They raised a ton of money on a high valuation, spent 25mil to make 1 mil last year and are now scrambling to raise a new crowd sourced round because they don't want to get wiped out in a down round.
This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an advertising based business model and I'm guessing they think they have "influencers" on their platform to bring in a decent audience.
They really needed this to exist about 6 months ago or whenever it was that Musk bought Twitter. There was a mass exodus then to Mastodon, and if they’d have brought this out then I reckon they would have done a good job of immediately dethroning Twitter as I reckon lots of journalists and writers would have jumped on board. Now they’re going to have to do it the long hard way and try and build the audience organically. I reckon they might be able to do it, but it’ll take them at least a few years because they missed the golden goose.
Elon showing the number of impressions a tweet or reply actually got was an eye-opener for me. Probably about 1-2% of "Followers" -- not just mine but most people's.
Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers.
I kind of see this as the whole "Substack is trying to become Twitter before Twitter becomes Substack" kind of race. Twitter added long tweets and subscriptions, if you could do markdown formatting and inline images in your long tweets - why would Substack authors stay on Substack when they could post basically the same thing to Twitter and have more audience (or potential audience) exposure.
If Substack sees the above as an existential risk - which it might be if Twitter executes well, then Substack is replying by trying to do the reverse to Twitter.
The point for me is that, at this moment, it has people that interest me without rage-baiting emotionally manipulative engagement farming bullshit.
That's all I want out of these platforms. I don't care about decentralization or who owns it. I just want to read interesting stuff and not get pissed off in the process.
Notes linking to Substack Newsletters should convert better. Notes are networked "post summaries" that represent an improvement over the traditional blog homepage format. I see a play that could improve what they're cloning while also benefiting their core offering.
It has potential but the likeness of the clone is a bit off-putting for me.
it certainly seemed to me like there was a good portion of twitter that was just people promoting their substack newsletters, and most of the people they interact with are doing the same. it makes perfect sense for substack to try to bring that under their roof.
As a reader, I like it. It might nudge me to subscribe to a few more newsletters even if I don’t plan to read all emails, just to see Notes from that author.
Sure, I won’t subscribe to hundreds of newsletters, but a few dozen might create a good feed.
If you follow any artists or writers or similar on Twitter you'll note that the biggest reason most of them cite for being there is because they have a conversational community that feeds into support for their art.
Substack has a perfectly good mechanism for publishing (paid and unpaid) to support people, but that conversation is missing. It's a pretty obvious move if you are engaged with the overlapping users of Twitter and Substack, and has potential to peel a lot of people out of Twitter if they're primarily there to follow their favorite authors, showrunners, etc.
I don't like it either. I use Substack (and previously Medium) when I want to read long-form content instead of tweets. If I wanted tweets, I'd use Twitter.
But Substack Notes allows for greater potential monetization (ick): TikTok style content, algorithmic recommendations, and ads. Especially ads.
I've just checked it out and it's much closer to a Twitter clone than I anticipated. Now it's clear why Elon made the drastic decision to mess with substack links on Twitter. The site is clean and simple.
I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.
I hope it doesn't. Because it essentially sets us up for a repeat. If Mastodon was 'just not the thing people were looking for' then at least it solves the problems that both Twitter and Substack have, which is that they are not federated. Better to fix Mastodon than to waste another decade on something that will ultimately blow up and with the way Substack has - in my head at least - been associated negatively with crap content it will probably be sooner rather than later.
> I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms.
I’m happy with the destruction of Twitter. I think it’s a net negative for the world and we’ll be better off without it. This might be the only tech I’ve ever felt like this about (including atomic bombs). I think it amplifies and even creates hate and division.
It will be funny if ten years from now we find out it was a gawker-style takedown with the intent to purposely destroy something in a lasting and permanent way as described in Ryan Holiday’s book about Thiel’s purposeful execution of strategy to destroy gawker, https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/conspiracy-ryan-holida...
PS- are there any other business/tech “case study” type books out there. I also liked Clifford Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg, John Brooks’ Business Adventures, Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, Po Bronson’s Nudist on the Late Shift, and David Kaplan’s Silicon Boys. Looking for more of what I suspect is more common than I can find.
I've been looking at Substack with the eyes of someone who has lived through the enshitment of Quora, Medium et al, and realized there are never guarantees with any such service. Apparently I owe them money and attention, and they owe me nothing. I will never get long term what I joined a service for, so today I simply do not commit. I never committed to Twitter, and I'm glad. I want to share content, I setup a ghost site. I want to read content, I use RSS and also read what I can for free. That's it.
