Substack Notes Launched
on.substack.com
on.substack.com
https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-1446... I’d a good summary. I don’t want to subscribe to hundreds of newsletters to see tweet (sorry, notes). But if you change that setup, it really is a Twitter clone with no upside to writers.
This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an advertising based business model and I'm guessing they think they have "influencers" on their platform to bring in a decent audience.
It's not. Substack is very clear about that. https://on.substack.com/p/notes-faq
"The ultimate goal on Substack is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. Because the Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, writers are rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences, not exploiting it like with ad-based social media."
"While Notes may look similar to social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. It’s social media with a heart transplant."
(I don’t think you’re wrong by a factor of 10, just curious where you got your number from.)
When will we realise that blogging websites (not personal blogs) are not sustainable in long run.
Source:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1783191/000167025423...
- Infinite scrolling feed w/ ads
- Video Substacks
- Infinite scrolling video Substacks w/ ads
Sorry to get off-topic, but is there a read/book to understand funding, VCs, etc., from a holistic POV. I totally didn't expect that consequence of having to raise a crowd sourced round due to initial high valuation.
The announcement for the feature on twitter[1] literally emphasizes the lack of ads, pointing out subs are their revenue source, so that would be some 4D enshittification chess.
[1] https://twitter.com/hamishmckenzie/status/164362995302659686...
Disclaimer - I'm not on Twitter, but my impression is that a few folks made a large amount of noise for leaving but most people shrugged. Other networks mat have seen a temporary large percentage Increase, but a) how much of that stuck and b) a large percentage increase of tiny absolute. Umber can be misleading.
Basically, every 4 years, half of America threatens to move to Canada, but here I am in Toronto and I ain't seeing it :->
However, anecdotally, my relatively static "following" count dropped from ~1k to ~600 over the course of the back-to-back Elon/Mastodon/Trump/etc events that were supposed to prompt mass exoduses. That could be 40% of the accounts I follow blocking me or getting banned, but deleting their accounts seems more likely in this instance.
And there will be many moments in the future, when Elon musk will have upset more of its users. And substock will be there to benefit just like Mastodon is benefiting every day.
Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers.
It's always been very difficult to get people to leave Twitter. This is why their ad business is worth so little. Advertisers pay for clicks, and Twitter just doesn't deliver them very well.
Most of my readers come from HN, reddit or substack itself. Now it's mostly Python so it makes sense a tech oriented medias will be reading more about it.
Still, the ban on substack by twitter means that, while a #python tweet gets some view, the same with an article to substack tanks bit time.
However, if I link to an external article or something, the percentage of people who actually click on it is relatively tiny.
If Substack sees the above as an existential risk - which it might be if Twitter executes well, then Substack is replying by trying to do the reverse to Twitter.
Because they wouldn’t have the followers’ email addresses, which is a big advantage to Substack.
That's all I want out of these platforms. I don't care about decentralization or who owns it. I just want to read interesting stuff and not get pissed off in the process.
One can post a note without having a newletter, and you can "see notes" from a user without subscribing.
Notes linking to Substack Newsletters should convert better. Notes are networked "post summaries" that represent an improvement over the traditional blog homepage format. I see a play that could improve what they're cloning while also benefiting their core offering.
It has potential but the likeness of the clone is a bit off-putting for me.
That said, Substack showing writers adjacent to your subscriptions in Notes makes if feel more Twitter-like in a way that I'm not sure I like.
it certainly seemed to me like there was a good portion of twitter that was just people promoting their substack newsletters, and most of the people they interact with are doing the same. it makes perfect sense for substack to try to bring that under their roof.
Sure, I won’t subscribe to hundreds of newsletters, but a few dozen might create a good feed.
Substack has a perfectly good mechanism for publishing (paid and unpaid) to support people, but that conversation is missing. It's a pretty obvious move if you are engaged with the overlapping users of Twitter and Substack, and has potential to peel a lot of people out of Twitter if they're primarily there to follow their favorite authors, showrunners, etc.
There's an option to just subscribe to notes and not newsletters on desktop, apparently, under the three-dots menu:
https://substack.com/profile/34072171-katie-substack/note/c-...
That UX is awful, but I'm sure they'll work it out in the coming weeks.
The phrasing is weird though: “You’ll then start seeing more of their notes in the Home tab.”
More? Not all? Odd.
But Substack Notes allows for greater potential monetization (ick): TikTok style content, algorithmic recommendations, and ads. Especially ads.
