1) For me, the importance of Substack is the substantial user base, the simple subscription model, and the fact that I 'own' my subscriber list. Since I also have my own domain, I could switch services tomorrow to something like Ghost if I were banned or Substack were outlawed in Germany. The process would be fairly seamless and some readers might not even notice, aside from the formatting changes. As far as I see it, this _is_ the free-speech protection, and it makes Substack fairly unique in the world of social media.
2) As for Substack taking a stand on free speech: The idea here is probably to give writers the freedom to say mostly what they want without drawing too much fire from legacy media, censorship NGOs, and various other internet discourse police. This is a way of taking a stand, albeit a pragmatic one. My own philosophy about censorship and the like, is that it is malicious and deplorable, but that it can also be self-defeating to concentrate too much on these bad actors and their tactics, because that gets in the way of content.
3) By providing a fairly basic blogging platform and letting writers do what they want, there's a lot of flexibility. Your debate platform idea, which I think is great, could be constructed to a large extent from existing features as a its own substack newsletter. It would require more behind-the-scenes curation than if it were a dedicated Substack feature, but I think the upsides of letting writers construct their own kinds of content within the fairly simple and stripped-down blogging platform Substack provides outweigh the downsides here. Again, platform independence is important insurance for writers, especially writers like myself who have made this their full-time occupation.
4) I enthusiastically agree that there's room for more substacks that place user interactions, or interactions among writers, in the foreground. This is obviously dependent on writer personalities. There are some writers people just want to read, and other writers people want to interact with.
5) More on features. Is the editor perfect? Probably not, but it's workable. I personally don't have major complaints here. The same goes for Substack support, at least in my experience. The truth is that Substack, without advertising, has revenues only from subscription fees, and so providing writers elaborate services, like legal teams, is probably beyond what they find financially workable. To be honest, I think this is probably a good thing: Any pressure on Substack to intervene in the content more directly will make Substack more expensive, likely increase subscription fees, and in the end make Substack more like other social media platforms.
Thank you Eugyppius, this is exactly the kind of conversation I was yearning for.
Let me start upside down, with 5)
I agree that the problems with the editor are not significant. They are just minor irritants which means that they should be easy to resolve. But irritants they are and I have the feeling that they are not taken seriously. I write in MS Word, then copy/paste after which I still have to do editing in Substack. These don’t have to be elaborate features, but the removal of at least the irritation would be nice. The important part of the irritation is the feeling that these concerns are not taken seriously. I would love to have some editing features in the comments, for example. Is that an irritant? Not really, but whern I would like to highlight something, it is a reminder.
As for ‘legal’ team, I was just carried away in my attempt to emphasize the importance. What is needed the most is clarity of position. There are only two things protecting free speech on Substack:
1 – its (still) relative obscurity and
2 – the higher-than-average intellectual nature of the conversations. Conversations here are more serious than on Twitter or Facebook – both of which can change
But yet again, all I am asking for is the conversation.
The likelihood of the censors to find Substack is directly proportional with its success. We cannot be complacent about it. Yes, you can move the blog, but relying on that possibility may not be the best approach. At some point you will have to make a stand.
In my view the answer is simple: all responsibility should be on the shoulders of individuals, both as a creator or a reader.
As for the debate platform, I was thinking about that already, especially seeing the success of @books that made us. I could try that, but it would mean MAJOR compromises to my vision of it.
I am not happy with the way this comment looks. It would be great if I could improve it with an editor :)
I joined substack (as a reader, not a writer), so *I* could be the customer not the product of the service, so *I* could be the one to chose who gets the (paltry) revenue I generate. But I'm only slowly finding writers I'm willing to commit the full recommended subscription to.
So I'd like to see Substack offer a monthly subscription *to the platform* that would get me access to the premium content of whichever writers I happen to read during a given week or month. This would be in addition to the the current direct-to-the-writer subscription.
The risk to the writer is a potential loss of royalty (i.e, predictable, long term) income, the benefit is no need to distinguish between free and premium content -- it's all your best, premium effort.
But it might bring in more aggregate income, and might distribute more of it to new or niche authors. It would provide a faster, though maybe noisier signal to the writers of what's appealing to their audience.
Speaking for myself, a year is a long time to commit to a single writer when I only have budget tsubscribe to maybe a dozen at $50 / yr. Caveat -- I'm new to the platform, feel free to inform me if I've got the model all wrong.
