We have this debate any time there's a new gravy train for online writing, and it's getting exasperating. Every new platform will reward a set of star writers in a POWER CLAW distribution, the early will cash in, and discovery is the unsolvable problem.https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1373392942170132480 …
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Now Substack (or whatever follows it) is going to laboriously reinvent editors, magazines, copyeditors and the newsstand, in the same way Uber eventually first-principled its way to inventing the bus. But the genuine revolution of this era is You! Can! Publish! Anything! Online!
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What rankles me in the Great Wheel of Online Publishing is not that we repeat the same debates about it each time, but that when these bloated platforms inevitably disappear they take entire communities and comment histories with them. And those have more value than the writing
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old man yells at the cloud
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Also why are the fonts so small??
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The problem isn't that only some people are making a living, it's that some people are being paid directly by Substack while others are getting paid by subscribers, that the distinction isn't being made clear, and that those Substack are paying tend to be alt-right types.
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I've not seen anyone with a problem that some writers on the site have tens of thousands of subscribers while others only have a handful. I *have* seen people with a problem that they're paying transphobes quarter-million-dollar "advances".
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It seems like the real problem is of gatekeeping. The gatekeepers used to be publishers but today’s gatekeeper is the attention span of every person on the internet, and that seems like it’s an even more difficult climb?
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But this is essentially the complaint about substack, that there is in fact a shadowy cabal of publishers who are gatekeeping at substack, and it's not the same shitty democracy that the NYT has worked out how to compete successfully with.
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Folks these days never think to start a bookmarking website to fund their blog posts!
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