Is Substack the Media Future We Want?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/is-substack-the-media-future-we-want

by misiti3780 • 6 years ago

54 66 6 years ago

PaulHoule• 6 years ago

The main trouble I have with Substack right now is that it looks so much like Medium it's hard not believe it is going to turn out the same in the end.

Unlike Medium, however, it's attracted some quality writing. (e.g. Medium seems to attract writers who are (a) blown away by much easier it is to get usage numbers compared to a real blog, and (b) are blown away by getting 70 "views" on an article.)

nicoburns• 6 years ago

Unlike Medium, however, it's attracted some quality writing.

IIRC Medium was like this too in the beginning. There was a time where I wanted to read articles on Medium because they were higher quality than average. I agree that it's hard to see Substack turning out differently. Although if the company isn't acquired / doesn't IPO then it's also true that these things can vary based on who is running the company.

ghaff2• 6 years ago

IIRC Medium was like this too in the beginning.

I think that's right. And one of the things that made Medium attractive to me to cross-post from my own blog to every now and then was that people who mostly didn't know any better saw the overall quality and assumed that there was some filtering going on. Which in turn made it seems more authoritative than a "blog." I stopped bothering once the quality went down and the paywalls went up.

smnrchrds• 6 years ago

I don't remember the beginnings of Medium, but I vividly remember Quora back in the day. It was full of successful CEOs, entrepreneurs, subject matter experts, scientists, etc. It was THE place to ask a question if you wanted high quality responses. Now, it is just a Google spam and growth hacking platform.

AnthonyMouse2• 6 years ago

The "problem" with Medium is that the quality of many of the articles is poor. But so what? That only matters if you're using presence on the site as your mechanism of quality filtering. If the site has mixed quality posts, read the ones from high quality authors.

There could be a market for a service that just does quality filtering as a news aggregation service. So basically the opposite of what YouTube is doing -- don't show anything from OAN or CNN or similar partisan outlets, don't show garbage blogs, show the good ones. Maybe easier said than done, but I bet there's a market there.

wongarsu• 6 years ago

That's basically what sites like Reddit or HN set out to do: aggregate the good articles, using the wisdom of the crowd. Of course that's not that easy, and not necessary what people even want

names_are_hard• 6 years ago

I agree. Another potential solution is a kind of service that will enable users to look for articles that meet some criteria, and the service could prioritize articles of higher quality. Then you wouldn't need to browse Medium, you'd just look for what you want and the service would recommend quality articles.

Of course the question is always how to properly rank an article's quality. I'd say the best approach is to crowdsource it - develop an algorithm that takes into account how many other highly ranked articles reference a given article, and give a higher rank to articles that have more references.

If you do this, make sure to give the algorithm a clever name. Ideally name it after yourself, unless your name is Smith. You'll never do well with a business built around something called SmithRank.

Now if your last name happened to be something related the things you're ranking, like, say..."Article"...wow, call it ArticleRank!

Just remember you heard it first here on HackerNews.

dionidium• 6 years ago

I’m sure I’ve read hundreds of pieces on Medium, but I don’t associate those pieces with anybody or anything and I definitely never gave them any money. On the other hand, I subscribe to multiple substacks and I’ve been really happy with the experience, one that I associate very directly with the specific writers I’m paying to read.

That feels like a big difference.

draw_down• 6 years ago

It’s funny to see the old media panic over Substack. Authors can go directly to their audience without their intermediation and institutional decrepitude, it must be dangerous.

Don’t they have another piece to write about how Trump is a crazy dictator?

black6• 6 years ago

Betteridge's law came to mind when I saw the headline, especially when "We" is taken to mean Conde Nast and the traditional, gatekeeper media.

ketamine__2• 6 years ago

Are people willing to pay for multiple newsletters? I'm paying for one but would find it hard to pay for two or three or five.

misiti37804• 6 years ago

I'm paying for 5. They are worth every penny.

ketamine__2• 6 years ago

For entertainment or are you using them to make money?

roadbeats• 6 years ago

Would you mind sharing the newsletters you pay for ?

tedjdziuba• 6 years ago

It's only a matter of time before Substack gets enough pressure from its employees or its payments provider and starts censoring "inappropriate" content.

(The definition of "inappropriate" being "whatever people on Twitter dislike today".)

vslira• 6 years ago

Considering that Substack's model is designed to attract independent thinkers with a following, I assume they are taking a very close look at their talent pipeline to avoid this issue. That would actually be a competitive advantage for them.

kurthr• 6 years ago

It seems like they let anything on, if it generates income. When you have Dana Loesch, I'm not sure you can be described as attracting independent thinkers, unless that's new code for outrage warrior. Looks to me like another platform (e.g. not Patreon/FansOnly) for influencers to monetize their more affluent (e.g. have $3/mo to spend) clientele.

