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.
"The ultimate goal on Substack is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. Because the Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, writers are rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences, not exploiting it like with ad-based social media."
"While Notes may look similar to social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. It’s social media with a heart transplant."
I remember there was a time when people were excited about medium. Then medium needed some money so they started blocking readers behind login dialog boxes. Then come substack and everyone got excited about it. Sooner or later it will be on same path that medium took.
When will we realise that blogging websites (not personal blogs) are not sustainable in long run.
It still blows my mind they can’t run this tiny operation profitably taking 10% of many multimillion dollar writers’ revenue. Is it a requirement that YC companies raise way too much money and then proceed to torch it any way possible?
> 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.
Sorry to get off-topic, but is there a read/book to understand funding, VCs, etc., from a holistic POV. I totally didn't expect that consequence of having to raise a crowd sourced round due to initial high valuation.
What did they spend their $25 million on? What's the tech they have that costs this much to build? Their hard problems are a building a CMS or are otherwise solved by using fastly and sendgrid?
>This notes thing looks like an attempt to pivot to an advertising based business model
The announcement for the feature on twitter[1] literally emphasizes the lack of ads, pointing out subs are their revenue source, so that would be some 4D enshittification chess.
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.
was there a "mass exodus"? What percentage of people actually left twitter forever to another system and stayed there? What percentage of audience or "influencers"?
Disclaimer - I'm not on Twitter, but my impression is that a few folks made a large amount of noise for leaving but most people shrugged. Other networks mat have seen a temporary large percentage Increase, but a) how much of that stuck and b) a large percentage increase of tiny absolute. Umber can be misleading.
Basically, every 4 years, half of America threatens to move to Canada, but here I am in Toronto and I ain't seeing it :->
There was no mass exodus. The sports and celebrity people are still on twitter. Nobody cares about rando journalists and techies, who are a vanishingly small part of the platform.
While it would have helped jumpstart Notes, I disagree. A lot of content creators have their feet in both puddles, waiting it out - and with this and the non-stop Musk antics and tantrums, we are looking at an actual stampede away from that hellhole.
This kind of feeling almost always turns out wrong. No one can predict when the big moment happens or if it already happened. Substack has benefited from the the Streisand effect. Also known as what ticked off Elon musk.
And there will be many moments in the future, when Elon musk will have upset more of its users. And substock will be there to benefit just like Mastodon is benefiting every day.
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.
> 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.
It's always been very difficult to get people to leave Twitter. This is why their ad business is worth so little. Advertisers pay for clicks, and Twitter just doesn't deliver them very well.
Most of my readers come from HN, reddit or substack itself. Now it's mostly Python so it makes sense a tech oriented medias will be reading more about it.
Still, the ban on substack by twitter means that, while a #python tweet gets some view, the same with an article to substack tanks bit time.
Maybe I'm just "good at tweeting" but my average top-level tweets have at least as many views as I have followers. The "bad" ones are maybe around 15-25%.
However, if I link to an external article or something, the percentage of people who actually click on it is relatively tiny.
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.
> ”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.”
Because they wouldn’t have the followers’ email addresses, which is a big advantage to Substack.
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.
Your post clarified my thinking on this. If I think of Notes as a Twitter clone then I'm upset because, like the parent poster, I want a much narrower subscription-base for long form content than I do short form content. However, if I think of this as merely a short form update from accounts I follow then it's fine.
That said, Substack showing writers adjacent to your subscriptions in Notes makes if feel more Twitter-like in a way that I'm not sure I like.
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.
Unfortunately, this perspective seems very head-in-a-bubble to me. It's a tiny tiny number of people who think the problem with Twitter and Substack is that they aren't federated. Federation isn't a feature people broadly care about. If it makes the platform work better, great! But I don't think that's the case for Mastodon or any other federated platform I've come across. It's the opposite, they make concessions on the experience in order to support federation. That would be ok if those sacrifices were for functionality people really want, but federation just ... isn't that.
The fact Mastodon sites don't even load without JS is absurd, a huge not-talked-about barrier to entry (globally), and a betrayal of its "protocol-first" talking points.
Until that changes Mastodon isn't trying to be a serious player.
- People I follow have left. Most have moved to Mastodon so I can still follow them there. It's a constant trickle but some day the weight will be higher on Mastodon's side of the balance.