I’ve seen “Elon ruined twitter”, but everyday I’m getting what I signed up for years back it hasn’t been ruined in any noticeable way. Fine they added the stupid views but who cares
>... essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms
I think it's a good thing in the long run.
Twitter was a gimmick in many ways. Here, throw a few words out into the ether and see who notices.
That simplicity attracted tons of people. Then it became THE place to reach a ton of people, even though it's format for such things is AWFUL for it. It's a TERRIBLE platform for meaningful information dispersal, but it's THE place to be, so you see a bunch of evidence of that.
Twitlonger, people chaining twitter posts, just about any conversation, etc. Worse it eliminated a lot of things that probably shouldn't have died. My personal pet peeve is the death of forums, most specifically for games. Pre twitter you could find old forum posts that were pinned about just about anything you wanted to get into seriously. Dustloop had character guides with a level of info that would justify a thesis on characters in games that were 8 years old and hardly ever played.
That level of information is still found now, but instead it's tied to a hashtag, and then vomited out...never consolidated. Right now i'm looking to mess with a new character in strive, and while the GGST_BE tag is nice for "oh that's neat" kind of tech discoveries, it's fucking awful for actually understanding how to play the character or what's useful from it.
To be fair, that's always the case with a brand new character, but in the old days it was somewhat easier to keep a running tally of what works and what doesn't in a forum discussion, while twitter just doesn't promote that, so picking someone up waaaay after the fact is miserable. Discord is the other spot these things are now heavily discussed (with similar issues to twitter, although the forum feature of discord has helped a bit) and the wiki's are in theory where the data is consolidated but it's just a much higher barrier to entry and thus often you have half completed pages with outdated information.
In short, i'm hoping the slow death of twitter (IF it dies. The number of people saying twitter is abhorrent...on twitter...is a sign to me it's not going anywhere) will finally lead to people realizing that we want a way to quickly spread information among those who want it, but we don't need it to be in this shallow, vapid, character limited style. Sure that works for "oh hey look at where I am today" but it drives me nuts every time i see some essay broken into 45 twitter posts.
RSS feeds are an alternative tech that's honestly quite close to being what most people want, but it lacks the discovery/aggregation effect of things like twitter in most cases (inoreader kind of has something like that), and thus mostly still relies on twitter for content (at least it did until they nuked the API).
It wasn't like Twitter's business had a large technical barrier-to-entry. And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can.
Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch!
Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@[email protected]) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.
Looking at Notes, I get why Elon is so mad about it. They totally ripped off the Twitter UI.
I follow Ed Zitron's Substack, and he is also a prolific Tweeter. He seems to be using Notes the same way he uses Twitter, for shitposting. I'm not sure that's really in line with the tone of Substack.
May be I'm old, but I love long form content and twitter took that away. People write long tweet threads instead of thinking things through and writing it in long form. This gives rise to tons of twitter thread collapsing tools/startups that push the concatenation of these tweets to Notion or whatever. This seems utterly silly to me. It almost looks like tech for the sake of tech. It's unfortunate that substack is going in the same direction. Are there no better problems to solve using tech?
Compare the two homepages without cookies [1][2]. The rounded buttons in orange instead of Twitter-blue. The footer nagbar. The similar navigation menu.
Following the whole banning-saga my impression was that Notes was a genuine extension of the Substack platform, but it being a frontend clone explains why such a tantrum was thrown by Musk.
Seems just like one of the many cookie-cutter Twitter clones out there. I don't think people would even be talking about Substack Notes had it not been for Musk's tantrum.
This is a case where an algorithmic feed would make this into a truly amazing product.
I don't want email spam from every follower, but do want to see the best snippets on substack.
Super easy to create a for you page, given text content:
Step 1: embed every article I ever read, or note I liked/comment/share and stuff it in a DB.
Step 2: every time a new note is posted (by anyone anywhere), embed it, search the db for my last 100 embedded items, and see if new note has relevance > 50%. If so, add it to my feed inventory. Resort my feed inventory by semantic relevance every hour. Remove items older than 7 days from feed inventory every hour.
Step 3: On page load, move everything in my feed inventory to my feed archive - never rerank again. (Bonus points for tracking note level views rather than assuming all were viewed, but small detail).
Bonus Step 4: Every 4th item in my feed inventory, intersperse something that's solely there based on popularity/top liked note of all notes visible to all of my followings. i.e., show me something possibly irrelevant but viral.
That'll get you pretty far, each step can be endlessly optimized over time.
I want to see the results of this so bad that I'll volunteer to build v1 this weekend if you really don't have time to do it internally. Tiktok for text... could be amazing.
