For those of you who are yet unfamiliar, an Investor is a person whose soul has collapsed into a black hole, rendering them functionally unable to think or respond like a normal human. They are exceedingly dangerous and they rule the lives of every person with a job. As they prefer to work through intermediaries, you are unlikely to meet them directly. (Even their intermediaries can be deeply unsettling. Have you ever seen the end result of a mind scooped out of the skull of a twenty-year-old man? They prefer their servitors young enough to believe stupid things when they wish to deceive you.)
But we live in a world of moral greys, certainly some are faced with the difficult task of societal resource allocation.
What's offensive about Investors is they don't understand the degree to which the desire for profits warps their worldview and their business models.
Witness: Substack. A wordpress clone. See the problem Substack tries to solve is a real problem. The solution they came up with is optimized for making money. These are comical absurdities.
Take the comments system. They understood that they needed niche politics, they understood niche politics thrives on communities. Their comment system is utter trash. They just didn't get it right.
Take the talent acquisition. In theory 'get a bunch of niche writers on your platform by paying them' is a good strategy. In practice when anyone intelligent can get their own domain running any of a number of blog software, the only people who want to write there are 1) political laymen, which is to say, wackadoodles, 2) tech bros with uninteresting opinions, and 3) a small subset of good writers who nevertheless saturate the readership of substack quickly.
Substack isn't a good enough blogging platform to let you use your own domain and if you did you would just use other, better software. Readers have no loyalty to substack.
The bottom line is: why pay money to Investors instead of the content creator?
Substack inserts itself as a middleman no one wanted, creates a product as that middleman inferior to the competition, and will ultimately want more of a cut of these authors' livelihoods than the value they offer in the form of that readership.
I've tried to like their platform but just couldn't get away from the fact that Wordpress's free offering works better and allows payments with the flip of a switch.
And all of this is without getting into the fact that if you write for money you're probably being scammed. Write for free: it's the only way you know you're not colonized.
.webp?h=8 "Merry Fistmas!")
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The problem substack solves is that people don't pay for blogs. The solution they came up with involves... making money?
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Because they're Investors, the only solution they could come up with involved a business, which expects to see a return on investment. That means money towards authors involves a cut for not the authors and literate people aren't stupid enough not to notice this.
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They could come up with any sort of solution, if they wanted to. They came up with a business, because investing in businesses is what they do. Next, complain that birds chirp, or wolves howl. Substack is the version of a blogging platform that is a business. Other ones exist that are charities, or coops, or ponzi schemes, but those are not substack. Substack happens to be particularly effective at getting bloggers to make money, which you can take as a measure of how good a business is at solving this problem.
10% is a relatively small cut. In practice, its a lot higher though, because bloggers agreed to give up equity in exchange for certainty. That's the tradeoff the writer makes. The readership probably cares about that a lot less than the writer.
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It is because they are unable to transcend what they are that they are ineffective. Learn the lesson well: what you become, what your nature is, will define success or failure far more than effort.
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neighbor just use banner ads
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