- Ads range from obnoxious to downright scams. I know some people used to block ad senders as a matter of routine, but I didn't, most of the time they were valid and I was happy to support the site via their ads. After Musk, most ads vanished and for a while all I saw was Nintendo and SpaceX (!?) ads. Now there's many ads, but I block 95% of them because I REALLY do not want to ever again see the kind of shit they're pushing.
- Search, and content outside of my carefully curated list of follows in my chronological timeline, has become complete hell. I used to be happy to search for "stuff that's happening" in Twitter rather than google or news sites, but now the stuff that comes out is not only irrelevant, but often disgusting.
I still use the site but in a very specific and controlled manner. In that way, the experience is still good (bugs aside). I suspect at some point Musk will force some algorithmic crap down my throat and that will be the end.
Counter anecdote: my personal experience is that the site is less entertaining. I've encountered technical bugs more, such as replies not loading without refreshing multiple times. The "for you" page doesn't show me anything I want to see. The checkmark thing remains super confusing to me. The quality of the ads I've been served have noticeably decreased/gotten more skuzzy.
Many people have left, including myself, due to imperious, chaotic, and plain mean mismanagement. Thus making it vastly less interesting and more trollish.
> 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 really like those "case study" books about our industry, too. Off the top of my head, two more:
- "Hatching Twitter" by Nick Bilton (published in 2014, about the early days of Twitter)
- "Super Pumped" by Mike Isaac (published in 2019, about the early days of Uber)
Neither of them go into great detail or nuance — they're made for popular consumption, so they simplify things and gloss over details. You won't find any extensive discussion of microservice architecture and organizational design. But they were still interesting reads.
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 (@jpmattia@mastodon.mit.edu) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.
The great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.
Relatively happy to see it... though I do tend to lean towards the free speech side of the coin, and kind of miss the relative wild west that was IRC in the 90's. I feel like centralized social media is a blessing and a curse. What's old is new again.
I'm loving Mastodon myself (@pxtl@mastodon.social) but I worry that the UI stumbling blocks caused by the multi-server system and the far-poorer discoverability than what we're used to from Twitter will keep it from growing well -- twitter's algorithmic feed and relevant-to-the-user trending topics and features like that help make twitter feel lively even for a new user even with just a handful of follows. I don't know that Twitter would be as successful today as it is now without those features.
I think "is X the next Twitter" is the wrong question to ask.
When I started working at Twitter (now years ago) my relatives asked me if they should join. And after thinking about it, my honest answer was "no". The only person who needs to be on Twitter is somebody who wants to feel like they're part of a global conversation. Most people just don't and won't.
Twitter is only successful because it started in an era where that was a novel and appealing idea, and because it developed a critical mass of users. Both traditional participants in that conversation (journalists, politicians, media personalities, etc) and new ones (like dril) came on board. It is now gradually losing that critical mass.
These days there are just too many options tuned to too many sets of needs. Mastodon will get a chunk of those people, as will existing social media properties. But I don't think we'll ever again see a global groupchat at the scale of Twitter. Assuming Musk persists in running it into the ground, I think in a decade's time Twitter will be in that bucket with MySpace or SixDegrees, one of those early-internet things that people remember with varying degrees of fondness but would never go back to using.
But also that help make twitter feel like a constant outrage factory that impacts negatively on a lot of people's mental health. I got off of twitter a year ago (deleted my account after 14 years,even) and I'm really appreciating mastodon's less addictive, less "lively"ness.
500M humans are not in Twitter looking to have pleasant, cordial, thoughtful interactions and consume high quality content in a highly moderated environment.
Actually that's exactly what we don't want.
So Substack will be successful in its own niche, doesn't need to eat Twitter's lunch for that.
The problem is at the current valuation of $650M and bleeding $25M per year, they will have to come up with a plan to generate revenue pretty soon, most likely in the form of ads and generally that's incompatible with high quality content.
Now if Substack's fan base put their wallets where their mouth is and pay say $30 per month, then maybe Substack wouldn't need ads, but we know that's not going to happen, not even at $5 per month.
In what sense do you think Twitter‘s business doesn’t have a large technical barrier to entry? Perhaps having a low-volume version makes it a lot easier and skipping all the ads stuff reduces the work.
