'Why We're Freaking Out About Substack' (nytimes.com) 113
The New York Times explores whether Substack is just a company that makes it easy to charge for newsletters — or a new direct-to-consumer media that's part of a larger cultural shift?
This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn't just transforming journalism. It's also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it's marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it's riding the wave, not creating it...
A New York Times opinion writer, Charlie Warzel, is departing to start a publication on Substack called Galaxy Brain... The Times wouldn't comment on his move, but is among the media companies trying to develop its own answer to Substack and recently brought the columnist Paul Krugman's free Substack newsletter to the Times platform... [T]he biggest threat to Substack is unlikely to be the Twitter-centric political battles among some of its writers. The real threat is competing platforms with a different model. The most technically powerful of those is probably Ghost, which allows writers to send and charge for newsletters, with monthly fees starting at $9. While Substack is backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ghost has Wikipedia vibes: It is open-source software developed by a nonprofit...
And it's easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their email lists and direct connections to their readers with them. Substack's model of taking 10 percent of its writers' subscriptions is "too greedy of a slice to take of anyone's business with very little in return," said Ghost's founder and chief executive, John O'Nolan, a tattooed, nomadic Irishman who is bivouacked in Hollywood, Fla. He said he believed subscription newsletter publishing was "destined to be commoditized."
But Ghost represents an even purer departure from legacy media. More than half of the sites on the platform simply run the software off their own servers. "The technology is designed to be decentralized, and there's no one institution or one corporation that can decide what is OK," he said.
The article also notes that Twitter recently bought the newsletter platform Revue, while Facebook "is developing ambitious plans for a rival that will provide a platform for local journalists, among other writers."
And in a section on indie spirit, it adds as an aside that Bustle Digital Group "confirmed to me that it's reviving the legendary blog Gawker under a former Gawker writer, Leah Finnegan."
A New York Times opinion writer, Charlie Warzel, is departing to start a publication on Substack called Galaxy Brain... The Times wouldn't comment on his move, but is among the media companies trying to develop its own answer to Substack and recently brought the columnist Paul Krugman's free Substack newsletter to the Times platform... [T]he biggest threat to Substack is unlikely to be the Twitter-centric political battles among some of its writers. The real threat is competing platforms with a different model. The most technically powerful of those is probably Ghost, which allows writers to send and charge for newsletters, with monthly fees starting at $9. While Substack is backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ghost has Wikipedia vibes: It is open-source software developed by a nonprofit...
And it's easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their email lists and direct connections to their readers with them. Substack's model of taking 10 percent of its writers' subscriptions is "too greedy of a slice to take of anyone's business with very little in return," said Ghost's founder and chief executive, John O'Nolan, a tattooed, nomadic Irishman who is bivouacked in Hollywood, Fla. He said he believed subscription newsletter publishing was "destined to be commoditized."
But Ghost represents an even purer departure from legacy media. More than half of the sites on the platform simply run the software off their own servers. "The technology is designed to be decentralized, and there's no one institution or one corporation that can decide what is OK," he said.
The article also notes that Twitter recently bought the newsletter platform Revue, while Facebook "is developing ambitious plans for a rival that will provide a platform for local journalists, among other writers."
And in a section on indie spirit, it adds as an aside that Bustle Digital Group "confirmed to me that it's reviving the legendary blog Gawker under a former Gawker writer, Leah Finnegan."
Old ideas meets new. (Score:5, Insightful)
E-mail newsletters. What was old is new again.
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E-mail newsletters. What was old is new again.
“Sooner or later, everything old is new again.”
History does in fact repeat itself. After all, it's the history of the same band of hairless apes.
Microhype (Score:1)
Just rename it to "micromessages" and it's hip again like "web services" to "microservices".
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I spent a lot of time trying to understand microservices. The "understanding" finally came when I realized that a microservice is just a service. Often they are not even micro.
The biggest problems you run into with microservices are the biggest problems that you run into with regular services: how to handle timeouts, how to handle double-requests, how to handle services that are down or queues that are filling up. The biggest problems are just networking problems, and async problems, and the solutions haven
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Ah, just like 'microtransactions'
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> The "understanding" finally came when I realized that a microservice is just a service. Often they are not even micro.
