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votes
Substacks?
Discoverability seems to be an issue, so I figured I'd outsource finding "good" publications to you fine intelligent folks.
- What are you subscribed to?
- Do you have any paid subscriptions?
- Where does Substack fit in your daily life?
Thank you kindly in advance
PS: I have other interests I'd like to see long-form content about, but this post isn't limited to these. But if you provide publications about them, I'll love you more than the other commentors:
- reverse engineering/binary analysis
- smoking meats
- moral philosophy
- philosophy of religion
- critical theory
I signed up to a ton of Substacks and haven’t read a single one of their emails nor the substack digest. Instead I have a few teach mailing lists I discovered that really hit the spot. I don’t see how Substack sustains itself. It has 0 marketing appeal and discoverability is terrible. I was going to start a blog on Substack but their mobile app doesn’t allow making posts, only consuming content…what’s the point of consuming content for creators? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Substack so far hasn't really tried to cash in on network effects or anything. So far, it's more like Shopify - authors host their content on the site, and they skim off of the payments.
In terms of how they sustain themselves, as far as I can tell they have a pretty lean engineering team and I can't imagine their hosting costs are very high considering they mostly serve text of all things. They use to have sweetheart deals with authors early on, but I don't think they do anymore, so it's not hard to see how they're net positive.
Superficially Substack looks a lot like Medium but the two sites couldn't be more different. I blame Medium for the decline of blogging as it has attracted "low effort" people who don't want to do the hard work of: (1) writing, (2) technically administers a blog, (3) marketing a blog. In principle Medium takes away (2) and (3) but the people who are attracted to that often don't have the work ethic for (1) so when ChatGPT can write your blog for you they are going to dry up and blow away.
(There was the guy who told me I should write on Medium who was so impressed that his post got 70 views; I had to break it to him that when I was blogging seriously I'd be really impressed if a post got 70,000 views.)
Substack on the other hand attracts professional writers who do have a work ethic, even if they sometimes are a bit bent. As opposed to algorithmic 'discovery' that can often be vapid and toxic, Substack writers depend on the strength of their brand. It's a problem for substack because they get much of their revenue from two handfuls of authors who could all afford to pay somebody to hook up an email newsletter script to a payment gateway and keep more money for themselves.
SubStack has been a blessing in the era of Chat GPT with your smooshed Medium into absolute uselessness. It's just discoverability is trickier I find
I really enjoy:
Sometimes these are worthwhile:
Shameful plug for myself (but I don't post regularly. I have something that I'm editing and I'll release in a week or maybe next month):
Two I follow are
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
and
https://tonyortega.substack.com/
Things are tight financially right now, so I've dialed back most of my subscriptions, but I've supported all of these financially when I was able to.
Pandemic / public health:
Politics / history
Side note to pick up on the thread with @casiomega, @stu2b50, and @UP8 about substack as a platform -- Forever Wars was on Substack when I found it. Apparently they had a deal with substack to produce 100 posts. But when they left substack for ghost.io, all did not go well. That post also gives some insight into the behind-the-scenes at substack.
Patrick Klepek's Crossplay is great - video game stuff from the perspective of engaging with kids, navigating the health and content issues as a parent, and interviews with companies making kids' content.
I need something to do on my phone while waiting in line besides crawling back to Reddit or scrolling the dead husk of Twitter. I like long-form content already (e.g., podcasts, video essays) so Substack was a straightforward option.
I have tried a handful but the only one I am still subscribing to is https://subspacechatter.substack.com for Star Trek stuff.
There's a list of my recommended Substacks in the sidebar of my blog and I've shared links to them on Tildes quite a bit.
(I use RSS whenever possible, so I technically don't subscribe to most substacks I read.)
As to how it fits into my daily life, when I think of something I want to write about, I will often start a draft on Substack, but I rarely finish them. I think one thing that's holding me back is that I think they look kind of dumb without a picture, and generating an image I like takes time.