Many many senses. First, it's already been built. Now people now how to build it. In fact, many of the people that actually built it have left the company and could presumably help to build it again.
Second, the toolchain has matured in absolutely huge ways. AWS exists. Twitter had to build their own cloud to meet scaling needs. Languages have matured or been purpose-written to enable building/scaling these types of systems. A huge portion of the N+1s and hidden footguns have been cleaned out of the thousands and thousands of open source libraries that you can glue together to get the system up and running.
Third, Silicon Valley engineers as a whole have spent the last decade-plus building all sorts of Twitter-adjacent Web 2.0 projects, so there's an incredibly deep pool of people that have extremely relevant experience, even if they never stepped foot inside the Twitter building.
Fourth, Twitter (and companies very similar) have been publishing literal engineering designs and post-mortems for public consumption on their engineering blogs. Even if you have no idea what HTML is, your path to self-education and building your own Twitter clone has never been shorter or better paved. They've even published huge chunks of their own work as open source projects.
And on and on and on and on. And here's the thing about growing to Twitter-scale: it doesn't happen all at once. You can build the low-volume version and just follow approximately the same technical scaling path that Twitter itself followed, except you'll be able to skip a whole bunch of mistakes.
Twitter's moat was and is network effect and having a critical mass of humans interacting through them. It was never about tech as such.
But Musk seems, knowingly or unknowingly, to be systematically pissing off Twitter's users. The blue tick shenanigans and conflating it with paid membership, pissing off advertisers, the bots problem that was never addressed, promoting himself at the cost of business, his covert/overt approval of extreme right wing tweets, so on and so forth.
There's only so much crap users can tolerate. A bunch of users have left for Mastodon, and a few more are doing so after he banned Substack links. Once a good chunk of core and influential content creators leave Twitter it'll get overwhelmed with bots and advertisers and will set of a negative spiral.
Just by not showing random posts which the algorithm decides I should see on my timeline itself makes Mastodon leagues better than Twitter.
I've been interacting with only couple of people whom I follow and vice versa for past several months I've been on Mastodon and I feel great about it. I'm convinced that federated instances are the solution to the social media problems just by strong focus on the theme and inherent limit to scaling without any pressure from VCs.
P.S. Please consider donating to your Mastodon instance.
without a UX that abstracts away the siloed nature of federated instances, it really is a massive hindrance to network effects and will prevent Mastodon from ever growing beyond a small niche
> And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can.
He's completely pissed it away. The skills at finessing the demands of different regulatory regimes were some of the first he got rid of, no doubt deriding it as "wokism". Now he's got fines racking up for publishing Nazi shit in Germany, privacy breaches in the EU, and is globally censoring anything that Hindu extremists don't like.
Turns out that the main problem in social media is the social bit, not whether you can convince a man-child that your code works.
But if we look at the "mainstream" usage, like English-language thought leaders, they are still there, still posting regularly. Like for example in the AI field, all relevant people are on twitter.
Newsfeed based systems like this lead to lousy consequences. Trolling, toxicity, witch hunts, tribalism, racism. Distraction. Disconnection between people and having to be a slave to some algorithm to get noticed. I’m really sad to see substack do this
Twitter's barrier wasn't that it was technically hard - it was that it was free and had critical mass. There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views
Musk is the least of my concerns, I can ignore his account if I cared that much. I can't really ignore that a lot of higher quality accounts have been interacting less because Twitter has become a technical mess, fucking up their timelines and notifications. This sort of loss is quiet, and slow. You only really notice it when it's too late, when your feed is nothing but mindless ads and random accounts you never followed shilling the latest thing on amazon.
The only reason most larger accounts are still "active" is because nobody wants to have to rebuild elsewhere without strong commitment from platform owners - and outside of Tumblr, nobody has really done that. Except maybe now with Substack, we'll see.
You are ignoring the whole Verification process. It was the only platform where users could have interactions with prominent people in a variety of fields and know the interaction was legitimate. That mattered! Killing the verification system chased away many blue checks, who happened to generate a huge amount of traffic for the site.
Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.
> There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views
Most of the people I follow have moved off it. They use Twitter largely for announcements when they've put out something new but all their casual, unfiltered thoughts are going in Mastodon. Every time I check in on Twitter now it seems the noxious behavior to signal ratio gets worse.
