Serializing a Book Online: Lessons From My Web 2.0 Memoir by [[Richard MacManus]] 2024-10-29

for - article - substack - altruism - indigenous - Will Ruddick - adjacency - indigenous altruism mythology - Deep Humanity - individual / collective gestalt - source - Donna Nelham Summary - A brief but insightful article that clarifies the roots of common misunderstanding of - altruism practices in indigenous cultures. - As often the case, an oversimplification is the root of the misunderstanding - The oversimplification posits that such altruism is completely selfless, - but this contradicts common sense as well as the foundations of biology and evolution - From a Deep Humanity perspective, it again highlights the importance of the idea of the intertwingled individual / collective gestalt

for - from - recommendation - from - Michel Bauwens - on Fair Share Commons chat thread, 2024 Oct 17 - context Karl Marx liberation of the individual - to - substack article - Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society - Michel Bauwens article details - title: From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body: A Labor Theory of Revolutionary Subjectivity & Religious Ideas" (2016) - author: Benjamin Suriano

to - Substack article - Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society - Michel Bauwens - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2F4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com%2Fp%2Fwhy-human-contributive-labor-remains&group=world

for - from - AnMaonaigh - annotation - Christian Monastic Communities - from article - Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society - Michel Bauwens - Substack - https://hyp.is/iITCrH2hEe-nIc9iOR4VeQ/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/why-human-contributive-labor-remains

for - Hanseatic cities - from - annotation - Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society - Michel Bauwens - Substack article

from - annotation - WHy Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society - Michel Bauwens - Substack article - https://hyp.is/Pcejdn2fEe-ppu9TjwiF_g/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/why-human-contributive-labor-remains

from - annotation of - Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society - Michel Bauwens - Substack article - https://hyp.is/v5Qe2H2gEe-v1O_KRz3jSQ/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/why-human-contributive-labor-remains

What To Do With Substack? by [[Dan Allosso]]

The "recency" problem is difficult in general in social media which tends to accentuate it versus the rest of the open web which is more of a network.

More Substack thoughts for the pile

from - Linked In - Michel's substack Linked In post - https://hyp.is/mFzOArocEe6De5dtN_2tMw/www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7155134664343441408/?updateEntityUrn=urn:li:fs_feedUpdate:(V2,urn:li:activity:7155134664343441408)

for - interview - alternative types of sovereignties - interview - Hugo Mathecowitsch - Michel Bauwens substack article

to - Michel's Substack - Translation of interview with Hugo Mathecowitsch on the topic of - A system of sovereign bonds but for alternative types of sovereignties? https://hyp.is/RBLQirocEe6eoeeG2hk_Sw/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/a-system-of-sovereign-bonds-but-for?showWelcome=true

for - interview - Hugo Mathecowitsch - Michel Bauwens - substack article - interview - alternative types of sovereignties

Molly says: "If anyone enshittifies my newsletter, it's going to be me, dammit!"

read [[Dan Allosso]] in Peer to Peer?

Not sure if you've seen/found it before, but as academia has been having bigger problems with granting tenure over the past 20 years, there's been a rise of discussion of alternate academia pathways, often under the term #AltAc in social media and other locations. Careers in writing in other spaces have certainly abounded here.

Read [[Doug Belshaw]] in I am so tired of moving platforms on 2023-12-27 (accessed:: 2024-01-05 09:58:46)

Read [[Laura Hilliger]] in FBT - Maybe I'm moving (back)

Read [[Audrey Watters]] in Leaving Substack (Again)

Read [[Alex Hern]] in Substack faces user revolt over anti-censorship stance on neo-Nazis

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/2024-plan

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/?gift=QOMQv_-OzUwtM49NPzkD3nEbcc1k4xnH_P8eWwZzVhU&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Keep Comments Open! by Dan Allosso

Some thoughts about the ability to turn off public comments on Substack posts, which may diminish the conversation.

https://substack.com/profile/12107345-chris-aldrich/note/c-16545418

first post

Reply to Dan Allosso at https://danallosso.substack.com/p/what-value-do-i-add-to-the-substack/comment/16463063

I just saw this morning that Jillian Hess, a professor/researcher/writer at a community college in New York, is also contemplating some of the same territory and trying to balance out the necessaries: https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/introducing-ps-a-new-paid-subscriber

I see that she's using both Amazon and Bookshop affiliate accounts and links in her stream. Have you delved into this for supplementation (albeit probably small)? I've done it for years and it never nets enough to even cover my hosting costs, though it makes the hobbyist portion of the outlay a bit more comfortable.

