Have you considered: meta comments about commenting first provide about as much value as commenting first in the first place. Because, at most, you're offering a derivative of an already poor comment.
I don't really know how to calculate this, but I see that other Substackers similar to me have done $10. I'm currently really surprised by how many people got paid subscriptions, both in absolute numbers and as a percent of total subscriptions, which makes me less likely to entertain arguments that I could do better by lowering the cost. Also, the coupon is $2.50, which is close enough to $5 that I feel like it lets people price discriminate correctly if they really wouldn't buy at $10 but would at $5.
I would buy a subscription at $5 and not at $10; I am rich enough to afford it so I feel like I shouldn't use the coupon, but it would becoming out of my 'support Patreons and similar' budget and the other people I support need it more.
If you're happy for people to use the coupon for price discrimination as well as for genuine need, I'll subscribe using the coupon.
On the other side of this, I'm willing to pay $10 per month for a subscription, but would probably pick $5 per month if that was an option. I'd say Scott could run a poll and see, since his potential-subscribers are probably unusually honest about these things, but I suspect most people don't actually know their "willingness to pay" unless they're looking at the credit card entry form and deciding to click "Submit".
> I suspect most people don't actually know their "willingness to pay" unless they're looking at the credit card entry form and deciding to click "Submit".
This seems true.
Also, many people's concern will be whether Scott gets enough money, not whether they miss out on "occasional shorter unimportant content" & open threads. So there's something to be said for Scott experimenting with $10, and people who feel ambivalent about paying that price sitting it out for now.
That way, they don't have to deal with their ambivalence, and it may then turn out that the people who readily pay $10 fund Scott sufficiently. And Scott himself can wait until then to decide whether he wants to see if he'd make more with a lower price, or is just fine with things as they are. He shouldn't be worrying about anything else since he's already given the coupon.
The post on bullshit jobs was solid, iirc. Yeah, it was short, but the subject's a deep one and it made me think.
I used to read fanfiction- I still do, sometimes, but I used to be socially active in that subculture- and it taught me that authors are *terrible* at judging the quality of their work.
"I don't have anything much new, but maybe you could look over this vignette I wrote while I was hopped up on cough syrup."
"...This is brilliant."
"No, it sucks. I was woozy when I wrote it, and I screwed up the scene transitions, and now I can't get them right. Look, I'll just throw it away."
"There's some really great character work in here."
"It's a silly little vignette. I wrote it to pass the time. I shouldn't even have shown it to you."
"...It's twelve thousand words."
(This is based on something that actually happened, a lot of things like it actually happened. Some of those works *did* get thrown away.)
(And yes, there's good fanfiction. Actually, there's mind-blowingly-great fanfiction. The fact that fanfiction is crap with even greater likelihood than Sturgeon's Law would predict doesn't actually have evidentiary implications re the rare pockets of utterly brilliant fanfiction.)
I trust Scott to do a lot, but ought I to trust him to pick which Scott Alexander posts are important and which are trivial? That's a pretty important job.
Agreed. I can afford it, but $10 is a consideration, whereas $5 is an auto-buy from my Patreon-ish budget. It didn't seem like the coupon is meant for our demographic.
Basically, consider the ~15 upvotes on mine and Michelle's comments as minor signal on what people think internet content "should" cost. We're unlikely to use a coupon meant for people in need, but also see 5 vs 10 as "chipping in for something I like" vs "how much value does this provide".
I subscribed at $10 but it feels like a lot to me.
Part of my calculation is that there are 4 or 5 other bloggers I follow at Substack, not to mention magazine subscriptions and podcasts, and suddenly I'm spending $200 per month on content which is more than my BBC license fee.
This is exactly how I feel. I would like a $5/mo subscription option paired with a place to donate when the extra disposable income opens up to do so. Or if there is a post that one particularly likes and wants to send a few extra bucks in acknowledgment.
Ordinarily I wouldn't consider $10/mo to read a blog, but Scott's blog is the best one in the world AFAIK. (but, am unemployed, so $2.50 it is.)
The key word is AFAIK. I bet there are similar, great writers who should be popular and paid, but toil in obscurity. I still haven't found an aggregator I like, and I tend to forget to visit other blogs that are very good but not my #1 favorite. I think the snowball effect that concentrates fame and fortune in only a few people is a tragic bug in society - but I am glad that Scott Alexander earned one of these coveted celebrity slots.
I was fine with using the coupon because it's specifically delineated for students. Pretty smart of Scott to add the Schelling fence of "students and poor people" - if he simply gave out the coupon without restrictions, poorer altruists and students would feel worse about using it, while people looking mainly to save a buck would not. Whereas with the fence, people looking to save a buck feel worse and students and poor altruists do not.
I know some things about pricing on the internet and the first rule of pricing is "charge more than you think you should, even after learning the first rule of pricing" and another rule is that what people say they would pay or what feels fair to them based on Netflix or whatever else they're anchoring on means almost nothing.
Um, it now occurs to me that might be poor form to sound so mercenary about pricing while using the logo of my startup as my avatar. Ironically we just wrote a post on the Beeminder blog today about Beeminder's pricing and how we don't think a freemium model is realistic for self-funded startups. But that's exactly what Scott is using here and it's working great for him, so, thinking-face.
One answer is that freemium only works if you're popular enough.
I think freemium is very different for Patreon-style support than it is for something that's more like a business transaction. I think Scott's surprise at his fraction of paying subscribers -- after carefully and repeatedly disclaiming how little you get for paying -- bears this out. Every time Patreon creators ask what supporters want in terms of rewards, I always try to chime in to say that my reward is being able to support their work, but I think a lot of people find this hard to believe.
Everything I'm doing right now in terms of pricing/model feels idiotic to me, but I'm following the advice of the Substack people, and they're 100% right and I'm 100% wrong.
They could be right overall without capturing all cases. I looked to subscribe to support you, hoping to pay $25 or $30 for a year. Didn't check the coupon because "can't" pay isn't literally true, and support, not the extras, are my goal. Considered asking for Patreon (where I support several people at similar rates) but suppose that dilutes Substack. So free content it is. Thanks regardless.
Or keep the $10 option up now and 13 months from now add a $5 then 13 months later add a $2. Maybe people willing to pay $10 start with that and never both to go change?
More people will get it at 5 but tbh with you 10 is fine. I won't get it, till i can afford it and thats okay. There will be enough that will get it for 10 and won't need you to haggle down. plus you're adding a coupon too so i think its fine.
Have you considered a non-credit card payment option? I know you might be limited by substack's payment processing system, but here in Europe credit cards are nowhere near as prevalent as they are in the USA.
Substack uses Stripe for payments which should support pretty much anything except PayPal. Is there a payment method it isn't accepting for you? Does it make it look like it's credit cards only?
(I'm asking very earnestly because the answer to both of those matter a lot for Beeminder. In particular, we're trying to decide whether we can safely drop support for PayPal.)
Hmm. What payment method would you ideally use that doesn't have the equivalent of a credit card number? Also, are you using a VPN or anything that would make it hard for Substack/Stripe to know you're in Europe?
Presumably whatever the local equivalent of iDEAL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL) is wherever Kuros is located (iDEAL is Netherlands only).
I'm in the same boat and can confirm that it can be really obnoxious at times that so many companies from the US seem to assume that everyone has a credit card.
I'm in Europe and basically if I can't pay with PayPal I just don't do it. The bank fees are too outrageous and Idon't actually know of any other (good) alternative.
If you've been deplatformed you can't use any payment system. We are currently disconnecting the entire banking system from the deplorables. We should really ask Kuros3's political stance before trying to troubleshoot.
There may be looong thin tail substack doesn't see; people* who would gladly give a little but can't afford the current minimum. The current substack audience probably is not rich in them, but this may be useful and rewarding to explore. The coupon is really helpful, but it sets a yes/no step at a fixed price.
* From poor country, poor reader (retired, or high disease costs, or on welfare), high other needs (single parent)…
Consider pushing substack (not necessarily now, but when you've gained sufficient weight, which I'm sure you will) towards a more flexible pricing system. Imagine a slider with labels:
A/B testing against the current system would be interesting, but the compared have to be similar -- which makes alternating months or weeks for the foreseeable future unreliable. Maybe compare user groups (odd/even nth digit of IP?, odd/even second of http request?).
I'm just pleased to have the option to make my revolutionary gesture against Corrupt Journalism Policewoman by immolating my checkbook instead of immolating myself.
The $10-$20 range seems to be the empirically optimal number for paid subscribers across a variety of services and platforms. If you drop the point to $5, you don't get twice as many subs, and many of your $10 subs downgrade to $5 if given that option, which loses you significant money on net. You can play games with this by changing reward levels for different tiers, but it's certainly not a safe bet that adding a lower tier will make more money. Source: I'm an Internet content creator who makes money on Patreon.
$10/month is more than I'm usually willing to pay for this kind of thing. If you had a patreon or something, I'd gladly contribute $1 or $2/month, even without getting extra content for it.
Seems to me then that you'd use the discount code, on the basis of "I suspect you'd rather be paid something than nothing"? That seems honest enough, especially since the product you're really buying is support for Scott and not the open threads or AMAs.
Worth considering at least, but I am not so sure about this because:
A) I'm not sure what kind of cut substack is taking.
B) The instructions were to use the coupon only if you are too poor to afford full price, not only if you would not have paid full price in the absence of a coupon.
Basically, I go by my piracy rules here. I've been downloading illegally since Napster, but I try to throw money at creators when I can, and when I think the price is reasonable. And if the price is reasonable to just buy it, I just buy it. Acknowledge that you can get it for free, but try not to be a freeloader.
I think I'll change my stance on (B) when Scott does something a little more explicit to contradict the very clear instructions he gave on the post as to when you should use the coupon.
Yup. For digital goods, they don't lose anything just from me taking a copy, so the ethics are very different from theft of objects. I'm well aware that it's illegal, but I think you can do it in ways that are still moral.
"After talking to Substack about this concern, they've agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers. I might occasionally remind you that they exist, but you won't get teased by the titles or see stubs that cut off halfway."
Will these posts also be completely hidden in Substack's RSS feed? I read your blog through RSS, not email. And Substack only has a public RSS feed. There are no per-subscriber unique feeds.
If the stubs are hidden in the RSS feed, then I will miss out on them, despite being a subscriber.
The best option would be for Substack to provide paid-subscriber feeds, separate from the free public ones.
I'm using an email-newsletter-to-RSS app to handle this (built into Feedbin, but I suspect most RSS readers do this now), but the user experience is significantly worse and I would strongly prefer an RSS feed.
Thirded. It seems from the support page like Substack has a feature like this for podcasts, providing an RSS feed per-subscriber that includes subscription-only posts.
It might be as simple as checking "Enable podcasting beta" in the Podcast section of Substack settings, per https://on.substack.com/p/how-to-use-substack-for-podcasts - I'm not seeing anything in there that suggests enabling the beta impairs making text posts, paid-access or otherwise. Even if that doesn't do it, the feature existing as part of the beta makes it seem like it might not be too hard to implement as an option for non-podcast Substacks.
Wait, yes, this is really important. I was just going to buy a subscription, but if it's not going to make my RSS feed contain the posts I'm paying extra for, then there's no point in subscribing.
Well, OK, upon a moment of self-reflection: the point to subscribing is to support Scott. I'm happy to do this and have just subscribed in order to do so.
Still, I'd really like an RSS feed that contains subscriber-only content mixed in!
If Substack "agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers" they were seemingly being careless, because the archive page and the (RSS?) feed both are displaying subscription-only posts.
I really, really wish Substack had an all-you-can-eat type feature. There's no way I can pay $100 for every single blogger I'm interested in, but I could probably pay $150 a year for several people.
I think we'll eventually see some of them consolidate into small magazines running on Substack, sort of like how Patreon has a bunch of content creators who have pretty much turned into small production companies to regularly produce content.
Keep in mind that there will exist Substack bloggers who will be ... *combative*, to put it mildly. Therefore, if Substack were to have an all-you-can-eat plan, some of that money would go to someone who a large number of members of the public see as their adversary. Factions in the public would then perceive all forms of participation in Substack as funding their opponents. And not entirely without reason. Much better, then, not to mix funding streams.
Substack blogs are not perceived as part of the same entity, and they need to stay that way. I tried to discover other bloggers through Substack, and hoped that I would fail for this reason. It turned out to be possible after all. But I have been very pleased that blog discovery was non-obvious.
FYI, the email I got has a footer at the bottom saying "You’re on the free list for Astral Codex Ten. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber" and a big "Subscribe" button. This doesn't bother me in the least (in fact, I appreciate the reminder and intend to subscribe within the next week or two); I'm simply letting you know in case this violates either your principles or agreements.
+1. I subscribed to support Scott, but if I didn't have so long a history with him, I would never have done that without knowing the sort of thing I was missing.
There are two remaining concerns about the comments:
1. The "Load more" button is annoying. My ideal would be to load all comments by default like on WordPress, but failing that there should be a one-click "load all comments" button. Without this, navigating the comments section, searching for previously read threads, etc., will be too inconvenient to allow discussion to flourish the way it did on SSC.
2. We also need a way to quickly find *new* comments. Currently, as far as I can see, nothing differentiates read comments from unread ones, so there's no good way to catch up on discussions in the various nested threads.
As long as you're talking to them about comments, there's one other crucial issue: you can get emails for likes _and_ replies to your comments, but you can't choose to get emails for only replies. That makes the email notifications effectively unusable.
Interesting, I got an e-mail about your comment, even though it is a sibling rather than a child of mine. I wonder if one gets notifications for grandchildren (as this comment is to bakkot), nephews (as Aapje's comment is to Glenn's), or grand-nephews (as this comment is to Glenn's).
