Hm, Substack seems to be monetized differently though. Medium was very much in the freemium camp: you go there to read articles, but if you read too many, you

Hm, Substack seems to be monetized differently though. Medium was very much in the freemium camp: you go there to read articles, but if you read too many, you get stuck by the paywall. So on the user side there was this constant friction that was obnoxious. But on the author side, the incentive was to make your content as broad as possible because (if I understand correctly) everything got paid by the view out of one big bucket, a la Spotify. This is horrible for premium content (which almost by definition has a more niche audience) so not much of a surprise that type of content suffers in this model. Substack seems to be more like Shopify: individual authors pick whether to monize, and if so how. This makes it much more viable to make true premium content, in the sense of "a thousand fans". I think this enables is creators who are very good at what they do, because their compensation is directly related to (number of readers times price each reader is willing to pay). In Medium that second term was basically fixed and the only way to increase revenue as an author was to write more click-baity articles. Substack optimizes the other direction. As someone who has interacted with a lot of authors, I think this has a lot of value. On HN it's easy to forget that the vast majority of authors are not technical (and I mean this kindly, but really, really not technical). These are people for whom setting up any sort of a blog at all is challenging. Having a way to directly put up content, and charge for it, and be in control seems like a huge win for authors, and if it's a win for authors I think those authors will bring their audiences along to the platform, and the platform wins.