long interview with Dril, using his real namehttps://www.theringer.com/tech/2023/4/12/23673003/dril-twitter-interview-profile-identitymy main takeaway here is "I'm nearly a decade older than dril. fucks sake."
― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Wednesday, 12 April 2023 18:15 (one year ago) link
yeah, I'm actually disappointed dril is not at least 50.
― INDEPENDENTS DAY BY STEVEN SPILBERG (President Keyes), Wednesday, 12 April 2023 18:56 (one year ago) link
oh wow I somehow forgot about horse_ebooks. anyway I'm pretty sure I actually remember this dude from FYAD, iirc the stuff he posted there would probably just get you banned from Twitter
― frogbs, Wednesday, 12 April 2023 19:01 (one year ago) link
Great interview. Always wondered how he found those tweets from accounts with no followers.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 12 April 2023 20:38 (one year ago) link
welly wonka
― mh, Wednesday, 12 April 2023 20:55 (one year ago) link
the kids posting three word descriptions of the oompa loompa for a school lesson on twitter is very funny.
― ꙮ (map), Thursday, 13 April 2023 02:25 (one year ago) link
BREAKING: Twitter to partner with eToro to let users access stocks and crypto trading— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) April 13, 2023
― limb tins & cum (gyac), Thursday, 13 April 2023 11:24 (one year ago) link
oh great.a couple of months ago twitter had a popup asking if I wanted to add an nft profile picture, the options were "yes" and "not now" - I looked in vain for the "fuck off" button.
― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Thursday, 13 April 2023 11:31 (one year ago) link
did a twitter search for the last name of the racist oxford tech philosopher guy to see what people were saying about his nytimes oped and there was so much porn in the results cause some low follower porn account has bostrom in its handle
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 13:08 (one year ago) link
Rocco's Basilisk
― Toploader on the road, unite and take over (Bananaman Begins), Thursday, 13 April 2023 13:43 (one year ago) link
...haa
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 13:44 (one year ago) link
it kinda crazy that what substack is trying to build doesnt already exist a social platform for paying writers, youtube has been paying people for years, medium kinda tried to do it but it was sort of a hybrid model too much blog/media org thought, tho tbf substacks secret sauce is email which is even older than blogs lol, kinda doubt their twitter clone will work but it is cool that you can just roll up a website/newsletter and start getting paid, even if the company sucks and will inevitably screw over the writers
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 14:00 (one year ago) link
The substackers I follow have almost completely abandoned Twitter and use Notes.
― "The pudding incident?" (Boring, Maryland), Thursday, 13 April 2023 14:05 (one year ago) link
wonder if theyre paying them to do it, wld be smart, notes only hope is for all of the journalists et al to go there, thats twitters draw that a lot of industry people are there
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 14:13 (one year ago) link
the pay people to write model is pretty obvious for substack at this point but not sure how they can pay people to tweet at scale
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 15:09 (one year ago) link
other networks that pay people to post are ad based notes is not the money is all coming from newsletter subscriptions, its prob doa
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 15:10 (one year ago) link
something will be lost if twitter goes and nothing replaces it
I keep waiting for someone else to make this point but it hasn’t happened yet. Or I haven’t seen it yet. Discovery on here sucks now. But there’s a very profound thing that Twitter provides creative industries that isn’t traffic. And when it’s gone, oh boy, are we gonna feel it…— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) April 13, 2023
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 15:14 (one year ago) link
Well it's less than useless for sharing anything right now because it treats links as spam, so you waste time trying to use it to promote anything you make. Even nothing would be an improvement on that, though of course there will be something, people won't just stop using the internet.
― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Thursday, 13 April 2023 15:28 (one year ago) link
“For you” has always penalized tweets with links fwiw
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, 13 April 2023 15:29 (one year ago) link
I look askance at the switchover to Notes -- I don't begrudge anyone doing it if they're already there, but placing one's faith in one private company over another seems like a lateral move.