An addendum to "load more" being annoying -- it also seems to break the comment links in the reply notification emails, which seems like an honest-to-god bug in substack. (Although I guess it could be related to whatever customization of the comment section they did for you.) But the links don't currently work for comments that aren't loaded when the page loads. (At least for me.)
Hi, Scott! Am I allowed to use the coupon if I am by no definition "too poor" (indeed quite the opposite, due to a recent-ish death in the family) but sincerely unsure how my finances are going to work out this year (due to the aforementioned recent-ish death in the family, which has generated bills that by now total an excess of more than I previously ever had in my bank account, some of which are recurring) and what I can spend on a regular basis? I would, if it lets me, change to a proper model once I know more (probably Q3 or Q4 this year?).
:) I'm not sure if you're mocking me. I assume not, but I still want to be clear, I'm just unfamiliar with a bunch of taxes and fees that didn't previously apply to my life, along with administrative overhead. I didn't own a house, I didn't own an apartment, I didn't have to pay a tax advisor, I didn't have to pay for a certificate of inheritance, graves and grave stones are expensive, et cetera.
If that were all, I'd subscribe normally, because I'd be objectively better off, but I've just changed jobs and will have to live in two places simultaneously for reasons (short version: my partner isn't moving with me and I'll be paying our current apartment's rent *plus* the rent of my new place... ooooor buy an apartment with the inherited money, in a city that's ultra expensive, and will leave me with approximately none of my inherited money left), and I don't know if the increase in income I've gotten covers everything it needs to cover.
tl;dr shit is complicated. I'm trying to summarise and I can tell the summary is inadequate, but maybe you can get an idea of why I'm unsure.
If I may, I'll serve as your conscience here. Go ahead and use the coupon if you really want to see the subscription content. Precommit here to pay if and when things resolve favorably. If you, at that time, feel your prior (current) fears were overblown, find a way to retroactively compensate Scott.
Thanks for the input! This sounds about like what I was planning.
That said, I do also know of myself that I err on side of being financially cautious - the current situation is difficult to get an overview on (due to lots of variables changing), so I am almost surely being overly cautious.
As such, I think it's probably best if I sleep on it? I prefer subscribing over not subscribing (as ZeroGravitas said, better some support than none), but maybe I can get the panicky feeling in my gut to subside by just sleeping over it a night.
It's good to know using the coupon is an option if the feeling doesn't go away (thanks for posting, Scott!). But I hope the feeling *does* go away. I feel like there's no reason it shouldn't subside, I'm cognisant that it's just been a rough couple of months and I have never seen invoices this large in my life (and I now no longer have any family to talk to about it), so it's definitely shaken me up a little bit. So obviously that makes me stupidly cautious.
Having had to deal with a solicitor who took forever and a day just handling a basic will with no huge inheritance or complications after a family death, and who was plainly milking the process to generate as much revenue for himself as possible, and who I couldn't ditch and get someone else to handle it because he was the solicitor involved in drawing up the will, handling the deeds of the house, etc. I completely sympathise with the unexpected expenses of a death in the family. Use the coupon in good faith. When/if you can afford to pay more, do so.
Yglesias really messed up on that first year deal. $250,000 is a lot of money, but he's going to end up paying Substack nearly three times that much for his first year out of his gross revenue until it goes back the usual cut next year (his monthly gross is a lot higher than $27,000/month now).
I wonder why he took it? The guy was a top columnist with two published books and the co-founder of Vox - I doubt he was hurting for spare cash unless he's got a $1500/day Faberge Egg addiction.
The negotiations were probably months ago, and I think it was unclear you could make $250K/year, let along more than that, from blogging at the time. I tried to eyeball how much money I could make blogging in the pre-Substack era and it was nowhere near that amount. I think Substack has succeeded beyond most people's wildest dreams and it's hard to remember what deals sounded good or bad way back in 2020.
"And I know some of you are concerned about the risk of corporate deplatforming. My weak answer is that so far Substack has been great at resisting calls for this, I think it's worth rewarding them with my business, and I'm proud to contribute to companies that share my values. My strong answer is that if I start feeling too constrained, I'll leave."
I hope you will test this sooner than later so that if you end up needing to leave, it happens before we all get accustomed to the new site and give substack too much money.
There are some Substacks with content much more controversial than anything Scott writes about (e.g. Niccolo Soldo interviewing Weev). If that kind of stuff gets removed that would be a pretty good canary in the coal mine.
I missed Slate Star Codex and am glad to have you back — I admit I’m excited to hear what you’re doing in your new psychiatry practice too, but that’s because I work in healthcare so healthcare model experiments are always interesting to me, and while I often like your content even when I disagree with it, the psychiatry posts have the special place in my heart of someone from several adjacent industries
Is there a mechanism in place by which I can support you while also making it clear that the additional fun incentives aren't exciting to me? I guess a Patreon or similar external service would accomplish that, but I don't mind the idea of some small cut of my contribution going to the platform. They're doing a lot of heavy lifting through exposure and lack of censorship, after all. Are there plans for a subscriber poll, perhaps? This seems like useful information to guide your decision-making process when it comes to incentives.
Not the original commenter, but I think the idea is to credibly signal that subscription-only content isn't what's generating the support, so that you don't feel tethered to subscriber models for continued income and can weigh tradeoffs better.
I see. I think even if Bibliophile personally did this, so few other people would that it wouldn't be a useful way of judging how many people would do this. If they just want to personally send the signal, consider it sent!
For what it's worth, I also expect to get ~0 value from subscriber only content, don't particularly want there to be valuable subscriber only content, but wanted to express support via the international standard unit of caring (dollars).
Same here, so n >= 3 for whatever that's worth. Scott could always do a survey if he needs more info on this. And the paywalled offerings are pretty minimal, so that is some data already.
Almost certainly Substack -- which takes a cut of Substack subscription revenue -- requires Scott not to cut out the middleman by allowing people to pay for his posts through other routes. That would be a very normal contract term for something like this. (In fact, it would be pretty surprising if they _didn't_ include it.)
Then I'll go ahead and send the same signal. I certainly won't turn down the private open threads, they sound pleasantly peaceful, but if you changed your mind about the incentives and made everything public, I wouldn't hesitate to stay subscribed.
I'll add my voice to the signal then. I will be subscribing because you deserve the support, but the extra content being subscription-gated actually makes me *less* enthusiastic about subscribing.
This is because I'm ideologically opposed to artificial scarcity of digital goods (ie restricting access to something that can be duplicated for free).
I understand that digital creators are stuck in a supply-and-demand based economy and don't have great options for making money without implementing artificial scarcity (aside from advertising, and I am guilty of screwing that model with adblockers) so I don't resent creators that do so, but I hate that the world works this way and it always makes me sad.
I'd rather my support of a creator help them to give more free content to everyone, not cause them to take some of their content away from other people.
Works for me. I suppose this comment thread provides a venue for a bit of initial feedback on the issue. If you start to get the impression that the quality of your incentives isn't tightly coupled with your success in attracting subscribers (e.g. your incentives don't do much to encourage subscription, but you have a contingent of loyal readers who subscribe anyway), something like a sub survey could always be a later step.
Given the structure of Matt's deal I wonder if it's better for me to wait a year then subscribe? E.g., does subscribing now mostly benefit Scott or mostly benefit Substack?
I think Matt's deal is kind of like Parfit's Hitchhiker ( https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/parfits-hitchhiker ) or one of those things. They only gave the advance believing that readers would subscribe, so if readers want to "counterfactually" "cause" the advance to happen, they should subscribe.
$10/mo is absolutely bonkers, completely out of touch with reality pricing for a single blogger. I didn't pay that much for the entirety of the NY Times, who's subscription I cancelled over the threat of doxxing you.
I kind of agree. I felt like $100 was well worth it to show appreciation for the years of previous content. But going forward, $1-$5 per month seems like the most that's reasonable for one author. For example, we spend $15 on a book that takes an author probably an average of a year of work to complete (via audible subscription).
A platform like substack is in a fantastic position to allow users to put together an a la carte menu of subscriptions of various authors for a very reasonable rate without suffering from falling into micropayments. A dollar per author per month is an extremely reasonable fee, make it a $10/mo minimum to substack, you pick out 10 authors. I'm extremely in favor of paying for content, but it has to have some basis in reality.
Isn't reality simply whether or not people find Scott's work worth it? There's no natural law or anything on how much things ought to cost, right? I never subscribed to the NY Times because I didn't think they were worth it at all. I'm happy to pay 8.33333 per month for Scott which is what 100/year amounts to.
Yes. But part of what determines what it's worth to read Scott's work is what the opportunity cost is. If I can buy 6-7 of the best books for the year for the same cost as subscribing, that's a relatively high opportunity cost.
Presumably, we've settled on a market price for books (around $15 per year of author output on average). Because that maximizes revenue for authors. There are some books *I'd* pay $100 for. But by lowering the price they expand their readership by more than enough to make up for the lower price.
If I were innovating in this sphere, what I'd try and do is keep the actual price low but then try and capture some of that consumer surplus in other ways. For example, get little badges or cosmetics next to your comments, more profile picture options, maybe allow color or different fonts for higher paying subscribers (That sounds kind of annoying though), maybe something like Reddit Gold where you can tag articles or comments you really like, the weekly subscriber threads or AMAs he's already mentioned, etc.
Honestly, I find these ideas awful. As a subscriber I would prefer if Scott would stick more or less to the same comment management policy as on the SSC. Why else (excluding altruism, of course), would people subscribe right now, if they would not like SSC and expect that this space would be similar in spirit?
Yah, those ideas weren't great. Idea is to try and capture more of the consumer surplus while keeping entry price lower though. I'm sure more imaginative people than me could figure out something (e.g., skins in video games but something that works in blog format).
In practice, right now, Scott has a $0 option and a $10 option. He's expecting most people do the $0 option, and to pay the bills with the $10 option.
If he offers a $5 option for everyone, then almost nobody who's currently paying $10 will choose to continue paying $10. A few generous people would, but the vast majority will choose to drop down to paying $5.
So the question becomes, would the increase in subscribers who are willing to pay $5, worth it compared to the number of people who are willing to pay $10? If the demand from "subscribers who are willing to pay" is mostly inelastic between $10 and $5 (which is very plausible), then it'd make more sense to charge $10.
Also, keep in mind that Scott has a $3 tier "for students and poorer people", which offers price discrimination to capture the lower end of the market, without "normalizing" a lower price like $5.
I'm sure Substack has information and statistics on the status of the market vs price of the blog. Choosing $10 as the default rate on Substack is probably the result of market studies showing the optimal income rate. If you're unwilling to pay $10, then just go with $0 for the free tier. It's pretty clear that even though you get some small token bonuses with paying for the premium tier, the intention of the payment is to mostly be a donation to Scott.
I feel that there's an important difference, which might be a reason to pay more for some and to pay less for others: most of his content is public and free.
I like Scott's content. But if I think about it, the fact that it's open, out there, and there are many other people reading, adds quite a lot of value to me. That is, I like it more because I know the ideas that I'm enjoying are being spread. It would be less valuable (though still valuable) if I was the only one in the world reading him.
If other people are like me in this regard, you can't just gauge the value of subscribing here with the value you get from the content of a book. In part, you are financing the fact that any article can end up being viral and spreading the ideas you like. And we know nowadays that some people spend hours every day trying to push their ideas around to their 17 followers.
Personally, I haven't subscribed though, but if I was in a better situation I might.
Do you personally value receiving the content Scott creates more or less than you personally value receiving the content the NY Times creates? They surely create a lot more of it. But if all I cared about was quantity, I'm sure I could subscribe to 4chan or something.
I can't say if it's fair, but Matt Yglesias charges basically that ($8/month) and is making $500,000+ a year, so I don't think it's out of touch with the reality of what people will pay.
I have no idea how Substack works and makes money, but it seems like it does so I'm going to participate in it and charge about what everyone else charges. I think it would be completely fair for you not to subscribe, and you'll still have access to most of the content.
I subscribe to Matt Yglesias's substack. It's great - daily open threads, near-daily posts that are really good for the frequency. But it's almost all behind a paywall. I'm paying to get that content. And it seems to be like his $8 is on the high end - Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi are all $5.
The $10 here seems very high if most stuff is free. Personally I'm happy to pay it. But I think it's a little out of step with the ecosystem.
FWIW I think the combination of "mostly free" and "more expensive" makes sense: it's asking the really committed people to subsidize free stuff for everyone, rather than selling a product at a particular price point. It's the public YouTube channel + Patreon with perks model, rather than the traditional newspaper model Greenwald et al are going for.
You know, you're probably right. Maybe Scott's style even fits particularly well with a Patreon model - a lot of people really, really loves the old blog!
For me, the more freely available content the *more* I am willing to pay. Patronage is to me about creating things that you want to exist in the world, not getting exclusive access to them.
As a counter-point to what Scott does, each time Sam Harris tightens his paywall the closer I come to cancelling my subscription.
Interesting. Was thinking about Yglesias, but had imagined it was more like 50% content behind the paywall. This makes me more inclined to subscribe to his.
As for the percentage for free content here, I paid for the same reason many people support PBS and NPR. It's a way to price discriminate voluntarily. Let the comfortable professionals like me cross-subsidized starving students.
I could end up being totally off, but I get the feeling this is an early adopter effect that relies upon people mostly not consuming content from bloggers you can individually subscribe to, so paying for Matt Yglesias is fine if you're not paying for much else. But if Substack or any aggregate of services where you can subscribe to individual writers takes off, we're either going to end up in a situation where everyone consumes content from only one or two writers or everyone is going to need to lower price per author. It likely needs to converge to something like YouTube Premium, which I think is $10 (I pay for it but don't even remember what they charge). I only follow about 8 channels or so on any regular basis there, but there is no way I'd pay $80 for that even though I could afford it.
