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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30545 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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The thing about Substack is the majority of its successful writers are people who became well known (mostly through legacy media) before they joined substack - Greenwald, Sullivan etc.

The ‘discovery mechanism’ for Substack is essentially Twitter (and, to some extent, the blogroll of other Substack users, which still usually comes down to Twitter). Very different to a publication with many writers where you browse by article title or genre/section.

It’s almost the difference between coming here and every regular having their own blog. This way is more efficient.

That could be visibility that legacy media gave them but I’d make a different argument. That people needed the training of doing good reporter and learning how to work a beat and research. Seeing how the grey haired guy works sources and the process of research helps to develop talent. Substack isn’t going to develop guys but provides the opportunity for people to avoid editor bias and the suits business plan. Substack probably won’t ever being any good at training writers.

But neither are major newspapers. They found it is nore advantageous from a pecuniary perspective to just hire a bunch of 20 or early 30 somethings to write from Brooklyn. Doing hard hitting investigative reporting is hard; doing a report on the latest thing the president said while heavily mixing in your opinion is cheap and easy.

Substack created it's own Twitter-like feed a while back, and had links to them banned in response. You can use it to discover new writers, writers can interact with each other thus boosting each other's visibility etc. Things are still pretty slow, but if they reach critical mass, that's all they need for discoverability. I can also tell you that my response to Twitter login wall wasn't "I guess I'll install Twitter then", it was "I guess I'll install Substack then".

They used to let you see posts people liked by looking at their profiles, and I kept finding new substacks that way. It's a good bit more effort for me to discover good ones now.

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