AMEN. I had originally thought Substack would be different. And in some ways it is.
But my professional life has been in fintech - I was one of the people who created "fintech" at Goldman Sachs back in the 1990s when it was a real partnership. I engaged with Chris Best and some of the other Substack managers a year ago about micropayments and was told they only wanted "macro payments." One of the companies I invested in has a perfect micro payments solution, so it was a real offer, not a theoretical one.
I still think that was a stupid decision but it is theirs to make.
Then there was an announcement somewhere that Substack would lure away writers who already had cashflow from other places. Basically underwriting their risk of moving; "If you make $1 million per week by writing for these outlets, and you make $10,000 on Substack, we Substack will pay you $990,000 to move your wonderful musings here."
I gather they got a massive bag of cash from a (Left leaning California) VC to bring shills like Robert Reich and now - God save us - Jim Fucking Acosta whose only claim to fame was being a rude douchebag to President Trump, giving an appalling display of Leftist disdain for a President they did not like. Now apparently, given the shit-eating grin Jimmy has in the MULTIPLE live broadcasts with Chris Best, Jimmy got some of those millions in Leftist cheddar for bringing his "deep thoughts" to Substack.
Oh well. For now, I keep using it - although much like facebook and Twitter, my account was suddenly SUSPENDED for no reason ever provided - although with an eye towards the exit in case it goes full Lefty Moronic. The existence of the Unholy and Somewhat Silly Trinity of the Eternally Empirically Wrong Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Jim Acosta means I can hear the hooves of the horsemen of the Apocalypse bearing down on us all.
If they are paying "Robert Reich and now - God save us - Jim Fucking Acosta" sums like $1M each a year I would consider that to be akin to the publisher book advance money laundering scam where politicians get a huge advance for a memoir that sells maybe 1000 copies
This is not in itself a problem as long as the money I pay substack doesn't pay for the grift, but it is indeed another sign of enshittification. That's actually not good for substack because the barrier to entry for them is relatively low. Quite a few people hopped off to Ghost when they were sure substack was hosting Nazis or whatever it was. There's nothing stopping the rest of us doing the same and building a community there or some other platform.
Heck back a few years I came up with a way to use cloudflare and host your ghost instance at home on a raspberry pi - https://micronetia.devtru.st/ . It still works, if I have the time and the irritation with substack to motivate me I can update that and add a relatively trivial - probably cloudflare hosted/fronted - reader page equivalent using RSS. Now it is true that substack does payments well and having them as a middleman for stripe is way easier than 1001 individuals creating stripe accounts and all their readers having to pay each one individually but none of this is a major factor. I'm pretty sure you and I and a fair number of others could form a similar stripe broker system if we felt like it
Got news for you, Francis: Cloudflare is at least as "en*ttified" as anything else. I can't use a VPN with it, it just puts up the verify you're human checkbox and never does. You're a customer? And you logged in with the same account name that's in the site's transaction records for 10 years back? Tough toenails.
The bottom line is that every one of the cloud hosting providers is techLeft. If you aren't in control of every aspect of your site, count on being policed by the "woke"... whether they admit it or not.
You don't need to use cloudflare to front hosting your own ghost if you don't want to. There are plenty of other options, such as ngrok or even renting your own VPS. It was an example of the low barrier to moving from substack.
Dunno if it's related, but I started noticing some seriously lefty columns and notes in my feed a few days ago. I even politely commented on one, and...it mysteriously vanished when next I came around! So maybe that's the way...when you get Jim Acosta or equivalent, drop a few polite comments that shoot holes in what he says, and maybe you'll disappear him from your feed as well! :-)
I haven't seen, not saying there aren't but haven't much of the ̶l̶e̶f̶t̶ ̶ wrong here.
Hadn't heard of Reich or as you said, Fucking Acosta. That may be, probably is because the follows and subscribes I make are all due to suggestions and recommendations from folks whose opinions I've found I respect.
Bottom line; substack's chunky, weird in places, admin not reachable but for now a lot I like here.
> I want to see comments, posts, notes and everything in chronological order by default.
This. This!!! THIS!!!!!
You are certainly not alone.
Another thing that greatly annoys me (because it greatly complicates any kind of discussion in the comments) is: nested comments. Next to Top/Most Popular order it's probably the greatest evil out there.
The Right Way (he said modestly) is *threaded* comments. Discord does this--and with one serious exception their implementation is pretty good. Bix.com did a good job of this way back in 1985, so it's not like it's an unknown concept, or even a great concept but hard-to-implement.
AMEN. I had originally thought Substack would be different. And in some ways it is.
But my professional life has been in fintech - I was one of the people who created "fintech" at Goldman Sachs back in the 1990s when it was a real partnership. I engaged with Chris Best and some of the other Substack managers a year ago about micropayments and was told they only wanted "macro payments." One of the companies I invested in has a perfect micro payments solution, so it was a real offer, not a theoretical one.
