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It really is the irony of entire Substack platform: the inspiration of it is Stratechery yet one of Ben Thompson's most consistent themes (aggregation theory) m

by davis 6y ago

It really is the irony of entire Substack platform: the inspiration of it is Stratechery yet one of Ben Thompson's most consistent themes (aggregation theory) makes it clear how precarious of a situation it can be when you rely on another company for your audience reach and when it comes to establishing a brand. Granted, I do think Substack is more of a platform than an aggregator compared to Facebook. But people that want to hop on Substack just need to know that you are (as of now) going to be sharing your brand with Substack and also that you will be at the whim of their feature development and what their roadmap looks like. They raised their Series A a year ago but their progress with site features has been... well, underwhelming.

RNCTX 6y ago
> but their progress with site features has been... well, underwhelming. As is Patreon, as well. Their website is slow and a pain to use. They just stopped publishing direct, hard links to S3 in subscription RSS feeds late last year or early this year (I forget which). They don't support generating per-user or per-timeframe affiliate/coupon URLs, despite suggesting that to their users as a paid content option. Ghost made a big deal in comments on this site awhile back about "how much work" was put into integrating with Patreon in regard to generating password-less links, but really... Patreon generates password-less links already, as do a hundred email marketing apps, not rocket science. It'd take someone about 5 seconds to find a Django tutorial explaining how to generate one-time links on youtube, I would wager. All of these platforms suffer more from their founders trying to be what they're not to some degree, in my opinion. A marketing platform run by people who aren't experienced in marketing isn't going to do well. Why do we expect that a publishing platform run by a journalist or an artist is going to do well?

by davis 6y ago

RNCTX 6y ago

> but their progress with site features has been... well, underwhelming. As is Patreon, as well. Their website is slow and a pain to use. They just stopped publishing direct, hard links to S3 in subscription RSS feeds late last year or early this year (I forget which). They don't support generating per-user or per-timeframe affiliate/coupon URLs, despite suggesting that to their users as a paid content option. Ghost made a big deal in comments on this site awhile back about "how much work" was put into integrating with Patreon in regard to generating password-less links, but really... Patreon generates password-less links already, as do a hundred email marketing apps, not rocket science. It'd take someone about 5 seconds to find a Django tutorial explaining how to generate one-time links on youtube, I would wager. All of these platforms suffer more from their founders trying to be what they're not to some degree, in my opinion. A marketing platform run by people who aren't experienced in marketing isn't going to do well. Why do we expect that a publishing platform run by a journalist or an artist is going to do well?