>There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views
There ISN'T? Ever since Musk stepped in it's riddled with bugs and changes for the worse. As an example very recently and as of now Twitter Circles are broken and tweets that should be private only for a select few are visible to anyone in the "For You" tab. This is MASSIVE and probably even a breach of GDPR.
I honestly don't care about his political views in my choice of social media (and I'm not aware of any views he holds that I would find extremely objectionable in any case).
I care about being able to choose between "For You" and "Following". I don't want an algorithmically curated feed which includes things I have consciously chosen not to look at. And I don't want people who follow me not to be able to see things I link to because of a pissing contest between tech companies.
There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views
This says so much more about you than about anyone leaving Twitter.
I'm a person of colour. Do I have not have a reason to leave a web site that platforms people who espouse the belief that my children are a disease that needs to be eradicated with fire?[1] Of course I do, and you know that. I do not have a "disdain for Musk's political views," to put it like that is to suggest that white supremacy is a view no different than believing in universal healthcare.
Your rhetoric is a shallow and obvious attempt to invalidate and dismiss other people's concerns.
And while you have a right to your beliefs, no matter how much they lack empathy, no matter how much they are divorced from a belief that other people are not NPCs and are truly entitled to their own world views...
This type of talk is not in the best traditions of Hacker News, a site that yes, has a far more Libertarian slant than I personally hold, but also yes, attempts to hold its discussions and debates to a higher standard than you display in this comment.
———
[1] Other people of colour take a different view on whether to use Twitter, and that's the entire point of not dismissing other people's views. They have their own strategies for making the world a better place, and I don't have to dismiss their choices as posturing, I can respectfully make different choices for myself.
Well, he is definitely upsetting some (many) people. But, at the same time, he is getting the new set of people as users. In the last few years, I would not touch Twitter with a ten-foot pole. Mostly because, I could no longer assess the provenance of the posts and the authenticity of their rankings. Is this post popular/important or is this post was put into my stream by Twitter/other entities in order to influence me? I don't like being manipulated so brazenly.
Now, with the new management, I find myself going to Twitter more and more often. I disagree with many posts and I do not like many posts, but now, I could have some assurance that I am getting an authentic information.
> Mostly because, I could no longer assess the provenance of the posts and the authenticity of their rankings.
How are you doing that now?
> Is this post popular/important or is this post was put into my stream by Twitter/other entities in order to influence me? I don't like being manipulated so brazenly.
I've fallen back to mostly just using the Recent (Following) tab, which means I miss a lot, but at least it's mostly relevant. I'll often search on a topic that I see on my youtube channels that I want to dig into.
My biggest complaint, is that even paying for it, you still see (a lot og) ads... I'd be happier paying for it, and getting no ads than the blue checkmark. Also, the UX on the post delay/edit with blue is annoying as hell.
In what way is Elon Musk not brazenly manipulating Twitter? It's certainly a different flavor of manipulation, but his management certainly isn't a great counterexample.
That would make sense, if you had your pants and shirt on backward.
Musk has introduced several high profile changes to corrupt "the authenticity of their rankings" - what on earth are you talking about regarding "authentic information" given the person running the place is a known and repeated liar, whose lied directly about his management decisions regarding the property you've mostly recently started liking?
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.
And it s not like twitter has some kind of optimal design. The heart button in the middle is bad for my fingers! the left sidebar is useless and search sucks. Both of these services should try to make good work instead of copying each other
I actually thought that a newsfeed would be a good fit for substack, but looking at this i dont think i m going to use it. It should be simpler, a timeline of things i ve subscribed, with some threaded, sane comments. The medium shapes the message, and twitter's medium is just not a good fit for substack's message
I didn't claim there was IP infringement. IG & lots of other companies stole the stories format from Snap. Makes it easier for users who recognize the ui, but it's still got to be galling.
GitLab initially copied GitHub’s UI, virtually identically, and the CEO advertised GitLab in every thread that involved GH for over a year. It didn’t seem that many people on HN cared, because GitLab was “open source” and ethics didn’t apply.
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?
