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Comment by jsemrau | Hacker News Reader

Dependence on ad-revenue has led to a decrease in quality researched content and to an increase is engagement articles. From what I've heard is that Journalists have left their traditional media outlets and publish now on substack because it allows them to publish quality content without an editorial oversight that emphasizes clickbait. Quo Vadis Medium? Medium used to be a site that worked well in the same niche and now hardly drives views.

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In both cases you're still subject to editorial oversight (your own) and (financially) encouraged to publish clickbait. It's just that the clickbait can be more narrowly targeted to the slice of the ideological/subject-interest spectrum your newsletter most appeals to. And if you stray outside of that line, you'll see revolt from subscribers just like any other publication.

Time will tell. I believe that evergreen content produces more revenue over time than clickbait.

Most people don't have a very long horizon.

Consider the stock market.

That’s ok as long as the few who do aren’t subject to the whims of the others

Interesting that you mention the stock market. The stock market velocity of content is entirely different than movie reviews, cultural research, or political commentary. The reason is that a movie does not update the storyline each quarter or change characters. A deep-dive analysis written on Seeking Alpha might be invalid within 1 minute if a short-seller has found evidence for fraud.

Sounds like it’s comparable to sports?

Yup. It's like an article comparing 2023 Manchester City with the 2020 Bayern team. While it might work as a thought exercise it wouldn't have an impact on who wins the cup in 2023.

I suspect the platform of choice will move around as the current one reaches saturation and more people are primarily on there to make money where the crowd is. The noise becomes greater than the signal.

That HN has been able to keep the signal to noise ratio high seems like a feat of the gods this day in age

I think through the subscription model has Substack solved the distribution/discovery problem.

While I might follow people/topics on Medium it doesn't help filter out the noise.

yeah, I'm not so sure they have "solved" anything. I think that many of the authors may be creating thought and feedback silos. They certainly aren't reaching as many people who think differently, helping to influence their thinking. This feedback loop with people who like your content only reinforces writing that they want over what needs to be said.

A good editor can make a huge difference, the interview with Foreign Affairs Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan was quite good. Really appreciated his thoughts on how a good editor should work with content authors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYCBg8-w5VU

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