Paused my newsletter again. Third time in 18 months. I'm kinda naturally an intermittent writer. I wonder how many people use substack's "pause billing" feature the way I do. Feels like I'm the only one who does this and everyone else just keeps grinding relentlessly.
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This is still too clumsy for me. I think my ideal subscription model would be a push-pull smart contract, where each time I send an email, I pull a bit of $ from contracts with subscribers, and if I don't send anything I don't get anything. And subscribers can pause/reverse too.
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This is an ideal smart contract application. You can even dynamically price things so that you get fixed USD denominated payments, and you don't even need a stablecoin to do it. Just current price.
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Basically a stable-priced subscription NFT essay thing on an unclocked pubsub protocol. Yo do this.
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In fact the smartest way to do this might be to have a general faucet product that subscribers can set up, and then any publisher can be sort of hook up to that faucet for a push-pull relationship that either can terminate anytime. You don't need an intermediary at all.
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What's more, without the intermediary, and an NFT based model, there is no such thing as shutting down a newsletter and it going offline. Whoever subscribed to a thing will have permanent access to it via a token-locked IPFS artifact.
Basically: publish encrypted on IPFS, airdrop an NFT key to everybody with an active sub. You could even create a "reader wallet" that just holds NFTs for all paid-for subs.
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Much as supporters might like to reliably support, as a producer, you actually want control over that and not take $ if you have a pay-for-content posture rather than a take-patronage posture. It can feel like debt you need to pay off.
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Replying to @vgr and @viamirror
Paetron has a “amount per x” option. YouTube creators do it per video. I find that annoying because I want to support the creator. Quality output is more important than output quantity at those scales.
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(In general, I'm not a fan of things that look like patronage rather than value exchange... which is one reason I don't like Patreon).
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