Another copy of Mastodon? No, thanks. Funnily Medium was first with their Mastodon instance.
Mastodon is fine for a specific audience but not a scalabale Twitter. SubNotes won't be either, but it's atop an ecosystem that should prevent the spam & trolls of Twitter, et.
al.
The 'engagement' monster strikes again. Substack is apparently making no money with email and is walking that back and trying to become like Twitter. Wonder how long it'll take for them to throw up an "algorithmic" "For You" page.
They are making plenty of money. Problem is being VC backed, they need to justify the massive valuations of the past. That's why I feel a really simple business like Substack would be much better being bootstrapped and growing organically.
I think the only reason they gained traction is by throwing money and benefits at big names to move to it. I doubt they could have afforded it without VC funding
Given they has specifically avoided an algorithmic recommendation engine for email this feels like an unfair criticism.
We’ll see how this plays out but a non advertising funded short form content alternative to twitter seems like potentially a good thing given Twitter’s current issues.
Algorithmic recommendations requires much more volume than what Substack has. Guess what fixes that - short form content. It's coming. We're in a world where Spotify of all apps has updated their UI to have an algorithmic video feed.