A Text Renaissance

Stripe is important because it allows content technologies and media to be built ground-up with monetization philosophy in place at the foundational level. It doesn’t have to be a janky bolted-on piece of the puzzle.

A common feature of all four horsemen of the textopia, from the publisher point of view, is that they trade quantity for quality. You want a more controlled, better gated, more intimate, and more financial relationship, with smaller audiences.

By offering a seamlessly integrated email, payment integration (Stripe is a big part of all these revolutions), and no-design-needed opinionated web presentation, Substack managed to basically resurrect a zombie category of text media that hadn’t really existed in this kind of pure form since the 90s.

Enter Substack. Substack, by eschewing the marketing communications (MarCom) market entirely, and focusing on writers people actually wanted to read, reversed the perceptions of the technology. Instead of trying to scam people into giving you “permission” to send them emails, Substack said, why not charge them to subscribe.

Email today is now less a communications medium than a communications compile target. It’s a clearinghouse technology. It’s where conversations-of-record go, where identity verification happens, where service alerts accumulate, and perhaps most importantly for publishers, where push-delivered longform content goes by default. It is distributed and ... See more

So you can write, structure, organize, refactor, bundle/unbundle, all in a single subconsciously learnable flow.

On the surface, Roam looks like a cross between a slightly weird wiki and a note-taking tool like Evernote. It’s not. It implements a few key features of 1980s vintage hypertext visions — block-level addressability, transclusion (changes in referenced blocks being “transfer-included” wherever they are cited), and bidirectional linking — that utterl... See more