The rich niche | Hacker News Reader

The rich niche

therebooting.substack.com

57 pointsyannovitch56 comments

I was recently a rep for the office's annual charity drive. At the end of it our office (west coast) was compared to offices in other parts of the country. While we had lots of one-time donations, literally nobody signed up for "workplace giving", to have money regularly taken off their paychecks. It is about fear an uncertainty. When people are stretched thin they will still give money when they can. But when is key. They will give money out of their pockets when asked but will not commit to future giving because they are unsure of that future. Subscriptions are for people who are confident in their month-to-month financial position. If you want to sell to the normal people, those who live from paycheck to paycheck, then you need to stick to single payment schemes.

Office charity drives are already bad enough in that they socially pressure employees to give money. I would be furious if the company I worked for asked me to start recurring donations out of my paycheck. Keep employer-employee relationships to strictly business. I can donate to charity on my own time.

It was a little more than that. There was some employer matching of funds, up to a point. And having it come off your paycheck saves a step come tax time.

My father mentioned that while working for banks, back in his day (~25 years ago), there were "guidelines" of how much you should donate to $bigNameCharity depending on your position. He was pretty much forced to donate $1500/year, a lot of money back then. Of course, way up the hierarchy, someone was friends with the charity's founders. And of course, these charities paid out huge salaries and expensed extravagant "business trips". Typical.

There's a lot of awful charities out there. I've used "https://www.charitynavigator.org" in the past to determine which charities are worth giving to, or not. However, I've personally interacted with three charities "on the ground" (in Hospital situations): Shriner's (burn unit in Galveston); McDonald's; and, St. Jude's. I 100% guarantee you that those charities are in the business of helping people (kids, in these cases), and doing so for the best-bang-for-their-buck they can. All three are non-religious (if that's important to you).

I think a lot of the people who read HN are probably in a life situation where they can help. Please do so.

All charity done by big companies smells shitty to me... you're a multimillion $$$ company, and you want me to donate 20$ to feed the poor?

I get it, but - anecdotally - I know someone whose son was dying of cancer and the McDonald’s foundation absolutely helped them a great deal.

For charity by companies I agree with your position. But when a company will match your donation (which is given in your name) why not?

I also don't agree with those big name-things donations by HNWs. If you really want to give, why name the thing after yourself? And depending on the charity of billionaires is a sign of a broken system anyway.

I worked at a college and during the hiring process, they tried to coerce you to sign up to automatic payroll deductions for donations to the college itself. I believe it was an opt-in by default, and you had to explicitly opt out by filling out a paper form. I was kind of confused by the absurdity.

Woah! Opt-in is bad enough, but opt-out "give us back part of your check" should be outright illegal.

Many years ago I worked for a company where the CEO or maybe his wife were associated with the local United Way branch. We were asked to contribute our "fair share" to the United Way campaign. We got a day off or something like that but it was also made very clear that this was not actually optional.

And, yeah, to the other point, while I have subscriptions to various things it's not something I really want to do when I have a choice given that such things tend to be out of sight/out of mind.

I think the explanation is even simpler: People don't like adding yet another monthly expense unless it's truly necessary.

Even for financially comfortable people, a one-off donation to a charity is easier to reason about than taking the same amount of money and dividing it into 24 bi-weekly payments. Then I'd have to remember where to get the end of year receipt for those payments when I do my taxes. I'd also burden myself with the decision of when to cancel the donations, which is something the charity probably makes as difficult as possible to increase their retention numbers. If I did decide to cancel, I'd have to invest potentially an hour or more to track down the information, maybe call someone, deal with their retention pitch over the phone, and then remember to check in a few weeks to confirm it actually ended.

It's all a lot of hassle that I really just don't want or need. Far easier to just donate once at donation time and then file the receipt in my tax folder. I can always decide to donate again next year.

I already have probably 20 or more monthly recurring payments from my mortgage to all of the insurance payments and internet, gas, water, electric, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, all of the software services I use and so on. Running a business can easily add 10-30 more monthly bills. I really, really don't want to add anything else to that list if I can avoid it.

This took a lot of my mental energy when I was a teacher. I didn't have any of my bills on autopay because I had to constantly manage when I would have enough money in my account to pay any given bill. Even now that I'm much more comfortable I only have about half of my bills set to autopay just in case, e.g., one bill comes due the day before my paycheck lands in my account.

Seems like it would be a fantastic feature for payment processors to provide scheduling! (and negotiating with subscription providers to operationalize that)

I dunno how many Bay Area SWEs/PMs can even grok such a lived experience, for them to prioritize it as a feature request.

