Substack won't make you rich

[throwaway201606]

The "curation is an great addition to value" argument is certainly a powerful one.

I agree with the position that it makes sense to pay for a selection of writing (or other content) that someone, who truly deeply understands their demographic, puts together.

This site ( HN ) is certainly proof of that. It is effectively a magazine curated by its readers (upvotes/downvotes) for 'my deomographic' which is the demographic of everyone on here I guess.

In the novel "Fall", Neal Stephenson developed a theme I found profoundly insightful - the internet becomes a morass of trash so to get anything out of it, you gotta be selective about what you read or consume.

Selectivity, for characters in the book, was effected by subscribing to 'edit streams' - content pushed to them by editors who figured out what they should see for news and what they should see elsewhere from the arts, science, anything.

The super wealthy have personal editors - bespoke curated balanced content that was super expensive since one essentially is paying for person to "pre-read" and "grade" everything.

The 'middle class’ subscribes to one or more cheaper good shared 'edit streams' that had balanced and nuanced selection made possible by amortizing the cost over a ton of subscribers - a magazine.

Everyone else consumes what FAANG equivalents and bottom of the barrel anybodies pushes out for free on the "Your Feed" streams. Since they are free, you are the product.

Anything on those is largely driven by agenda - think "the right vs the left", propaganda, 'just because I have a mic", anarchy, pick your poison.

Two thoughts pop to mind out of all this

- just occurred to me that Facebook's / TikTok's /YouTube's etc "For You" streams are just really bad, (very addictive) very poorly edited magazines. Can't really make money from them because they are the equivalent of a old-timey pulp magazine.

- (this is the biggie) these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc). Just send me a cash "Thank You" to cover college bills and the mortgage for this idea.

[moring]

> these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc)

Not sure what you mean by "patented, TM, etc". Other than that, I think this should already be possible from the outside e.g. by setting up a Patreon whose sole point is to provide a curated list of content from other platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, and already has a payment mechanism.

This hinges on the fact that content can be linked from the outside, but any approach will be subject to the mercy of the big platforms that host the actual content.

[renegat0x0]

About user input, where the users can moderate contents by tools (like upvote/downvote).

I think that the user feedback is sometimes very dangerous. Corporation XY releases trailer, users do not like it. Trailer is review bombed. People running corporation are angry, they do not want downvotes.

There are several things that can be done to solve that "problem". For one: you can remove transparency. If things are not transparent it is easier to "fool" users, boost some things that should not be, or limit reach of things that are correct, true, but undesirable by the big tech.

I think that is the main reason why social media feels muddied, user input does not seem to matter that much.

It is hard to push content on mainstream media, if it is transparent that the quality of the thing you are pushing is mediocre.

[burticlies]

I want search engines to operate similar to this. Instead of using googles monolithic index, you can subscribe to different trusted sources for lists of sites that are curated and maintained. Then your personal search engines queries them all at once.

I think if you could balance the incentives right it would put the onus on the curators to make sure that their indexes were full of high quality sites. And if one starts giving you rubbish, just remove their index from your search engine.

[chapliboy]

This is an interesting idea. The way I see it, there is a lot of really high quality content that does rise to the top of YouTube. But also the feed has a lot of recency bias. So a great creator who puts out things once every many months, ends up having their stuff at the top of the pile for just a week or two.

So as time passes, high quality quickly gets buried by the mediocre barrage of content.

So an interesting feed would have some dimension of time-indepedence.

Really made me think. Thanks

[mike_hock]

Ah, I thought that novel was called "Reality" and had ten billion authors.

[Exoristos]

Substack has some great writers, for sure. But unfortunately something about the marketing and business model seems to induce a large portion of Substack users to treat it as a kind of pyramid scheme. People cannibalize each other's subscribers, subscribe to each other as a favor or for strategic reasons, and of course there's the barrage of self-interested comments on every new celebrity Substack post. Further, Substack themselves pepper everything with sales pitches, and even remove comments that might appear to question their claims. There's a bad smell there, and I ended up leaving.

[rch]

I'm not sure how many paid substacks I'm signed up for, but it's a few.