They are "micro" in the sense that they are no longer the megalithic mega java bean stack that became super common during the age of enterprise-dinosaurs.
when it takes 40+ minutes for a companies main web server just to get through the constructor start up, people started to realize maybe having an all encompassing java.
so people started toying around with making things the age old unix
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If you can't write a good monolith in Java, then you're not going to write a good microservice system in Node. The microservice system is harder.
Re: Old ideas meets new. (Score:2)
Re: Old ideas meets new. (Score:1, Interesting)
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It would be really nice if we could actually get some strait factual reporting from somewhere. You can't hardly get it on the left or the right.
I would be really really nice if someone would just provide some dry facts for a change.
"X migrants arrived at the border today. White House Immigration Czar stated that its not a crisis and we have sufficient resources to accommodate everyone. Senator SoAndSo responded the White House is lying and only arrives arrives at their sufficient accommodations by requirin
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(It) would be really really nice if someone would just provide some dry facts for a change.
There's no money to be made doing that. Therefore, it will never happen, I'm sorry to say.
Re: Old ideas meets new. (Score:1)
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It wasn't always about profit. From their inception until being acquired and consolidated by mega-corps the TV networks treated their news divisions as Cost Centers instead of Profit Centers. 'News' losing money wasn't an issue, they saw it as a public service. Once those networks were acquired by publicly-traded companies with shareholders to appease is when things changed. Expensive investigative journalism that took months to develop a story that might not even run once completed was entirely scrappe
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Just reporting what people claim isn't really enough, articles about any contentious issue would end like you said "SoAndSo said the White House lied, but the White House said SoAndSo lied." Journalists used to investigate stuff on their own, and make their own judgment calls about what sounds right or wrong. That's why journalists used to want/need to appear trustworthy.
A real reporter needs to go to the border and see for themselves what's up. If they are just reporting what others claim, then the most au
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>The New York Times...
...and even less significant.Other than publishing legal notices for the local area, the NYT really doesn't matter these days, and that's their own fault.
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And yet, Democrats don't usually agree with much that these center-right publications have to say.
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Right, you're a moron if you think the New York Times belongs to the left. That's why they're not very profitable anymore; when the right moved wayyyy to the right, suddenly their old favorite centrist newspaper looked left wing. To liberals, the New York Times was always the newspaper for "less right wing bankers."
Re: Old ideas meets new. (Score:2)
There's a moron born every day.
Actually, lots of 'em.
We make sure of that, /every day/. -- The industry.
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It won't work for the same reasons email newsletters died.
Half the time they get sent to the spam folder*. There is no interactivity, and people like being able to comment and discuss.
* Anyone else noticed that Gmail thinks Slashdot notification emails are spam now? Not just spam, but that the links within are potentially dangerous.
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That's why I have not yet thrown out my mimeograph machine.
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Long form discussion (Score:3, Insightful)
People are flocking to a new form of communication: the long form discussion.
Probably the most famous of these is Joe Rogan. The format is where he has someone with interesting opinions or experience, and talks to them for 2 hours or more. Different podcasts have different lengths, and I've seen some that go for 3 hours. Lots of other people are jumping on the bandwagon, starting their own podcasts.
Scott Adams observes that one thing you will find is people telling the truth with integrity. They may be wrong, and you may not agree with their views, but what they're saying is what they actually believe, and it's quite refreshing.
Jordan Peterson points out that, for a CNN half hour discussion among 5 people, everyone tries to get their point across in 5 minutes and it's usually incomprehensible chaos.
In contrast, Joe Rogan has listed his interviewees by type [jrelibrary.com], and it's pretty good. If you're into science, go listen to some of the scientists talking about what they're working on. If you're into bodybuilding, martial arts, or writing... there's plenty of categories to choose from. Other people even do news podcasts where the announcer reports what happened, and not what opinion you should have about what happened.
It's killing the mainstream media, even while the mainstream media is actively burning their brand and supplying an awful experience.
