A positive sign about substack is that I was largely unaware of what seems to have been some big culture war skirmish around it last week... despite writing two newsletters on it. It seems to lack the contagion dynamics of more public media.
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The substack audience does not feel monolithic the way patreon and medium did/do. The platform is the backend, the writer is the middle, the reader is the edge. With other media, platform feels like the middle topologically.
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I would guess the subscription patterns are rather random since they are writer driven rather than platform driven
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It feels like I literally don’t have to care who else is on the platform, kinda like I share roads with people whose politics I can be indifferent to. It’s commodity infrastructure.
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Possibly deplatforming as a tactic does not work on commodity infrastructure. The platform brand has to add distribution amplification for deplatforming to be a credible attack surface
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I suspect this is because the “excess” attention you might get on other platforms is a capturable mechanism. Either regulatory or mob capture.
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Yep. That’s the rubicon.
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Replying to @vgr
True for now, the question is whether Substack starts pushing Discoverability, then Personalized Recommendations, then leader boards...
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I said the same thing in November when the bluecheckification began. You cross-promote you lose immortality. Golden rule of platform culture.
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But the *moment* you decide to exercise the cross-promotion option, you're no longer editorially neutral. You're moving away from variance and towards bias on the bias-tvariance tradeoff curve.
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