Substack still likes drama, "In November, an anonymous Substack account published a newsletter titled “vote_pattern_analysis,” with a single, elaborate post claiming election fraud. On Twitter, the link was tagged with a fact-check label. For a time in December, the newsletter became one of the top free publications on Substack.", but I doubt it will descend into reddit territory.

baggy_trough• 6 years ago

I'm not sure, but I'm not liking the media present we have.

bosswipe• 6 years ago

Need to reinforce your bubble.

tootie3• 6 years ago

I think it's not possible to have an opinion on "the media". It's an industry not an entity. The MSM has mostly done an outstanding job, newspapers in particular. There's a lot of terrible media too.

high_derivative• 6 years ago

The MSM has mostly done an outstanding job, newspapers in particular.

I really genuinely cannot tell whether you are being sarcastic.

amadeuspagel• 6 years ago

What a vapid essay. Full of stupid cliches, like "newsletters have existed since time immemorial". Long lists and descriptions not just of substacks, but even of other newsletters. Little to no discussion of why people prefer substacks to traditional media. But perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps the essay is an attempt to illustrate just that, by parodying the intellectual emptyness of traditional media.

Pils4• 6 years ago

intellectual emptyness of traditional media.

What do you mean by this? What does "traditional media" mean in this context? Anything that isn't self-published?

AndrewUnmuted• 6 years ago

I think pretty clearly he's referring to the specific schism of corporate media that The New Yorker occupies.

A specific term coined by Curtis Yarvin, "The Cathedral," comes to mind.

echlebek• 6 years ago

I doubt "We" includes me, from the perspective of the New Yorker.

d33lio• 6 years ago

This is a dying legacy news company trying to shit on what is and will be the future of long form real journalism - plain and simple.

Ironically, platforms like SubStack strike a fantastic balance. They're generally populated by journalists who can actually write or have huge notoriety (Glenn Greenwald and the like) who are writing substantive news and not JS tutorials. I think "freedom of speech" in time will be promulgated as metered and well thought out arguments that don't seek to slander or directly attack any singular person. This is how real adults talk, not how activists talk.

To be fair, Medium is shit. It's already started to become susceptible to similar "creator negatives" that have emerged on YouTube in the last 5 years (Casey Neistat personified this trend). People now just write clickbait / click-driven sharticles that sell ads. Granted, it's still better than what the NYT generally publishes.

Moreover - the boomer concept of physical newspaper delivery is equivalent to how millennials perceive well structured html / css emails that contain "news" or "journalism". It's a place I expect to see longer-ish form content and it's not in an app or platform that wants me to look at ads, boobs or something else they want to glue my eyeballs to.

anshumankmr• 6 years ago

In other words, a dinosaur is worried about an incoming meteor.

pron• 6 years ago

Most meteors miss. A dinosaur looking up at the sky, worried about a meteor and saying, nah, this one's probably harmless was right a hundred thousand times out of a hundred thousand and one. And even the dinosaurs knew they'd become extinct one day, they didn't know how it would happen and when.

jtdev• 6 years ago

LOL, yeah - I want The New Yorker telling me what media future I want. What a joke.

fevangelou• 6 years ago

Ah, the New Yorker. Spot-on commentary on the important things in life.

dang3• 6 years ago

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

golemotron• 6 years ago

Is Substack the Media Future We Want?

If you're the New Yorker, no. Duh.

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

Probably not, substack will be great until it begins censoring content. The end goal is to rediscover self-hosted blogs, but this time with a paid option to view the premium content.

SllX2• 6 years ago

Stratechery then? I would be okay with that.

say_it_as_it_is3• 6 years ago

Substack's success is a reaction to the pervasive authoritarian BLM religious cult [1] wrecking media companies. Heterodoxy cannot exist in many places where it once did. Substack is currently an outlet for free thinking. Yet, its founders haven't been tested by woke cancel culture. What will they stand for when those moments present themselves?

[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619

Pils4• 6 years ago

Guess I never saw it that way, thanks.

Could you go more into the religious aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement?

say_it_as_it_is3• 6 years ago

https://samharris.org/podcasts/217-new-religion-anti-racism/

drannex• 6 years ago

This is such a garbage take, and you know it. Stop trying to bait others with takes that are entirely nonsensical to the article at hand.

Linking to flawed critiques of the 1619 project and proclaiming "BLM" both authoritarian (it's not, and decentralized) and calling it a religious cult (not a religion, nor a cult, nor a formalized central power structure) is just totally irrelevant and implicit subversive racism. Your comment stands out for nothing substantive but bigotry.

say_it_as_it_is3• 6 years ago

Prove that what I said is bigotry or "implicit subversive racism". I chose a recent, controversial event illustrating an influential media company -- The New York Times -- doubling down on costly mistakes made in the name of social justice. The heterodox thinkers of the Times will move on to the Substacks of the world where their critical reasoning skills and rejection of cult membership make them even more valued.