I think I feel the same way about Substack. I'll pay you $10 a month right now, but I'm never going to pay $80 a month for access to blogs if writers I care about just as much all migrate to here.
At least in your case, there's some additional goodwill in that I'd like to subsidize your medical practice experiment, but really I'd prefer a more direct way to do that. Had you considered incorporating it as a non-profit so it could just accept donations?
Strongly disagree. I value Scott's writing more than I value Netflix or Amazon prime, both of which I happily pay for. I certainly value Scott's writing more than I value the NYT. $10/month feels super fair, especially given the coupon he included.
Love you Scott, and so glad you are back. Just a request, would be nice if you too didn't start saying "some of whom are probably women or minorities". As a woman and "minority" in the context of America, getting so tired of everyone playing identity politics and reducing people to their identities. If you like a female blogger, or a minority blogger, just link to them and talk about their work. Stop mentioning their immutable characteristics.
This whole thing has gotten so bad that now whenever they mention that a minority or female is going to talk about something, especially at work, I immediately get biased that they are going to be worse than the other speakers because they were just brought in for woke points. And I personally feel that instead of just being evaluated as a person, I'm also being evaluated on my gender and ethnicity and have something to prove on it's behalf.
That comment seemed like a half-hearted sarcastic quip about the medias bias towards identity politics. But I suppose even being sarcastic towards identity politics is somewhat playing into it in a way.
I don't think it's playing into it, but just a soft criticism. What's true though is that it's harder and harder to be obviously sarcastic without being explicit "\s". People are so fed up of the ridiculous non-sarcastic comments that it just doesn't land.
Lol very accurate, so hard to tell what is sarcasm when the most idiotic things are said with an earnest straight face. Perhaps I wouldn't have written this comment if I didn't have to attend a straight faced meeting about diversity metrics on my team 5 mins before reading this article, with someone explicitly asking everyone to prove how they were diverse.
As a woman myself, it annoys the hell out of me because the opinions ascribed to "women and minorities" are generally not ones I hold. Some women do have those opinions, maybe even a lot of them! But some of us don't! I'm already on the weird side of womanhood by having a selection of traditionally male-coded interests and a severe lack of interest in a lot of traditionally female-coded ones, I don't need to be made feel like a Martian for not being in lockstep with "everyone kno wimmen'n'minorities think dis".
I don't mind feeling like a Martian, I just resent the implication that "100% all women everywhere believe this thing".
Nice to see you, Deiseach! (would it help to be thought Martian by the local community standards :) over your Catholicism rather than over your phenotype or [presumably Irish] haplotype? :) )
I've felt like a Martian from late preadolescence on (well, when I first grasped how really abnormal I was, probably around age 10-11 - 1968/9 -, I _wanted_ to be a Vulcan, but thought the mental discipline involved - not the silly superhero powers - were an unrealistic aspiration).
But I'd like to gently push back on "I don't need to be made feel like a Martian: if group norm enforcement can make you *feel* like a Martian when or in those aspects where your best judgement is that you are not a Martian, you might need to work on resistance to letting your emotions be driven by group norm enforcement - that's a constant battle for me (and the fact that I try is a Martian characteristic, I think), so please don't assume I claim an answer. And yes, I grasp that until pretty recently anyway group norm enforcement overall was more intense on wimmen than on menfolk. Not sure how true that is for a PMC male of ten in 2021 America.
I don't mind being a Martian. That developed over a long time, and various different elements, of being exposed to wider media/pop culture of the "everyone naturally feels like this/thinks this/all right-thinking people agree that..." type. "Okay then, if Not This means Not Human, then I'm Not Human". It's annoying though, when it comes from the same types of people who would be very scrupulous about fine shades of difference in something else. If it's bad to lump "all X" together then it's equally bad to have "all women" or "all minorities". I understand the good intentions behind some of it, but equally some of it is what, over on the sub-reddit TheMotte, calls "consensus building": 'all right-thinking people agree that..." with the unstated but implicit "and if you disagree then you are a wrongthinker and bad person".
You may have a point about emotion-driven resistance to group norm enforcement, I do tend to pin back my ears and dig my heels in and balk like a mule when I feel that I am being forcibly nudged towards "we all agree on X, don't we?" There's an Irish saying "I'll be led but I won't be drove" that fits there 😀
Yea dude (a banned word at my company), feel the same. Women are 50% of the population. Also, some of the so-called minorities are literally more than 1/3rd of the world population, aka chinese and indian. It's such a reductive annoying term, POC. Reminds me of how everyone found cubans voting for Trump being strange, it's like these people literally don't get we too are entitled to our own opinions.
"whenever they mention that a minority or female is going to talk about something at work..." Do you feel this way any time there is a female or minority speaker? Or only when these characteristics explicitly get called out?
(also, I agree with gph's take below that Scott was being slightly tongue-in-cheek here)
Responded to singalong above that the most idiotic stuff is being said earnestly so I can no longer tell what is sarcasm and not. Before reading the post I was in a meeting where we all had to say how we were diverse, in order to track diversity on our team, which pissed me off that I didn't even notice scott wrote that in a sarcastic sense.
To be perfectly honest, I never did feel biased earlier because I never cared for their identity. But working in a company where we are constantly told to cut corners on hiring "diverse" individuals, hosting them on talks and keynotes despite them not being close to as qualified as the best people, and knowing this is becoming standard across industries, I can't help but require the "diverse" person to prove themselves first in my mind.
Which is personally upsetting, because I think I'm very competent so when I am contacted by someone I would want to work with, or am joining a new team, I feel obligated to prove my worth to them. Because I know how **I** would feel about someone with my attributes.
The more unconscious bias training I have to attend, the more I resent these people for making me feel like my gender and ethnicity come way before my work and personality, and the more I am conscious of it, the more I view another person through this lens.
Somewhat related, but I'll probably use a different account to make other comments because I don't want to be associated with my identity. I get that it might be a reach to feel that way, but I want my comments to be decoupled with what I look like and stand on their own. It's sad that the internet is the only place left where this is possible these days.
If past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, you will probably mention something similar again in the future. Will you change account again? Might as well keep this one.
On the other hand, perhaps changing accounts regularly is good practice these days. But you will need a new e-mail, I guess.
Everyone has a unique financial situation, and a unique approach to making financial decisions. With that said, I feel compelled to offer one additional piece of information for anyone who wants to develop a mental model that covers subscription behavior: I chose to subscribe at a price greater than $10/mo. Probably not a lot of people will comment to say as much, but we do exist.
I think there should be an option for more than $10/month or $100/year. People would then be able to engage with you out of a sense of philanthropy. Your work is a social good at this point.
I don't know if there's a monthly option, but you can choose to pay more than $100 if you do it yearly (I think it's called something like Founder's level?). You seem to be able to put in a custom amount.
I subscribed and it's already paid for itself just from discovering Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive". <3
My first question: Why "ten"? I mean, I know it turns the near-anagram that was "slate star codex" to an exact-anagram of "scott alexander". But this is Scott, so of course there will be significance of the number 10 as well somehow.
"I subscribed and it's already paid for itself just from discovering Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive". <3"
Wow, one of today's lucky 10,000! :D If you hadn't heard it before, I also highly recommend playing Portal, the game whose theme song it is. It's oldish at this point, but still a classic, and no less funny than when it was new. (Unless you just hadn't heard JC's own version of the song, which he wrote, but obviously did not sing in the game itself.)
I may be the only one who wants this, but can you bring back ads? Ads on the original blog were a really useful way for me to get exposure to the ssc community for my product. I can always buy ads on the subreddit, but I'd rather send money to you. Besides, people tend to adblock on reddit.
I don't have a lot of control over layout right now - Substack did me a favor by even allowing the blogroll. Given the business community controversy around ads on Substack (see https://www.businessinsider.com/advertisements-emerge-on-substacks-ad-free-newsletter-ecosystem-2021-1 ) I think it might be a hard sell to get them to allow that. I'll continue advertising worthy causes on Open Threads, and maybe worry more about ads once all the other logistical issues have been cleared up.
It's none of my business, but there are two problems I have with ads:
1) Annoying ads that actively interrupt my browsing experience. The worst are pop-ups and videos, but even having to skip blocks of unrelated content in the middle of an article is annoying.
2) Tracking.
The old ads at SSC did neither. They were on a sidebar, and I assume they were static images served by the website without tracking. I have no problem with this. I wish all advertising could be like this.
But I understand how "no ads, ever" is a better Schelling point for Substack, especially because users will try all kinds of tricks.
> My new psychiatry practice is (I think) potentially genuinely interesting, but I'd prefer people not get too excited about it until I've been doing it a year or two and can confirm that the business model actually works. My patients are random innocent people who happened to get matched with me at my past clinic and don't need to be ambushed for a news story about changing trends in mental health blah blah blah.
Honestly, Scott should consider opening up his practice to target the SSC demographic. Or at least, this is just me voicing my frustrations at the inability to find psychiatrists who are willing to work with people who experiment with 5-HT2a agonist RCs and want to talk about the science behind it. I feel like (especially in the bay area) this subset of people are somewhat underserved. Half of silicon valley goes off to Burning Man every year and dose a 10strip of LSD or some other lysergamide or tryptamine, but this is barely noted in medical practice.
While I understand what you want and think it's a reasonable thing to want, I think most doctors (including myself) would be really nervous about those patients.
For one thing, *I* would have to know about 5-HT2a agonist RCs, and although coincidentally I know a little about that particular topic, there are lots of similar things that would force me to hit the books before I could have coherent opinions on them. A doctor who has to hit the books for an hour to have a coherent opinion on a particular patient is a doctor who will never have any free time (existing business models are predicated on spending 10-45 minutes per patient, total, entirely in the appointment block, and even taking detailed notes means working overtime).
For another, there's no way to give great medical guidance about this; even if I did hit the books, a lot of the relevant studies just haven't been done. If I said anything other than "this isn't safe" and you did it, you could probably sue me. While you personally probably wouldn't sue me, if I have 250 patients and I'm putting myself at slight legal risk to all of them, that's a lot of legal risk.
Also, a lot of what doctors do is based on intuition. If you asked me "Can I take LSD and DMT at the same time?", or whatever insane thing you want to do, probably what would happen is - first I'd spend an hour hitting the books seeing if anyone else had done that before. Probably the answer is "no" or maybe "yes and nobody superficially noticed any problem". But my advice would still be "no, on priors", and then you would very reasonably ask me which priors, and I would have to answer something like "the priors against doing dumb stuff", and then you would think I was some kind of fraud because I should be telling you about receptor interactions or something. The whole process would be a lot more stressful and lawsuit-baity than just telling depressed people to take SSRIs.
I'm studying this area and plan to synthesize what I learn pseudonymously. What would you consider the top resources for information on 5-HT2a agonist RCs?
> After talking to Substack about this concern, they've agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers. I might occasionally remind you that they exist, but you won't get teased by the titles or see stubs that cut off halfway.
I had the same thing and it turns out your real name is built into my version of the About Divinity mod. I clicked through though and it looks like that's no longer the case, so it might just be an early version of that css?
Seems like a good enough place to ask for an edit button if that's within your capabilities. Low priority but it'd be nice to remove the extra "through" from the the comment above
I would love a comment editing button for substack. If Scott's got the juice for a contract, and his blog will be community-forward (which it is) maybe he can help all substackers by getting this feature!
Scott may have some "juice", but don't forget that implementing these features takes time and money. Tweaking display templates for a site is pretty mechanical. Implementing completely new features is not. And if you assume that Scott's getting a quarter-mill from this site, Substack's only getting about $25,000. Which isn't *nothing*, but it doesn't buy you as much development time and overhead as you might expect.
It's not available; it's just that whoever owns it didn't configure an A record, so visiting it in e.g. a browser fails because there's no IP address to look up by it.
I am interested in reading via the web/RSS and not email; I would be sad if I got emails in my inbox for AC10. So, after subscribing, I went to my account page. There I found this interesting checkbox:
> Email notifications:
> [ ] Newsletter posts
> (Disabling all notifications will unsubscribe you from this publication)
I have unchecked the checkbox, and as far as I can tell I'm still paying someone money, so I'm probably still subscribed. But this seems like a strange UI, that you might want to ask Substack about, especially if you are encouraging people to read via the website.
Any comment on the extremely long legal agreement that Substack requires me to agree to before they'll take my money? I won't read it (or agree to it). I WILL send you money via any payment service that didn't do that. Maybe you'd like to post some other payment mechanism.
I don't think he wants to accept money any other way (because of provisional loyalty to Substack).
Like you, I dislike excessive legal agreements for everyday tasks. How else can we make our point?
What if you were to start a charity fundraising page on Just Giving (or similar) in aid of, say, the Khan Academy? Emphasize that people only need to enter into that one legal agreement (Just Giving's one), and from then on they can take a stand against excessive legal agreements by publicly diverting money from good causes such as a Patreon or Substack creators to this different good cause. I would then donate $50 to your page and put "Khan Academy instead of Astral Codex Ten because of Substack's excessive legal agreement" as my publicly visible comment.
As a subscriber to several Substacks, I do find it odd to paywall only a small amount of material, yet charge (at least as a couponless default) a full $10/month. The typical price for solo bloggers is $5, with $10 being the price more common for team efforts.
