Will Notes Ruin Substack?

Thinking Fast and Slow

The Substack honchos write,

we set about building a system that fosters deep connections and quality over shallow engagement and dopamine hacks. We turned away from advertising and the attention economy and toward subscriptions and direct relationships. We believed that something beautiful could emerge from marrying the internet’s powers with a business model that puts writers and readers in charge, that rewards great work with money, and that protects the free press and free speech.

When I moved my blog over to Substack, it was not because of the economic model. Yes, I think that subscriptions can be a better model than advertising.

I think that an even better model than individual subscriptions is bundled subscriptions. In the context of newspapers, you get wire service stories, reporting, opinion pieces, sports, crossword puzzles, classified advertising, and more. Bundling is the right idea, but the newspaper bundle is an anachronism, and the newspapers were too stubborn to change, even though they were warned.

For Substack, a bundle could consist of volume discounts for participating writers. Suppose I am a participating writer. If as a reader you pay for 3 newsletters from participating writers, I give you a five percent discount (as do the other two participating writers). If you subscribe to 5 newsletters, you get a ten percent discount. With 10 subscriptions, you get a twenty percent discount. Something like that.

But I do not think that the subscription/advertising dichotomy is as powerful as the Substack honchos make it out to be. I think that the bad incentives in Twitter are baked into the short form of Tweets. If I am correct, then Substack Notes will turn out to be noisy at best and a sewer at worst.

I think that longer-form writing is better than tweets. Short-form writing consists of “takes” that are rapid-fire. You are rewarded for fast reaction time. So you don’t think long-term. You say things you later regret, because you spoke too soon. You speak in a loud, nasty voice, because you are animated by what makes you angry. You get energized by the Current Thing and ignore more important subjects that are not hot at the moment.

Daniel Kahneman has taught us that our brain has two systems. System One reacts rapidly and emotionally. System Two reasons slowly and rationally. Short-form writing is adjacent to System One. Long-form writing is adjacent to System Two.

I have never followed people on Twitter or checked it for anything other than people’s mentions of me. Soon after I started this Substack seventeen months ago, as a “perk” for paid subscribers I did some live events over Zoom (I will get back to that in a few weeks). In some of my first events, I interviewed people I admire, like Tyler Cowen, and asked them about the case for using Twitter. I wanted to know what appealed to them and how I could learn to find Twitter useful. But after several of these interviews, I did not think any more highly of Twitter. I did not adopt any of my guests’ habits for using Twitter.

Twitter’s problem for me is that it fails to filter out noise. Going from an advertising model to a subscription model would not solve that problem.

My guess is that for Twitter the subscription revenues are unlikely to flow from followers to writers. They are more likely to flow in the other direction, from the writers who value being Twitter celebrities. In an environment that is mostly shouting, you would pay to try to have a big microphone. I can see the subscription model in reverse, with popular Twits paying to keep their ego support.

Noah Smith writes,

In an epic blog post called “Status as a Service (SaaS)”, Eugene Wei offered a general theory of social media that has now — quite deservedly — become conventional wisdom. Wei posits that in addition to “use value” — what you directly get out of using a social network — people also care about “status value”. Status value is the amount of social approval you get from a network — likes, retweets, faves, follows, etc. Humans like getting approval from their fellow humans, and social networks are designed to deliver that dopamine hit, day after day.

So another way of putting my idea of paying for ego support is paying for “status value.”

Maybe the Substack honchos are right, and they can create value in a Twitter clone by avoiding the advertising model. But I probably will just stick to reading and writing newsletters. Meanwhile, I hope that Notes does not take over Substack and ruin it.

Substacks referenced above:

@

Will Elon Musk kill Substack?

@

Introducing Substack Notes