Good riddance to that. Long form discussions are the future.
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I was just thinking this morning, given an interview with Boehner who has a new book. He claims that when the rest of the party was being stupid he'd still go along because otherwise he wouldn't be a leader. Ie, when the herd went one direction he'd run to catch up and be in front, which he claimed was necessary as a leader. He said this was from his past in sales/marketing where you need to listen to the customer rather than just talk at them. So, the pack wants to block changing the debt ceiling (dest
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Even if you want the long form, it doesn't mean you want to listen to someone for that long. It's the Youtube effect - a 4 second tip turns into a 30 minute video, because a 4 second tip doesn't pay you money and a 30 minute video, if you have hundreds of them a week, may allow you to quit your day job that you suck at. So why listen to someone for two hours when you can get a well written paper instead that you can read in 10 minutes?
Most podcasts are listened to in the background while multitasking (suc
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No, that's just the people who are in cults. Those who are not in cults tend to tolerate dissenting messenging, even if it's generally less well received than things that confirm their biases.
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It generally needs to be well reasoned dissenting messaging. The problem with most talking heads on the current mainstream media (this includes Fox) is that it doesn't know how to do that consistently anymore. The writers who've moved to Substack do (Taibbi, Greenwald, Tracey, Weiss).
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Indeed. Which is why those who staked their careers on being the five minute screechers, be they on the left or the right are using their preferred vectors of attack against people who actually went into long form dissenting messaging right now.
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Today's Republicans are very strong on their own cancel culture. How much tolerance on the far right is there for gays, atheists, muslims, pre-marital sex, marijuana use, etc? Right now their cancel culture is going overboard on trying to purify their own side - Trump's biggest enemies are his fellow Republicans who don't follow his way of thinking and not Democrats. Trump hates McConnell more than he hates Schumer! Georgia yanked away the Secretary of State's powers because he dared to call the election
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Since when are Ted Talks about learning rather than "this semi-famous person would like to sell you on their latest?"
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I watched TV at my friend's house for the first time in a while. It was depressingly painful. There are so many better ways available to entertain yourself. The only reason people still watch TV is because they haven't been made aware of the better options.
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Breaking News: Joe Rogan passed away peacefully in his sleep this morning.
Re: Long form discussion (Score:2)
No, sorry, but that is like death. /whatsoever/.
It means you got no life
You put your own entire existence on hold.
To passively record someone else's output.
And worst of all, that someone else is blabbering meaningless crap with the usefulness density of the intergalactic medium.
Which is also a complete waste of even his life.
It's a veritable deathception.
Even Slashdot comments are more valuable for your life than that.
Go out and make something!
You don't need to be good. You only need to hold something in yo
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You don't *need* to but you'll get a lot more out of it if you learn how to *do* first. There's a vast difference in result and that feeling of accomplishment between a well made coffee table and a bench made of 2x4s.
Not learning first is how we wound up with post-modernist art.
Re:Long form discussion (Score:5, Insightful)
Good riddance to that. Long form discussions are the future.
Don't be so quick to celebrate. The long form discussions may be good for some topics but absolutely suck for others. If you're after a detailed analysis then go for it. You can still find that in the mainstream media, just not in the snippet of a Facebook advert or the title of a front page article.
But the counter example to that is what is happening in the podcast media or the youtube media where a simple piece of information that could be skim read for relevant information in a minute turns into a 30 fucking minute video of irrelevant bullshit because "the people expect long form discussion".
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Joe Rogan is finally getting good at interviewing, so yeah it's nice. He still doesn't challenge his guests enough, but he is improving. For example his interview with Ben Shapiro last year had a few moments where he deconstructed Shapiro's fast-talking BS and it was hilarious, as well as at least a little bit informative for his audience to hear.
Many have tried to imitate Rogan and most have failed. Long form interviews only work if the interviewer is asking the right questions, otherwise it's just giving
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Joe Rogan is unfortunately a bad example, as he has admitted that Spotify censors what he can do and whom he can have on.
Substack just reflects the fact that people want to get information that is not censored by biased editors who have an agenda.
