Pluralistic: Middlemen Without Enshittification; The Bezzle Excerpt

The recent history of the Internet, however, warns that we shouldn’t necessarily expect the endearingly homegrown nature of these 1,000 True Fans communities to persist. When viable new economic niches emerge online, venture-backed businesses, looking to extract their cut, are typically not far behind. Services such as Patreon and Kickstarter are j... See more

Controlling valuable pillars of internet utility -- the flow of information, social connections, music and video delivery -- has created tremendous wealth for a few while very little for stakeholders not on the company’s cap table.

One reason this is personally interesting to me is that I sense a comparable network happening here at Substack, where a huge amount of the value created is flowing to the creators. Now, it's true Substack authors don't participate in the enterprise value of Substack, Inc, but theoretically that could be part of the package through more traditional... See more