I thought article is well written and explains interesting mechanics that professional authors face. The core insight is that all you need is a tribe of few hun

I thought article is well written and explains interesting mechanics that professional authors face. The core insight is that all you need is a tribe of few hundred people paying $10/mo if you want to make living out of your writings. However constructing such a tribe requires producing serious long-form high-value content as opposed to something that people will be amused by a short piece and immediately move on to next random amusing short piece. Counterintuitively, the goal isn’t to reach largest possible audience but the most serious audience which might be pretty small. You want your content to be valuable enough that people would be willing pay by their cold hard cash as opposed to pay by their attention. In this model knowing and connecting with your tribe members deeply is also important. The author argues that Medium attempts to imitate all-you-can-eat model of Spotify and Netflix but for written text. This model depends on grabbing attention as much as possible by random stream of articles each providing small dopamine hit instead of providing long term value to determined readers who are willing to put in work to digest complex long-form content. Currently they also don’t allow you to connect back to your followers. This means it’s hard to build tribe of serious audience, forced to write simple attention grabbing short pieces and depend on vitality lottery/luck factor to get paid.