Twitter C/D

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.

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.

its funny the new substack ideas are just copies of other social media, wasn't there like a substack chatroom recently too...

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&D

I 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

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).

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

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"

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

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.

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.

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

iirc the NYT makes most of it's money from the puzzles section?

Yeah I signed up for the crossword subscription and it gave me the rest of the paper free for two years

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?

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

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

yeah i finally cancelled my discounted sub. it was jumping up to the normal rate and i’m like fuck you.

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.

You have to start them extremely cheaply!

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

jfc

Tweeter there recommends Ghost, which seems like a legit outfit to me. And you aren’t cobranded with a dumb startup

lol at "You know this is a very bad response to this question, right? You’re aware that you’ve blundered into this. You should just say no. And I’m wondering what’s keeping you from just saying no."

A lot of the questions that interviewer asks are really fucking dumb. Like, if he thought for thirty seconds he'd have his answer. I don't think this interview makes Substack guy sound as bad as the people throwing these clips around seem to think it does.

it makes him sound terrible to me fwiw, but i already thought substack's owners were creeps and and bari types.

Well Patel does note something re that section of the interview:

A quick note — Chris and I are about to talk about Substack’s content moderation guidelines. Like I said at the top of the show, it makes sense to me that you have looser guidelines the more you provide infrastructure, like an email service to people, and stricter guidelines the more your product looks like a consumer service. Substack has pretty loose guidelines, and I wanted to know if it would tighten those guidelines for Substack Notes, the new feature that looks like Twitter.

I want to call out that I got something wrong here — I came up with what I thought was an easy hypothetical, about whether posts calling to kick brown people out of the country would be moderated on Substack Notes. I thought it was a gimme because, well, obviously, but also because I read Substack’s content guidelines a little too loosely. Here’s the relevant section, under the topic of “Hate”:

“Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition.”

Now, I think it’s debatable whether calling to kick brown people out of the country incites violence — I think it does, but I can see the argument that, in my example, it literally does not. I wish I had used a clearer example. That’s on me. But I think it’s more notable that Chris didn’t correct me either way and actually didn’t engage the question at all, which… well, you’ll see how that went.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FtH6A3RWcAEzn-T?format=jpg

great bunch

Like, if he thought for thirty seconds he'd have his answer.

he doesn't want his answer? he wants mr university of austin business school's answer, on the record.

i already thought substack's owners were creeps and and bari types

I don't think that, but I also don't care what kind of person owns the platform I use to send emails about jazz to people who have signed up to read them. If I ever get an email from Substack that says, "we will pay you to include a lil' dash of transphobia in your next newsletter" or "if you don't start including transphobic content in your newsletter, we're gonna suspend your account," that will be a problem and I will respond appropriately at that time.

yes, i'm aware you use and like their product. i don't think that makes it a bad interview.

substack has been staunchly anti moderation for their entire brief history, which is convenient for their business, like michael jordan said nazis publish newsletters too

Substack has been fine with Gr4h4m L1n3han’s behaviour until now, why would standards be an issue

and up til now its been pretty easy for their users to ignore it cause you dont really see the newsletters you disagree with, however if you throw all the users onto a twitter clone that will probably change

this is what i mean by "there is no way substack is going to go mainstream".

isn’t ghost open source and therefore has no content moderation by design?

and up til now its been pretty easy for their users to ignore it cause you dont really see the newsletters you disagree with, however if you throw all the users onto a twitter clone that will probably change

― lag∞n, Thursday, 13 April 2023 7:06 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

was content moderation an issue on other plaintext platforms like wordpress or blogspot or medium? there are/were definitely many super sketchy far right blogs on all those sites. i guess it’s a bit different w substack bc of the money

Yes the money and hosting in fact makes them more ethically and possibly legally accountable for content moderation than tools that don’t do the hosting or don’t pay for content.

Ghost is more the Wordpress model than anything, but with built-in account management for members and newsletter-style functionality in addition to the blogging bit. They have a hosted option you can pay for monthly that gives you niceties like handling bulk email, etc

seems like one of the things that makes sites like substack onlyfans patreon work is everything being centralized especially the payments its very easy to add more subscriptions once youre on there

I’ve installed ghost and it’s got a pretty decent set of plugins. Even if you install it yourself, you can set up paid subscriptions by signing into a stripe account out of the box

how is substack hosting in a way that blogger or medium isn’t?

ghost feels like mastodon to me.. seems like it’s for linux people

idk man, I’d recommend using all the different things a little as a reader and maybe make a little blog/newsletter to see what the experience is like

I think the main substack pitch is the email-friendly formatting and their handling of bulk email which is trickier than you might think. lots of energy trying to pretend it’s an old-timey newsletter

i’m agnostic about what site the stuff is hosted on, afaik a couple newsletters im on are ghost ones, and there’s no noticeable diff. but it does sound more complicated to set one up

are you basing that on the part where you can install it yourself? hosted ghost just looks like every other product https://ghost.org/publishers/

personally i use blogspot and tumblr

like you can sign up for these things and poke around for a half hour and then delete them it’s kind of fun

blogspot is just blogger with a custom domain right

I think erstwhile ilxor max has some decent thoughts on why a person may want to pay for a social media platform in a recent substack newsletter of all things

xps mh- sry i don’t follow what you’re talking abt. my post was based purely the time i tried to set up a ghost newsletter for a friend for 15 min over a year ago and we found it complicated and gave up. maybe we missed that feature

i like max’s newsletter. also i like how he wrote a long essay about being “the guy who famously quit twitter” and then 99% of his posts are about twitter and he’s obviously super up to date and links to like 15 fresh tweets each post. can’t get away

thinking about the “twitter doesn’t drive traffic” thing. at first it felt counterintuitive to me since so much of twitter is links but then upon further introspection i realized i rarely click on links, the feed is just too mesmerizing gotta keep scrolling

sorry for the confusion, I was just trying to remember if blogger and blogspot (and by extension, blogspot.com) were all the same thing and it looks like they are, under the Google umbrella

x[ Well, also, Twitter has a relatively small user base. I don't know that Facebook is any better at getting people to click on links to NPR stories, but there are many more Facebook users than there are Twitter users. So for most mainstream media outlets, which also get a lot of referrals from search, Twitter is never going to make up a significant *share* of their overall traffic.