Average writers, like most professionals, need to associate themselves with a well known brand. No surprise there.

[gnicholas]

Substack seems to be lucrative for folks who use it in combination with another complementary publishing platform. If you write a bunch of articles on Substack and then put together a book made up largely of said articles, it can be good because it doesn't really cost you anything extra. Also, if you have a podcast then you can use similar content for both.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

Out of the tech authors that I read, seems like Lenny and Gergely are printing money, but everybody else is unlikely to be even breaking even. But like with YouTube, Twitch and OnlyFans, it's imperative that people feel like there's a chance a chance of them joining the ranks of superstars, or growth stops.

[water-your-self]

Who are Lenny and Gergely?

[AlbertCory]

Right. The difference is, most people realize they won't become wealthy actors or musicians. But let some new Web platform come along where a few people are killing it, and everyone thinks "why not me?" And the platform owners are happy to encourage it.

[paulpauper]

disagree. many people do not expect to become rich but do it for fun

[ahupp]

I'm not sure who this is directed at. A more interesting question is, does Substack expand the number of people who can support themselves by writing vs a world without it? I personally spend over $1k/yr on Substack; sometimes because I get great value out of the paid posts, and more often because I want to author to keep working in an area I care about.

[beachy]

> I personally spend over $1k/yr on SubstacK

I imagine your photo might be up on a "whales" board back at Substack HQ, and the growth team might refer to you by name in their weekly meetings when they hypothesise on how to attract more like you.

[gnicholas]

> Of all these writers I subscribe to for free: would I be willing to pay a single price for all of them together? That might be worth $10 a month

Fair enough, but a magazine is largely filled with advertisements, which is where much/most of the revenue comes from. I like that Substack does not have ads like this.

[AlbertCory]

There are magazines with no ads, like Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated in its early days.

[stevenfoster]

Here for the Manchester United / Manchester City comments in response to that roster faux pas.

[AlbertCory]

Fixed. Thanks.

(I was aware they were different.)

[farhanhubble]

Another sustainability crisis playing out is in the field of software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39085704

[fortran77]

I never paid for a Medium blog, but I subscribe to three Substacks. It may not "make you rich" but it's the only pay-to-read blog platform that got me to open my wallet!

[strken]

How many authors on Substack expect to make a living from it?

I get that if you have e.g. an Onlyfans or a full time acting career you expect to earn money, but how many writers have that expectation?

[throwaway2037]

> how many writers have that expectation?

Caroline O'Donoghue talks about exactly that issue on her blog "Sentimental Garbage": https://sentimentalgarbage.substack.com/

In short, most writers take any kind of commercial copy/edit/writer work to pay the bills. During down times, they work on their book.

[paulpauper]

Like this for anything with low barriers to entry. On the opposite extreme are tech jobs, in which the Iq barrier is higher but so is median pay.

[maerF0x0]

> You know, fellow authors: I’m often interested in what you have to say. But not interested enough to pay for it.

Another thing to know is that engineers are notoriously cheap. For whatever reason we'll pay $100K for a degree, but not $5 for an article that helps us in the next hour or a tool that saves us an hour.

[lelanthran]

That's because the degree helps us get more money in a direct and easily understandable way.

A tool that saves an hour doesn't save us an hour, it saves our employer an hour. We don't get to home home an hour early when we save our employer an hour.

You're looking at an entirely rational chain of logic.

[aymar_99]

It's more of a cost benefit analysis as the author pointed out. When so much of valuable content is surfacing in hackernews and other streams, it's not cheap, rather a wise decision not to spend money.

[throwaway4good]

Really? That is rather surprising - time to jump on TikTok. And Twitter X.

[renegade-otter]

Correction - it won't make most authors rich. It's like cooking - most chefs are ruining their health with 14-hour-days for pennies, and like five others are crushing it. You have to be really, REALLY good.

[paulpauper]

or just lucky. as someone who reads a lot of blogs, the top substack bloggers are not that much better, if at all ,compared to obscure ones

[coldtea]

Are the chefs that are crushing it "really, REALLY good", or just good, comparable perhaps to tens of thousands of others (and worse than many of them) that nonetheless aren't crushing it?