substack’s ideological insistence that subscriptions are the only way forward has echoes of soviet style planned economies send tweet

writer of manifestos, petter of cats.

in devotional pursuit of the stories that bring us back to life @ http://manifesto.quest

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it's something around how substack has increasing cultural mass as a social/discovery platform, so certain types of writers kinda have to be there if they wanna make a living. paired with their leadership's ideological insistence that subscriptions are the Only Moral Way For Writers To Monetize.

for me it rings of far off bureaucrats saying "you must grow corn because the state's five year plan demands it" when i'd rather happily subsistence farm by growing veggies or whatever.

a lot of my frustration stems from wanting to sell access to my writing with a one-off fee instead of subscriptions. i've run membership businesses as a creator, and it is such a grind. creating customers is harder, mitigating churn is a pain, and it's just not a fun thing for me as a creative. it's frustrating to want to be on substack because the network is good, but not to be able to run my business in a way that i know to be more in alignment with my values

it's a pretty sloppy and imperfect analogy tbh, because we can all go wherever we want online and build our businesses however we want. there's no state level coercion. but i do think they use a lot of language about empowering and freeing creators, while simultaneously boxing them into an ideological structure that limits freedom to monetize creatively.