Agreed. I commented this on the announcement thread, but there's so much... Bluesky, T2, Hive, Post, now this. I'm not gonna jump to a new microblogging platform when 10% of my friends are on one, 10% on another.
If you are making a twitter clone, AP is the only way to go
I've been checking out Notes all morning (I write a jargon-free, FOMO-free, AI newsletter). It's kind of a weird product launch? My feed is primarily content that the people I subscribe to post or comment on, but I don't subscribe to that many people.
I'm not sure what the average number of subscriptions a Substack user has, but it seems like a very echo-chambery setup right now. As an author there are definitely things that I want to share that aren't worth of an email, but I'm pretty sure very few of my audience members are going to see it. Maybe this makes more sense for writers with audiences who are on the Substack app all day.
Substack really competes with creators leaving and setting up their own newsletter + payment gateway software. That’s like a $20,000 or so project from a web dev firm and for a creator who gets $200,000 a year from their newsletter it pays for itself in a year. The trouble is that substack makes almost all of its money from two handfuls of users who make more than that so if substack loses those creators it is left with all the expenses but none of the revenue.
The question about any feature they add is “what does it do about that situation?”
It’s a start. Hopefully they’ll improve the reader experience. Having a single general-purpose forum (a “firehose”) doesn’t really work for me since it’s so random, but with so little content, it’s probably necessary for now.
Subscribing needs improvement. Subscribing to a hashtag might make sense? It seems like subscribing to someone’s notes and their blog should be independent, because maybe someone has a good blog but you don’t care for their notes, or vice-versa. Having them tied together also doesn’t work for people like me who use RSS. I don’t usually want email from blogs I read, so I only subscribe to blogs where I’m interested in the paid content and usually turn the email off.
I think this loses what makes Substack interesting, though, which is keeping the community for each blog separate, so you don’t care what people are saying on other blogs that you don’t read. Putting everyone in one community, or an unclear blob of overlapping communities, seems likely to be bad for the same reasons Twitter can often be bad.
I guess blogs need discovery, though, and maybe external sites aren’t enough?
(I think I’ll repost this as a note, since they need the content.)
Wow, didn't exactly stick their necks out on the design did they? Almost zero visual differentiation from the noisy flamewars of Twitter this is supposed to be the antidote to.
One thing I noticed right away, is when I scrolled down their page it didn't pop up that horrible popup all substack pages have asking you to subscribe; maybe they can ditch Notes and implement that feature on the rest of substack.
Curious how they plan to handle handles. Right now they're using full names for link text and having the URL as the unique identifier. Seems difficult to account for in the actual notes when you have multiple instances of the same name or full name (for example I'm @Zachary).
Substack has been adding a lot of random features lately and it makes me worry that they will lose focus on the email
newsletter aspect of their platform, which is what I like about it.
So, I gave it a try today. Was hopeful, because on Twitter all my posts go essentially into the void.
However, Substack Notes seems to have no method for discovery. They add some random larger accounts to my feed.
You can't search Notes to find people posting content in order to find others potentially interested in similar content.
So, unless you already have a large following, seems like posting into another void. People are reluctant to follow you as well, since you must subscribe to the persons newsletter, they are the same action.
The sign in flow is completely broken for me. I am signing up with an email, after I click the verification link it takes me to a page where I need to enter my email yet again. Here it says I already might have an account and sends another verification email which does the same thing again.
Also found other issues the site after going to the home page. Multiple modals overlapping with the sign in flow.
Same. Managed to get in by opening one of the links in Chrome instead of my usual Firefox. Haven't managed to set a password yet though. It's a real fucking mess.
[+] [-] ghiculescu|2 years ago|reply
https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-1446... I’d a good summary. I don’t want to subscribe to hundreds of newsletters to see tweet (sorry, notes). But if you change that setup, it really is a Twitter clone with no upside to writers.
[+] [-] m_ke|2 years ago|reply
This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an advertising based business model and I'm guessing they think they have "influencers" on their platform to bring in a decent audience.
[+] [-] rcarr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers.
[+] [-] ALittleLight|2 years ago|reply
If Substack sees the above as an existential risk - which it might be if Twitter executes well, then Substack is replying by trying to do the reverse to Twitter.
[+] [-] BaculumMeumEst|2 years ago|reply
That's all I want out of these platforms. I don't care about decentralization or who owns it. I just want to read interesting stuff and not get pissed off in the process.
[+] [-] msabalau|2 years ago|reply
One can post a note without having a newletter, and you can "see notes" from a user without subscribing.