Beyond this, you might appreciate her particular Substack on note books and note taking or her new book: Hess, Jillian M. How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. https://amzn.to/3VY4RU7

You're probably beyond needing them, but Substack has been building their writer resources and tips for helping to build paid audience. Details at https://on.substack.com/s/resources and https://on.substack.com/s/office-hours

6-7 contractual courses at a public community college in New York is roughly equivalent to 5-10% of Hess' Substack subscribing at $50/year.

Rough estimates of the variables could fill in the holes here to get a current estimate of subscribers.

Perhaps you're conflating too many things? Ask first, what value do I add to the world? (Arguably loads.) Then ask: How do I (best) distribute this value? To this perhaps one of your answers is Substack, which may or may not be one of many tools you use for this purpose. Then the follow on question is what value do you get back from it?

Given HCR's numbers (especially in comparison with Twitter) and her time on the platform, I suspect she may have (or at this point had) some sort of special platform deal with Substack which isn't publicly known beyond the basics of what the typical person could get. It's probably the modern digital equivalent of the sort of deal a highly visible academic might get from a magazine like The Atlantic. The pay scale may be different but we can obviously see that the daily output is wildly different too. If you're not aware, when Substack started they reached out to a wide variety of famous/semi-famous people and helped them to build a quick audience that would have taken them far more time and effort than they would otherwise have ever invested. Part of this was providing initial payment/seed money which was really their early investment for getting lots of quality content on the platform as a means of drawing the masses to come to the platform to both read and create as well. Unless you're a massive name working with them directly, you're unlikely to get this sort of deal today, and this means a tougher up hill slog for the "rest of us" as the platform doesn't need to pay for this sort of scaling/network effect now. If nothing else, knowing these early economies of Substack (and really lots of other social platforms, Medium certainly followed this script as an example) will help you to have a broader perspective and better compare your apples to others' oranges.

https://on.substack.com/p/how-to-sell-a-book-on-substack

https://substack.com/notes

Yet another status update-like product, this time from Substack as Twitter is heavily waning...

Introducing Substack Notes<br /> by Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi

Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...

Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.

As of April 2023, only 5.7% of Substack active subscriptions are paid.

How exactly do they define "active" subscriptions?

https://tracydurnell.com/2022/12/27/i-asked-substack-to-add-webmention-support/

#webmention is just...magic. Instead of getting comments on twitter, substack, your blog, etc etc. It just all comes to one place? I'm actually surprised @SubstackInc doesn't have support already: anytime someone blogs or substacks about your newsletter, you get a mention? 👌👌

— person72443 (@person72443) May 9, 2022

The linguist in me notes that the tweet above from @person72443 is the first time I've seen someone verbify Substack as "substacks"

Every is an example of a newsletter built on Substack that realized what a massive cut was being taken out of the middle so they created their own platform instead.

Today, we can announce that there are more than 1 million paid subscriptions to publications on Substack. On Substack, the newsletter from Substack https://on.substack.com/p/one-million-strong on 2021-11-15

Caveat emptor. A lot of these "influencer" methods are leaving 30% or far more of their value with the platforms they're using for distribution. A better path is to build and promote your own platform and have a direct relationship with one's readers (in newsletter spaces, it's about "owning"/having your reader's email address). Some other newsletter options can be found here: https://indieweb.org/newsletter as well as methods for building and owning your own technology stack across its site. If nothing else, consider having a website where you can have a portfolio/archive of your work.

Careful watchers of the newsletter space will notice that almost all of the highlight examples on these services are established big names with pre-existing platforms and audience. Where are the stories of the other 99.9% and how well they're doing? Who is actually making a full time living doing this without a significant leg up to start? As examples, look for major writers leaving the New York Times to set up newsletters, or people like Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg leaving The National Review to set up The Dispatch (as a newsletter platform)—it's a good bet that they're getting a better deal from Substack than the average person. The NiemanLab has some relatively good coverage of some of this space. (Their annual predictions series also has solid forward looking coverage of the journalism/technology space: https://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2022/.)

