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What an ironic post given that the author's domain is "Empathy Novel". Or was that intentional? Here are some ways this author is misguided: - "Appeal to emot

What an ironic post given that the author's domain is "Empathy Novel". Or was that intentional? Here are some ways this author is misguided: - "Appeal to emotion is bad": No, it's a totally valid business strategy. Literally all good marketing (Apple billboards, etc) is appeal to emotion. Sure, maybe you're "above" that, but many people aren't. Lots of people want to feel like they're a part of something instead of just being an emotionless business robot. - "Substack relies entirely on external traffic": If I remember correctly, Substack has said that traffic from Twitter is ~2% of their inbound traffic. I could be wrong though. Also, so what? - "pay hundreds of dollars per year to read their goddamn blogs" - Substack is literally mostly free. What is this guy on about? Honestly it seems like a guy who didn't see any personal success on Substack maybe because his writing (and logic) aren't superb, then received a poorly-timed email from Substack and decided to vent about it.

ldehaan 3y ago
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giftedhorse 3y ago
I looked at this author's other posts, and I sort of understand why he's so angry. He complains again in April about lack of discovery on Substack (aka 'nobody's reading my stuff'). But are the posts worth recommending? His posts are all snippets of some sort of book (or play?) that he's writing. Example - his latest post is titled "Empathy No. 123 01/11/03, Roderick bedrm. 2:00 PM (approx)". It's a few sentences of dialog that have zero context. Even if these posts were recommended, what would you guess the clickthrough rate for a title like that is? I'd say that Substack's recommendation algorithm is doing just fine not recommending these posts. Sure, Substack could probably do better at discovery. But there are other possible explanations for "nobody's reading my writing" than simply "Substack sucks".
RheingoldRiver 3y ago
> If I remember correctly, Substack has said that traffic from Twitter is ~2% of their inbound traffic. FWIW this is unlikely to have any correlation to their total inbound traffic, but moreso to demonstrate that Twitter itself is notoriously bad at generating any outbound traffic (from Twitter to anything) itself. I was actually surprised that the author mentioned Twitter in their list of referrals period for this reason. It was known by advertisers for ages that Twitter was a poor source of click-throughs but when Twitter started showing view metrics on tweets, everyone started realizing the click-through rates on links were abysmal compared to other social media sites. It's like Tiktok, you're consuming short bytes of content, you stay there to continue consuming short bytes of content. You don't leave to go read a long [whatever].
JPKab 3y ago
On point. It amazes me how much energy some people waste by packaging their personal grievances as "influential" blog posts.

ldehaan 3y ago

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giftedhorse 3y ago

I looked at this author's other posts, and I sort of understand why he's so angry. He complains again in April about lack of discovery on Substack (aka 'nobody's reading my stuff'). But are the posts worth recommending? His posts are all snippets of some sort of book (or play?) that he's writing. Example - his latest post is titled "Empathy No. 123 01/11/03, Roderick bedrm. 2:00 PM (approx)". It's a few sentences of dialog that have zero context. Even if these posts were recommended, what would you guess the clickthrough rate for a title like that is? I'd say that Substack's recommendation algorithm is doing just fine not recommending these posts. Sure, Substack could probably do better at discovery. But there are other possible explanations for "nobody's reading my writing" than simply "Substack sucks".

RheingoldRiver 3y ago

> If I remember correctly, Substack has said that traffic from Twitter is ~2% of their inbound traffic. FWIW this is unlikely to have any correlation to their total inbound traffic, but moreso to demonstrate that Twitter itself is notoriously bad at generating any outbound traffic (from Twitter to anything) itself. I was actually surprised that the author mentioned Twitter in their list of referrals period for this reason. It was known by advertisers for ages that Twitter was a poor source of click-throughs but when Twitter started showing view metrics on tweets, everyone started realizing the click-through rates on links were abysmal compared to other social media sites. It's like Tiktok, you're consuming short bytes of content, you stay there to continue consuming short bytes of content. You don't leave to go read a long [whatever].

JPKab 3y ago

On point. It amazes me how much energy some people waste by packaging their personal grievances as "influential" blog posts.