[+] [-] shanebellone|2 years ago|reply
Notes linking to Substack Newsletters should convert better. Notes are networked "post summaries" that represent an improvement over the traditional blog homepage format. I see a play that could improve what they're cloning while also benefiting their core offering.
It has potential but the likeness of the clone is a bit off-putting for me.
[+] [-] notatoad|2 years ago|reply
it certainly seemed to me like there was a good portion of twitter that was just people promoting their substack newsletters, and most of the people they interact with are doing the same. it makes perfect sense for substack to try to bring that under their roof.
[+] [-] soneca|2 years ago|reply
Sure, I won’t subscribe to hundreds of newsletters, but a few dozen might create a good feed.
[+] [-] rodgerd|2 years ago|reply
Substack has a perfectly good mechanism for publishing (paid and unpaid) to support people, but that conversation is missing. It's a pretty obvious move if you are engaged with the overlapping users of Twitter and Substack, and has potential to peel a lot of people out of Twitter if they're primarily there to follow their favorite authors, showrunners, etc.
[+] [-] LordDragonfang|2 years ago|reply
There's an option to just subscribe to notes and not newsletters on desktop, apparently, under the three-dots menu:
https://substack.com/profile/34072171-katie-substack/note/c-...
That UX is awful, but I'm sure they'll work it out in the coming weeks.
[+] [-] Nezteb|2 years ago|reply
The phrasing is weird though: “You’ll then start seeing more of their notes in the Home tab.”
More? Not all? Odd.
[+] [-] bmarquez|2 years ago|reply
But Substack Notes allows for greater potential monetization (ick): TikTok style content, algorithmic recommendations, and ads. Especially ads.
[+] [-] kritiko|2 years ago|reply
I think it does add some confusion to the product if notes become more popular than articles / comment sections on articles.
[+] [-] jononomo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capital_guy|2 years ago|reply
I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.
[+] [-] jacquesm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hersko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|2 years ago|reply
I’m happy with the destruction of Twitter. I think it’s a net negative for the world and we’ll be better off without it. This might be the only tech I’ve ever felt like this about (including atomic bombs). I think it amplifies and even creates hate and division.
It will be funny if ten years from now we find out it was a gawker-style takedown with the intent to purposely destroy something in a lasting and permanent way as described in Ryan Holiday’s book about Thiel’s purposeful execution of strategy to destroy gawker, https://www.grahammann.net/book-notes/conspiracy-ryan-holida...
PS- are there any other business/tech “case study” type books out there. I also liked Clifford Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg, John Brooks’ Business Adventures, Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, Po Bronson’s Nudist on the Late Shift, and David Kaplan’s Silicon Boys. Looking for more of what I suspect is more common than I can find.
[+] [-] figassis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hereme888|2 years ago|reply
I returned to Twitter recently due to great features like Community Notes. I don't see what people are complaining about.
[+] [-] Eji1700|2 years ago|reply
I think it's a good thing in the long run.
Twitter was a gimmick in many ways. Here, throw a few words out into the ether and see who notices.
That simplicity attracted tons of people. Then it became THE place to reach a ton of people, even though it's format for such things is AWFUL for it. It's a TERRIBLE platform for meaningful information dispersal, but it's THE place to be, so you see a bunch of evidence of that.
Twitlonger, people chaining twitter posts, just about any conversation, etc. Worse it eliminated a lot of things that probably shouldn't have died. My personal pet peeve is the death of forums, most specifically for games. Pre twitter you could find old forum posts that were pinned about just about anything you wanted to get into seriously. Dustloop had character guides with a level of info that would justify a thesis on characters in games that were 8 years old and hardly ever played.
That level of information is still found now, but instead it's tied to a hashtag, and then vomited out...never consolidated. Right now i'm looking to mess with a new character in strive, and while the GGST_BE tag is nice for "oh that's neat" kind of tech discoveries, it's fucking awful for actually understanding how to play the character or what's useful from it.
To be fair, that's always the case with a brand new character, but in the old days it was somewhat easier to keep a running tally of what works and what doesn't in a forum discussion, while twitter just doesn't promote that, so picking someone up waaaay after the fact is miserable. Discord is the other spot these things are now heavily discussed (with similar issues to twitter, although the forum feature of discord has helped a bit) and the wiki's are in theory where the data is consolidated but it's just a much higher barrier to entry and thus often you have half completed pages with outdated information.