Unfortunately, the Substack business model is doomed to failure, because they will never get enough revenue to support their contributors in the style to which they have become accustomed. The only way to do that is through advertising, and you may have noticed th
Re: Whatever (Score:2)
Correct.
Call me when they fly to war regions to film at the front, or go undercover in terror groups or evil corporations, and don't give a shit about being sued or threatened with a gun.
Disclaimer: That was my dad's job. Literally. There are still countries where he'd be shot to death right at the border checkpoint, if he ever dared to get in, after revealing what their leaders did.
I'd pay loads for that! Hell, if I see you did that, I'd pay your next project in advance, and you never have to commit the cr
Heavy handed corporations (Score:1)
NYT freaking out because... (Score:5, Insightful)
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In fact it's nothing new. New middleman comes along with lower prices. Either goes bust, or gains a large audience and then gradually takes an increasingly large slice of the pie until the pattern repeats. Just has youtube keeps tightening the screws, and services like Netflix get more expensive. It's a natural cycle and it won't end.
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Then you get some superb offer from nyt. I get promotional 2 EUR/4 weeks for a year and then 8 EUR/4 weeks. Whether the single author offer is worth it depends on your reading patterns, but if you have limited interests in nyt content then it may be better.
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I don't get why it's better.
The quality of journalism is better. NYT is highly politicized, they simply do not report on the news that do not fit their narrative. As such, having competition capitalizing on that blind spot is a good thing as it will put additional pressure on NYT to not blackhole newsworthy events.
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NY Times is $17/month, currently with a promotion for $4/month.
That's probably why somebody would spend $1 for something else, and have saved money.
Never heard of it (Score:2)
Never heard of it
Is there anybody important or interesting on there?
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Depends on who you think is interesting or important. Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, Dan Rather, Scott Alexander, John McWhorter, Freddie deBoer, Bari Weiss, Mona Eltahawy, Will Wilkinson, and more of those sorts.
Re: Never heard of it (Score:2)
they're outside my field of expertise. but good for them for creating something together.
Slashvertisement. (Score:2)
This was the point of TFS. :)
To advertise it to you, so you'd ask that question, and some unknowing puppet can do the viral marketing for them. See above for examples.
It's going to be a hard sell. (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems like it may be a hard sell because newspaper articles aren't just written by a single person. While not redeeming, it may have some success because of biases presented. However, it's a race to the bottom because selling a story is more important than the veracity of the content. This will work against it because there will be a massive credibility issue as blatantly false articles could easily be promoted. People in echo chambers may buy the fake stuff but there is plenty of false info already spread freely.
The bottom line is there is a quality control issue newspapers at least try to address and if this does nothing then all the quality reporting will be drowned out by garbage and fluff.
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The problem is that the MSM is garbage and fluff. Including the NYT.
Re:It's going to be a hard sell. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's hard to find a news source these days that does actual investigative reporting. There aren't many of them anymore.
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It's hard to find a news source these days that does actual investigative reporting.
And if they promote investigative reporting over other things posted then they might have a chance.
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Is there anything like The Guardian in the US? Does investigative journalism that turns up important stuff, is mostly neutral and unbiased, and accepts direct donations rather than having a paywall?
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The NYT and WSJ both do investigative journalism, and so does MotherJones. But these are rare and not enough to investigate everything that comes up.
Whereas 25 years ago, even small town newspapers did investigative journalism.
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Re: It's going to be a hard sell. (Score:2)
Each article is written by a single person though.
And there is no reason to mash them all into a "newspaper".
In a sane world you'd have multiple sites listing authors and topics, and subscribe to their RSS/ATOM feeds through there. And it would be the same as "social media", except P2P.
Oh, and payment would be done through a IPv6 optional header extension where it sends extended ICMP or something to tell you if a packet was refused and requires payment, and the header keeps track of payment tokens. (Obvious
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You're conflating a sane world with a world you want.