I've never seen a credit card that did not allow you to schedule your payments. If you auto-pay everything with credit cards, then by default you are scheduling your payments. Same with mortgages. For the few things that don't accept cards (rent/water/gas/electric?) you could schedule payments whenever you want through your bank, though you'd likely be paying in advance rather than in arrears.

I've never paid bills from the CC side, but from the provider side. I don't even know how I'd tell my CC to automatically pay some entity on a set schedule. It's all pulled by the service providers, separately, on whatever schedule they decide (or choose to let me configure). I know I can do it with account-to-account transfers (so, electronic checks) from my checking account, but had no idea that was a thing for credit cards. Where do you tell it to send the money? Do you have to get bank account info for the receiver?

[EDIT] On reflection, I've even built subscription systems reliant on credit card payments, and didn't know you could do this.

You don't need to tell your CC to pay some entity on a set schedule. I don't think my initial post was clear enough.

Credit cards are paid in arrears, usually with a 15 day grace period, so you are effectively getting a 15-30 day interest free loan on all purchases. When you set up a credit card, you can select any payment date you want. So, if I get a new AMEX, I can choose to have the bill due on the 1st, or 12th, or any day I want.

If I pay all my bills (i.e. Netflix, car insurance, etc.) with my AMEX, I know the AMEX bill is due every 12th (or whatever day of the month I choose). For any bill paid by the credit card (i.e. Netflix, car insurance, etc.), it doesn't matter what day of the month that particular bill gets charged to the AMEX. I only pay AMEX once a month, on the day I selected. So, by choosing what day my AMEX gets paid, I am effectively choosing which date I am required to pay all of the bills that got charged to my AMEX.

There are very few things that you can't pay by credit card. For those (i.e. mortgage, some utilities), you can schedule auto-payments on any day you want, through your bank.

> Seems like it would be a fantastic feature for payment processors to provide scheduling!

No, no, no. You have it wrong. You're not thinking about being able to charge late fees. How are you going to charge late fees if nobody is ever late?

I mean, doesn't everyone do this, even if they aren't living on a shoestring budget? I usually plan ahead about 1-2 months in advance: Pay my bills on the due date, keep track of when each pay check will come in and the expected amount, on days when the balance is expected to drop below zero, either 1. find some way to deposit some cash or 2. (if able) schedule a small transfer from my savings account to cover the difference. On days when the balance is more than what's needed for my next set of bills, schedule a small transfer into the savings account. Checking account never contains more than what's needed until your next paycheck.

I pay every possible bill on a 2% cash back credit card that is basically dedicated to that purpose. That way my bills can come out whenever and it is my job to pay off that card every month to avoid interest payments and in exchange for that convenience I get rewarded with 2% of my mandatory spending to be put back into my pocket, and it gives me flexibility should I need to dole out on an unexpected expense with cash.

Really great insight. I have absolutely seen this in my own approach to subscriptions. I cancel them when I work for startups and sign up for them when I work for big stable companies.

Even if I could, I wouldn't sign up for workplace giving, because I know it's just a ploy to get tax breaks for the company. I'd much rather donate directly, and get the max tax breaks for myself. Same with giving donations in the checkout line. Amazon Smile is the only one I use, because it doesn't cost me extra.

I'm not in any immediate danger of being overdrawn, and I still detest automatic billing in general. (I do it for one bill where there's a significant upcharge for not doing it and switching providers isn't easy.) If I'm spending or giving away my money, I want to sign a check or at least tap a button every time. It's insulting to me for a charity to say, "Here, giving what you want is a bother, let us just take care of it."

I see a lot of people at my place of work giving from their gross income via salary sacrifice simply because they've maxed out their pension allowance and would rather see a charity get it than pay the government another penny in tax.

Once I reach that level of income I'd probably do the same, even if on a take-home basis I didn't feel "rich" due to high CoL.

Right now though, my primary concern is having a big enough pot in retirement, so my tax advantaged contributions go to pension (401k equivalent)

I don't mind subscriptions as they're more valuable to the organizations I support than a similar dollar-value of one-time-gifts. Though I do get why people in precarious positions (e.g. low paid workers, founders, or many people in high cost-of-living areas) would prefer not to use them.

But the only reason I can imagine routing charitable giving through work is to take advantage of company matching. At a past company that did 100% dollar-for-dollar matching (up to something like ten thousand dollars) I was happy to shift as many of my donations as possible through work to direct more of the company's giving towards my preferred charities. At my current company that does 0% matching there's no reason for me to involve work in my charitable giving.

