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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

> Starting today, we’re making Revue’s Pro features free for all accounts and lowering the paid newsletter fee to 5%

...and there goes Substack's entire business.

Overall, this is great for writers however. The missing component to Substack was the discovery/social mechanism. From a strategic perspective, it's easier to bolt on newsletter sending than it is to build a new social network.

So this was always a huge risk for Substack as a platform. But hey, there's also an alternate universe where Twitter stays dumb and lazy and never crushes Substack. So I see why investors took the risk.

But I see no path forward for Substack if Twitter manages to not completely botch this.

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Not exactly. The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now.

I think it's the same thing with Slack, Slack only exists because Microsoft teams is made by Microsoft.

I swear to God it's mostly a placebo effect, but you're like oh yeah we're using slack we're the cool kids now. Many companies will have a single breakaway team that uses slack just to feel cool.

But if $10 a month makes a developer happier she might produce another $500 in value.

> The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now.

I see "current press sentiment" as an irrelevant factor. Just wait until some prominent right winger heads to Substack and the journalists start aiming their sights.

The point is, if I'm going to start a paid newsletter, am I willing to give up an extra 5% of my income for the same feature set?

The answer is hell no. Substack will have to lower their prices, and then the feature war will begin. Twitter will always have the upper hand given they can directly integrate newsletter sign up forms into twitter.

But hey, bureaucratic incompetence is endemic at Twitter, so they might screw up this obvious path to victory they have in front of them.

To each their own, but given the major questions around how much power Twitter has, I don't see a lot of free and open journalism happening there.

Ideally the entire reason you pay for this type of content is because you don't want to just read CNN. If Twitter is perceived as controlling your content anyway, why pay for it

IMHO, the only solution is a fairly complicated decentralized structure with economic incentives for all.

Even then you have gatekeepers for hosting and payment processing.

Exactly the problem cryptocurrency was created to address.

We use both Slack and Teams. I strongly disagree that it's the 'cool factor' making Slack better. Teams is just a pain to use for 70% of my day-to-day messaging needs. Teams works well for meetings and large presentations. For intra-team communication and bot integration, Slack wins hands down for my team.

Teams works.

Your team is just used to Slack.

At the same time , if it costs 2k in lost productivity to switch, it's easier to keep using Slack.

I agree Slack is better though. I can't imagine if I started a new team I'd fight for slack over teams though

> The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now.

Can you explain? I use Twitter daily (hourly) and haven't read anything that lessened my opinion of them. Are you talking about censorship / Trump stuff? Personally they have not gotten on my bad side with any of that.

> Slack only exists because Microsoft teams is made by Microsoft

I'm also not sure what you mean by this. Microsoft Teams exists because of Slack.

A few of Substack's writers wouldn't be allowed for long on a Twitter-owned platforms, and they know it. Writers like Greenwald, Yarvin, and Taibbi are all to varying degrees, transgressive enough and critical enough of social media to perceive the extra cut Substack takes as a reasonable ask in exchange for a greater level of platform security.

Substack will certainly lose a lot of writers, but I think it'll be safe as a profitable niche alternative.

Aren't they all active on Twitter? Greenwald certainly is. It's a major part of their brand-building effort already at the very least

Yarvin isn't, to my knowledge. It's a matter of how they communicate on the platform, vs off. It's entirely feasible for them to present their more anodyne content on the platform, while still expressing a wider range of ideas and opinions off of it. This has been the smartest strategy for a while. Twitter doesn't usually care what you do outside their platform.

> It’s a matter of how they communicate on the platform, vs off. It’s entirely feasible for them to present their more anodyne content on the platform, while still expressing a wider range of ideas and opinions off of it.

Greenwald’s Twitter is no more anodyne than his substack; the only real difference seems to be the usual kinds of adaptation to microblogging vs. long-form.

> A few of Substack’s writers wouldn’t be allowed for long on a Twitter-owned platforms, and they know it.

Maybe, but two of your three examples clearly would be allowed, and quite active, for quite a while "on a Twitter-owned platform":

> Writers like Greenwald,

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald (1.5M followers, since Aug 2008)

> Yarvin,

The only one without an obvious verified account on Twitter. There's a no-activity @CurtisYarvin regular account, though.

> and Taibbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi (0.5M followers, since May 2009)

You're conflating mantaining a presence on the platform, with the willingness to make it your source of income. It's a matter of risk mitigation with consideration to Twitter's history of moderation.

I cited them not because they've been deplatformed, I cited them because they've at various points commented on media and platform censorship.

Considering Twitter's response to the Hunter Biden NYP story, and the fact that Greenwald left The Intercept over its inwillingness to publish his opinion piece on it, I doubt he would trust a company under Twitter to host his content.

Yarvin is an obvious no - being a neoreactionary who makes often despicable-sounding commentary, Twitter would be unlikely to keep him online and commercialized with pressure from activist groups.

Taibbi is quite moderate, but from interviews, I'd place him in a similar to bucket to Greenwald in terms of demanding editorial independence, and a durable revenue stream from his host platform.

Let's see if the DOJ goes after them for predatory pricing first. Twitter may have bought themselves enough favor with the Biden administration that he'll let it slide.

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