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 13 April 2023 15:32 (one year ago) link
twitter has never really been good for sharing links its for sharing tweets
in the tech journalism world, despite a lively community of programmers on twitter, a link from a site with 2007-era web design called something like "Bob's Linux Chat" would send you several orders of magnitude more traffic than the most viral twitter link https://t.co/ZeYas8uBCn— Josh Fruhlinger (@jfruh) April 13, 2023
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 15:33 (one year ago) link
I don't know about "always" but yes it has been this way for a long time, though has got even worse of late. It's still leagues better than Facebook, who will only share links to people who have already liked your page if you pay them, or Instagram where you can't share links at all. Reddit has managed to internalise this into a culture where anyone sharing their work =spammer
― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Thursday, 13 April 2023 15:41 (one year ago) link
― lag∞n, Thursday, April 13, 2023 11:09 AM (forty-four minutes ago)
they probably can't, substack's financials are ... shitty
― 龜, Thursday, 13 April 2023 15:55 (one year ago) link
That means Substack was required to disclose financials for 2020 and 2021 only, which it did yesterday ($12m of 2021 gross revenue, $22m net loss and $55m of cash on hand).
i imagine the $12MM doesn't include the subscription revenue that goes directly to creators, only substack's cut
youtube, otoh, pulled in $29B (billion with a B) in ad revenue in 2022
i wonder if substack revenue is more stable from the pov of a creator, if you're a youtuber you're at the mercy of the algorithm but as a substack guy i wonder if most of your subscribers just end up forgetting they're paying you $50 a year
― 龜, Thursday, 13 April 2023 15:59 (one year ago) link
seems like substack has an obvious path towards profitability but that might not be enough for their vc overlords
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 16:01 (one year ago) link
the model i see for the future is that everyone pays me to tweet, it's win-win
― mark s, Thursday, 13 April 2023 16:10 (one year ago) link
substack fucked up by setting the default option to be that you stop paying when your subscription ends (usually after 1 year) instead of having it auto renew. nyt goes to insane lengths to make it impossible to end your subscription
― flopson, Thursday, 13 April 2023 16:12 (one year ago) link
yeah weird decision by a company that seems otherwise extremely mercenary
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 16:15 (one year ago) link
substack should be copying onlyfans' business model
― mh, Thursday, 13 April 2023 16:29 (one year ago) link
I don't want to see Matt Taibbi and Jedd Legum naked thank you.
― dan selzer, Thursday, 13 April 2023 16:53 (one year ago) link
I'm not gonna use it as a Twitter replacement; I'm just gonna send out the odd link as the mood strikes, just to keep my subscribers on the hook in between newsletters.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Thursday, 13 April 2023 17:19 (one year ago) link
its funny the new substack ideas are just copies of other social media, wasn't there like a substack chatroom recently too...
― 龜, Thursday, 13 April 2023 17:24 (one year ago) link
xp lol they’re trying to branch out, not sure how successfully. the safe for work homepage gives you cooking videos and people talking about playing AD&DI think the deal with patreon is their image/video hosting is kind of janky and it’s not really great a great reading experience, but the entire “support a creator” model still has some space to breathe in-between patreon, substack, etc
― mh, Thursday, 13 April 2023 17:26 (one year ago) link
are 2022 numbers not going to be better? i feel like i only became aware of it in late 2020
one obstacle to revenue growth for substack is that writers incentives and the platforms incentives aren’t well aligned for bundling, which is a logical next step for the platform to bring in more cash. i’m subscribed to a bunch of newsletters, but only free version, and it’s already way too much to read. substack as a whole would make more money if it could bundle all the newsletters i read into one, put it all behind a paywall, and charge me 5$ or whatever.
