This friction to comment, not only selects for higher quality users and lowers the need for moderation, but also creates “buy-in”, which reduces churn without limiting their funnel of users. MAUs just reached 202mn, +55% YoY and “official members” who passed the exam reached 103mn, +51% YoY.
Thinking with a web3 mindset doesn't come naturally because its properties aren't inherent in our world today e.g. almost nothing is by default public unless you choose to make it so, whereas everything that happens on-chain is public. But -- as a result of these properties, we can do a variety of things that we weren't able to do before. Some exam... See more
If you want to build a product that millions (or hundreds of millions) of people can use, you must defy this tendency to prioritize the core product at the expense of the “first mile.”
The attention economy has benefited corporations. The creator economy helps creators a lot more but leaves a lot on the table. Fans can’t participate in the upside of a creator’s growth for example.
It is well understood that the internet has created extraordinary abundance in information and products. Whereas once, consumers might have been restricted to their town paper for information and local mall for apparel, they can now find functionally unlimited amounts of both online.
To the extent that Substack fixes something in the journalism industry, it might be compared to GoFundMe—a survival mechanism whose resources are unevenly, arbitrarily distributed, laying bare systemic problems without directly tackling them.