Author's argument seems to be that the only profitable publishers are subscription-based, and therefore cater to the rich, because only the rich can afford subscriptions.

That seems to ignore...the entire history of publishing. Like how a newspaper used to cost a quarter and everyone read it.

The newspaper price was heavily subsidized by ad revenue. If the paper had to depend solely on the sales revenue, the price would have had been much higher than a quarter, and consequently, much fewer people would buy it regularly.

Ad-supported business models are more prevalent and profitable now then at any other time in history. Why do you think publishing was left out?

Newspapers were information and entertainment to many; the eyeballs coming for the latter subsidized the former. They lost the entertainment eyeballs -- now what happens to those who need reliable information?

This article is decrying the outcome of that, maybe.

Same reason why horse drawn coaches were left out despite demand for transportation being higher than ever: newspaper ads lost to competition from other advertising venues, because they provided inferior product.

This probably isn't exactly correct but, as I recall, the idea was that the subscription/newsstand revenues paid for the printing and distribution of the physical paper while advertising paid for the creation of the content.

For my book, I did a ton of historical research, mainly the LA Times (via newspapers.com). You can get a free trial of that without paying, but the subscription price is pretty nominal. You can probably get a paper from where you grew up, too.

Anyway, it's pretty eye-opening to see how much of the paper in the late 70s was ads. Like, 3/4 of most pages in the front section, after the first three. The Sunday paper was 300+ pages. They were raking it in. They could afford to subsidize some foreign bureaus.

Why was that? There was no other good way to reach the Southern California audience. I got my job at Xerox by answering an ad in the Sunday Times.

So they had a monopoly, and now it's gone.

I’ve been a subscriber to the print edition of Wired for about 4 or 5 years now. Lately the ads and articles targeted at the absurdly-affluent have got on my nerves, and I don’t think I’ll renew again. I can’t say whether this is because the ads are now more pervasive, or because I’ve become more class-conscious over time.

As a side note, does anyone find it ridiculous that a combined household income of $100k is supposedly “affluent?” When my partner and I broke that barrier, we were living in a shitty apartment with a roommate. Didn’t feel affluent

> does anyone find it ridiculous that a combined household income of $100k is supposedly “affluent?”

It's 150% of the median household income[0] in the United States, so no I don't think it's that ridiculous.

[0] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...

Depends on where you are and who you are. Housing costs vary dramatically across the U.S.: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388.

In addition, most zoning regulations reduce the supply of housing and thus raise prices as demand go up. Someone who bought a place in California or New York or Boston 30 years ago may have seven figures in a primary asset and relatively low earnings.

I'm making $120k in Seattle and it seems like I'm no better off than my mom was making $35k as a nurse when I was a kid. Sure, that was 20 something years ago but its absurd how I make nearly 4x the money and it still doesn't go as far as it used to.

Annual vacations, family car, 3 bd house at an affordable price. Sure, we didn't have cable but we would get dvd rentals and broadcast TV worked pretty well. Now you are lucky to get 3 channels that work consistently even with an amplified antenna.

I feel the same way. My SO and I together bring in over 2x the median US household income in a below-average COL area outside a small city, no kids. We have a comfortable life: own our home, one modest vacation per year, and have some money left over each month to spend on hobbies. But damn, this doesn’t feel like “affluence” to me.

You can argue that this is a feedback loop, though.

I can survive on minimum wage in the UK, therefore if I earn min wage + 1,000 (after tax), I can afford these subscriptions.

The question is whether I prefer that over other things.

I prioritised learning materials, computers, etc in my youth when I had a hilariously low budget and it paid dividends.

The questions IMO are:

1) to what extent is the economy zero sum, e.g. can everyone avoid being a retail worker

and

2) if we satisfy 1, how do we expand critical thinking such that people invest in themselves

Reading the news is, in my opinion, nearly diametrically opposed to investing in yourself. You will get a better understanding of current events (upon hearing of them from others, the best filter that money can't even buy) by reading history books exploring the past couple hundred years. The news is an entertainment product where personalities are constantly making statements or predictions that never pan out, and they never face any penalty for it. Look at how nearly everyone involved in the media push for the Iraq war still has a career and is seemingly respected by their peers. Look at how half the media lost their heads over the Trump/Russia thing, leading people on for three years straight, never amounting to anything. Someone who completely ignored that entire thing would be massively better off intellectually (and be better informed about the world) than someone who hung onto the daily "the walls are closing in" predictions.

Daily or even weekly, maybe monthly reading of the news is over 95% noise and is a pure negative for personal development.

I agree, I guess I was addressing the general point about paying for information.