Substack is great for subscription long form content already. It is reliant on Twitter on creating a network for information distribution and curation, though. I don't think Substack is attempting to be more like Twitter - I think Substack needs something like Twitter to sustain the long-form subscription content and this is a defensive move to make sure that Twitter's ongoing collapse doesn't take them out, too.
You still don't see many people using long tweets which is good. I used to despise seeing tweet threads starting with [1/20] for years but Twitter integrating their Threader acquisition via "reader mode" which turns multi-tweet threads into a single page like a blog post really helped solved the UI issue with that (blue feature) but I still tend to avoid threads.
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.
The terrible idea is only having an algorithmic feed. If you always offer the user the option to not use it and instead have a feed they can control, then it’s a non issue
Algorithmic feeds generate more user engagement, that is what they are for. That's why platforms built around following updates from people that you like can't help themselves but implement them.
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
please no. Substack Notes is a self-quarantine zone for the kind of self-promoting Twitter users who viewed the site as a place for them to engage an audience. despite its many, many faults, at least the Fediverse has real people hanging out and chatting with each other.
Mastodon lacks personalized sorting in its news feed as well as account-to-follow recommendations. A news feed that is strictly organized in chronological order becomes unusable when users follow more than 100 accounts. This can only be solved by having a centralized services like Substack.
Readit News
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.
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.
It's not. Substack is very clear about that. https://on.substack.com/p/notes-faq
"The ultimate goal on Substack is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. Because the Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, writers are rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences, not exploiting it like with ad-based social media."
"While Notes may look similar to social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. It’s social media with a heart transplant."
(I don’t think you’re wrong by a factor of 10, just curious where you got your number from.)
When will we realise that blogging websites (not personal blogs) are not sustainable in long run.
Source:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1783191/000167025423...
- Infinite scrolling feed w/ ads
- Video Substacks
- Infinite scrolling video Substacks w/ ads
Sorry to get off-topic, but is there a read/book to understand funding, VCs, etc., from a holistic POV. I totally didn't expect that consequence of having to raise a crowd sourced round due to initial high valuation.
The announcement for the feature on twitter[1] literally emphasizes the lack of ads, pointing out subs are their revenue source, so that would be some 4D enshittification chess.
[1] https://twitter.com/hamishmckenzie/status/164362995302659686...
Disclaimer - I'm not on Twitter, but my impression is that a few folks made a large amount of noise for leaving but most people shrugged. Other networks mat have seen a temporary large percentage Increase, but a) how much of that stuck and b) a large percentage increase of tiny absolute. Umber can be misleading.
Basically, every 4 years, half of America threatens to move to Canada, but here I am in Toronto and I ain't seeing it :->
And there will be many moments in the future, when Elon musk will have upset more of its users. And substock will be there to benefit just like Mastodon is benefiting every day.
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.
It's always been very difficult to get people to leave Twitter. This is why their ad business is worth so little. Advertisers pay for clicks, and Twitter just doesn't deliver them very well.
Most of my readers come from HN, reddit or substack itself. Now it's mostly Python so it makes sense a tech oriented medias will be reading more about it.
Still, the ban on substack by twitter means that, while a #python tweet gets some view, the same with an article to substack tanks bit time.
However, if I link to an external article or something, the percentage of people who actually click on it is relatively tiny.
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.
Because they wouldn’t have the followers’ email addresses, which is a big advantage to Substack.
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.
One can post a note without having a newletter, and you can "see notes" from a user without subscribing.
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.
That said, Substack showing writers adjacent to your subscriptions in Notes makes if feel more Twitter-like in a way that I'm not sure I like.
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.
Sure, I won’t subscribe to hundreds of newsletters, but a few dozen might create a good feed.
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.
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.
The phrasing is weird though: “You’ll then start seeing more of their notes in the Home tab.”
More? Not all? Odd.
But Substack Notes allows for greater potential monetization (ick): TikTok style content, algorithmic recommendations, and ads. Especially ads.
I think it does add some confusion to the product if notes become more popular than articles / comment sections on articles.
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.
Is that possible? Seems kind of difficult due to its nature, but I admit I'm just a very casual user of it and don't know much.
Signed up for the Substack thing. Seems worth a look - it's very similar to Twitter.
Not sure how to solve the HOA problem though…
Until that changes Mastodon isn't trying to be a serious player.
