Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

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You realize this “dumb blogspot” is written by the most successful writer in the industry as far as revenue from a paid newsletter? He has had every major tech CEO on his podcast and he is credited for being the inspiration for Substack.

The Substack founders unofficially marketed it early on as “Stratechery for independent authors”.

Your analysis concerning the technology instead of focusing on the business is about like Rob Malda not understanding the success of the “no wireless, less space than the Nomad lame”.

Even if you just read this article, he never argued that Google didn’t have the best technology, he was saying just the opposite. Nvidia is in good shape precisely because everyone who is not Google is now going to have to spend more on Nvidia to keep up.

He has said that AI may turn out to be a “sustaining innovation” first coined by Clay Christenson and that the big winners may be Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon because they can leverage their pre-existing businesses and infrastructure.

Even Apple might be better off since they are reportedly going to just throw a billion at Google for its model.

A lucky few can make good money telling rich people what they want to hear.

eg Yuval Noah Harari, Bari Weiss, Matthew Yglesias

As someone who has built actual multi billion dollar ad platforms his take is so laughable juvenile it’s not worth the bits it’s written with.

I can’t emphasize enough how bad Ben’s take is here. He needs to stop writing and starting doing something.

> You realize this “dumb blogspot” is written by the most successful writer in the industry as far as revenue from a paid newsletter?

The belief that adding ads makes things better would be an extremely convenient belief for a writer to have, and I can easily see how that could result in them getting more revenue than other writers. That doesn't make it any less dumb.

At at least $5 million in paid subscriptions annually and living between Wisconsin and Taiwan, as an independent writer do you really think he needs to juice his subscriptions by advocating other people do ads on an LLM?

Any use of LLMs by other people reduces his value.

None of this proves anything other than he writes what audiences want to hear.

Which as we know has nothing to do with reality.

Who do you think his 30-40K paying subscriber audience are?

I can guarantee you that most of his audience stands on the other side of “yes advertising is a good thing” than he does.

He has said as much.

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