(Apologies for lurking... 😅, but happy to chat technology/publishing with anyone interested.)

Navlakha, M. (2022, January 24). On Substack, COVID misinformation is allowed to flourish. Mashable. https://mashable.com/article/substack-covid-misinformation

--Ray

https://www.platformer.news/p/what-i-learned-from-a-year-on-substack

Definitely a hot take, but a truthful sounding one.

Some evidence of Substack acting along the lines of agent, production company, and studio. Then taking a slice of the overall pie.

By having the breadth of the space they're able to see who to invest in over time, much the same way that Amazon can put smaller companies out of business by knocking off big sales items.

Covid One Year Ago. (2021, January 20). If you’d like to see longer and more detailed items which don’t fit on twitter, please join us on substack! Https://t.co/EqsIDz91p6 [Tweet]. @YearCovid. https://twitter.com/YearCovid/status/1351898525693460483

There's a certain sort of irony that this essay is on Substack.

An interesting take on Substack bringing back some of what blogging used to be.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jay Rosen</span> in "A writer explains in this thread why he's going Substack. "The shortest answer I can give is: I miss blogging and Substack seems the best path for a return to a viable blogging culture." It's true that he says about that culture. I was there. 😎" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>04/22/2021 16:08:34</time>)</cite></small>

Given some of the press Substack has gotten in the past few months, I think there's more to be said for actively leaving Substack to move to WordPress or some other platform where you can use your own domain name and content.

Congratulations on the move!

I have a feeling some of the money framing in the newsletter space is overblown. Some bigger names with pre-existing platforms (and by this I mean exposure, popularity, voices, and other possible media outlets already) have some serious upside to creating paid newsletters. Many of these platforms are trying to not only capture a slice of these pies, they're trying to leverage those same big names to actively make it seem to the average person that they too could have a paid newsletter (see how easy it is...). The reality is that many of these others are going to spend a lot of time and effort to try to garner pennies on the dollar or ultimately fail. This sort of game works much better in the YouTube space where self-hosting the video and doing distribution is a much higher bar. The VC space for newsletters is going to have a dreadful crash when folks realize that there's more competition in the space than they bargained for.

Knowing market efficiencies can significantly help some platforms. Not all platforms have this value built in. Many writers are unlikely to see this sort of value in places like Substack which are trying to buy in bulk while they're experimenting. What happens to well-paid writers a year from now when the experimentation ends or dies completely? Where do they take their business then?

I don't see this ending well for most.

This is an important data point. Almost no one is putting any value on editing and other institutional support that outlets provide. Some writers can see at least a little bit of the future.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aram Zucker-Scharff</span> in Ernie Smith on Twitter: "You don’t need Substack. Today’s @readtedium explains how you can self-host your newsletter on the cheap: https://t.co/yp2tLBRS4a" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>03/18/2021 23:48:57</time>)</cite></small>

This is the short version of what Substack is and why people want to use it.

This is also the case for many other toxic online social media platforms. A fantastic framing.

This is a damning definition of Substack

YouTube's model is certainly more mature, but is very similar. Some very high profile creators get paid very well and act as scions for hoi poloi who also think they can replicate the same system and become rich themselves. The incredibly vast majority will never come close.

为了应对这种电子邮件爆炸式增长，创业公司 Substack 在2017年推出了一个新闻发布和盈利平台。大多数通讯平台和支付系统并没有以流畅或有意义的方式集成。收费访问可能是一项繁重的任务。不过通过Substack系统，发布者可以很容易地设置对新闻稿的计量访问，并收取订阅费。截至10月，Substack拥有超过2.5万名订阅者，涵盖各种通讯，平均每年支付80美元。《滚石》杂志的记者马特·泰比（Matt Taibbi）最近在Substack上连载了他的小说《毒品交易的商业秘密》。贾德·莱古姆的《大众资讯》也通过Substack发布。

Example of a writer with a platform helping out new talent.

Something to watch with respect to this is Jonah Goldberg and Steven Hayes who are working with Substack to put out a membership driven news website.