I think it does add some confusion to the product if notes become more popular than articles / comment sections on articles.
I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.
Is that possible? Seems kind of difficult due to its nature, but I admit I'm just a very casual user of it and don't know much.
Signed up for the Substack thing. Seems worth a look - it's very similar to Twitter.
Not sure how to solve the HOA problem though…
Until that changes Mastodon isn't trying to be a serious player.
- Ads range from obnoxious to downright scams. I know some people used to block ad senders as a matter of routine, but I didn't, most of the time they were valid and I was happy to support the site via their ads. After Musk, most ads vanished and for a while all I saw was Nintendo and SpaceX (!?) ads. Now there's many ads, but I block 95% of them because I REALLY do not want to ever again see the kind of shit they're pushing.
- Search, and content outside of my carefully curated list of follows in my chronological timeline, has become complete hell. I used to be happy to search for "stuff that's happening" in Twitter rather than google or news sites, but now the stuff that comes out is not only irrelevant, but often disgusting.
I still use the site but in a very specific and controlled manner. In that way, the experience is still good (bugs aside). I suspect at some point Musk will force some algorithmic crap down my throat and that will be the end.
The content moderation is basically nil now so tons of racist content is propagated throughout the network.
Various technical bugs plaguing things - videos not playing, images not appearing, etc
The verification system has been destroyed which has allowed fake accounts to run rampant
The API has been wrecked, causing third party apps to stop working and massive amounts of research being done to be halted
I’m happy with the destruction of Twitter. I think it’s a net negative for the world and we’ll be better off without it. This might be the only tech I’ve ever felt like this about (including atomic bombs). I think it amplifies and even creates hate and division.
It will be funny if ten years from now we find out it was a gawker-style takedown with the intent to purposely destroy something in a lasting and permanent way as described in Ryan Holiday’s book about Thiel’s purposeful execution of strategy to destroy gawker, https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/conspiracy-ryan-holida...
PS- are there any other business/tech “case study” type books out there. I also liked Clifford Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg, John Brooks’ Business Adventures, Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, Po Bronson’s Nudist on the Late Shift, and David Kaplan’s Silicon Boys. Looking for more of what I suspect is more common than I can find.
- "Hatching Twitter" by Nick Bilton (published in 2014, about the early days of Twitter)
- "Super Pumped" by Mike Isaac (published in 2019, about the early days of Uber)
I returned to Twitter recently due to great features like Community Notes. I don't see what people are complaining about.
I think it's a good thing in the long run.
Twitter was a gimmick in many ways. Here, throw a few words out into the ether and see who notices.
That simplicity attracted tons of people. Then it became THE place to reach a ton of people, even though it's format for such things is AWFUL for it. It's a TERRIBLE platform for meaningful information dispersal, but it's THE place to be, so you see a bunch of evidence of that.
Twitlonger, people chaining twitter posts, just about any conversation, etc. Worse it eliminated a lot of things that probably shouldn't have died. My personal pet peeve is the death of forums, most specifically for games. Pre twitter you could find old forum posts that were pinned about just about anything you wanted to get into seriously. Dustloop had character guides with a level of info that would justify a thesis on characters in games that were 8 years old and hardly ever played.
That level of information is still found now, but instead it's tied to a hashtag, and then vomited out...never consolidated. Right now i'm looking to mess with a new character in strive, and while the GGST_BE tag is nice for "oh that's neat" kind of tech discoveries, it's fucking awful for actually understanding how to play the character or what's useful from it.
To be fair, that's always the case with a brand new character, but in the old days it was somewhat easier to keep a running tally of what works and what doesn't in a forum discussion, while twitter just doesn't promote that, so picking someone up waaaay after the fact is miserable. Discord is the other spot these things are now heavily discussed (with similar issues to twitter, although the forum feature of discord has helped a bit) and the wiki's are in theory where the data is consolidated but it's just a much higher barrier to entry and thus often you have half completed pages with outdated information.
In short, i'm hoping the slow death of twitter (IF it dies. The number of people saying twitter is abhorrent...on twitter...is a sign to me it's not going anywhere) will finally lead to people realizing that we want a way to quickly spread information among those who want it, but we don't need it to be in this shallow, vapid, character limited style. Sure that works for "oh hey look at where I am today" but it drives me nuts every time i see some essay broken into 45 twitter posts.