In the short term, people will just pay — we want to support you! But as time goes on, you probably should try to make the experience behind the paywall actually worth the additional cost to the people interested in paying. This could mean even more frequent open threads (as Yglesias does), but I think a direction that would be attractive to you is to put most if not all of the culture war content back there, even the posts you deem less impulsive or more important.
Is it actually the case that people will not pay in the long term primarily to support Scott? Would be interesting to poll subscribers on their motivation. (I am paying primarily to give support, as is true for ~all my Patreon subscriptions also.)
Count me on the list of people who would be happy to pay some small amount of money (~$1-2) a month for no specific benefit. I'm very happy you're back but don't love the idea of hidden ~~SSC~~ ACX content. $10/mo also feels like enough money that it comes with the sensation of *fealty*, and neither you nor any blogger deserves that (in both the positive and the negative sense).
I just read “Substack’s view of content moderation” and really dig it. I didn’t know they had a grand vision that I liked so much! After reading that I feel like moving to Substack was a great choice, and plan to see if I can find more writers here I like enough to subscribe to.
First and foremost, I'm very happy to see you blogging again, I've missed SSC and I have high high hopes for this one!
Second though, I'm a bit sad that my options eem to be either "support at double what I was paying on patreon" or "don't support". Am I right in guessing that there won't be the option to support via other platforms and forgo the subscriber content on here?
I am excited for your new beginnings and i love the efforts you're going to to make it a smooth experience for non subscribers. I think can't afford it currently but i will likely get it when being able to becomes an option.
Just so impressed all round with the way you do things, Scott
"And I know some of you are concerned about the risk of corporate deplatforming."
What if Substack itself gets deplatformed? Are they reliant on AWS? Are they offering crypto as a payment option in case payment providers shut them off? Do they have a contingency plan in case Gmail starts marking all their emails as spam? (Example: I noticed that the only way to log into my account is to get a login email from them? It might be good to harden the service by doing a standard username+password login so they're a bit less vulnerable to deplatforming by email providers.) Are they publishing the address of an office that could be targeted by rioters? Are they doing all their own email infrastructure, so their email provider can't terminate the relationship and force them to rebuild the reputation of the IP address they're using to send email, etc.?
Yes, these measures might seem a little excessive now, but it does seem to me that there has been a sort of "boiling frog" effect from the deplatformers where what was once unthinkable gradually becomes thinkable and then it actually happens. "Only the paranoid survive."
I'm especially concerned that Substack will make some kind of controversial moderation call which will cause all the left-of-center Substackers to abandon the platform in protest (zillion witches effect), leaving a platform full of right-of-center Substackers who FAANG feel comfortable deplatforming.
From my own perspective, I intend to use Substack as long as I can, get a cushion of savings, then switch to something else.
From society's perspective, I'm optimistic that the more deplatforming happens, the more people are incentivized to use the decentralized tools already available. Right now there's stuff like Mastodon and cryptocurrency, but the users are either very early-adopter techies, or far-right types on Gab or whatever's even more extreme than that. Nobody else has any incentive to get involved. I'm thinking of this as a combination technological, economic, and social problem. The technological problem is whether these tools exist, whether crypto can handle enough payments per second to handle big parts of the economy, etc. The economic problem is whether there are enough users that these services are profitable and it's profitable for top-notch companies to work on expanding them - this is solved in terms of crypto but maybe not in terms of Mastodon, decentralized DNS, etc. The social problem is whether doing decentralized things is so associated with the alt-right that everyone else would be scared / feel gross using them - I wanted to see what was going on on Gab but I was too scared to join under my real name (what if someone saw me and thought I was a real Gab user?).
If we're at the point where I'm getting deplatformed, probably people like Matt Yglesias or Glenn Greenwald are also getting deplatformed, and there's enough of a user base of people who like those kinds of writers that I expect the technological, economic, and social problems to get solved pretty quickly. In this sense the frog-boiling is on our side; it gives everyone enough time to see which way the wind is blowing and react. I'm still trying to figure out what I can do to speed the positive side of process up, but I'm optimistic about the relative speeds.
To be totally honest I'm not sure how I feel about decentralized everything. I'm not a free speech maximalist, and I think one could reasonably argue that our discourse was healthier before social media made it way easier for lots of people to speak. I remember reading panglossian editorials in the early days of the internet saying it was gonna revitalize democracy blah blah blah, and it didn't seem like that went as well as expected. I feel like the optimism around "decentralized everything" could be another case of people projecting vague ideals on to some new technology while ignoring the more important and difficult to predict question of the incentive structures the new technology will create.
I agree that it's not excessive to assume that the deplatforming ratchet will keep tightening. But your list of 'attack surfaces' is so long that I'm demotivated! I wonder if it isn't better to instead spend every penny and hour we have campaigning to give monopoly regulators a statutory duty to prevent "collusion to exclude from service" and the power to apply huge fines and even force providers to offer services on reasonable terms.
I've noticed that the new blog isn't licensed under CC-BY like SSC is. Is this an intentional decision, a condition of moving over to substack, or something that might change in the future?
100$ is very far out of my price range, considering everything else I'm already subscribed to. 5$ would be better...
My favorite articles were your calm insights into culture war topics, but 120$ (for a monthly subscription) would amount to a significant chunk out of my yearly income... I feel like this might defacto limit your content to readers from rich countries who can afford the cost.
(But I'm also not in a financial strain so I don't feel comfortable using the coupon.)
Anyone know off the top of their head how to alter the Stylebot CSS to make the title bar not be sticky? I don't like how it re-appears when I scroll up, I'd prefer if it was just static at the top of the page.
The last time I subscribed to a "news" anything was my senior year of college as a undergraduate, and the only reason I subscribed to an alleged "newspaper" was because as a college student I was somehow entitled to pay the staggering amount of one dollar per year for the school year subscription.
Implicitly that meant, I believe, I was only to receive the daily edition whenever the delivery person (who I swear was Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong) remembered to deliver it.
When it was delivered it was - politely - a disaster. It seems the cost of a proofreader was too much for the publication's budget and no one else could proofread before publishing so. . . And then the publisher/editor decided a sure-fire business idea was to insult, alienate, offend, and generally antagonize subscribers and advertisers alike by way of his weekly, poorly written screed in his capacity as Mr. Know It All. (I prefer the Rocky and Bullwinkle version of said expert, incidentally.)
The real world beckoned me, and working life kept me from having time to sit and read the newspaper in the morning or the evening, and I decided, after visiting a friend who had subscribed to a daily newspaper that amounted to an ink-stained impending avalanched in the corner of his living room, that spending money on a subscription a "news" anything was not a good investment.
I ask one thing, should I consider a subscription: Quality. Save the insults, the threats, the abuse, the antagonism for the sandbox, the litter box, or Fakebook or Twitter or whatever Social Media platform the cool kids, the in crowd, the fashionable folk frequent nowadays.
I am on the verge of subscribing after enjoying many years of wonderful content from S.S.C. Can someone please explain what differentiates the “founding member” option? Is this simply additional generosity to express one’s love of all things Scott Alexander, or is there a further benefit to the subscriber? Thanks
The old blog is still up at slatestarcodex.com. While all the posts are there, it's a little barebones, but you can see the old version using archive.org.
But more importantly, congratulations on having comment id 1111111!
Glad to see you are back! Does the "light content" that is premium-only include future short stories and such? They were amazing, and I would be very sad to miss them.
Book recommendation time! I'm on an English history kick at the moment, having finally succumbed and read Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" trilogy (did it convince me Thomas Cromwell was a misunderstood woobie? it did not, but it did give me new insights on his character). After that, I got on to two biographies of Cromwell, one by Diarmaid MacCulloch, and that led me on to his 2003 book about the Reformation, titled (of course) "The Reformation: A History" https://www.amazon.com/Reformation-History-Diarmaid-MacCulloch/dp/014303538X.
As an aside, I need a good biography of (1) Thomas Cranmer - the only version of one by MacCulloch is in print - no e-book version so I'd have to read it like a caveperson or something! - and his character is a fascinating one which I want to see explored; he seemed to crumple like a wet paper bag when it came to giving in to Henry VIII (obligingly provided him the annulments for two of his wives) yet bravely went to the stake in Mary's reign, and I want to know more about him than simply "wrote the Book of Common Prayer which is beautiful English language" and (2) Henry VIII himself - there's something very slippery psychologically about him which makes it extremely tempting to go all Freudian on him, and he seemed to switch from "you are my bestest pal in all the world" to "send him/her to the headsman's block" in minutes. Descriptions of his marital shenanigans (poor guy managed to get himself not-really-marred THREE times) and the brutal way in which he discarded former favourites (had wife Number Three lined up to marry within two days of having Number Two, Anne Boleyn's head chopped off; married Number Five the same day as the annulment from Number Four was through) is breath-taking in its seeming psychopathy. I really want to know if anyone has had a good attempt at trying to see what made him tick.
So on to The Reformation. I deliberately picked MacCulloch because I knew he would have completely different views from my own (he's thoroughly Anglicised though of Scottish heritage, raised Anglican in a long-tailed clerical family, no longer in that or any tradition; I'm none of those) and although I'm only a couple of chapters in, I find it very good. I had no idea the Portuguese were so important, for instance. So can definitely recommend it.
I'd also recommend his Cromwell biography to let you see the rise and fall of this superstar fixer of the Henrician court. He overhauled the unwieldy mediaeval political structure to establish Parliament and how it operated on a firmer basis, unwittingly creating the one force which in later years and centuries could stand up to the king (who, under Henry and his underlings' reform of the church and state was now the sole spiritual and temporal authority who could rule over you body and soul) and drafted a raft of laws amongst other works; they really were New Men creating a New World and bringing about the birth of the modern world. The description of how he used those laws, particularly in the Boleyn affair, is very striking in how it anticipates some elements of the modern world - the way he went about picking victims and disposing of them is awfully (and I do mean that) reminiscent of Soviet show trials.
And then within four years of this great triumph of destroying Queen Anne, he himself went to the execution ground. Riding the tiger is a thrilling experience - until you fall off.
That should be "not-really-married" not "marred" and for those of you keeping a scorecard it goes:
(1) Katherine of Aragon, Number One: not-really-married because forget the dispensation we went to all that trouble to get, turns out she really was married to my brother first so me marrying her later was incest so not really a legit marriage. God and the Bible said so.
(2) Anne Boleyn, Number Two: turns out I was seduced and bewitched by means of spells and witchcraft into this one, so lack of consent means I was not really married. (The incest excuse for Katherine didn't get trotted out this time, even though it had been an objection raised by some back when Henry was first eager to wed Anne, given that he had taken her elder sister Mary as a mistress and possibly even fathered a son on her:
"Sir George recalled that he turned the King’s talk of his conscientious scruples in an even bolder direction than Temys: ‘I feared if ye did marry Queen Anne, your conscience would be more troubled at length, for that it is thought ye have meddled with the mother and the sister.’ Caught badly off guard by this breathtaking directness, the King retorted defensively, ‘Never with the mother,’ while Cromwell lashed out in an effort to save the situation, ‘Nor never with the sister neither, and therefore put that out of your mind.’
(3) Anne of Cleves, Number Four: For some reason I didn't like her at first sight so the marriage was never consummated. This was embarrassing as there was gossip I was impotent (as if!) and that was why, when I wanted this one annulled, but luckily Anne was sensible and Cranmer did the needful. Everybody agreed that Anne had actually been pre-contracted to a different suitor, so technically she was married at the time so of course we couldn't be married, could we? So again I was not-really-married for a third time!
The Cranmer one is because of the Wife In A Box. His marital misadventures led to that joke by his enemies/Catholics, that he smuggled his wife around in a box.
Because he was (a) married then bereaved in early life and only was ordained after he was a widower (b) was a bishop and ordained in the (Roman) Catholic church at the time so had taken a vow of celibacy (c) even in the meddling Henry did with the church, he was severely on the side of clerical celibacy, so it was embarrassing and inconvenient, to say the least, and had potential severe down-sides if he found out any of his clergy were married (d) all that aside, when Cranmer (who was already of Reformed/Lutheran sympathies) was appointed ambassador to the court of Charles V, he travelled to Nuremberg, met with Lutheran clergy there and got on swimmingly with one of them, Andreas Osiander. So swimmingly, that he married Osiander's niece, despite the fact that he didn't speak German and she didn't speak English OH YEAH AND HE WAS A PRIEST WHO WASN'T DISPENSED FROM HIS VOW OF CELIBACY.
Cranmer comes home to England about a year later, and sends for his wife - I'm not too sure if she only joins him two years after the marriage. They have to live discreetly - he seems to have shuttled her off to one of his episcopal palaces down the country - and this is where the rumour about "he carried her around in a box on his journeys" came from. I can't imagine it was much fun for Mrs. Cranmer being stuck in a foreign country with little knowledge of the language and nobody can be told that he's your husband because it will get you all into trouble. About six years later (1538 or so) Henry gets his Six Articles pushed through, one of which reaffirms clerical celibacy, so Mrs. Cranmer gets sent home to Germany until it's safe for the Archbishop to come out as married, which doesn't happen until 1547 when Henry dies and his son Edward, who is moulded by his advisors/regents as a thoroughly Protestant monarch, succeeds.
I genuinely do wonder if the marriage was less about "fell in love" and more about "cementing close links with the Lutheran theologians by way of marriage" as was the custom for alliances.
"Thomas Cranmer, “Smuggler of the Lutheran Nobsey”
Exactly when Thomas Cranmer’s second wife Margarete stepped on English soil is not known, but all indications are that she arrived after her husband’s return from Europe to accept his appointment as archbishop. Where did she live? A closely guarded secret successfully kept, her location was and still is unknown. Margarete certainly was not either at Lambeth Palace, where a German woman’s presence would elicit curiosity — nor as humorously and commonly believed, hidden in a large wooden box.