No bigotry or racism here.

dang3• 6 years ago

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's repetitive, tedious, nasty, and not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang3• 6 years ago

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. It's repetitive, tedious, nasty, and not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hombre_fatal3• 6 years ago

With a title like that, you'd think the article would make a more obvious enumeration of the reasons Substack might not be the future we want. Instead it spends most of its time in a declarative, historian's voice.

But while the author drops a few implications along the way, it's not really until the fifth or so paragraph from the end do they finally reveal a more concrete suspicion:

A robust press is essential to a functioning democracy, and a cultural turn toward journalistic individualism might not be in the collective interest. It is expensive and laborious to hold powerful people and institutions to account, and, at many media organizations, any given article is the result of collaboration between writers, editors, copy editors, fact checkers, and producers.

Dunno, it kinda seems like wondering if there can be room for a multi-million dollar HBO special like Game of Thrones in a world where niche Patreon creators are making thousands of dollars. I guess we don't even need analogy: how do paid niche blogs (which is a far more accurate description of Substack than "premium newsletters") threaten large publications?

But to answer their question: yes, I think Substack is definitely part of the future we want. For years we've wondered if we could back out of our ad-driven internet economy where small players had no shot at making a living if they couldn't attract ad dollars. We've brainstormed so much about what that could even look like.

Then platforms like Patreon and Substack popped up and demonstrated what a lot of us assumed was impossible: people opening their wallet to support an individual.

Looks like there actually is a way through this ad-driven mess.

nine_k• 6 years ago

More glaringly, a piece with a title like that in a major media outlet lays bare an obvious conflict of interest. "No, not the future you want."

hombre_fatal3• 6 years ago

I was ready for some interesting points about the downsides of Substack.

But reading the article, especially with the 15(!!) inset ads and the Creative Cloud sidebar ad that followed me the whole length of the article, I realized how hard it is to damn Substack with anything that doesn't pale in comparison to ad-captured traditional media.

SllX2• 6 years ago

But to answer their question: yes, I think Substack is definitely part of the future we want.

You wrote what I wanted to.

Substack is an enabling technology, and functionally replaces the printer that magazines like the New Yorker use to physically print their magazine before sending them out to readers via USPS (instead of email) or to bookstores.

They also picked a very good payment processor in Stripe, another enabling technology that functionally replaces the physical terminals you would get from Square or First Data.

In the long term I might be concerned about Substack if they take on too much VC money and try to go the full Medium route. In the short term, concerning yourself with Substack is like concerning yourself with what kind of printers that a book publisher uses. A printer can be technically interesting, but ultimately it does the job you ask of it.

hombre_fatal3• 6 years ago

What excites me about Patreon and Substack is the underlying cultural shift that makes them possible.

10 years ago, users of a free service I run urged me to put up a Paypal donation button like they were dying to throw money at me. After months of urging, I finally did. ...I received so little in donations that I refunded the money.

Last year, my users urged me to put up a Patreon and, expecting the worst, I finally did it. The service isn't nearly as popular as it was 10 years ago, yet they've committed $300+/month which is enough to at least pay for some of my time to improve the service, a service I considered taking down.

It's hard to overstate what's going on here. There are avenues opening up just when I thought, yesterday, that they closed off for good.

Just like Adsense created a content renaissance that let small creators (on a couple mediums) make a living, it might not be overstating it to say that we're seeing the next one, this time with direct, recurring (important!) funding.

Aside, I wonder what the historian's analysis of the cultural shift would look like mapped out. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitch was the lynchpin in normalizing direct contribution.

bryzaguy• 6 years ago

I mostly feel bad for the node.js developer, James Halliday, who goes by substack. Seeing this article (ad?) and their recruiting ads on HN reminds me of his tweets:

https://twitter.com/substack/status/1323049757615353856?s=21

Unsure of the validity to those claims. But it did seem like they capitalized on the familiarity of his username to gain traction early on.

ulisesrmzroche2• 6 years ago

That’s ridiculous, maybe familiar to a few node devs who are knee deep in code all day but let’s not pretend that he’s a household name on the level of Steve Wozniak

ulisesrmzroche2• 6 years ago

It would be nice if it doesn’t wind up like Medium, where’ it’s all productivity porn and identity politics but I don’t have much hope unless they do some sort of signup gating

SecurityMinded• 6 years ago

Not a big fan of substack but anything better than liberal media, like Newyorker or NYT. Suck it idiots!

Is Substack the Media Future We Want?

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