- Ads range from obnoxious to downright scams. I know some people used to block ad senders as a matter of routine, but I didn't, most of the time they were valid and I was happy to support the site via their ads. After Musk, most ads vanished and for a while all I saw was Nintendo and SpaceX (!?) ads. Now there's many ads, but I block 95% of them because I REALLY do not want to ever again see the kind of shit they're pushing.
- Search, and content outside of my carefully curated list of follows in my chronological timeline, has become complete hell. I used to be happy to search for "stuff that's happening" in Twitter rather than google or news sites, but now the stuff that comes out is not only irrelevant, but often disgusting.
I still use the site but in a very specific and controlled manner. In that way, the experience is still good (bugs aside). I suspect at some point Musk will force some algorithmic crap down my throat and that will be the end.
The content moderation is basically nil now so tons of racist content is propagated throughout the network.
Various technical bugs plaguing things - videos not playing, images not appearing, etc
The verification system has been destroyed which has allowed fake accounts to run rampant
The API has been wrecked, causing third party apps to stop working and massive amounts of research being done to be halted
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 returned to Twitter recently due to great features like Community Notes. I don't see what people are complaining about.
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).
Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch!
Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@jpmattia@mastodon.mit.edu) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.
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When I started working at Twitter (now years ago) my relatives asked me if they should join. And after thinking about it, my honest answer was "no". The only person who needs to be on Twitter is somebody who wants to feel like they're part of a global conversation. Most people just don't and won't.
Twitter is only successful because it started in an era where that was a novel and appealing idea, and because it developed a critical mass of users. Both traditional participants in that conversation (journalists, politicians, media personalities, etc) and new ones (like dril) came on board. It is now gradually losing that critical mass.
These days there are just too many options tuned to too many sets of needs. Mastodon will get a chunk of those people, as will existing social media properties. But I don't think we'll ever again see a global groupchat at the scale of Twitter. Assuming Musk persists in running it into the ground, I think in a decade's time Twitter will be in that bucket with MySpace or SixDegrees, one of those early-internet things that people remember with varying degrees of fondness but would never go back to using.
But also that help make twitter feel like a constant outrage factory that impacts negatively on a lot of people's mental health. I got off of twitter a year ago (deleted my account after 14 years,even) and I'm really appreciating mastodon's less addictive, less "lively"ness.
Actually that's exactly what we don't want.
So Substack will be successful in its own niche, doesn't need to eat Twitter's lunch for that.
The problem is at the current valuation of $650M and bleeding $25M per year, they will have to come up with a plan to generate revenue pretty soon, most likely in the form of ads and generally that's incompatible with high quality content.
Now if Substack's fan base put their wallets where their mouth is and pay say $30 per month, then maybe Substack wouldn't need ads, but we know that's not going to happen, not even at $5 per month.
Second, the toolchain has matured in absolutely huge ways. AWS exists. Twitter had to build their own cloud to meet scaling needs. Languages have matured or been purpose-written to enable building/scaling these types of systems. A huge portion of the N+1s and hidden footguns have been cleaned out of the thousands and thousands of open source libraries that you can glue together to get the system up and running.
Third, Silicon Valley engineers as a whole have spent the last decade-plus building all sorts of Twitter-adjacent Web 2.0 projects, so there's an incredibly deep pool of people that have extremely relevant experience, even if they never stepped foot inside the Twitter building.
Fourth, Twitter (and companies very similar) have been publishing literal engineering designs and post-mortems for public consumption on their engineering blogs. Even if you have no idea what HTML is, your path to self-education and building your own Twitter clone has never been shorter or better paved. They've even published huge chunks of their own work as open source projects.
And on and on and on and on. And here's the thing about growing to Twitter-scale: it doesn't happen all at once. You can build the low-volume version and just follow approximately the same technical scaling path that Twitter itself followed, except you'll be able to skip a whole bunch of mistakes.
But Musk seems, knowingly or unknowingly, to be systematically pissing off Twitter's users. The blue tick shenanigans and conflating it with paid membership, pissing off advertisers, the bots problem that was never addressed, promoting himself at the cost of business, his covert/overt approval of extreme right wing tweets, so on and so forth.