In December 1543, Thomas Cranmer endured the personal tragedy of his palace at Canterbury being destroyed by fire. One of his brothers-in-law and several of his faithful servants were killed. Saved from the fire was a precious box owned by the archbishop, the contents within unknown. This in turn evolved into a story commonly enjoyed and told repeatedly by Roman Catholics during the reigns of Queens Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. Margarete was hiding in that box. Well, of course she was!
Shortly after Thomas Cranmer’s martyrdom, detractors published a widely distributed and humorous story weaving a plot where during the reign of King Henry VIII, Cranmer travelled throughout England with his wife, carefully hidden in a large crate with breathing holes. Later versions of the story portray His Grace anxiously praying for the safe retrieval of a precious wooden crate during the Canterbury Palace fire, the box of course containing “this pretty nobsey”.Unfortunately, this is our only hint of Margarete Cranmer’s appearance.
In reality, a complete silence enveloped Margarete Cranmer during her stay in England throughout the 1530’s. For all intents and purposes, she was invisible. For the politically naive Thomas Cranmer, this was an outstanding accomplishment. In fact, the feat was “astonishing”, claims historian Diarmaid MacCulloch. With conservative detractors seeking any way possible to upend him for good, His Grace’s ability to keep his wife and later also his daughter safe speaks to his steadfast commitment to his family and his remarkable resourcefulness.
Unfortunately, even with Thomas Cranmer’s great caution, by 1539 it became too dangerous for his wife Margarete and their young daughter Margaret to remain in England. The passage of the The Six Articles of 1539 through Parliament, which included a mandate of strict adherence to clerical celibacy, imposed all married clergy put away their wives. The risk to his family now untenable, he arranged for their exile in Europe.
Thus, His Grace was separated from his family for the remaining eight long years of King Henry VIII’s reign."
I made heavy use of MaCulloch for my podcast episodes on the Reformation. The Cranmer episode, which focused on the execution, "Mimetic Disaster," is the most popular one for me by a long ways.
This is neat; I had no idea Cranmer was ever married, and I might have to put MacCulloch's book on my reading list. I haven't been doing much history lately, but I am in the middle of Servais Pinckaers' Morality: A Catholic View atm. I've also been reading a bunch of John Bellairs books lately. I'm planning on giving Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates a go next.
A couple of points, possibly already made as I admit I haven't gone through all the comments...
I think we are all aware of the kind of content we are going to receive from Scott (and the kind of discussion we are going to get from his followers). Most of us are here because we like what Scott has to say, and simply want him to continue saying it.
The comparison to buying a book by someone who has spent a year researching it is unfair. This is a book Scott has been continuously writing since he began blogging. What he has written every year could easily fill a book, so let's ask how many books Scott has written that we have read for free over the years?
To me, the 10 dollars I have happily paid is as much indicative of my support for what Scott is doing with his medical practice, his decision to leave his job and pursue it, and the continuance of his blogging practice. That is: I support his content creation, yes, but I also support Scott and his choices. I think we are all aware of the value Scott adds to our lives through his writing. The ideas, maybe we could get elsewhere (maybe), but his digestion and regurgitation of them we cannot. That’s what I am happily paying for.
I might be a minority here, but I want to make sure there's still psychiatry blogging. I've really missed you digging through metanalyses and discussing chemical pathways.
I can't be the only one terrified that a "like" system in the comments will completely change the quality and character of the discussions here. I'd predict a lot more dunking and Reddit style pithiness because with any points system, the discussion necessarily becomes a competition.
I suspect that even giving subscribers "advanced access" to "culture war" posts would help alleviate the dangers of going viral, both because the initial audience would be generally familiar with your work and sympathetic to your opinions and your style, and because you'd have an opportunity to edit the more emotional bits before making these posts public.
Another group to shill: some rationalist / LW sphere people decided they were going to try to replicate GPT-3 and release it to the world, because why not? Six months later they’ve secured funding, have a viable plan for achieving the goal, and have two (not directly related) NLP papers under review. Check them out at www.eleuther.ai
Is there any chance that healthcare providers might be able to get continuing education credits for your psychiatry posts? I don't know how hard it is to set up for that. It would definitely be cool.
1. You said "I might also paywall a few very impulsive Culture War posts, just to prevent them from going viral." Please consider not doing this. It's fine if you want to prevent them from going viral in some other way, but please consider providing people with someone to view these posts for free, like by logging in or something.
2. You said Substack has "agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers". Please consider changing it so that people who want to see the titles of subscription-only posts can do so, even if the list doesn't show up on Google search results.
"I might also paywall a few very impulsive Culture War posts, just to prevent them from going viral."
It's a nice thought, but this will not work and you know it. Instead of reading your controversial statements for themselves, people will just take the word of whoever is misquoting you.
FYI at the bottom of your posts there is a link to a Hidden Open Thread. I am a non-subscriber. When I click the link it takes me to a "this post is for paying subscribers" page. The link looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/wfCBQYi
Just sharing in case this is a thing you want to change.
"After talking to Substack about this concern, they've agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers. I might occasionally remind you that they exist, but you won't get teased by the titles or see stubs that cut off halfway. If you do see these, something has gone wrong and you should let me know."
Just got one of these for the "Technocracy-Zilla: Origins" post. It showed up in my RSS feed as just a link, when I clicked through I got the teaser followed by the "this post is for paying subscribers, subscribe" banner.
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Ultricies leo integer malesuada nunc vel. Quam vulputate dignissim suspendisse in est ante in nibh mauris. Porttitor rhoncus dolor purus non. Quis auctor elit sed vulputate mi sit. Blandit massa enim nec dui. Euismod elementum nisi quis eleifend quam adipiscing. Odio ut sem nulla pharetra diam sit amet. Vel risus commodo viverra maecenas accumsan lacus vel facilisis volutpat. Faucibus scelerisque eleifend donec pretium vulputate sapien nec sagittis. Orci eu lobortis elementum nibh tellus molestie nunc non. Metus dictum at tempor commodo ullamcorper a lacus. Maecenas sed enim ut sem viverra aliquet eget.
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> This is a really long quote that will no doubt span multiple lines. Depending on how wide your screen is, this might have to be really long in order to do that. I guess I'd better add another sentence to make sure. Maybe one more? Okay this is the last one.
Some *formatting tests* _are done here_ -possibly struck through-. ~Tildes~ are fun. **Lots** of __emphasis__.
I attempted to reply to a comment on the "List of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned by the SEC" post. After spending 5 minutes typing up my reply and setting up my account, I was told that only paid subscribers could comment on that post.
I did not see any warning that comments were subscriber-only until I hit Post.
I am not sure whether this is a bug or an intended feature. I do know that it is frustrating to have to put effort into a post *before* knowing whether one is wasting said effort.
After the NYT piece i would hope that the discussion flourishes on both sides and that evolving SSC platform grows with the new home. NYT probably is not going anywhere and in general, their approach to the news is of value. I knew nothing about SSC until the Times starting probing the story. IMO its all very interesting , valuable ideas.
I probably would have found you again eventually, but I am here today because of he-who-must-not-be-naned at NYT. I will suscribe in two weeks. Peter Robinson
- subscriber-only posts show up on the Archive pages
- when viewing comments in "Chronological" order, the buttons to show new comments seem to work strangely (I can't figure out the exact details of how they're going wrong, but they're going very wrong and this should be obvious to any Substack dev who spends a couple minutes playing around with them - my best guess is "inheriting functionality from Newest First mode")
Saying “first” in a comment thread is really obnoxious so I won’t do it. Plus if I refresh I probably won’t be first.
Have you considered: meta comments about commenting first provide about as much value as commenting first in the first place. Because, at most, you're offering a derivative of an already poor comment.
I mean, some comment's value are so poor that they can only go up. You can get some reliably positive value derivatives from poor comments.
This thread lacks value completely.
and you were the first to say it.
Have you considered a $5/mo subscription price point? I suspect that you'd see more than double the number of subscribers and come out ahead.
I was thinking that too. $10/month is a bit steep for my budget, but I could probably do $5/month.
I don't really know how to calculate this, but I see that other Substackers similar to me have done $10. I'm currently really surprised by how many people got paid subscriptions, both in absolute numbers and as a percent of total subscriptions, which makes me less likely to entertain arguments that I could do better by lowering the cost. Also, the coupon is $2.50, which is close enough to $5 that I feel like it lets people price discriminate correctly if they really wouldn't buy at $10 but would at $5.
I would buy a subscription at $5 and not at $10; I am rich enough to afford it so I feel like I shouldn't use the coupon, but it would becoming out of my 'support Patreons and similar' budget and the other people I support need it more.
If you're happy for people to use the coupon for price discrimination as well as for genuine need, I'll subscribe using the coupon.
On the other side of this, I'm willing to pay $10 per month for a subscription, but would probably pick $5 per month if that was an option. I'd say Scott could run a poll and see, since his potential-subscribers are probably unusually honest about these things, but I suspect most people don't actually know their "willingness to pay" unless they're looking at the credit card entry form and deciding to click "Submit".
> I suspect most people don't actually know their "willingness to pay" unless they're looking at the credit card entry form and deciding to click "Submit".
This seems true.
Also, many people's concern will be whether Scott gets enough money, not whether they miss out on "occasional shorter unimportant content" & open threads. So there's something to be said for Scott experimenting with $10, and people who feel ambivalent about paying that price sitting it out for now.
That way, they don't have to deal with their ambivalence, and it may then turn out that the people who readily pay $10 fund Scott sufficiently. And Scott himself can wait until then to decide whether he wants to see if he'd make more with a lower price, or is just fine with things as they are. He shouldn't be worrying about anything else since he's already given the coupon.
The post on bullshit jobs was solid, iirc. Yeah, it was short, but the subject's a deep one and it made me think.
I used to read fanfiction- I still do, sometimes, but I used to be socially active in that subculture- and it taught me that authors are *terrible* at judging the quality of their work.
"I don't have anything much new, but maybe you could look over this vignette I wrote while I was hopped up on cough syrup."
"...This is brilliant."
"No, it sucks. I was woozy when I wrote it, and I screwed up the scene transitions, and now I can't get them right. Look, I'll just throw it away."
"There's some really great character work in here."
"It's a silly little vignette. I wrote it to pass the time. I shouldn't even have shown it to you."
"...It's twelve thousand words."
(This is based on something that actually happened, a lot of things like it actually happened. Some of those works *did* get thrown away.)
(And yes, there's good fanfiction. Actually, there's mind-blowingly-great fanfiction. The fact that fanfiction is crap with even greater likelihood than Sturgeon's Law would predict doesn't actually have evidentiary implications re the rare pockets of utterly brilliant fanfiction.)
I trust Scott to do a lot, but ought I to trust him to pick which Scott Alexander posts are important and which are trivial? That's a pretty important job.
What are some examples of such pockets of FanFiction outside of HPMOR?
I know they exist. I just want recommendations.
Agreed. I can afford it, but $10 is a consideration, whereas $5 is an auto-buy from my Patreon-ish budget. It didn't seem like the coupon is meant for our demographic.
Basically, consider the ~15 upvotes on mine and Michelle's comments as minor signal on what people think internet content "should" cost. We're unlikely to use a coupon meant for people in need, but also see 5 vs 10 as "chipping in for something I like" vs "how much value does this provide".
I subscribed at $10 but it feels like a lot to me.
Part of my calculation is that there are 4 or 5 other bloggers I follow at Substack, not to mention magazine subscriptions and podcasts, and suddenly I'm spending $200 per month on content which is more than my BBC license fee.
This is exactly how I feel. I would like a $5/mo subscription option paired with a place to donate when the extra disposable income opens up to do so. Or if there is a post that one particularly likes and wants to send a few extra bucks in acknowledgment.
Ordinarily I wouldn't consider $10/mo to read a blog, but Scott's blog is the best one in the world AFAIK. (but, am unemployed, so $2.50 it is.)
The key word is AFAIK. I bet there are similar, great writers who should be popular and paid, but toil in obscurity. I still haven't found an aggregator I like, and I tend to forget to visit other blogs that are very good but not my #1 favorite. I think the snowball effect that concentrates fame and fortune in only a few people is a tragic bug in society - but I am glad that Scott Alexander earned one of these coveted celebrity slots.
I was struggling a bit whether I should use coupon or not, and in the end I decided that 25$ annually would be better support than zero dollars.
$10 is more of a psychological barrier to me than a financial one ($10 is a price of netflix or amazon prime, etc).
I was fine with using the coupon because it's specifically delineated for students. Pretty smart of Scott to add the Schelling fence of "students and poor people" - if he simply gave out the coupon without restrictions, poorer altruists and students would feel worse about using it, while people looking mainly to save a buck would not. Whereas with the fence, people looking to save a buck feel worse and students and poor altruists do not.
I know some things about pricing on the internet and the first rule of pricing is "charge more than you think you should, even after learning the first rule of pricing" and another rule is that what people say they would pay or what feels fair to them based on Netflix or whatever else they're anchoring on means almost nothing.
Um, it now occurs to me that might be poor form to sound so mercenary about pricing while using the logo of my startup as my avatar. Ironically we just wrote a post on the Beeminder blog today about Beeminder's pricing and how we don't think a freemium model is realistic for self-funded startups. But that's exactly what Scott is using here and it's working great for him, so, thinking-face.
One answer is that freemium only works if you're popular enough.
I think freemium is very different for Patreon-style support than it is for something that's more like a business transaction. I think Scott's surprise at his fraction of paying subscribers -- after carefully and repeatedly disclaiming how little you get for paying -- bears this out. Every time Patreon creators ask what supporters want in terms of rewards, I always try to chime in to say that my reward is being able to support their work, but I think a lot of people find this hard to believe.
