That is approximately as true of Hacker News commenters as it is of Substack writers.
Sure, but HN commenters aren’t trying to get paid by commenting.
No, we compete for community approval, the pleasure of “well actually…”, and meaningless upvotes.
Or promoting and creating a newsletter grift on every tweet.
I’m curious, what definition of grift are you using here? Do you consider all paid writers who promote their work to be grifters, just writers who have newsletters, or just writers who have newsletters on Substack?