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Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb | The platform seeded its own content-moderation crisis
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Everyone is going to be so pumped when they learn about websites. The media has reported on substack this way since they began and it's so fucking stupid. It's a website with an email list as a service. Substack is nothing.
I'd say the difference is convenience, brand recognition, and social media features.
You only need to sign up to Substack and you can already start publishing, so the vast majority of people who just want to write and not have to bother with building their own website will opt for the simpler option. Even if it takes only a handful more clicks to publish a personal website, the very idea of having to build something will be daunting enough to turn off most people.
Then there's the fact that while many people are willing to sign up to a well-known website like Substack, not that many are willing to enter their email into some random blog. I'm willing to bet that if some famous online personality made their own website+newsletter to publish their writings they'd get a lot of responses along the lines of "Who cares for antiquated personal blogs nowadays? What is this, 2005? Just make a Substack!"
And while the article presents Substack's social media features as a possible negative, the idea that anyone could see your post if it pops up in their frontpage, or that you might be the next lucky writer to get noticed by the algorithm and be recommended to thousands of people, will certainly be tempting to many.
The media loves shit like this because they don’t want media to be a passive choice. They want to feed it to you. They want to push it deep into your brain. They want flyers, they want certified mail, they want propaganda. Because it is profitable.
Websites are easy to leave, ignore, or forget. They’d have to work for your attention.
Email just shows up.
I mean yeah but at the same time, every email list I've ever been on has ended up in the trash bin and eventually unsubbed. I don't know if I ever read a singe letter.
I have read a number, but as you said, eventually they degrade, generally pretty quickly. It just becomes noise too quickly when the pushers saw (already knew) the opportunity to monetize (i.e. plain old marketing BS)
Why can’t we just go back to blogs and RSS? That worked lovely.
That's not a monetizable platform on the scale that a locked in social media platform is. That and the average user doesn't seem to understand what websites are if they aren't individual apps on their phone