There's only so much crap users can tolerate. A bunch of users have left for Mastodon, and a few more are doing so after he banned Substack links. Once a good chunk of core and influential content creators leave Twitter it'll get overwhelmed with bots and advertisers and will set of a negative spiral.
I've been interacting with only couple of people whom I follow and vice versa for past several months I've been on Mastodon and I feel great about it. I'm convinced that federated instances are the solution to the social media problems just by strong focus on the theme and inherent limit to scaling without any pressure from VCs.
P.S. Please consider donating to your Mastodon instance.
He's completely pissed it away. The skills at finessing the demands of different regulatory regimes were some of the first he got rid of, no doubt deriding it as "wokism". Now he's got fines racking up for publishing Nazi shit in Germany, privacy breaches in the EU, and is globally censoring anything that Hindu extremists don't like.
Turns out that the main problem in social media is the social bit, not whether you can convince a man-child that your code works.
The only reason most larger accounts are still "active" is because nobody wants to have to rebuild elsewhere without strong commitment from platform owners - and outside of Tumblr, nobody has really done that. Except maybe now with Substack, we'll see.
Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.
Most of the people I follow have moved off it. They use Twitter largely for announcements when they've put out something new but all their casual, unfiltered thoughts are going in Mastodon. Every time I check in on Twitter now it seems the noxious behavior to signal ratio gets worse.
There ISN'T? Ever since Musk stepped in it's riddled with bugs and changes for the worse. As an example very recently and as of now Twitter Circles are broken and tweets that should be private only for a select few are visible to anyone in the "For You" tab. This is MASSIVE and probably even a breach of GDPR.
I care about being able to choose between "For You" and "Following". I don't want an algorithmically curated feed which includes things I have consciously chosen not to look at. And I don't want people who follow me not to be able to see things I link to because of a pissing contest between tech companies.
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This says so much more about you than about anyone leaving Twitter.
I'm a person of colour. Do I have not have a reason to leave a web site that platforms people who espouse the belief that my children are a disease that needs to be eradicated with fire?[1] Of course I do, and you know that. I do not have a "disdain for Musk's political views," to put it like that is to suggest that white supremacy is a view no different than believing in universal healthcare.
Your rhetoric is a shallow and obvious attempt to invalidate and dismiss other people's concerns.
And while you have a right to your beliefs, no matter how much they lack empathy, no matter how much they are divorced from a belief that other people are not NPCs and are truly entitled to their own world views...
This type of talk is not in the best traditions of Hacker News, a site that yes, has a far more Libertarian slant than I personally hold, but also yes, attempts to hold its discussions and debates to a higher standard than you display in this comment.
———
[1] Other people of colour take a different view on whether to use Twitter, and that's the entire point of not dismissing other people's views. They have their own strategies for making the world a better place, and I don't have to dismiss their choices as posturing, I can respectfully make different choices for myself.
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Now, with the new management, I find myself going to Twitter more and more often. I disagree with many posts and I do not like many posts, but now, I could have some assurance that I am getting an authentic information.
How are you doing that now?
> Is this post popular/important or is this post was put into my stream by Twitter/other entities in order to influence me? I don't like being manipulated so brazenly.
Bad news: Musk is doing plenty of that. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
How ? And how is this different than before ?
My biggest complaint, is that even paying for it, you still see (a lot og) ads... I'd be happier paying for it, and getting no ads than the blue checkmark. Also, the UX on the post delay/edit with blue is annoying as hell.
Musk has introduced several high profile changes to corrupt "the authenticity of their rankings" - what on earth are you talking about regarding "authentic information" given the person running the place is a known and repeated liar, whose lied directly about his management decisions regarding the property you've mostly recently started liking?
Seriously, what?
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.
I actually thought that a newsfeed would be a good fit for substack, but looking at this i dont think i m going to use it. It should be simpler, a timeline of things i ve subscribed, with some threaded, sane comments. The medium shapes the message, and twitter's medium is just not a good fit for substack's message
I wasn't aware of any IP protection of Twitter's UI, which in one form or another has been done 100's of times.
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
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
The fact that Musk is known to be thin-skinned and prone to internet outbursts explains why he threw such a tantrum.
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.
how many platforms need to be ruined by an algorithmic feed before people understand that its a terrible idea?
If you are making a twitter clone, AP is the only way to go