the $45M ARR figure is interesting because detailed information on Substack financials is not to be had. If you assume that Substack has 17,000 writers (the most recent figure I could find) then collectively they earn about $3.2M per month (assuming 86% of revenue goes to writers) or under $200 per month per writer on average. Somewhat coincidentally, this is close to the average monthly earnings for Patreon projects last time I looked. However median earnings on Patreon were (and presumably still are) an order of magnitude lower, and I would expect the same to be true of Substack if (as I hypothesize) earnings follow a similar log-normal distribution. So I would not be surprised if monthly earnings for the median Substack writer were as low as $25 or less or about $300 per year. This may be even lower if Substack's distribution of earnings is even more skewed than Patreon's, which seems plausible. (I've seen statements that the top 10 Substack writers collectively take home about $25M, which leaves less than $20M for the other 16,990.)
A couple of considerations:
1) John Gruber is considerably less impressed by the financials, the need for another funding round, and the talk about "surfaces" and "pivots". Either Substack is a publishing platform, the next generation Blogspot with better author control over subscriptions, or it is something else. If so, what? An "everything app"?
2) the Nazi problem that Substack continues to have is glossed over very quickly. I am deeply conflicted by continuing to pay writers I respect (e.g. Prof DeLong) via a platform and executive team that is deeply intertwined with Nazis, fascists, and people who want to see me die in a work camp
Re the "growing demand for more interactive, community-driven formats...that existing technology does not yet fully support" -- does it support being able to view the N comments on a post without having to click N/8 times? (and, ideally, to filter the "well done, old chap" comments into their own corral)
Update, seems the N/8 problem is fixed, thanks.
I’m experiencing two issues with sub stack at this point:
One, discovery doesn’t work well. The algorithmic feed combines links to posts, re-stacks and Twitter style meta-commentary.
Two, related to the “Nazi bar“ problem, is that it’s way too easy to find yourself unwillingly seated in the Klan section of SubStack — plenty of overtly hate-filled Notes and innocuous-sounding Posts that are full of n-bombs.
Ken White compared SubStack to a neighborhood bar which has Nazi Night every Tuesday — but that presumes some level of containment.
So not only have i been speaking prose all my life but I [a free-subscriber non-true fan] serve as a SubStack’s marketing department. :)
Has the Royal Academy ruled on "Substack" vs "SubStack?"
:-)...
The SubStack people do not like SubStack. But I do...
No mention of where the suggestion box is?
Thanks for the summary; I'm torn between finding a lot value in Substack and also feeling like the more substack grows the harder it is to find connections that feel organic and the easier it is to repeatedly see big accounts.
A disappointment for me has been the section of (unknown) people swearing that this post by this unknown person is an absolute must-read, only to find uniformly that it is a meh.
"To the extent that there are ideas and thoughts behind these, they are the thoughts of the people who wrote the words on which the models have been trained, perhaps in a way similar to the way in which the motions of the character Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies are distorted reflections of the underlying motions of the actor Andy Serkis."
Yes! (insert Guinness "brilliant" gif)
Whose artifice?
That will always and forever be the key question in AI.
Practical advice for (some of) those looking for an alternative.
https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/
"The process of migrating, unfortunately, is daunting. Every newsletter is different, every destination is different, and there is no unified how-to guide that covered what I was trying to do. So, for the benefit of anyone out there who might be trying to do what I did — that is, migrate from Substack to a self-hosted instance of the open source Ghost blogging software — here is my version of the guide I wish I had."