I still think that was a stupid decision but it is theirs to make.
Then there was an announcement somewhere that Substack would lure away writers who already had cashflow from other places. Basically underwriting their risk of moving; "If you make $1 million per week by writing for these outlets, and you make $10,000 on Substack, we Substack will pay you $990,000 to move your wonderful musings here."
I gather they got a massive bag of cash from a (Left leaning California) VC to bring shills like Robert Reich and now - God save us - Jim Fucking Acosta whose only claim to fame was being a rude douchebag to President Trump, giving an appalling display of Leftist disdain for a President they did not like. Now apparently, given the shit-eating grin Jimmy has in the MULTIPLE live broadcasts with Chris Best, Jimmy got some of those millions in Leftist cheddar for bringing his "deep thoughts" to Substack.
Oh well. For now, I keep using it - although much like facebook and Twitter, my account was suddenly SUSPENDED for no reason ever provided - although with an eye towards the exit in case it goes full Lefty Moronic. The existence of the Unholy and Somewhat Silly Trinity of the Eternally Empirically Wrong Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Jim Acosta means I can hear the hooves of the horsemen of the Apocalypse bearing down on us all.
If they are paying "Robert Reich and now - God save us - Jim Fucking Acosta" sums like $1M each a year I would consider that to be akin to the publisher book advance money laundering scam where politicians get a huge advance for a memoir that sells maybe 1000 copies
This is not in itself a problem as long as the money I pay substack doesn't pay for the grift, but it is indeed another sign of enshittification. That's actually not good for substack because the barrier to entry for them is relatively low. Quite a few people hopped off to Ghost when they were sure substack was hosting Nazis or whatever it was. There's nothing stopping the rest of us doing the same and building a community there or some other platform.
Heck back a few years I came up with a way to use cloudflare and host your ghost instance at home on a raspberry pi - https://micronetia.devtru.st/ . It still works, if I have the time and the irritation with substack to motivate me I can update that and add a relatively trivial - probably cloudflare hosted/fronted - reader page equivalent using RSS. Now it is true that substack does payments well and having them as a middleman for stripe is way easier than 1001 individuals creating stripe accounts and all their readers having to pay each one individually but none of this is a major factor. I'm pretty sure you and I and a fair number of others could form a similar stripe broker system if we felt like it
"cloudflare hosted/fronted"
Got news for you, Francis: Cloudflare is at least as "en*ttified" as anything else. I can't use a VPN with it, it just puts up the verify you're human checkbox and never does. You're a customer? And you logged in with the same account name that's in the site's transaction records for 10 years back? Tough toenails.
The bottom line is that every one of the cloud hosting providers is techLeft. If you aren't in control of every aspect of your site, count on being policed by the "woke"... whether they admit it or not.
You don't need to use cloudflare to front hosting your own ghost if you don't want to. There are plenty of other options, such as ngrok or even renting your own VPS. It was an example of the low barrier to moving from substack.
Dunno if it's related, but I started noticing some seriously lefty columns and notes in my feed a few days ago. I even politely commented on one, and...it mysteriously vanished when next I came around! So maybe that's the way...when you get Jim Acosta or equivalent, drop a few polite comments that shoot holes in what he says, and maybe you'll disappear him from your feed as well! :-)
Yeah I think that's the "home" vs "followers" thing. If you change it to followers you don't get that
I haven't seen, not saying there aren't but haven't much of the ̶l̶e̶f̶t̶ ̶ wrong here.
Hadn't heard of Reich or as you said, Fucking Acosta. That may be, probably is because the follows and subscribes I make are all due to suggestions and recommendations from folks whose opinions I've found I respect.
Bottom line; substack's chunky, weird in places, admin not reachable but for now a lot I like here.
I like it so far. I just see signs that it's heading the wrong way and I want to stop that
A together the factors that as Substack grows it hires more people, many of those will be born bureaucrats and Conquests laws 2 and 3 :
"2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."
Though to be fair I'm more noticing the downstream effects of law #3 than #2 . #2 in this case may be a downstream effect of #2
I agree - I've trying to create a small blog on ss, and it's driven me up the wall. No instructions, no hints,nothing to explain their system.
I've decided to dump them & find another location.
> I want to see comments, posts, notes and everything in chronological order by default.
This. This!!! THIS!!!!!
You are certainly not alone.
Another thing that greatly annoys me (because it greatly complicates any kind of discussion in the comments) is: nested comments. Next to Top/Most Popular order it's probably the greatest evil out there.
The Right Way (he said modestly) is *threaded* comments. Discord does this--and with one serious exception their implementation is pretty good. Bix.com did a good job of this way back in 1985, so it's not like it's an unknown concept, or even a great concept but hard-to-implement.