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I love Substack. But apart from to mess with Twitter I really don’t understand the point of this. https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-14461
by ghiculescu 4y ago
I love Substack. But apart from to mess with Twitter I really don’t understand the point of this.
https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-14461479 https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-1446... I’d a good summary. I don’t want to subscribe to hundreds of newsletters to see tweet (sorry, notes). But if you change that setup, it really is a Twitter clone with no upside to writers.
- ALittleLight 4y agoI kind of see this as the whole "Substack is trying to become Twitter before Twitter becomes Substack" kind of race. Twitter added long tweets and subscriptions, if you could do markdown formatting and inline images in your long tweets - why would Substack authors stay on Substack when they could post basically the same thing to Twitter and have more audience (or potential audience) exposure. If Substack sees the above as an existential risk - which it might be if Twitter executes well, then Substack is replying by trying to do the reverse to Twitter.
- soneca 4y ago> ”why would Substack authors stay on Substack when they could post basically the same thing to Twitter and have more audience (or potential audience) exposure.” Because they wouldn’t have the followers’ email addresses, which is a big advantage to Substack.
- rcarr 4y agoThey really needed this to exist about 6 months ago or whenever it was that Musk bought Twitter. There was a mass exodus then to Mastodon, and if they’d have brought this out then I reckon they would have done a good job of immediately dethroning Twitter as I reckon lots of journalists and writers would have jumped on board. Now they’re going to have to do it the long hard way and try and build the audience organically. I reckon they might be able to do it, but it’ll take them at least a few years because they missed the golden goose.
- linuxftw 4y agoThere was no mass exodus. The sports and celebrity people are still on twitter. Nobody cares about rando journalists and techies, who are a vanishingly small part of the platform.
- observd 4y agoOn the other hand, it shows they still have some level of influence that people think there was as mass exodus.
- rcarr 4y agoHard disagree with this. The majority don’t care about twitter, the only people who absolutely adore it are journalists and techies which is why it was such a big deal in the news and on forums and everyone in the real world just went about their business. The celebrities are only there for marketing and connecting with the journalists.
- linuxftw 4y agoWhich Mastodon does LeBron James use again?
- brewdad 4y agoI wouldn't know. I haven't watched an NBA game in over a decade.
- LightBug1 4y ago>>×The majority don’t care about twitter Exactly. Exactly. Good luck to Substack, though. I'm rooting for them in this scenario.
- LightBug1 4y agoActually, I'll take that back... https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR35o66A/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR35o66A/
- soneca 4y agoAs a reader, I like it. It might nudge me to subscribe to a few more newsletters even if I don’t plan to read all emails, just to see Notes from that author. Sure, I won’t subscribe to hundreds of newsletters, but a few dozen might create a good feed.
- m_ke 4y agoThey raised a ton of money on a high valuation, spent 25mil to make 1 mil last year and are now scrambling to raise a new crowd sourced round because they don't want to get wiped out in a down round. This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an advertising based business model and I'm guessing they think they have "influencers" on their platform to bring in a decent audience.
- v0idzer0 4y agoIt still blows my mind they can’t run this tiny operation profitably taking 10% of many multimillion dollar writers’ revenue. Is it a requirement that YC companies raise way too much money and then proceed to torch it any way possible?
- laratiede 4y ago[dead]
- te_chris 4y agoZIRP picking off its victims one by one
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blitzar 4y agoYou are not a victim in any real sense if they cut you a fat cheque first then take away the toys.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoOnly victims are the pension funds and sovereign funds and HNIs who fund VCs. Everyone else made money. Founders made money at every raise, employees made money with fat salaries, users “made” money with fat discounts.
- msabalau 4y agoBeing a place for people to land as they leave Twitter seems a reasonable thing to pursue. One can post a note without having a newletter, and you can "see notes" from a user without subscribing.
- AlbertCory 4y agoElon showing the number of impressions a tweet or reply actually got was an eye-opener for me. Probably about 1-2% of "Followers" -- not just mine but most people's. Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers.
- galdor 4y agoI’m curious, what works better than Twitter for this kind of use case? Mastodon is better than Twitter for me, but it still is very slow.
