Conversation

Replying to
I've been on WPEngine a long time, happily paying premium to not have to think about the headaches of self-admin'ed WP. But hosted WP is not a platform and can never be. The tech is fundamentally a digital mansion. At most you can create a feudal landscape of mansions. Not a city
1
6
Ok, read it. Kinda meh. The writer kinda doesn't get it I think. The choice to center the kind of writer who is hoping to go to a secure paid gig at the same level of effort, lower risk, and more pay, is not really the interesting kind of writer for the future.
1
10
Like many rearview mirror analysis, the writer is looking at this through the lens of old media and the unexamined assumption that the same people must succeed on the new medium, for the same kinds of value/recognition. Begging the question basically.
1
7
If you assume the status hierarchies of the old world must self-evidently be sustained in the new world, of course you'll reach the conclusion that that is what will happen. The problem is there may soon be no "traditional" world for people "passing through" substack to aspire to
1
5
If you've been substacking with the hope of getting a NYT op-ed gig... you are kinda missing the whole point. The point is that utopian destination is increasingly not a tenable one at all and its own top people are abandoning ship. So this sort of thing is "it."
1
14
My unsolicited top-3 advice items: 1. Stay the course focusing on writers over readers 2. Avoid cross-promotion 3. Build more individual writer branding tools and push tech into the background. Avoid temptation of making the platform the brand.
2
18
Basically the product would benefit from being more product-driven. True north is not NYT but WordPress. Deeper, more feature-ful product, more customizable for all. Definitely do NOT create 2 classes of writers (rating system is fine, different feature sets starts to get dicey)
2
9
tldr of strategy recommendation for substack: commoditize your complement, ie writers to the tune of 90% but not 100%. Putting all writer brands on an equal level playing field instead of creating *feature* tiers for bluechecks is the key to being a good platform.
Replying to
There is no royal road to geometry There is no special iPhone for special people, everybody gets the same price points. No special substack for special writers. But fee tiers for ++ services are okay. Like the extra fee for own domain mapping.
1
5
This is possibly a problem for history-completist readers, but is frankly not a big deal for me. I'd be fine with most of my content just vanishing into random blackholes so long as I've gotten what I want out of creating it.
Quote Tweet
We just need to go back to blogs. This cycle keeps happening, and all of this content is going to end up in abandoned silos. twitter.com/vgr/status/132…
1
8