I wish substack will just hurry up and make its medium.com or quora turn so everyone will agree to ignore it and it doesn't blogspam up every social media.
"Why I don't actually like greenfield projects."
"What I learned when I stopped writing clickbait."
"When it's actually a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket."
"When is it the time to make a mountain out of a molehill?"
"What I learned on my journey to stop turning the other cheek."
I might even say Target, as Substack isn't so bad at this point as to compare it to Walmart's lower-mid quality tier.
If you actually democratize writing/publishing/blogging (as their product tries to; as many others have tried to), you're not going to end up with a higher quality outcome than Substack. It's practically impossible. That's what we have the NY Times, Washington Post, Wired, The Economist, et al. for.
You can post anything there. You personally just keep happening to see a particular brand of content linked off substack because that’s your bubble. Afterall, often do you make an actual effort to find content on substack / medium that doesn’t fit that category?
I only started noticing substack URLs very recently. I haven’t even taken the time to figure out what substack is. I can’t figure out if I am late or if you are early in saying it has already jumped the shark.
I think what ftxbro is saying is that Medium and Quora have both worthless content and a horrible user experience, and people ignore them because of the horrible user experience, so their worthless content does not get shared, whereas Substack has worthless content but a pleasant user experience, so its worthless content does get shared, and he hopes that its user experience degrades, so this stops.
EDIT: Which is surprising; surely a fellow traveller of the EA/LW crowd would understanding optimising for the maximal update to your prior?
If you have to ask if you should use Twitter post-acquisition when any audience you gather may not be there in x time as Musk makes questionable decision after questionable decision, the answer is "no". I feel like a hostage to the platform in many ways as that's where my biggest social audience is—not that I particularly use it anyway these days.
No, I've been on Twitter since the '00s, and have posted over 100k+ tweets. It's not like you go on there and suddenly become a success. It's all dependent on buying ads these days.
A good chunk of my audience has left already, plenty planning to etc. And just because there's a few tens of thousands of followers doesn't meant it gets reach or engagement like it used to. Seen that for most people.
Who says it's a flex? You're projecting a lot here.
The whole point is illustrating that an audience doesn't come out of nowhere and the company is now under new management. History will not repeat itself, the world has changed, what value I perceived in Twitter has now gone because my audience there is in decline post-acquisition.
My investment of time is now worthless other than what I took away from the platform in the long-term in terms of biz and friends.
Back in the day, we used to use TweetDeck columns like IRC channels in terms of hashtags, and new tweets on x from y would appear in the relevant column. If you don't know what is, imagine a group chat, but people come and go. Of an evening, I could probably rattle off a couple hundred tweets discussing and debating. Keep in mind the original character count, and a simple response could be a dozen tweets.
It's well within reasonable limits; assuming most of your karma comes from posts you've posted about 8 times a day on HN. Sounds about right for a social media platform.
1. Nobody really uses those dinosaurs for modern tech writing.
2. Neither platform is VC funded with the expectation of hyper growth (which will eventually result in paywalls). One of them is owned by Google (and is more likely to get cancelled outright), and the other has grown naturally and organically over two decades.
I think these are promoted on HN (Substack is an YC startup). More than once there's been a substack link, older, with less comments and less upvotes but placed higher on the main page than newer posts with active discussions and more internet points.
I mean, this post in particular was chosen manually by hacker news moderators or reviewers to be moved to the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