So, I have a few responses:
1) For me, the importance of Substack is the substantial user base, the simple subscription model, and the fact that I 'own' my subscriber list. Since I also have my own domain, I could switch services tomorrow to something like Ghost if I were banned or Substack were outlawed in Germany. The process would be fairly seamless and some readers might not even notice, aside from the formatting changes. As far as I see it, this _is_ the free-speech protection, and it makes Substack fairly unique in the world of social media.
2) As for Substack taking a stand on free speech: The idea here is probably to give writers the freedom to say mostly what they want without drawing too much fire from legacy media, censorship NGOs, and various other internet discourse police. This is a way of taking a stand, albeit a pragmatic one. My own philosophy about censorship and the like, is that it is malicious and deplorable, but that it can also be self-defeating to concentrate too much on these bad actors and their tactics, because that gets in the way of content.
3) By providing a fairly basic blogging platform and letting writers do what they want, there's a lot of flexibility. Your debate platform idea, which I think is great, could be constructed to a large extent from existing features as a its own substack newsletter. It would require more behind-the-scenes curation than if it were a dedicated Substack feature, but I think the upsides of letting writers construct their own kinds of content within the fairly simple and stripped-down blogging platform Substack provides outweigh the downsides here. Again, platform independence is important insurance for writers, especially writers like myself who have made this their full-time occupation.
4) I enthusiastically agree that there's room for more substacks that place user interactions, or interactions among writers, in the foreground. This is obviously dependent on writer personalities. There are some writers people just want to read, and other writers people want to interact with.
5) More on features. Is the editor perfect? Probably not, but it's workable. I personally don't have major complaints here. The same goes for Substack support, at least in my experience. The truth is that Substack, without advertising, has revenues only from subscription fees, and so providing writers elaborate services, like legal teams, is probably beyond what they find financially workable. To be honest, I think this is probably a good thing: Any pressure on Substack to intervene in the content more directly will make Substack more expensive, likely increase subscription fees, and in the end make Substack more like other social media platforms.
Thank you Eugyppius, this is exactly the kind of conversation I was yearning for.
Let me start upside down, with 5)
I agree that the problems with the editor are not significant. They are just minor irritants which means that they should be easy to resolve. But irritants they are and I have the feeling that they are not taken seriously. I write in MS Word, then copy/paste after which I still have to do editing in Substack. These don’t have to be elaborate features, but the removal of at least the irritation would be nice. The important part of the irritation is the feeling that these concerns are not taken seriously. I would love to have some editing features in the comments, for example. Is that an irritant? Not really, but whern I would like to highlight something, it is a reminder.
As for ‘legal’ team, I was just carried away in my attempt to emphasize the importance. What is needed the most is clarity of position. There are only two things protecting free speech on Substack:
1 – its (still) relative obscurity and
2 – the higher-than-average intellectual nature of the conversations. Conversations here are more serious than on Twitter or Facebook – both of which can change
But yet again, all I am asking for is the conversation.
The likelihood of the censors to find Substack is directly proportional with its success. We cannot be complacent about it. Yes, you can move the blog, but relying on that possibility may not be the best approach. At some point you will have to make a stand.
In my view the answer is simple: all responsibility should be on the shoulders of individuals, both as a creator or a reader.
As for the debate platform, I was thinking about that already, especially seeing the success of @books that made us. I could try that, but it would mean MAJOR compromises to my vision of it.
I am not happy with the way this comment looks. It would be great if I could improve it with an editor :)
I joined substack (as a reader, not a writer), so *I* could be the customer not the product of the service, so *I* could be the one to chose who gets the (paltry) revenue I generate. But I'm only slowly finding writers I'm willing to commit the full recommended subscription to.
So I'd like to see Substack offer a monthly subscription *to the platform* that would get me access to the premium content of whichever writers I happen to read during a given week or month. This would be in addition to the the current direct-to-the-writer subscription.
The risk to the writer is a potential loss of royalty (i.e, predictable, long term) income, the benefit is no need to distinguish between free and premium content -- it's all your best, premium effort.
But it might bring in more aggregate income, and might distribute more of it to new or niche authors. It would provide a faster, though maybe noisier signal to the writers of what's appealing to their audience.
Speaking for myself, a year is a long time to commit to a single writer when I only have budget tsubscribe to maybe a dozen at $50 / yr. Caveat -- I'm new to the platform, feel free to inform me if I've got the model all wrong.
Thanks Bob, and yes, you got it right.
I am also a reader and I have to make the same decisions you do.
There are some ideas floating around, yours could be one of them.
Creator collectives - there are a few already
Microfinance where you would pay by posts read for let's say a quarter
It could be something like a subset of yours - paying for areas of interest
I think it will evolve, and I would like to see a lot more conversation about it.
Gonna go take a look at that...