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Not surprised. A ton of political writers who got slurped up into Substack all compete over the same niche audience who definitely aren't paying $10/month or whatever for 15 different writers doing basically the same "heterodox" takes. That swarm effect works on "free" mediums like the blogosphere back in the day or Twitter, but it doesn't really scale to paywalled newsletters.

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A lot of people want to support those writers in a Patreon-like model, which is the role that Substack plays for readers who want to help writers have an online presence where they are free to honestly write about different subjects.

A Ko-Fi button and a sign-up page on a blog could achieve that.

I suspect Substack writers are hoping to get elevated to the 'paid writer' status that big names like Andrew Sullivan have. That's the only network effect I can think of with their product.

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