but thats not a good deal for the writers, relative to their current deal. a successful newsletter writer has a small number of paid subscribers but high revenue per subscription. by bundling with another newsletter you increase the number of subscribers but dilute your cut of revenue per subscription. unless the bundling brings in enough additional subscribers to compensate, it’s not worth it for the most successful newsletters to join the bundle. so only the shittiest writers want to join the bundle and it unravels
nyt is hundreds of writers writing semi-regularly, dozens writing multiple times a week, and it costs less than some of the pricier newsletters yet brings in a tonne of cash because so many people read it, even though very few people read everything. to some extent it’s nyt’s brand that solves the bundling problem. people pay the big bucks for nyt cooking (honestly insane that they can charge 20$ per month for a cookbook in an app with terrible ui) not for sam sifton
― flopson, Thursday, 13 April 2023 17:52 (one year ago) link
patreon is my favourite platform but they still hide the download button (the only important button) under the three dots at the bottom of a post, along with "report post"
― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Thursday, 13 April 2023 17:53 (one year ago) link
interesting reading the dril interview where he says how little money he makes off his patreon. if twitter had a youtube-like mode he’d be a millionaire
― flopson, Thursday, 13 April 2023 17:57 (one year ago) link
I just got a message from Twitter about "creator subscriptions" and was told if 10% of my followers paid 5 dollars a month I could make hundreds of bucks. But then told that I don't meet their criteria. Is anybody really going to sign up for that? I feel like it'll just make more people join substack to do the same.
― dan selzer, Thursday, 13 April 2023 18:20 (one year ago) link
Elon just casting about for any possible way to make money except actually returning Twitter to the somewhat moderated and predictable environment it had spent years trying to create.
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Thursday, 13 April 2023 18:34 (one year ago) link
i think 2022 numbers will be better but the real question is what the market for paid substacks is. maybe a useful proxy is how much revenue the NYT brings in, that feels like the upper limit for amount of money out there from people who are willing to pay $ for words only
― 龜, Thursday, 13 April 2023 18:58 (one year ago) link
iirc the NYT makes most of it's money from the puzzles section?
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, 13 April 2023 19:03 (one year ago) link
Yeah I signed up for the crossword subscription and it gave me the rest of the paper free for two years
― papal hotwife (milo z), Thursday, 13 April 2023 19:19 (one year ago) link
hah my wife just signed up for a games subscription for the crossword (and spelling bee).
from the latest 10-K - i believe the numbers are presented in 10,000s.
https://i.ibb.co/mcZWzSZ/image.png
what I gather from this is that there are 88.83 million digital subscribers (sorry, that's not in the screenshot) and of that 88 million, you have 63.7 million who do have access to the news, but you don't know how many of those have a bundle that also includes games. but i think you can infer from that that means there are 24.6 million subscribers who do not have news access, so these must be the guys who only subscribe to some combo of the athletic, cooking, games, or wirecutter. that's as clean as it gets, i think, unfortunately.
then there's another table that talks about number of subscriptions rather than number of subscribers, and it's a higher number because apparently some subscribers have multiple subscriptions. somehow, the number of print subscriptions (which only includes paid subscriptions) is smaller than the number of print subscribers, maybe because some of those print subscribers get print delivery for free?
― 龜, Thursday, 13 April 2023 19:44 (one year ago) link
im an athletic subscriber but theyll give it to you for a dollar a month as an intro and then again if you try to unsubscribe, before the times bought them i was happy to support them at their normal rate but now im like take yr dollar piggies
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 20:04 (one year ago) link
its very easy to read every times article for free if you want to which i appreciate, while i acknowledge them as an important institution i will not pay due to all the nasty shit they are always pulling
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 20:07 (one year ago) link
yeah i finally cancelled my discounted sub. it was jumping up to the normal rate and i’m like fuck you.
― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 13 April 2023 20:43 (one year ago) link
Patreon is another fucked company with a business model that should be obvious and boring but is fucked by VC and nothing there is gonna get fixed ever again. Creator economy platforms cannot thrive if they are in debt.
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Thursday, 13 April 2023 21:26 (one year ago) link
You have to start them extremely cheaply!
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Thursday, 13 April 2023 21:27 (one year ago) link
there is no way substack is going to go mainstream. their leadershim is deranged.
👍 https://t.co/wlLFqBYZJQ pic.twitter.com/l5r7WvAz8Z— luke (@lukeoneil47) April 13, 2023
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, 13 April 2023 21:37 (one year ago) link
jfc
― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 21:39 (one year ago) link
Tweeter there recommends Ghost, which seems like a legit outfit to me. And you aren’t cobranded with a dumb startup
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Thursday, 13 April 2023 21:40 (one year ago) link