You should add a feature where "goodbye yellow brick road" starts playing whenever the user starts slacking.
Everything I'm doing right now in terms of pricing/model feels idiotic to me, but I'm following the advice of the Substack people, and they're 100% right and I'm 100% wrong.
They could be right overall without capturing all cases. I looked to subscribe to support you, hoping to pay $25 or $30 for a year. Didn't check the coupon because "can't" pay isn't literally true, and support, not the extras, are my goal. Considered asking for Patreon (where I support several people at similar rates) but suppose that dilutes Substack. So free content it is. Thanks regardless.
Or keep the $10 option up now and 13 months from now add a $5 then 13 months later add a $2. Maybe people willing to pay $10 start with that and never both to go change?
More people will get it at 5 but tbh with you 10 is fine. I won't get it, till i can afford it and thats okay. There will be enough that will get it for 10 and won't need you to haggle down. plus you're adding a coupon too so i think its fine.
Have you considered a non-credit card payment option? I know you might be limited by substack's payment processing system, but here in Europe credit cards are nowhere near as prevalent as they are in the USA.
Substack uses Stripe for payments which should support pretty much anything except PayPal. Is there a payment method it isn't accepting for you? Does it make it look like it's credit cards only?
(I'm asking very earnestly because the answer to both of those matter a lot for Beeminder. In particular, we're trying to decide whether we can safely drop support for PayPal.)
For me, it's only showing a request for a CC number, and nothing else.
Hmm. What payment method would you ideally use that doesn't have the equivalent of a credit card number? Also, are you using a VPN or anything that would make it hard for Substack/Stripe to know you're in Europe?
Presumably whatever the local equivalent of iDEAL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL) is wherever Kuros is located (iDEAL is Netherlands only).
I'm in the same boat and can confirm that it can be really obnoxious at times that so many companies from the US seem to assume that everyone has a credit card.
I'm in Europe and basically if I can't pay with PayPal I just don't do it. The bank fees are too outrageous and Idon't actually know of any other (good) alternative.
If you've been deplatformed you can't use any payment system. We are currently disconnecting the entire banking system from the deplorables. We should really ask Kuros3's political stance before trying to troubleshoot.
There may be looong thin tail substack doesn't see; people* who would gladly give a little but can't afford the current minimum. The current substack audience probably is not rich in them, but this may be useful and rewarding to explore. The coupon is really helpful, but it sets a yes/no step at a fixed price.
* From poor country, poor reader (retired, or high disease costs, or on welfare), high other needs (single parent)…
Consider pushing substack (not necessarily now, but when you've gained sufficient weight, which I'm sure you will) towards a more flexible pricing system. Imagine a slider with labels:
"I can afford AND I want to pay every month:
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 12 - 15 - 20 - 25 - 30 - 40 - 50 - 60 - 80 - 100 - 150 - 200 - 250 - 300 - [other] "
A/B testing against the current system would be interesting, but the compared have to be similar -- which makes alternating months or weeks for the foreseeable future unreliable. Maybe compare user groups (odd/even nth digit of IP?, odd/even second of http request?).
As edits are not possible:
This page is in the Archive, but not on the main page. Many readers will miss it.
I'm just pleased to have the option to make my revolutionary gesture against Corrupt Journalism Policewoman by immolating my checkbook instead of immolating myself.
This guy demand curves.
$10 is really quite a bargain if you think of it as paying $5 for the essays and $5 for the feet pics.
...There will be feet pics, right Scott? Scott?
The $10-$20 range seems to be the empirically optimal number for paid subscribers across a variety of services and platforms. If you drop the point to $5, you don't get twice as many subs, and many of your $10 subs downgrade to $5 if given that option, which loses you significant money on net. You can play games with this by changing reward levels for different tiers, but it's certainly not a safe bet that adding a lower tier will make more money. Source: I'm an Internet content creator who makes money on Patreon.
Metaculus is better than PredictIT in basically every way, except the only way that counts!
Accuracy? I don't know if anyone has done a good comparison between them.
I assume he means Metaculus still awards fake internet points instead of actual money, unless something has changed.
$10/month is more than I'm usually willing to pay for this kind of thing. If you had a patreon or something, I'd gladly contribute $1 or $2/month, even without getting extra content for it.
Seems to me then that you'd use the discount code, on the basis of "I suspect you'd rather be paid something than nothing"? That seems honest enough, especially since the product you're really buying is support for Scott and not the open threads or AMAs.
Worth considering at least, but I am not so sure about this because:
A) I'm not sure what kind of cut substack is taking.
B) The instructions were to use the coupon only if you are too poor to afford full price, not only if you would not have paid full price in the absence of a coupon.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/logistics/comments#comment-1103146 seems like it could be argued to be an answer to B). But I don't actually know.
Basically, I go by my piracy rules here. I've been downloading illegally since Napster, but I try to throw money at creators when I can, and when I think the price is reasonable. And if the price is reasonable to just buy it, I just buy it. Acknowledge that you can get it for free, but try not to be a freeloader.
I think I'll change my stance on (B) when Scott does something a little more explicit to contradict the very clear instructions he gave on the post as to when you should use the coupon.
"Piracy rules". Priceless. There are rules to being a thief, eh?
Yup. For digital goods, they don't lose anything just from me taking a copy, so the ethics are very different from theft of objects. I'm well aware that it's illegal, but I think you can do it in ways that are still moral.
"After talking to Substack about this concern, they've agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers. I might occasionally remind you that they exist, but you won't get teased by the titles or see stubs that cut off halfway."
Will these posts also be completely hidden in Substack's RSS feed? I read your blog through RSS, not email. And Substack only has a public RSS feed. There are no per-subscriber unique feeds.
If the stubs are hidden in the RSS feed, then I will miss out on them, despite being a subscriber.
The best option would be for Substack to provide paid-subscriber feeds, separate from the free public ones.
Seconded. I also use RSS and I'd love a paid subscriber feed.
I'm using an email-newsletter-to-RSS app to handle this (built into Feedbin, but I suspect most RSS readers do this now), but the user experience is significantly worse and I would strongly prefer an RSS feed.
Thirded. It seems from the support page like Substack has a feature like this for podcasts, providing an RSS feed per-subscriber that includes subscription-only posts.
It might be as simple as checking "Enable podcasting beta" in the Podcast section of Substack settings, per https://on.substack.com/p/how-to-use-substack-for-podcasts - I'm not seeing anything in there that suggests enabling the beta impairs making text posts, paid-access or otherwise. Even if that doesn't do it, the feature existing as part of the beta makes it seem like it might not be too hard to implement as an option for non-podcast Substacks.
Wait, yes, this is really important. I was just going to buy a subscription, but if it's not going to make my RSS feed contain the posts I'm paying extra for, then there's no point in subscribing.
Well, OK, upon a moment of self-reflection: the point to subscribing is to support Scott. I'm happy to do this and have just subscribed in order to do so.
Still, I'd really like an RSS feed that contains subscriber-only content mixed in!
Replying to add my voice to this. Sub posts on RSS in some way please.
Conversely, I'm _not_ a paid subscriber, and have just received the stub of a paid post via the RSS feed.
For the record, this^ seems to be the reality.
If Substack "agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers" they were seemingly being careless, because the archive page and the (RSS?) feed both are displaying subscription-only posts.
I really, really wish Substack had an all-you-can-eat type feature. There's no way I can pay $100 for every single blogger I'm interested in, but I could probably pay $150 a year for several people.
I think we'll eventually see some of them consolidate into small magazines running on Substack, sort of like how Patreon has a bunch of content creators who have pretty much turned into small production companies to regularly produce content.
Keep in mind that there will exist Substack bloggers who will be ... *combative*, to put it mildly. Therefore, if Substack were to have an all-you-can-eat plan, some of that money would go to someone who a large number of members of the public see as their adversary. Factions in the public would then perceive all forms of participation in Substack as funding their opponents. And not entirely without reason. Much better, then, not to mix funding streams.
Substack blogs are not perceived as part of the same entity, and they need to stay that way. I tried to discover other bloggers through Substack, and hoped that I would fail for this reason. It turned out to be possible after all. But I have been very pleased that blog discovery was non-obvious.
The idea would presumably be that substack tracks which bloggers you read and distributes your subscription money among those. Not among everyone.
FYI, the email I got has a footer at the bottom saying "You’re on the free list for Astral Codex Ten. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber" and a big "Subscribe" button. This doesn't bother me in the least (in fact, I appreciate the reminder and intend to subscribe within the next week or two); I'm simply letting you know in case this violates either your principles or agreements.
I actually think I might prefer getting to see some hints of subscriber-only content?
I'm probably not going to subscribe now at $10/month, but if I see one or two subscriber-only posts that seem interesting, I might.
+1. I subscribed to support Scott, but if I didn't have so long a history with him, I would never have done that without knowing the sort of thing I was missing.
Perhaps there could be a semi-regular "here's what you're missing out on" topic on open threads?
Really good to see you writing again, Scott.
There are two remaining concerns about the comments:
1. The "Load more" button is annoying. My ideal would be to load all comments by default like on WordPress, but failing that there should be a one-click "load all comments" button. Without this, navigating the comments section, searching for previously read threads, etc., will be too inconvenient to allow discussion to flourish the way it did on SSC.
2. We also need a way to quickly find *new* comments. Currently, as far as I can see, nothing differentiates read comments from unread ones, so there's no good way to catch up on discussions in the various nested threads.
I agree, I'll talk to Substack.
As long as you're talking to them about comments, there's one other crucial issue: you can get emails for likes _and_ replies to your comments, but you can't choose to get emails for only replies. That makes the email notifications effectively unusable.
As a workaround, you could use an e-mail filter to delete e-mails about likes.
The solution is to write bad comments, so you get few likes. :P
Interesting, I got an e-mail about your comment, even though it is a sibling rather than a child of mine. I wonder if one gets notifications for grandchildren (as this comment is to bakkot), nephews (as Aapje's comment is to Glenn's), or grand-nephews (as this comment is to Glenn's).
An addendum to "load more" being annoying -- it also seems to break the comment links in the reply notification emails, which seems like an honest-to-god bug in substack. (Although I guess it could be related to whatever customization of the comment section they did for you.) But the links don't currently work for comments that aren't loaded when the page loads. (At least for me.)
I am delighted to support you. I have already gotten a full measure of value from SSC and everything else is a bonus.
For anyone interested, here's a robot narrated podcast feed for the new blog: https://danwahl.net/ac10-podcast/feed.xml
Also, the human version of the SSC Podcast is apparently being updated with new posts as well: http://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/rss
Hi, Scott! Am I allowed to use the coupon if I am by no definition "too poor" (indeed quite the opposite, due to a recent-ish death in the family) but sincerely unsure how my finances are going to work out this year (due to the aforementioned recent-ish death in the family, which has generated bills that by now total an excess of more than I previously ever had in my bank account, some of which are recurring) and what I can spend on a regular basis? I would, if it lets me, change to a proper model once I know more (probably Q3 or Q4 this year?).
Probabilistically financially incapable?
Fortunately, I have a handy formula to help you work this out:
P(no money|subscription) = P(subscription|no money) * P(no money)/P(subscription)
:) I'm not sure if you're mocking me. I assume not, but I still want to be clear, I'm just unfamiliar with a bunch of taxes and fees that didn't previously apply to my life, along with administrative overhead. I didn't own a house, I didn't own an apartment, I didn't have to pay a tax advisor, I didn't have to pay for a certificate of inheritance, graves and grave stones are expensive, et cetera.
If that were all, I'd subscribe normally, because I'd be objectively better off, but I've just changed jobs and will have to live in two places simultaneously for reasons (short version: my partner isn't moving with me and I'll be paying our current apartment's rent *plus* the rent of my new place... ooooor buy an apartment with the inherited money, in a city that's ultra expensive, and will leave me with approximately none of my inherited money left), and I don't know if the increase in income I've gotten covers everything it needs to cover.
tl;dr shit is complicated. I'm trying to summarise and I can tell the summary is inadequate, but maybe you can get an idea of why I'm unsure.
If I may, I'll serve as your conscience here. Go ahead and use the coupon if you really want to see the subscription content. Precommit here to pay if and when things resolve favorably. If you, at that time, feel your prior (current) fears were overblown, find a way to retroactively compensate Scott.
Thanks for the input! This sounds about like what I was planning.
That said, I do also know of myself that I err on side of being financially cautious - the current situation is difficult to get an overview on (due to lots of variables changing), so I am almost surely being overly cautious.
As such, I think it's probably best if I sleep on it? I prefer subscribing over not subscribing (as ZeroGravitas said, better some support than none), but maybe I can get the panicky feeling in my gut to subside by just sleeping over it a night.
It's good to know using the coupon is an option if the feeling doesn't go away (thanks for posting, Scott!). But I hope the feeling *does* go away. I feel like there's no reason it shouldn't subside, I'm cognisant that it's just been a rough couple of months and I have never seen invoices this large in my life (and I now no longer have any family to talk to about it), so it's definitely shaken me up a little bit. So obviously that makes me stupidly cautious.
Thanks for thinking it through with me, GMN!
That seems like it would be a good reason. Also the discounted price is more than the otherwise 0 he would be getting.
Having had to deal with a solicitor who took forever and a day just handling a basic will with no huge inheritance or complications after a family death, and who was plainly milking the process to generate as much revenue for himself as possible, and who I couldn't ditch and get someone else to handle it because he was the solicitor involved in drawing up the will, handling the deeds of the house, etc. I completely sympathise with the unexpected expenses of a death in the family. Use the coupon in good faith. When/if you can afford to pay more, do so.