RSS feeds are an alternative tech that's honestly quite close to being what most people want, but it lacks the discovery/aggregation effect of things like twitter in most cases (inoreader kind of has something like that), and thus mostly still relies on twitter for content (at least it did until they nuked the API).
Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch!
Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@jpmattia@mastodon.mit.edu) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.
When I started working at Twitter (now years ago) my relatives asked me if they should join. And after thinking about it, my honest answer was "no". The only person who needs to be on Twitter is somebody who wants to feel like they're part of a global conversation. Most people just don't and won't.
Twitter is only successful because it started in an era where that was a novel and appealing idea, and because it developed a critical mass of users. Both traditional participants in that conversation (journalists, politicians, media personalities, etc) and new ones (like dril) came on board. It is now gradually losing that critical mass.
These days there are just too many options tuned to too many sets of needs. Mastodon will get a chunk of those people, as will existing social media properties. But I don't think we'll ever again see a global groupchat at the scale of Twitter. Assuming Musk persists in running it into the ground, I think in a decade's time Twitter will be in that bucket with MySpace or SixDegrees, one of those early-internet things that people remember with varying degrees of fondness but would never go back to using.
But also that help make twitter feel like a constant outrage factory that impacts negatively on a lot of people's mental health. I got off of twitter a year ago (deleted my account after 14 years,even) and I'm really appreciating mastodon's less addictive, less "lively"ness.
Actually that's exactly what we don't want.
So Substack will be successful in its own niche, doesn't need to eat Twitter's lunch for that.
The problem is at the current valuation of $650M and bleeding $25M per year, they will have to come up with a plan to generate revenue pretty soon, most likely in the form of ads and generally that's incompatible with high quality content.
Now if Substack's fan base put their wallets where their mouth is and pay say $30 per month, then maybe Substack wouldn't need ads, but we know that's not going to happen, not even at $5 per month.
Second, the toolchain has matured in absolutely huge ways. AWS exists. Twitter had to build their own cloud to meet scaling needs. Languages have matured or been purpose-written to enable building/scaling these types of systems. A huge portion of the N+1s and hidden footguns have been cleaned out of the thousands and thousands of open source libraries that you can glue together to get the system up and running.
Third, Silicon Valley engineers as a whole have spent the last decade-plus building all sorts of Twitter-adjacent Web 2.0 projects, so there's an incredibly deep pool of people that have extremely relevant experience, even if they never stepped foot inside the Twitter building.
Fourth, Twitter (and companies very similar) have been publishing literal engineering designs and post-mortems for public consumption on their engineering blogs. Even if you have no idea what HTML is, your path to self-education and building your own Twitter clone has never been shorter or better paved. They've even published huge chunks of their own work as open source projects.
And on and on and on and on. And here's the thing about growing to Twitter-scale: it doesn't happen all at once. You can build the low-volume version and just follow approximately the same technical scaling path that Twitter itself followed, except you'll be able to skip a whole bunch of mistakes.
But Musk seems, knowingly or unknowingly, to be systematically pissing off Twitter's users. The blue tick shenanigans and conflating it with paid membership, pissing off advertisers, the bots problem that was never addressed, promoting himself at the cost of business, his covert/overt approval of extreme right wing tweets, so on and so forth.
There's only so much crap users can tolerate. A bunch of users have left for Mastodon, and a few more are doing so after he banned Substack links. Once a good chunk of core and influential content creators leave Twitter it'll get overwhelmed with bots and advertisers and will set of a negative spiral.
I've been interacting with only couple of people whom I follow and vice versa for past several months I've been on Mastodon and I feel great about it. I'm convinced that federated instances are the solution to the social media problems just by strong focus on the theme and inherent limit to scaling without any pressure from VCs.
P.S. Please consider donating to your Mastodon instance.
He's completely pissed it away. The skills at finessing the demands of different regulatory regimes were some of the first he got rid of, no doubt deriding it as "wokism". Now he's got fines racking up for publishing Nazi shit in Germany, privacy breaches in the EU, and is globally censoring anything that Hindu extremists don't like.
Turns out that the main problem in social media is the social bit, not whether you can convince a man-child that your code works.
The only reason most larger accounts are still "active" is because nobody wants to have to rebuild elsewhere without strong commitment from platform owners - and outside of Tumblr, nobody has really done that. Except maybe now with Substack, we'll see.
Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.
