added by sari and · updated 1mo ago
[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast
The problem is not merely homogeneity of topic, but homogeneity of substance. If you have to publish a newsletter every week, you don’t have the room or incentive to take risks.
from [Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast by Applied Divinity Studies
Chad "Curly" Hall added 3mo ago
- In the past, you might have spent 10 hours reading a book that took 4 years to research and write, a 3500x multiple on time! Today, a newsletter that publishes M-F and takes 30 minutes to read only provides a 67x multiple.
from [Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast by Applied Divinity Studies
sari added 3y ago
- In financial terms, blog posts have asymmetric returns with capped downside but unlimited upside. If you write a bad post it won’t get shared and no one will see it. If you write a great post and it goes viral, everyone on the internet thinks you’re a genius. Since content is shared organically, your best work gets way more exposure than your worst... See more
from [Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast by Applied Divinity Studies
sari added 3y ago
- The difference is that status on Twiter comes from who follows, likes and retweets you, not just how many of them there are
from [Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast by Applied Divinity Studies
sari added 3y ago
- The problem is not merely homogeneity of topic, but homogeneity of substance. If you have to publish a newsletter every week, you don’t have the room or incentive to take risks.
from [Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast by Applied Divinity Studies
sari added 3y ago
- RSS is a civilized way of following updates from disparate sites you like, aggregating them in one central place that's separate from the mailbox where they can be saved to be read later, organized by source if need be. Newsletters —stuff that hits your inbox— strike me as barbaric.
from [Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast by Applied Divinity Studies
sari added 3y ago
- It’s better for authors to think persistently and write occasionally than the other way around.
from [Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast by Applied Divinity Studies
sari added 3y ago
- Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes so that the thinking accumulates.
from [Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast by Applied Divinity Studies
sari added 3y ago
- The biggest risk to Substack isn’t that Gmail changes its algorithm or that readers set up automatic forwarding and share accounts. It’s that years from now, each author will have built up so much content that a reader can pay a 1 month subscription, download the archive, and be set on reading material.
from [Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast by Applied Divinity Studies
sari added 3y ago