cjbest

I think this is right.

> whose bias your are familiar with I This is fair, but there is a positive version which is "whose worldview you understand, and find interesting/valuable"

Every person and organization comes with some kind of bias - even if part of that bias is "try to be clear eyed and tell the truth".

The advantage of subscribing directly to writers is that you get to choose explicitly who you want to trust, and having done so the writers' incentive is to keep that trust.

As a writer, you get to make your own bet about what work is important, you get paid in proportion to the value you create, and only your readers can fire you.

Substack founder here. You might be surprised at the relative importance of the mailing list. You also have your own Stripe account on Substack.

That said, it’s a fair point, and I understand wanting to wait until we support it.

Substack (W18) | Full Stack Eng | full time | SF | Onsite (once safe) | https://substack.com

Substack lets writers start their own subscription publication - think paid blog/newsletter - where writers' and readers' incentives are aligned. Over 100k people pay to subscribe to publications, and top writers are making six figures.

We use Node, Express, and Postgres on top of Heroku. React for frontend. Simple & effective so we can focus on solving problems for users. We are 11 people. We raised a series A from a16z and are thoughtfully building our early team. Two of our three founders are technical (the other is a writer) and we're looking for folks to work along side us, shipping things that touch thousands of writers and millions of readers.

Come join us! https://careers.substack.com

Even if you accept technology will be part of their lives, it doesn't follow that any addition of technology in the classroom is good.

How much rigor should we ask of evidence showing it's bad? Does the evidence showing it's good clear that bar?

How much do people care about what they listen to? What kind of pricing power can the best stuff command?

I think it might not be as simple as supply and demand, because a) you can't just trade one piece of content for another and b) the marginal cost is ~$0.

Put another way: there are only so many hours in your life when you can listen to stuff. If Spotify has all the best stuff, it might be worth it to pay quite a lot, even if that stuff was cheap to produce.

Good, it was getting awfully corrupt

In fact, unless you think that the company was better before and is worse now, it should be striking how much the narrative has changed without any underlying change.

Yup.

> something noticeably changed. They got combative. They got sloppy.

An interesting take, whatever you think of the underlying merits of the company and the complaints against it.

This part really struck me:

> It feels like finance in 2009.

> One one side, you had smart, ambitious people who ended up there simply because you were told to go. On the other, you had the classic Gordon Gekko-ish types reciting Liar’s Poker anecdotes ad nauseam.

> Enter the crisis and everyone was equally tarred as the bad guys. The former have slowly made their way out (mostly over to tech), while the latter remain[...]

It does feel like the tide of public opinion might be turning from "too uncritical" to "too critical".

At least, as somebody who spends too much time on both Hacker News and Twitter, this seems believable to me.

One of the founders of Substack here.

It's built in house. Thank you for the kind words. I'm not sure I'd call it a clone of HN, but that's definitely one of our influences :)

Oh cool!

I hope it will now work for both Venture Capitalists and Version Control Systems

No that's my fault, and you're quite right. Sorry about that.

Interestingly the grocery store bank thing more or less happened in Ontario and it’s quite good/popular: https://www.pcfinancial.ca/en

Substack (W18) | Full stack engineer | San Francisco | Onsite | https://substack.com

Substack lets writers start their own subscription publication - think paid blog/newsletter - where writers' and readers' incentives are aligned.

Over 50k people pay to subscribe to publications, and top writers are making six figures.

We use Node, Express, and Postgres on top of Heroku. React for frontend. Simple & effective so we can focus on solving problems for users.

We are 4 people. We raised a series A from a16z this summer and are thoughtfully building our early team. Two of our three founders are technical (the other is a writer) and we're looking for folks to work along side us, shipping things that touch thousands of writers and millions of readers.

Come join us! https://careers.substack.com

> People will pay really little for a blog post emailed to them each week

You'd be surprised.

One of the Substack founders here. Thanks! We definitely aim to “build something people want”

My co-founder Hamish wrote this book (before we started our company) and it's just come out.

There are similarities between publishing your first book, and starting your first company. I wonder why more authors aren't founders (or vice versa)

Just to avoid any confusion: we are not affiliated with James Halliday, the developer who uses the Github/Twitter handle substack.

(Though now that I look at it, I definitely respect his work, especially minimist)

I buy that. I think some people will subscribe to an individual journalist that they really like, or covers something especially important to them, but others may need some kind of federation/bundling in the long run.

I'd prefer to see a world where that happens bottom up -- writers choose to band together with other writers they trust. But we'll see :)

I think micropayments don't work.

Even if you make payment as completely frictionless as possible, there is still the mental overhead of deciding to pay. As the dollar amount gets smaller and smaller, the "pain of deciding to pay" becomes a higher fraction of the total pain, and the economics don't make sense. Plus, if you just charge for each click or whatever, you get the bad incentives of clickbait back.

Subscriptions are great because you only have to make one (big) decision. Subscribing to individual writers is great, because the thing you are deciding is do you like/trust/want to keep reading this writer, which is something that people actually do have strong feelings about.

As distribution has become free, the value of content has been driven to zero. But now the value of curation -- of reading somebody you trust -- gets higher. That's what people are willing to pay for.

Thank you for subscribing!

The main protection is that it's really hard to get people to pay you money if you don't have evidence of substance. It's harder to make paybait than clickbait.

That said, it is definitely an issue we will have to navigate carefully.

Bingo.

That said we have (basic) RSS support as well for those that prefer it, and it's on our list of things to improve.

Maybe read the first chapter and then decide? ;)

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/chapters-one-and-two-the-busin...

The idea that getting substantial recurring revenue helps put the author in a position to deliver, and avoid the "popular thing gets canceled" effect.

The relationship is between the reader and the writer, and the writer puts their reputation behind what they're doing. We see our job as to give them options if unexpected issues come up - pausing subscriptions, partial refunds, or whatever is necessary.

Nope, just an awesome writer using our tools.

Chris from Substack here not Matt. The great thing about the Substack model is that it is a big financial opportunity. We help writers get paid, and we take a cut of that so that we're aligned.

What that means is that if we are successful, we get to build a sustainable company that does this important thing.

We are, and it is an interesting problem!

I don't want to get too deep into the details here other than to say at a product level we're focused on being respectful with the access we get to people's inboxes. We hate junk mail as much as everybody else, and being good citizens is necessary (but not sufficient) to deliver lots of email.

Exactly. This is an emergent consequence of 1) prioritizing "engagement" and 2) the mechanics of "retweet with comment"

This can happen on social media even if almost everybody would prefer that it didn't. The way to fix it is to change the rules :)

We're working on this! Right now most people discover through the author's networks, and from people sharing free content.

We made a super basic discovery feature (that's just chronological free posts) here: https://www.substack.com/discover but we need to make that a lot better now that the home page is starting to get appreciable traffic :)

One thing I'd add to this: the algorithm actually selects for stuff you agree with or hate. So sometimes instead of an echo chamber you get a war chamber, which I'm not sure is better.

We think that people should choose what they read. Stepping back and thinking about what you want to subscribe to -- instead of doing one more scroll -- helps.