Most of the people I follow have moved off it. They use Twitter largely for announcements when they've put out something new but all their casual, unfiltered thoughts are going in Mastodon. Every time I check in on Twitter now it seems the noxious behavior to signal ratio gets worse.
There ISN'T? Ever since Musk stepped in it's riddled with bugs and changes for the worse. As an example very recently and as of now Twitter Circles are broken and tweets that should be private only for a select few are visible to anyone in the "For You" tab. This is MASSIVE and probably even a breach of GDPR.
I care about being able to choose between "For You" and "Following". I don't want an algorithmically curated feed which includes things I have consciously chosen not to look at. And I don't want people who follow me not to be able to see things I link to because of a pissing contest between tech companies.
This says so much more about you than about anyone leaving Twitter.
I'm a person of colour. Do I have not have a reason to leave a web site that platforms people who espouse the belief that my children are a disease that needs to be eradicated with fire?[1] Of course I do, and you know that. I do not have a "disdain for Musk's political views," to put it like that is to suggest that white supremacy is a view no different than believing in universal healthcare.
Your rhetoric is a shallow and obvious attempt to invalidate and dismiss other people's concerns.
And while you have a right to your beliefs, no matter how much they lack empathy, no matter how much they are divorced from a belief that other people are not NPCs and are truly entitled to their own world views...
This type of talk is not in the best traditions of Hacker News, a site that yes, has a far more Libertarian slant than I personally hold, but also yes, attempts to hold its discussions and debates to a higher standard than you display in this comment.
———
[1] Other people of colour take a different view on whether to use Twitter, and that's the entire point of not dismissing other people's views. They have their own strategies for making the world a better place, and I don't have to dismiss their choices as posturing, I can respectfully make different choices for myself.
Now, with the new management, I find myself going to Twitter more and more often. I disagree with many posts and I do not like many posts, but now, I could have some assurance that I am getting an authentic information.
How are you doing that now?
> Is this post popular/important or is this post was put into my stream by Twitter/other entities in order to influence me? I don't like being manipulated so brazenly.
Bad news: Musk is doing plenty of that. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
How ? And how is this different than before ?
My biggest complaint, is that even paying for it, you still see (a lot og) ads... I'd be happier paying for it, and getting no ads than the blue checkmark. Also, the UX on the post delay/edit with blue is annoying as hell.
Musk has introduced several high profile changes to corrupt "the authenticity of their rankings" - what on earth are you talking about regarding "authentic information" given the person running the place is a known and repeated liar, whose lied directly about his management decisions regarding the property you've mostly recently started liking?
Seriously, what?
I follow Ed Zitron's Substack, and he is also a prolific Tweeter. He seems to be using Notes the same way he uses Twitter, for shitposting. I'm not sure that's really in line with the tone of Substack.
I actually thought that a newsfeed would be a good fit for substack, but looking at this i dont think i m going to use it. It should be simpler, a timeline of things i ve subscribed, with some threaded, sane comments. The medium shapes the message, and twitter's medium is just not a good fit for substack's message
I wasn't aware of any IP protection of Twitter's UI, which in one form or another has been done 100's of times.
Following the whole banning-saga my impression was that Notes was a genuine extension of the Substack platform, but it being a frontend clone explains why such a tantrum was thrown by Musk.
Here's a side-by-side comparison for anyone that doesn't want to go through the same process:
The fact that Musk is known to be thin-skinned and prone to internet outbursts explains why he threw such a tantrum.
I don't want email spam from every follower, but do want to see the best snippets on substack.
Super easy to create a for you page, given text content:
Step 1: embed every article I ever read, or note I liked/comment/share and stuff it in a DB.
Step 2: every time a new note is posted (by anyone anywhere), embed it, search the db for my last 100 embedded items, and see if new note has relevance > 50%. If so, add it to my feed inventory. Resort my feed inventory by semantic relevance every hour. Remove items older than 7 days from feed inventory every hour.
Step 3: On page load, move everything in my feed inventory to my feed archive - never rerank again. (Bonus points for tracking note level views rather than assuming all were viewed, but small detail).
Bonus Step 4: Every 4th item in my feed inventory, intersperse something that's solely there based on popularity/top liked note of all notes visible to all of my followings. i.e., show me something possibly irrelevant but viral.
That'll get you pretty far, each step can be endlessly optimized over time.
I want to see the results of this so bad that I'll volunteer to build v1 this weekend if you really don't have time to do it internally. Tiktok for text... could be amazing.
how many platforms need to be ruined by an algorithmic feed before people understand that its a terrible idea?