In short, i'm hoping the slow death of twitter (IF it dies. The number of people saying twitter is abhorrent...on twitter...is a sign to me it's not going anywhere) will finally lead to people realizing that we want a way to quickly spread information among those who want it, but we don't need it to be in this shallow, vapid, character limited style. Sure that works for "oh hey look at where I am today" but it drives me nuts every time i see some essay broken into 45 twitter posts.
RSS feeds are an alternative tech that's honestly quite close to being what most people want, but it lacks the discovery/aggregation effect of things like twitter in most cases (inoreader kind of has something like that), and thus mostly still relies on twitter for content (at least it did until they nuked the API).
[+] [-] jpmattia|2 years ago|reply
Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch!
Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@[email protected]) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.
[+] [-] kritiko|2 years ago|reply
I follow Ed Zitron's Substack, and he is also a prolific Tweeter. He seems to be using Notes the same way he uses Twitter, for shitposting. I'm not sure that's really in line with the tone of Substack.
[+] [-] posharma|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Confiks|2 years ago|reply
Following the whole banning-saga my impression was that Notes was a genuine extension of the Substack platform, but it being a frontend clone explains why such a tantrum was thrown by Musk.
[1] https://twitter.com/
[2] https://substack.com/notes
[+] [-] drusepth|2 years ago|reply
Here's a side-by-side comparison for anyone that doesn't want to go through the same process:
https://i.imgur.com/On0RZG8.png
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alsodumb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pantalaimon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilsonnb3|2 years ago|reply
The fact that Musk is known to be thin-skinned and prone to internet outbursts explains why he threw such a tantrum.
[+] [-] obblekk|2 years ago|reply
I don't want email spam from every follower, but do want to see the best snippets on substack.
Super easy to create a for you page, given text content:
Step 1: embed every article I ever read, or note I liked/comment/share and stuff it in a DB.
Step 2: every time a new note is posted (by anyone anywhere), embed it, search the db for my last 100 embedded items, and see if new note has relevance > 50%. If so, add it to my feed inventory. Resort my feed inventory by semantic relevance every hour. Remove items older than 7 days from feed inventory every hour.
Step 3: On page load, move everything in my feed inventory to my feed archive - never rerank again. (Bonus points for tracking note level views rather than assuming all were viewed, but small detail).
Bonus Step 4: Every 4th item in my feed inventory, intersperse something that's solely there based on popularity/top liked note of all notes visible to all of my followings. i.e., show me something possibly irrelevant but viral.
That'll get you pretty far, each step can be endlessly optimized over time.
I want to see the results of this so bad that I'll volunteer to build v1 this weekend if you really don't have time to do it internally. Tiktok for text... could be amazing.
[+] [-] 2h|2 years ago|reply
how many platforms need to be ruined by an algorithmic feed before people understand that its a terrible idea?
[+] [-] xd1936|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] internetter|2 years ago|reply
If you are making a twitter clone, AP is the only way to go
[+] [-] charlierguo|2 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what the average number of subscriptions a Substack user has, but it seems like a very echo-chambery setup right now. As an author there are definitely things that I want to share that aren't worth of an email, but I'm pretty sure very few of my audience members are going to see it. Maybe this makes more sense for writers with audiences who are on the Substack app all day.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
The question about any feature they add is “what does it do about that situation?”
[+] [-] skybrian|2 years ago|reply
Subscribing needs improvement. Subscribing to a hashtag might make sense? It seems like subscribing to someone’s notes and their blog should be independent, because maybe someone has a good blog but you don’t care for their notes, or vice-versa. Having them tied together also doesn’t work for people like me who use RSS. I don’t usually want email from blogs I read, so I only subscribe to blogs where I’m interested in the paid content and usually turn the email off.
I think this loses what makes Substack interesting, though, which is keeping the community for each blog separate, so you don’t care what people are saying on other blogs that you don’t read. Putting everyone in one community, or an unclear blob of overlapping communities, seems likely to be bad for the same reasons Twitter can often be bad.
I guess blogs need discovery, though, and maybe external sites aren’t enough?
(I think I’ll repost this as a note, since they need the content.)
[+] [-] processing|2 years ago|reply
“Log in to Substack”
closes tab
[+] [-] s1k3s|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user00012-ab|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldstrangers|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praisewhitey|2 years ago|reply
https://substack.com/notes
[+] [-] keiferski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 13years|2 years ago|reply
However, Substack Notes seems to have no method for discovery. They add some random larger accounts to my feed.
You can't search Notes to find people posting content in order to find others potentially interested in similar content.
So, unless you already have a large following, seems like posting into another void. People are reluctant to follow you as well, since you must subscribe to the persons newsletter, they are the same action.
[+] [-] nullgeo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hamuko|2 years ago|reply