Orwell's Books vs. Cigarettes is just as poignant today as it was then.

By forgoing that pint at the pub earlier and buying textbooks, now I can afford both.

Trump's ties to the Russian government and intelligence services are far from a hoax.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/513499-republicans-i...

https://i.redd.it/nf1crtngi3iy.jpg

Look, I know there's negligible chance I'll be able to overcome your sunk cost of multiple years of attention and presumably many authored social media posts, but you really can just move on and nobody will actually care one way or the other. The 2016 election wasn't rigged, it's just a weird thing that happened and a handful of Russian people being paid to post poorly-made memes contributed very little to the outcome. I don't like Trump but it's getting a bit embarrassing at this point. A lot of people, your fellow Americans, really did vote for him for their own reasons. You can either integrate that into your worldview or keep living in a world created and then abandoned by media personalities once it outlived its usefulness.

You should probably stop imagining that people you're talking to are saying the election was rigged.

I agree for the most part.

That said, it requires actually reading the news for someone to come to the same conclusion that you did through first hand experience, rather than just taking your word for it.

The author mentions that they've contributed to Puck, which is a comical example of this: https://puck.news/

Open up the side menu and you'll see you can select each of Puck's area of interest:

- Hollywood

- Wall Street

- Silicon Valley

- Washington

It would be easier to describe these as "bubbles".

"one valid criticism often leveled at them is that they are catering to rich and influential people"

It's not actually a valid criticism, and it is also not a problem.

Anybody who worries about that is free to launch another publication targeted at whomever they fancy.

What IS a problem is that people really think that kind of thinking has merit.

That's how capitalist societies centered on maximizing profit have always worked. When someone tells someone else to "pick themselves up by their bootstraps", really what they're saying is "sell someone to someone else with money willing to pay for your service". Homeless people and poor people are basically invisible to the economy, and serving them literally contributes nothing to the economy (directly at least) since GDP by definition only includes monetary transactions.

Even as a white collar worker, you'll quickly realize that the executives calling the shots are generally already rich themselves, and their bosses the investors are even richer. Money dictates everything we do down to the mission of our companies and the role of our jobs. Sure you can opt out, but then you're essentially taking a vow of poverty, and unless you're rich already that's a pretty big risk. It's no surprise that workers realizing that they are effectively servants of the rich have backlashed and opted out.

This phenomenon of serving rich people exists not just within our labor market, but also in politics. In theory a democracy should reflect the will of the people, but in practice the rich own the media/advertising, and the poor are too busy working to make ends meet to be politically active.

> One of the more cringeworthy cliches is “riches in niches.”

cliches, riches, niches. (Proounced clee-shays, ritches, nee-shiz.)

Hooray English!

> Credible information shouldn’t be a luxury good.

Shockingly, a good substack article.

A better quote:

> Jonah Peretti was right in 2017 when he warned that paywalls are “bad for democracy.” Credible information shouldn’t be a luxury good.

Paywall does not automatically mean luxury? I think the actual problem is the average internet user expects everything to be free, independent from his/her income.

Anecdotal: I have friends with iphones of whom I wonder how they can spend so much on a mobile. It is about making choices.

A paywall does always mean luxury. It's spending money on things you don't need. If your friends have recent model iphones, that is also luxury. Apple is a luxury brand.

I think this is also why some writers are making so much from substack. There is a huge market for affluent readers with disposable income. People will pay to support their favorite creators.

High quality news is paid for by people who want to read high quality, sophisticated news. There is ample free news out there - I would call it buzz feed, instagram, local media websites, and on and on. These are more bite-sized and ad-driven. Most people don't want to read their news in novella format, but for those that do, they are more willing to pay the fees necessary to produce it for the limited audience that reads it.

It's far from just writing though, isn't it? With the massive shift in the percentage of GDP that flows to capital rather than labor, the motivation for almost all economic activity to focus on the desires and whims of the rich gets stronger and stronger. Luxury spas, housing, boats, clothing, resorts, processed foods, even popular entertainment: cater to the whims of the rich, and you seem to have more of a chance of making a living than catering to the needs of the less-rich and poor.

Of course, this is more or less precisely the opposite of what an economy is supposed to do, but is simultaneously obviously the inevitable behavior of an economy structured and run by the assumptions of 21st century US capitalism.

>Jonah Peretti was right in 2017 when he warned that paywalls are “bad for democracy.”

Haven't we also come to the conclusion that ad-supported clickbait journalism is bad for democracy?

Most of this article seems to be one anecdote about how someone made the author a bad job offer once.

Couldn't care less.

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