If you are making a twitter clone, AP is the only way to go
I'm not sure what the average number of subscriptions a Substack user has, but it seems like a very echo-chambery setup right now. As an author there are definitely things that I want to share that aren't worth of an email, but I'm pretty sure very few of my audience members are going to see it. Maybe this makes more sense for writers with audiences who are on the Substack app all day.
Is my email inbox an echo chamber because I don't get random newsletters from political activists?
The question about any feature they add is “what does it do about that situation?”
>The question about any feature they add is “what does it do about that situation?”
The answer is the same in the cases of Amazon & Substack: generating sales isn't free, and in all likelihood the platform can do it cheaper than you can. Take the $200k writer who pays $20k to Substack annually. Either Substack can generate 166 subscriptions ($10/mo) annually so it's worth the money, or you move. (That's almost correct: if you are a writer, it may be worth it to you to let Substack continue to own this piece so that you don't have to run a business. There's a lot of value in being able to focus on thinking and writing and not SEO and ad placement.)
One Substack "generates" the sale, transferring the relationship to your own site feels cheap.
It's like if Amazon stopped selling New Yorker subscriptions. If I actually gave a crap about the NYer subscription I was paying for, I'd find some other way to pay for it. Amazon [Substack] is a commodity in this vertical.
Of course, the people who didn't care about your subscription because they never read it would disappear. But, they were going to churn eventually. I imagine if you amortize over a year, this marginal loss is less than the diff between Substack's take rate and operating your own blog + newsletter.
---
Acting rationally from an economic point of view, the only reason you'd want to stick around on Substack is that you think this equation holds true:
(Future subscriber base on Substack * (monthly rate - Substack fee)) > (Future subscriber base as an independent * (monthly rate - cc transaction fees)).
For "young" writers who don't yet have an audience, Substack helps a lot. But if you have a well-developed audience, IDK, I imagine Substack must view them as big flight risks (hence the advance payments).
Some substantial things Substack can do to make this equation more favorable:
- Give you free (or low-fee) marketing on substack properties (note this is a zero sum game over ad inventory, choosing to give you ad space means choosing to not give it to others. this is a hard game to solve, but they can probably do it).
- Reduce their take rate for mature audiences.
IMO, their current model doesn't make a lot of sense if you're somebody with a large audience. Especially now that we're out of ZIRP and they can't afford to sweeten the deal as much anymore.
So far the superstars of Substack (say Matt Taibbi) were superstars before Substack and promote Substack as opposed to the other way around.
Substack competes with traditional journalism, which delivers more journalism per dollar than the typical Substack but is based around the strength of the brand of The Guardian or The Economist as opposed to that of the individual journalist. From the viewpoint of the journalist the newspaper is an aggregator that is doing their marketing work for them.
Substack also competes with Medium which plausibly claims to be doing promotional work for its authors, but despite claiming to be a place which is a little bit better than the rest of the web it's actually a place that is a little worse than the rest of the web and isn't making significant amounts of money for anyone.
I mean, youtube had half the internet complaining "I wish that link was text and not a video" and the other half complaining "I wish it was as easy to monetize writing as it was to monetize video" and Substack saw the obvious solution.
Most creatives don't want to run a business, they want to create.
I know a warvlogger, however, who is still active on YouTube but moved to Patreon because he felt constrained about what he could post on YouTube who left Patreon because Patreon kicked out all warvloggers, now he has his own members-only website.
Another example is OnlyFans which has the same inequality problem as Substack. In my mind it is a little more mysterous how you'd run your own video streaming platform than how you'd run an email newsletter system, but I know you can rent video streaming from AWS so it isn't so hard. I think it's interesting how live-interaction platforms like Clubhouse outside pornography collapsed really quickly though.
If it's really possible to charge $20,000 for this service then please tell me where to find clients.
You could put a job like that up on a freelancer platform for a lot less money and you might get a good outcome or you might not.
My figure would assume there is a certain amount of arguing and barguing about requirements and that you’re dealing with somebody who will really come through, dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s and it is worth it if you are really making money on a newsletter.
Subscribing needs improvement. Subscribing to a hashtag might make sense? It seems like subscribing to someone’s notes and their blog should be independent, because maybe someone has a good blog but you don’t care for their notes, or vice-versa. Having them tied together also doesn’t work for people like me who use RSS. I don’t usually want email from blogs I read, so I only subscribe to blogs where I’m interested in the paid content and usually turn the email off.
