Discussion
Thinking on how the pattern that Substack represents keeps happening and Substack is just the latest prominent version of it.
People want to have the possibility of publishing extended and/or rich media stuff in the context of something that feels like *their* website.
But they also want their website not to be an island. They want it to be embedded in a community. And they definitely want the **absolute minimum of technical overheads**.
But the dilemma is…
@urlyman is small, it's too unknown, so you get rarely new readers from there. Therefore people remain on Substack, only therefore. All these systems are only free as long as you don't earn, just blog a bit. But they take something like 10% plus fees from every income you earn. Just count the big writers with thousands of paying members: Substack earns like crazy! The more members, the more they earn. They can afford the free bloggers easily.
@NatureMC I meant “their website” only loosely. I was condensing a variety of motivations into a single post.
As for Substack’s revenue, its $45 mn earnings in no way justify their $1.1 bn valuation. It’s a bubble
@urlyman I know. I just wanted to add another side, to show why many of their writers don't want to change: we still have not enough alternatives or they are unknown because people only promote Ghost.
…The dev people with the biggest money runway to throw at lowering the technical gradient to the point where it feels easy and is ‘free’ are generally shitbags.
The dev people with far less money who just want to build a good product need to charge for it.
And so end users gravitate to the convenience of the shitbaggery
For me, the biggest tell re Ghost is that its recent
🔔big noise about Activity Pub🚨
is counterpointed by it *not being here*
…Ghost is on Threads, which is not the same thing at all.
And they haven’t published about their LLM-image-infused Activity Pub mission in almost a year
…And then somewhere in the middle is Ghost, which dangles a free tier but seems to me to have other frailties, like a banal enthusiasm for AI, and a heavy whiff of bullshit
…What I think is coming down the line, though, is that the cost of hosting is going to skyrocket.
Supply chains for compute will falter due to Gulf War fallout and struggle to get back to where they have been. They may never get back.
So the cost of compute at massive scale will change radically.
And that will fracture the economics of platform enterprise
@urlyman interesting thoughts and insights. Will be intrigued to see what happens in the coming months. Regarding the tendency you observed (big money vs. good people with less money and 'technical gradients') is definitely a thing - I wrote this about it a while back: https://davelane.nz/why-mainstream-social-media-so-damn-user-friendly
…The good news is that that same dynamic will undermine #LLMadness.
The bad news is that governments really like the ability to surveil and wage war. And so may continue to central-bank-roll the stupidest modes of compute at the expense of pro-social ones
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@urlyman I don't think that people choose Substack for the feeling of "being their website", the known writers have their website.
What professional writers need is a newsletter system for earning money to live. With simple paying systems and a big community that brings new readers.
I e.g. use the European Steady https://steady.page Great, because they work with EU regulations, and give me automatically invoiced for the tax declarations. This is the service, writers want. But the community