Real writers have day jobs.
Actually now that I think of it, zero of the people whose writing I would pay for are "writers" by trade, which is part of the dullness problem of consumer media.
True, there are actually some real writers worth reading on substack, but imo, not enough of them, and even less of them that I would be willing to pay to read - heck, I won't even pay to read a newspaper online anywhere as you can get it almost all for free someplace else with a few clicks.
Seems like an attempt to monetize free blogs, problem is, there are still plenty of other free blogs to read - they haven't gone away.
It would help writers and readers if Substack bundled groups of writers together, perhaps by genre/type/subject like a magazine, and for the current cost of one subscription newsletter have 5 newsletters that the subscriber/paying customer can choose to assemble to create their personal "magazine." This would allow the reader to financially support more writers/artists, which would allow more of them to continue publishing their work and grow.
Alternatively, if I care what you have to say, you're probably not a professional writer. Maybe there's a better way to do it than we've seen so far, but I have yet to watch someone go that route without overhyping every little thing, stretching the truth, and then outright making stuff up.
For me email is a big ball of stress, there is always a huge amount of spam to delete, even if I keep up on unsubscribing from lists and blocking addresses that send me spam.
When I am reading email I am generally trying to get some specific task done and having email newsletters get in the way means I'm going to skip over the newsletters and never read them.
What the world needs is an RSS reader which is like that Talking Heads song Psycho Killer: "See something once, why see it again?"
One of the big advantage of the mail-style presentation is the client indexes the content and gives you full-text search of the stories you've read. Once you get used to that it's hard to go back.
Their target consumer (affluent/intellectual enough to pay for access to ideas) has access to a far wider variety of arguably better content if they're willing to build up a set of RSS feeds.
Maybe there's room to build a company on top of the RSS ecosystem, but it's difficult when free, feature-rich, and high quality alternatives exist.
FWIW, it does seem like Substack is trying to attack this space: https://on.substack.com/p/new-reader-homepage.
However, as a publisher/bundler of paid RSS feeds, they have a big conflict of interest in offering an RSS reader. Like Spotify and their "exclusive" podcasts, they have an incentive to push bland content and obscure the rich niches that make the RSS ecosystem actually-valuable.
"awesome rss feeds site:github.com"
But you can start with any publications you already subscribe to (newspapers, magazines, etc).
See if any people you respect write blogs, follow those links and see if those people write blogs, etc.
First few of those it found had a lot of links, sure!, but no commentary around them to explain why they are awesome which is the other half of the discovery problem, no? If I have to click 50 links to find out what they are - and they generally link to the RSS, mind, without a link to the website which means that clicking will only give me a "Do you want to open this in ReadKit?" prompt - I've got better things to do with my time, really.
There's probably a better way to discover than sifting through large lists with zero commentary, but if you're starting from literal zero, a big list isn't an awful place to start.
It'd be interesting to seed some pagerank-like crawler with blogs you enjoy, so you could use its outputs as your "try this out" list. I've experimented with building something like it in the past, it's an entertaining task for sure.
Some bloggers also have handy pages designed to give you a high-strength outbound signal, e.g. https://jvns.ca/blogroll/. It's worth seeking those out, where they exist.
Some stories are still behind paywalls (e.g. The Local in Munich), but you can at least read the headlines.
What a great quote!