I think this loses what makes Substack interesting, though, which is keeping the community for each blog separate, so you don’t care what people are saying on other blogs that you don’t read. Putting everyone in one community, or an unclear blob of overlapping communities, seems likely to be bad for the same reasons Twitter can often be bad.
I guess blogs need discovery, though, and maybe external sites aren’t enough?
(I think I’ll repost this as a note, since they need the content.)
I have the same concern. Substack creators are paid for highly engaging content as individuals subscribe to individual content creators. I don't see how that mechanism works with short form content; it could easily prove to be another platform where number of minutes of eyes on content is the metric that's optimised, rather than engagement with high quality content.
“Log in to Substack”
closes tab
The following command works well:
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "fps=10" -loop 0 out.gif
To be clear, the loop 0 will make the gif infinitely loop. By setting a number n, it will set the gif to loop n times.
gifs just constantly remind me that they're not made for what we used them for these days
Or Command + Shift + 5
Even with all the other options, my favorite is still ScreenFlow. It has a lot of editing features… basically uMovie for screen recordings.
* Make it look exactly like Twitter in every way
END OF DOCUMENT
Uh, no, I was observing how every other "social media" company has done this, and was guessing that Substack, having already told its users to write more frequently, would jump in with both feet.
My general belief is that we won't get a better Twitter from VC world. I also have zero confidence in the Fediverse because it has no business strategy.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/17/23309877/substack-forever...
I dunno, I think a lot of the enshittification[0] of social media companies comes in part because of their business strategies. VCs demand eternal growth or an eventual buyout. Fedi doesn't have that incentive. The worst that can happen to it is what happened to e-mail, where you get a few nebulously large providers but it's still more than possible (although with e-mail, rather aggravating due to an outdated tech stack that we've bolted a bunch of asterisks onto to try and make it more suited for general use) to live outside that bubble and interact with that big provider bubble anyway.
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
HTTP also has no business strategy. Any number of sites that use the protocol can have different strategies, profit-oriented or otherwise.
However, Substack Notes seems to have no method for discovery. They add some random larger accounts to my feed.
You can't search Notes to find people posting content in order to find others potentially interested in similar content.
So, unless you already have a large following, seems like posting into another void. People are reluctant to follow you as well, since you must subscribe to the persons newsletter, they are the same action.
I put forward this suggestion to Twitter, I doubt they will use it, but it is currently ranked 4th by up votes.
Maybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links containing to Substack.
That seems to have accelerated the shift for some to Substack [1] (imagine if Google blocked searches for Bing or Brave!). Suppressing Substack makes the Twitter brand look weak and nervous.
1. https://reason.com/2023/04/10/elon-musk-matt-taibbi-twitter-...
Suppressing substack when substack is trying to advertise for a twitter competitor is just common sense. There's no need for twitter to advertise for a competitor. That isn't censorship, thats just normal business. If substack was depending on twitter for free data and free advertising they were the ones who were weak and nervous.
If you want to bethe next massive aquistion/IPO, then maybe not.
But... paying for a Tumblr sounds weird. People are already used to paying for Substacks, so there's that.
However now that Substack is becoming more like a conventional social media platform they will have a harder time being an "absolute free speech" app.
Never using that shit :)
The entire free speech movement was a response to government literally throwing people in jail for even talking about a given topic. It was never about allowing minority opinions to be as loud as majority opinions.
[1] - https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...
Though I do appreciate the niche focuses of these apps, e.g. posts is primarily designers, farcaster is a lot of crypto people, etc, I still use Twitter for most of my content discovery.
> 1. Go to Settings on the web version of substack.com
> 2. Scroll down to you publications
> 3. Click into any publication you don’t want to get emails.
> 4. Deselect “Receive emails for new posts”
Hoping they improve the experience.
I'm left in awe of the wranglers at SpaceX and Tesla who have managed to keep the companies in question profitable despite being surgically sewn to a narcissistic fauntleroy
RSS solved the "you fully own the content, everyone else can discover it via a well-known protocol" problem decades ago! Is it just that stuff like comments and reactions would be harder with just RSS?
Whether by design or because such sites just attract those kind of individuals, that's not good for a couple of key reasons:
1: Those kinds of interactions turn away many potential users
2: It makes advertising basically impossible (No potential advertiser wants to be associated with that kind of site)
There's a good reason that as sites like Reddit got larger, they started to clamp down on less desirable content.