100% not mocking you at all, I just wanted to give the situation a snappy name
Hah! In that case, achievement unlocked. :)
Yes, sure.
Yglesias really messed up on that first year deal. $250,000 is a lot of money, but he's going to end up paying Substack nearly three times that much for his first year out of his gross revenue until it goes back the usual cut next year (his monthly gross is a lot higher than $27,000/month now).
I wonder why he took it? The guy was a top columnist with two published books and the co-founder of Vox - I doubt he was hurting for spare cash unless he's got a $1500/day Faberge Egg addiction.
The negotiations were probably months ago, and I think it was unclear you could make $250K/year, let along more than that, from blogging at the time. I tried to eyeball how much money I could make blogging in the pre-Substack era and it was nowhere near that amount. I think Substack has succeeded beyond most people's wildest dreams and it's hard to remember what deals sounded good or bad way back in 2020.
$250k is a pretty fat bird in the hand.
Very glad you have survived this. I even wondered if this was all a major conspiracy/advertising campaign ;) lol
"And I know some of you are concerned about the risk of corporate deplatforming. My weak answer is that so far Substack has been great at resisting calls for this, I think it's worth rewarding them with my business, and I'm proud to contribute to companies that share my values. My strong answer is that if I start feeling too constrained, I'll leave."
I hope you will test this sooner than later so that if you end up needing to leave, it happens before we all get accustomed to the new site and give substack too much money.
There are some Substacks with content much more controversial than anything Scott writes about (e.g. Niccolo Soldo interviewing Weev). If that kind of stuff gets removed that would be a pretty good canary in the coal mine.
I missed Slate Star Codex and am glad to have you back — I admit I’m excited to hear what you’re doing in your new psychiatry practice too, but that’s because I work in healthcare so healthcare model experiments are always interesting to me, and while I often like your content even when I disagree with it, the psychiatry posts have the special place in my heart of someone from several adjacent industries
Is there a mechanism in place by which I can support you while also making it clear that the additional fun incentives aren't exciting to me? I guess a Patreon or similar external service would accomplish that, but I don't mind the idea of some small cut of my contribution going to the platform. They're doing a lot of heavy lifting through exposure and lack of censorship, after all. Are there plans for a subscriber poll, perhaps? This seems like useful information to guide your decision-making process when it comes to incentives.
I'm having trouble figuring out what you're asking - is there some reason that also getting the incentives would make you unhappy?
Not the original commenter, but I think the idea is to credibly signal that subscription-only content isn't what's generating the support, so that you don't feel tethered to subscriber models for continued income and can weigh tradeoffs better.
I see. I think even if Bibliophile personally did this, so few other people would that it wouldn't be a useful way of judging how many people would do this. If they just want to personally send the signal, consider it sent!
For what it's worth, I also expect to get ~0 value from subscriber only content, don't particularly want there to be valuable subscriber only content, but wanted to express support via the international standard unit of caring (dollars).
On reflection, it wasn't clear what I actually did with that intention: I subscribed.
Same here, so n >= 3 for whatever that's worth. Scott could always do a survey if he needs more info on this. And the paywalled offerings are pretty minimal, so that is some data already.
You used to have the Patreon. Is there some legal or contractual reason to leave it down?
Almost certainly Substack -- which takes a cut of Substack subscription revenue -- requires Scott not to cut out the middleman by allowing people to pay for his posts through other routes. That would be a very normal contract term for something like this. (In fact, it would be pretty surprising if they _didn't_ include it.)
Then I'll go ahead and send the same signal. I certainly won't turn down the private open threads, they sound pleasantly peaceful, but if you changed your mind about the incentives and made everything public, I wouldn't hesitate to stay subscribed.
I'll add my voice to the signal then. I will be subscribing because you deserve the support, but the extra content being subscription-gated actually makes me *less* enthusiastic about subscribing.
This is because I'm ideologically opposed to artificial scarcity of digital goods (ie restricting access to something that can be duplicated for free).
I understand that digital creators are stuck in a supply-and-demand based economy and don't have great options for making money without implementing artificial scarcity (aside from advertising, and I am guilty of screwing that model with adblockers) so I don't resent creators that do so, but I hate that the world works this way and it always makes me sad.
I'd rather my support of a creator help them to give more free content to everyone, not cause them to take some of their content away from other people.
Works for me. I suppose this comment thread provides a venue for a bit of initial feedback on the issue. If you start to get the impression that the quality of your incentives isn't tightly coupled with your success in attracting subscribers (e.g. your incentives don't do much to encourage subscription, but you have a contingent of loyal readers who subscribe anyway), something like a sub survey could always be a later step.
Given the structure of Matt's deal I wonder if it's better for me to wait a year then subscribe? E.g., does subscribing now mostly benefit Scott or mostly benefit Substack?
I felt guilty after posting this so I just subscribed
I think Matt's deal is kind of like Parfit's Hitchhiker ( https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/parfits-hitchhiker ) or one of those things. They only gave the advance believing that readers would subscribe, so if readers want to "counterfactually" "cause" the advance to happen, they should subscribe.
$10/mo is absolutely bonkers, completely out of touch with reality pricing for a single blogger. I didn't pay that much for the entirety of the NY Times, who's subscription I cancelled over the threat of doxxing you.
I kind of agree. I felt like $100 was well worth it to show appreciation for the years of previous content. But going forward, $1-$5 per month seems like the most that's reasonable for one author. For example, we spend $15 on a book that takes an author probably an average of a year of work to complete (via audible subscription).
A platform like substack is in a fantastic position to allow users to put together an a la carte menu of subscriptions of various authors for a very reasonable rate without suffering from falling into micropayments. A dollar per author per month is an extremely reasonable fee, make it a $10/mo minimum to substack, you pick out 10 authors. I'm extremely in favor of paying for content, but it has to have some basis in reality.
Isn't reality simply whether or not people find Scott's work worth it? There's no natural law or anything on how much things ought to cost, right? I never subscribed to the NY Times because I didn't think they were worth it at all. I'm happy to pay 8.33333 per month for Scott which is what 100/year amounts to.
Yes. But part of what determines what it's worth to read Scott's work is what the opportunity cost is. If I can buy 6-7 of the best books for the year for the same cost as subscribing, that's a relatively high opportunity cost.
Presumably, we've settled on a market price for books (around $15 per year of author output on average). Because that maximizes revenue for authors. There are some books *I'd* pay $100 for. But by lowering the price they expand their readership by more than enough to make up for the lower price.
If I were innovating in this sphere, what I'd try and do is keep the actual price low but then try and capture some of that consumer surplus in other ways. For example, get little badges or cosmetics next to your comments, more profile picture options, maybe allow color or different fonts for higher paying subscribers (That sounds kind of annoying though), maybe something like Reddit Gold where you can tag articles or comments you really like, the weekly subscriber threads or AMAs he's already mentioned, etc.
Honestly, I find these ideas awful. As a subscriber I would prefer if Scott would stick more or less to the same comment management policy as on the SSC. Why else (excluding altruism, of course), would people subscribe right now, if they would not like SSC and expect that this space would be similar in spirit?
Yah, those ideas weren't great. Idea is to try and capture more of the consumer surplus while keeping entry price lower though. I'm sure more imaginative people than me could figure out something (e.g., skins in video games but something that works in blog format).
There's some market economics at work here.
In practice, right now, Scott has a $0 option and a $10 option. He's expecting most people do the $0 option, and to pay the bills with the $10 option.
If he offers a $5 option for everyone, then almost nobody who's currently paying $10 will choose to continue paying $10. A few generous people would, but the vast majority will choose to drop down to paying $5.
So the question becomes, would the increase in subscribers who are willing to pay $5, worth it compared to the number of people who are willing to pay $10? If the demand from "subscribers who are willing to pay" is mostly inelastic between $10 and $5 (which is very plausible), then it'd make more sense to charge $10.
Also, keep in mind that Scott has a $3 tier "for students and poorer people", which offers price discrimination to capture the lower end of the market, without "normalizing" a lower price like $5.
I'm sure Substack has information and statistics on the status of the market vs price of the blog. Choosing $10 as the default rate on Substack is probably the result of market studies showing the optimal income rate. If you're unwilling to pay $10, then just go with $0 for the free tier. It's pretty clear that even though you get some small token bonuses with paying for the premium tier, the intention of the payment is to mostly be a donation to Scott.
I feel that there's an important difference, which might be a reason to pay more for some and to pay less for others: most of his content is public and free.
I like Scott's content. But if I think about it, the fact that it's open, out there, and there are many other people reading, adds quite a lot of value to me. That is, I like it more because I know the ideas that I'm enjoying are being spread. It would be less valuable (though still valuable) if I was the only one in the world reading him.
If other people are like me in this regard, you can't just gauge the value of subscribing here with the value you get from the content of a book. In part, you are financing the fact that any article can end up being viral and spreading the ideas you like. And we know nowadays that some people spend hours every day trying to push their ideas around to their 17 followers.
Personally, I haven't subscribed though, but if I was in a better situation I might.
Do you personally value receiving the content Scott creates more or less than you personally value receiving the content the NY Times creates? They surely create a lot more of it. But if all I cared about was quantity, I'm sure I could subscribe to 4chan or something.
I can't say if it's fair, but Matt Yglesias charges basically that ($8/month) and is making $500,000+ a year, so I don't think it's out of touch with the reality of what people will pay.
I have no idea how Substack works and makes money, but it seems like it does so I'm going to participate in it and charge about what everyone else charges. I think it would be completely fair for you not to subscribe, and you'll still have access to most of the content.
I subscribe to Matt Yglesias's substack. It's great - daily open threads, near-daily posts that are really good for the frequency. But it's almost all behind a paywall. I'm paying to get that content. And it seems to be like his $8 is on the high end - Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi are all $5.
The $10 here seems very high if most stuff is free. Personally I'm happy to pay it. But I think it's a little out of step with the ecosystem.
FWIW I think the combination of "mostly free" and "more expensive" makes sense: it's asking the really committed people to subsidize free stuff for everyone, rather than selling a product at a particular price point. It's the public YouTube channel + Patreon with perks model, rather than the traditional newspaper model Greenwald et al are going for.
You know, you're probably right. Maybe Scott's style even fits particularly well with a Patreon model - a lot of people really, really loves the old blog!
For me, the more freely available content the *more* I am willing to pay. Patronage is to me about creating things that you want to exist in the world, not getting exclusive access to them.
As a counter-point to what Scott does, each time Sam Harris tightens his paywall the closer I come to cancelling my subscription.
/s/creating/supporting. Ugh.
I'm personally very happy that Scott is finally offering an easy way to donate to his blog precisely for this reason
Interesting. Was thinking about Yglesias, but had imagined it was more like 50% content behind the paywall. This makes me more inclined to subscribe to his.
As for the percentage for free content here, I paid for the same reason many people support PBS and NPR. It's a way to price discriminate voluntarily. Let the comfortable professionals like me cross-subsidized starving students.
I could end up being totally off, but I get the feeling this is an early adopter effect that relies upon people mostly not consuming content from bloggers you can individually subscribe to, so paying for Matt Yglesias is fine if you're not paying for much else. But if Substack or any aggregate of services where you can subscribe to individual writers takes off, we're either going to end up in a situation where everyone consumes content from only one or two writers or everyone is going to need to lower price per author. It likely needs to converge to something like YouTube Premium, which I think is $10 (I pay for it but don't even remember what they charge). I only follow about 8 channels or so on any regular basis there, but there is no way I'd pay $80 for that even though I could afford it.
I think I feel the same way about Substack. I'll pay you $10 a month right now, but I'm never going to pay $80 a month for access to blogs if writers I care about just as much all migrate to here.
At least in your case, there's some additional goodwill in that I'd like to subsidize your medical practice experiment, but really I'd prefer a more direct way to do that. Had you considered incorporating it as a non-profit so it could just accept donations?
Strongly disagree. I value Scott's writing more than I value Netflix or Amazon prime, both of which I happily pay for. I certainly value Scott's writing more than I value the NYT. $10/month feels super fair, especially given the coupon he included.
Love you Scott, and so glad you are back. Just a request, would be nice if you too didn't start saying "some of whom are probably women or minorities". As a woman and "minority" in the context of America, getting so tired of everyone playing identity politics and reducing people to their identities. If you like a female blogger, or a minority blogger, just link to them and talk about their work. Stop mentioning their immutable characteristics.
This whole thing has gotten so bad that now whenever they mention that a minority or female is going to talk about something, especially at work, I immediately get biased that they are going to be worse than the other speakers because they were just brought in for woke points. And I personally feel that instead of just being evaluated as a person, I'm also being evaluated on my gender and ethnicity and have something to prove on it's behalf.
That comment seemed like a half-hearted sarcastic quip about the medias bias towards identity politics. But I suppose even being sarcastic towards identity politics is somewhat playing into it in a way.
I don't think it's playing into it, but just a soft criticism. What's true though is that it's harder and harder to be obviously sarcastic without being explicit "\s". People are so fed up of the ridiculous non-sarcastic comments that it just doesn't land.
Lol very accurate, so hard to tell what is sarcasm when the most idiotic things are said with an earnest straight face. Perhaps I wouldn't have written this comment if I didn't have to attend a straight faced meeting about diversity metrics on my team 5 mins before reading this article, with someone explicitly asking everyone to prove how they were diverse.
