onfocus

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators' work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable.

I absolutely despise that a Substack publication’s home page is, typically, nothing more than a sign-up field for your email address to get the publication by email, and a small “No thanks” link to actually read the damn thing. Half the time when I see that page, I just close the tab out of spite. In what world is “No thanks” a good link to convey the meaning “Let me read the thing I came here to read”?

In recent years, the web has become increasingly monopolized by the small group of powerful companies that have come to be known as "Big Tech". He will hear no argument from me on that point, although the role his own company played in that particular shift is a large and completely unmentioned elephant in the room throughout a book in which he continually condemns these "power brokers" and "capricious gatekeepers" that "squelch competitors" and keep a "stranglehold ... on our lives".

We're all trying to find the guy who did this.

Obviously a guaranteed ten percent raise is wonderful, and I assumed that whatever subscriber losses I suffered in migrating would at least be offset by that. But in fact, as you can see, paid subscriptions are significantly higher since the move. There were about 175 new paid subscribers in my first two days on Beehiiv, which looks to me like a direct measure of the demand that was being suppressed by potential customers not wanting to pay for Substack.