And any form of social media with no advertising is always going to be very tiny and niche, and in general likely to die out quickly.
I first heard about nostr last in November when Twitter tried to ban it. There's an incredible dev ecosystem developing — so much so that I decided to rebuild Satellite (https://satellite.earth) the social platform I'd been working on to become a client for the protocol.
There's a bunch of other clients too. Someone started a directory here https://www.nostrapps.com/
I'm happy to answer technical questions about nostr if anyone is curious.
People want enjoyable communities far more than they want the 'freedom' to spam the n-word.
Elon's regexp for matching Substack links just got defeated.
If so, I don't really see this taking a notable chunk out of Twitter until this happens.
I see a Substack Reader app, but it's more or less read-only.
Forcing me to login to a single account is not going to work beyond a single email address that I can pick.
I love that it's going to enrage Elon. He's going to realize that he paid 44 billion for something that's going to lose users to Substack's side project.
I guess by now he probably appreciates people going off the deep end for/against him.
Not to mention that old Twitter never hamfistedly censored people by straight up shadowbanning users for using the words 'mastodon' or 'substack' in their tweets.
Unfortunately I haven't reached that level of enlightenment yet.
I root for Elon to fail in the same ways I root for Donald Trump to fail. He's destructive, self-serving, thinks he's above the law, and hasn't faced real consequences for his actions.
I'm rooting for him to fail because he constantly lies, about big and small things. An example: He claimed Substack is downloading Twitter user data to power their competitor. There's no evidence of this. He said this before backtracking because he knew he was looking bad.
I'm rooting for him to fail so folks, like the ones in this very comment chain, can come back to reality and see that he's a flawed human like the rest of us and stop the blind worship.
In this specific case, I'm rooting for him to fail because he's proven over and over he's unfit to lead Twitter and make it a better product.
I'm basically looking for the "Medium from when Medium was good"
So much for giving a new platform a try. I will never use this
However, by poking around in my browser debugger's XHR calls, it only took me a few hours to write a translator from Substack's (not-publicly-supported) JSON-based browser API to RSS.
am i missing something in my understanding?
Then, they will let an Algo organize the feed of articles.
Then the ads - no, wait, the "sponsored post - will start popping in, etc, etc...
Maybe they won't. I enjoy substack as it is today, and maybe they'll pull it off. But I can't help seing this as the next step towards enshitification. In the words of a 21s century social media author : "so sad".
I think the real problem is when this is done with an ad-supported business model. In that model, the interests of the algorithm designer are too far removed from the interests of the user. Presumably, since substack has a subscription business model (like netflix) we may end up with algorithmic feeds that users enjoy using.
No need for a $8 verified button, they can just say how many paying subscribers has as a form of social truth. That is game-able, obviously, but imposes a substantial cost on buying credibility.
If you follow 100 people who post 3 times a day, that's 300 posts. You're awake 16 hours a day, so an average of ~18 posts per hour, or 1 every 3 minutes. Many users follow way more people and/or follow accounts which post much more often.
Having a non-algorithmic feed means that posters will see low levels of engagement and users will quickly be overwhelmed with their reading list, and miss most of the posts. It's a vicious circle which will cause both writers and readers to eventually give up.
If, on the other hand, posts are ranked based on user popularity and engagement and that rank affects its position in subscriber feeds, then it's a virtuous cycle where more people will be directed to interesting posts, and those posters will be incentivised to post more.
This is why Mastodon has seen its usage drop after their initial surge earlier this year. We don't have time to wade through a firehouse of random posts every day.
You can also post notes without even having a newsletter.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of paying for content directly (I spend over $100/mo on Patreon), but I feel like Substack has cultivated a nasty branding issue for themselves. To me, and I know I'm not alone, Substack is where you go when you want to hear some 17-year-old who got high for the first time tell you what THE MANNNN doesn't want you to know, duuude. Greenwald and Taibbi and the like. I guess there's probably other types of content on there, but that's all I ever see from the domain.
Anyway I'm not going to register an account to see whatever's going on with Notes. Good luck, guys.
The media folks are clearly escaping scrutiny and playing to their base, but there are many excellent Substackers in other fields!
I don't like Twitter though, so I don't really care about Notes
Not to mention, a good chunk of those actual actions have resulted in Twitter being a legitimately worse place for a great number of people to spend time on/engage with, and thus they... leave.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35530201.