Creators

i usually take everything Taylor Lorenz says with a grain of salt but this take about substack's dark patterns re: creators stuck with me:

"substack's whole appeal to creators is that their creative labor is worth something, and creators should own the fruits of that labor, namely the connections with their audience. 

substack successfully differentiated itself from other platforms with this value proposition and attracted a vibrant array of talented creators as a result. 

with the follow button, however, substack contradicts their core principle of creator ownership, instead recreating the very kind of walled garden their founders originally opposed.”

anchoring substack's app experience in generalized attention is paradoxically hostile towards a creator's individualized mission and limits a creator's growth outside of substack's own walls.

in the near future, direct-to-fan relationships > direct-to-consumer platforms.

helping build farcaster | surfing @ venice, ca | eating @ gjusta / gjelina | “lucky me, lucky mud”

he's right about that ... but substack is on the slippery slope for the past couple of years

positioning rants 🚀; bringing you ✍️ /buildbetter, 🎙️ /artistspotlight and🎙️ /web3magic; De*** & open-source HW/SW enthusiast; https://nf.td/bfg

yes, she, I've heard substack guys talk about how they optimise for creators and their mantra was "email" early on, but if they really wanted optimise for creators and not for their business they could do number of things ... eg. switch onchain, lower their fees, introduct new payment rails

instead they also talked about the need to make the business work - which is very valid but contradicts the first part - and they talked about new ways to make it harder to leave the ecosystem = the more you shape your product into "everything app" (email, audio, notes, chats, video, payments, etc.) the harder you make it for any successful creator to leave because the cognitive load for everyone (creator and fans) is becoming insurmountable. 

If you left substack for ghost 3-4 years ago, you took your email list and that was it. If you leave now, it's totally different story and you have to re-do everything.

That's what I mean by slippery ... cos they talked good game but actions already went towards extractive part