- AlbertCory 4y agoI'm not on Mastodon. So that works? Actually, this site is usually the best, and Facebook (the latter might reflect my audience). Reddit subs tend to censor any attempt at self-promotion, which you can't blame them for, I guess. And StackExchange is the absolute worst. The level of asshole-ness there has to be seen to be believed.
- bee_rider 4y agoIs it really asshole-ness? YC/Reddit/SE being good/bad/worse for self-promotion seems to be 100% in line with the intended use of these sites.
- AlbertCory 4y agoI'm hardly the first person to single out SE / SO for trashing.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoSame. Most of my readers come from HN, reddit or substack itself. Now it's mostly Python so it makes sense a tech oriented medias will be reading more about it. Still, the ban on substack by twitter means that, while a #python tweet gets some view, the same with an article to substack tanks bit time.
- BaculumMeumEst 4y agoThe point for me is that, at this moment, it has people that interest me without rage-baiting emotionally manipulative engagement farming bullshit. That's all I want out of these platforms. I don't care about decentralization or who owns it. I just want to read interesting stuff and not get pissed off in the process.
- LordDragonfang 4y ago>I don’t want to subscribe to hundreds of newsletters to see tweet (sorry, notes). There's an option to just subscribe to notes and not newsletters on desktop, apparently, under the three-dots menu: https://substack.com/profile/34072171-katie-substack/note/c-14461853 https://substack.com/profile/34072171-katie-substack/note/c-... That UX is awful, but I'm sure they'll work it out in the coming weeks.
- bmarquez 4y agoI don't like it either. I use Substack (and previously Medium) when I want to read long-form content instead of tweets. If I wanted tweets, I'd use Twitter. But Substack Notes allows for greater potential monetization (ick): TikTok style content, algorithmic recommendations, and ads. Especially ads.
- kritiko 4y agoThe upside to writers would be traffic to their articles. Once you get to the article, you can have the usual subscribe overlay. I think it does add some confusion to the product if notes become more popular than articles / comment sections on articles.
- jononomo 4y agoWhat if Substack just eats Twitter's lunch? Would you see the point then?
- ghiculescu 4y agoSure. But it won’t happen.
- rodgerd 4y agoIf you follow any artists or writers or similar on Twitter you'll note that the biggest reason most of them cite for being there is because they have a conversational community that feeds into support for their art. Substack has a perfectly good mechanism for publishing (paid and unpaid) to support people, but that conversation is missing. It's a pretty obvious move if you are engaged with the overlapping users of Twitter and Substack, and has potential to peel a lot of people out of Twitter if they're primarily there to follow their favorite authors, showrunners, etc.
- notatoad 4y ago>I really don’t understand the point of this. it certainly seemed to me like there was a good portion of twitter that was just people promoting their substack newsletters, and most of the people they interact with are doing the same. it makes perfect sense for substack to try to bring that under their roof.
- Nezteb 4y agoI wondered the same. This support page kind of answers the question: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/14743651942036-What-does-subscribe-on-Substack-Notes-mean- https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/1474365194203... The phrasing is weird though: “You’ll then start seeing more of their notes in the Home tab.” More? Not all? Odd.
- shanebellone 4y ago"a Twitter clone with no upside to writers" Notes linking to Substack Newsletters should convert better. Notes are networked "post summaries" that represent an improvement over the traditional blog homepage format. I see a play that could improve what they're cloning while also benefiting their core offering. It has potential but the likeness of the clone is a bit off-putting for me.
- sf_rob 4y agoYour post clarified my thinking on this. If I think of Notes as a Twitter clone then I'm upset because, like the parent poster, I want a much narrower subscription-base for long form content than I do short form content. However, if I think of this as merely a short form update from accounts I follow then it's fine. That said, Substack showing writers adjacent to your subscriptions in Notes makes if feel more Twitter-like in a way that I'm not sure I like.
- shanebellone 4y ago"However, if I think of this as merely a short form update from accounts I follow then it's fine." Substack will need to decide if they view Notes as a search engine with an RSS feed or a standalone social network. Edit: I don't think their positioning is obvious yet.