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This seems like it may be a hard sell because newspaper articles aren't just written by a single person
Newspapers have a couple of skilled writers and a bunch of people riding their coat tails. How many subscribed to the Miami Herald *just* for Dave Barry articles? Matthew Yglesias is making $250k + 15% for his first year on substack, and anticipates making multiple times that in the future (he accepted the 250k upfront as part of an initial deal but is actually pulling in much more). Just a few thousand subscribers and you're pretty well set.
However, it's a race to the bottom because selling a story is more important than the veracity of the content.
You're thinking of newspapers. They make money off of headlines
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Absence of evidence.
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Re: Great! (Score:2)
Make... make an "AI" do it!
You need to think *batshit*, Marty!
I read it 3 times and I don't get it (Score:2)
Sorry. I usually follow the tech stuff, but I didn't know anyone was "freaking out" and I don't really grok what Substack does.
I guess it's been over a decade since I poured Marc Andreessen a scotch at our startup's release party. I guess this old dinosaur has been out of the loop too long.
Although there is the remote possibility that vapid hype no longer affects me. I may have grown immune over after repeated exposure.
Man in Black: They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.
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Plenty of well known "reporters" and "journalists" are absolutely freaking out over Substack, mostly on Twitter. Glenn Greenwald regularly mocks them mercilessly. The usual tropes are being used to slander it, it's all white-supremacy! and even the more worse fad du jour "anti-trans!" so must be shut down. Seriously.
Re: I read it 3 times and I don't get it (Score:2)
I think we should support trans people and treat them like ... people (dub). It breaks my heart when people with priviledge carry on about a cause that they probably have no stake in and likely won't influence in any positive way. In short, virtue signaling as a status symbol has to stop. But I have no litmus test to offer to filter out the posers from the genuine. So we're probably stuck with this shitty society for the foreseable future.
A some wise dudes once said: Be excellent to each other.
Another wise
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Greenwald's tactic of just openly mocking them and then playing the same "if you attack me then you must be anti-gay and an anti-semite" is the most effective way to deal with. It makes their heads explode and is hilarious to see when they don't realize his sarcasm.
Modern-day "journalists" at the NYT and WAPO are truly the intel agencies useful idiots pushing pure propaganda at this point and they're all too stupid to realize it when it's plain as day to most of the rest of us.
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it's hard to find the dividing line between hyperbolic and serious in your post.
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That is because you're looking for something that doesn't exist.
Conflicted about this a bit (Score:3)
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But on the other hand, I feel like this will lead to readers going deeper into their own echo chambers where they can isolate themselves even more from opposing viewpoints, just reinforcing their own biases.
Can you present a case that this is not already happening with people that only reading NYT?
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I agree with you - The problem I see is why have "both sides"? Whatever happened to The Facts and nothing but The Facts? Opinions are great for discussions, debate and forums. Half truths are bad, but will be formed based on one's opinions as one decides to bend the facts to frame an internalized "truth". News should be about what happened so that those opinions and "truths" can be formed by the reader, not how to spin what happened to make a particular event or view look better or worse. News has been mist
BlockNYT.com (Score:3)
If you're on Twitter go to BlockNYT.com. It'll ask for permissions via the Twitter API, block over 800 NYT-affiliated accounts for you, then immediately direct you to revoke its permissions. A shining star from the security perspective (within Twitter constraints).
If an NYT employee contacts you and you're not a Cathedral operative, it's for a hit piece. They'll be all lovey-dovey to your face and then the knives come out for publication. The Truth will not protect you.
Starve the corporate media Beast. Support Indy Media.
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without censorship (Score:1)
there's no one institution or one corporation that can decide what is OK
that.
Opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
Glenn Greenwald is on Substack. [substack.com] Yes, that Glenn Greenwald who worked with Mr. Snowden and objected vigorously when the Guardian destroyed the Snowden data. He's also the guy that left his own company, the Intercept, because of newsroom censorship in the last election.
Newsrooms are, for better or worse, engines for furthering personal and corporate agendas. Democratization of stories allows writers to escape that, and that is a good thing.
Unfettered conversations (Score:2)
For the end user... (Score:2)
Which of these services has an "unsubscribe" handler that doesn't just pipe to /dev/null?