Arghh
As a woman myself, it annoys the hell out of me because the opinions ascribed to "women and minorities" are generally not ones I hold. Some women do have those opinions, maybe even a lot of them! But some of us don't! I'm already on the weird side of womanhood by having a selection of traditionally male-coded interests and a severe lack of interest in a lot of traditionally female-coded ones, I don't need to be made feel like a Martian for not being in lockstep with "everyone kno wimmen'n'minorities think dis".
I don't mind feeling like a Martian, I just resent the implication that "100% all women everywhere believe this thing".
Nice to see you, Deiseach! (would it help to be thought Martian by the local community standards :) over your Catholicism rather than over your phenotype or [presumably Irish] haplotype? :) )
I've felt like a Martian from late preadolescence on (well, when I first grasped how really abnormal I was, probably around age 10-11 - 1968/9 -, I _wanted_ to be a Vulcan, but thought the mental discipline involved - not the silly superhero powers - were an unrealistic aspiration).
But I'd like to gently push back on "I don't need to be made feel like a Martian: if group norm enforcement can make you *feel* like a Martian when or in those aspects where your best judgement is that you are not a Martian, you might need to work on resistance to letting your emotions be driven by group norm enforcement - that's a constant battle for me (and the fact that I try is a Martian characteristic, I think), so please don't assume I claim an answer. And yes, I grasp that until pretty recently anyway group norm enforcement overall was more intense on wimmen than on menfolk. Not sure how true that is for a PMC male of ten in 2021 America.
I don't mind being a Martian. That developed over a long time, and various different elements, of being exposed to wider media/pop culture of the "everyone naturally feels like this/thinks this/all right-thinking people agree that..." type. "Okay then, if Not This means Not Human, then I'm Not Human". It's annoying though, when it comes from the same types of people who would be very scrupulous about fine shades of difference in something else. If it's bad to lump "all X" together then it's equally bad to have "all women" or "all minorities". I understand the good intentions behind some of it, but equally some of it is what, over on the sub-reddit TheMotte, calls "consensus building": 'all right-thinking people agree that..." with the unstated but implicit "and if you disagree then you are a wrongthinker and bad person".
You may have a point about emotion-driven resistance to group norm enforcement, I do tend to pin back my ears and dig my heels in and balk like a mule when I feel that I am being forcibly nudged towards "we all agree on X, don't we?" There's an Irish saying "I'll be led but I won't be drove" that fits there 😀
Yea dude (a banned word at my company), feel the same. Women are 50% of the population. Also, some of the so-called minorities are literally more than 1/3rd of the world population, aka chinese and indian. It's such a reductive annoying term, POC. Reminds me of how everyone found cubans voting for Trump being strange, it's like these people literally don't get we too are entitled to our own opinions.
"whenever they mention that a minority or female is going to talk about something at work..." Do you feel this way any time there is a female or minority speaker? Or only when these characteristics explicitly get called out?
(also, I agree with gph's take below that Scott was being slightly tongue-in-cheek here)
Responded to singalong above that the most idiotic stuff is being said earnestly so I can no longer tell what is sarcasm and not. Before reading the post I was in a meeting where we all had to say how we were diverse, in order to track diversity on our team, which pissed me off that I didn't even notice scott wrote that in a sarcastic sense.
To be perfectly honest, I never did feel biased earlier because I never cared for their identity. But working in a company where we are constantly told to cut corners on hiring "diverse" individuals, hosting them on talks and keynotes despite them not being close to as qualified as the best people, and knowing this is becoming standard across industries, I can't help but require the "diverse" person to prove themselves first in my mind.
Which is personally upsetting, because I think I'm very competent so when I am contacted by someone I would want to work with, or am joining a new team, I feel obligated to prove my worth to them. Because I know how **I** would feel about someone with my attributes.
The more unconscious bias training I have to attend, the more I resent these people for making me feel like my gender and ethnicity come way before my work and personality, and the more I am conscious of it, the more I view another person through this lens.
Somewhat related, but I'll probably use a different account to make other comments because I don't want to be associated with my identity. I get that it might be a reach to feel that way, but I want my comments to be decoupled with what I look like and stand on their own. It's sad that the internet is the only place left where this is possible these days.
If past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, you will probably mention something similar again in the future. Will you change account again? Might as well keep this one.
On the other hand, perhaps changing accounts regularly is good practice these days. But you will need a new e-mail, I guess.
That sounds really frustrating! Let us hope for saner times. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I’m a student and I subscribed using the coupon. Thank you!
🙏🤗 warm thoughts from Ibasho & microcovid project, it's great to have you back!
Everyone has a unique financial situation, and a unique approach to making financial decisions. With that said, I feel compelled to offer one additional piece of information for anyone who wants to develop a mental model that covers subscription behavior: I chose to subscribe at a price greater than $10/mo. Probably not a lot of people will comment to say as much, but we do exist.
I think there should be an option for more than $10/month or $100/year. People would then be able to engage with you out of a sense of philanthropy. Your work is a social good at this point.
Oops, there's a $250 option, but even that might be too low for some people. Let people write you blank checks.
If you select that Founding Member option it lets you put in whatever amount you like from what I'm seeing
Yeah, I figured that out and in the process accidentally became a founding member. So, you're welcome?
You used to be able to use the "Founding member" option yesterday to pay whatever amount you want. Not sure if that's changed today.
I don't know if there's a monthly option, but you can choose to pay more than $100 if you do it yearly (I think it's called something like Founder's level?). You seem to be able to put in a custom amount.
I subscribed and it's already paid for itself just from discovering Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive". <3
My first question: Why "ten"? I mean, I know it turns the near-anagram that was "slate star codex" to an exact-anagram of "scott alexander". But this is Scott, so of course there will be significance of the number 10 as well somehow.
PS: I asked this on the Discord and someone reminded me of Sephirot -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefirot and https://unsongbook.com/chapter-9-with-art-celestial/ -- which sounds like a likely answer.
"I subscribed and it's already paid for itself just from discovering Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive". <3"
Wow, one of today's lucky 10,000! :D If you hadn't heard it before, I also highly recommend playing Portal, the game whose theme song it is. It's oldish at this point, but still a classic, and no less funny than when it was new. (Unless you just hadn't heard JC's own version of the song, which he wrote, but obviously did not sing in the game itself.)
> Why "ten"?
Subscription is $10?
But it should really be renamed Astral Codex Net to match the domain name astralcodex.net.
I may be the only one who wants this, but can you bring back ads? Ads on the original blog were a really useful way for me to get exposure to the ssc community for my product. I can always buy ads on the subreddit, but I'd rather send money to you. Besides, people tend to adblock on reddit.
As a consumer, I also liked the ads on SSC. They were always tasteful, and I was very often interested in what they were peddling.
I don't have a lot of control over layout right now - Substack did me a favor by even allowing the blogroll. Given the business community controversy around ads on Substack (see https://www.businessinsider.com/advertisements-emerge-on-substacks-ad-free-newsletter-ecosystem-2021-1 ) I think it might be a hard sell to get them to allow that. I'll continue advertising worthy causes on Open Threads, and maybe worry more about ads once all the other logistical issues have been cleared up.
I'd rather see no ads.
It's none of my business, but there are two problems I have with ads:
1) Annoying ads that actively interrupt my browsing experience. The worst are pop-ups and videos, but even having to skip blocks of unrelated content in the middle of an article is annoying.
2) Tracking.
The old ads at SSC did neither. They were on a sidebar, and I assume they were static images served by the website without tracking. I have no problem with this. I wish all advertising could be like this.
But I understand how "no ads, ever" is a better Schelling point for Substack, especially because users will try all kinds of tricks.
> My new psychiatry practice is (I think) potentially genuinely interesting, but I'd prefer people not get too excited about it until I've been doing it a year or two and can confirm that the business model actually works. My patients are random innocent people who happened to get matched with me at my past clinic and don't need to be ambushed for a news story about changing trends in mental health blah blah blah.
Honestly, Scott should consider opening up his practice to target the SSC demographic. Or at least, this is just me voicing my frustrations at the inability to find psychiatrists who are willing to work with people who experiment with 5-HT2a agonist RCs and want to talk about the science behind it. I feel like (especially in the bay area) this subset of people are somewhat underserved. Half of silicon valley goes off to Burning Man every year and dose a 10strip of LSD or some other lysergamide or tryptamine, but this is barely noted in medical practice.
While I understand what you want and think it's a reasonable thing to want, I think most doctors (including myself) would be really nervous about those patients.
For one thing, *I* would have to know about 5-HT2a agonist RCs, and although coincidentally I know a little about that particular topic, there are lots of similar things that would force me to hit the books before I could have coherent opinions on them. A doctor who has to hit the books for an hour to have a coherent opinion on a particular patient is a doctor who will never have any free time (existing business models are predicated on spending 10-45 minutes per patient, total, entirely in the appointment block, and even taking detailed notes means working overtime).
For another, there's no way to give great medical guidance about this; even if I did hit the books, a lot of the relevant studies just haven't been done. If I said anything other than "this isn't safe" and you did it, you could probably sue me. While you personally probably wouldn't sue me, if I have 250 patients and I'm putting myself at slight legal risk to all of them, that's a lot of legal risk.
Also, a lot of what doctors do is based on intuition. If you asked me "Can I take LSD and DMT at the same time?", or whatever insane thing you want to do, probably what would happen is - first I'd spend an hour hitting the books seeing if anyone else had done that before. Probably the answer is "no" or maybe "yes and nobody superficially noticed any problem". But my advice would still be "no, on priors", and then you would very reasonably ask me which priors, and I would have to answer something like "the priors against doing dumb stuff", and then you would think I was some kind of fraud because I should be telling you about receptor interactions or something. The whole process would be a lot more stressful and lawsuit-baity than just telling depressed people to take SSRIs.
I'm studying this area and plan to synthesize what I learn pseudonymously. What would you consider the top resources for information on 5-HT2a agonist RCs?
We missed you.
Is there a depth-limit to how much these comments nest? Someone probably already knows, so I don't need to test it myself.
Where's the fun in taking someone's word for it? Let the reply pyramid building begin
Have u folks nothing better to do?
I was never a big fan of the nesting cap on the old site, it'd be fun if it does more of a reddit style zoom-in-if-needed.
Is it gonna get crazy narrow?
Hmm I like that substack emails me about replies, but the link to my comment seems broken and I had to go digging, which is annoying...
> After talking to Substack about this concern, they've agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers. I might occasionally remind you that they exist, but you won't get teased by the titles or see stubs that cut off halfway.
Thank you.
> I've revealed my real name to prevent people from threatening me with it, but I'm still going by Scott Alexander.
In that case, you might also consider changing the name that each article is posted under, too.
Are you seeing articles posted under my real name? Where?
I had the same thing and it turns out your real name is built into my version of the About Divinity mod. I clicked through though and it looks like that's no longer the case, so it might just be an early version of that css?
Seems like a good enough place to ask for an edit button if that's within your capabilities. Low priority but it'd be nice to remove the extra "through" from the the comment above
You bamboozled yourself! Your comment is actually correct as written. Read it more slowly. ;-)
I would love a comment editing button for substack. If Scott's got the juice for a contract, and his blog will be community-forward (which it is) maybe he can help all substackers by getting this feature!
Scott may have some "juice", but don't forget that implementing these features takes time and money. Tweaking display templates for a site is pretty mechanical. Implementing completely new features is not. And if you assume that Scott's getting a quarter-mill from this site, Substack's only getting about $25,000. Which isn't *nothing*, but it doesn't buy you as much development time and overhead as you might expect.
General question - it looks like the ssc.com domain name is available, how hard would it be to make it redirect to here?
It's not available; it's just that whoever owns it didn't configure an A record, so visiting it in e.g. a browser fails because there's no IP address to look up by it.
I am interested in reading via the web/RSS and not email; I would be sad if I got emails in my inbox for AC10. So, after subscribing, I went to my account page. There I found this interesting checkbox:
> Email notifications:
> [ ] Newsletter posts
> (Disabling all notifications will unsubscribe you from this publication)
I have unchecked the checkbox, and as far as I can tell I'm still paying someone money, so I'm probably still subscribed. But this seems like a strange UI, that you might want to ask Substack about, especially if you are encouraging people to read via the website.
Any comment on the extremely long legal agreement that Substack requires me to agree to before they'll take my money? I won't read it (or agree to it). I WILL send you money via any payment service that didn't do that. Maybe you'd like to post some other payment mechanism.
I don't think he wants to accept money any other way (because of provisional loyalty to Substack).
Like you, I dislike excessive legal agreements for everyday tasks. How else can we make our point?
What if you were to start a charity fundraising page on Just Giving (or similar) in aid of, say, the Khan Academy? Emphasize that people only need to enter into that one legal agreement (Just Giving's one), and from then on they can take a stand against excessive legal agreements by publicly diverting money from good causes such as a Patreon or Substack creators to this different good cause. I would then donate $50 to your page and put "Khan Academy instead of Astral Codex Ten because of Substack's excessive legal agreement" as my publicly visible comment.
Glad to hear they're giving you the opportunity to leave if it doesn't work out. That was my biggest concern.
What is the "founding member" price? I notice you don't mention it - is it a default Substack thing?
As a subscriber to several Substacks, I do find it odd to paywall only a small amount of material, yet charge (at least as a couponless default) a full $10/month. The typical price for solo bloggers is $5, with $10 being the price more common for team efforts.
In the short term, people will just pay — we want to support you! But as time goes on, you probably should try to make the experience behind the paywall actually worth the additional cost to the people interested in paying. This could mean even more frequent open threads (as Yglesias does), but I think a direction that would be attractive to you is to put most if not all of the culture war content back there, even the posts you deem less impulsive or more important.
Is it actually the case that people will not pay in the long term primarily to support Scott? Would be interesting to poll subscribers on their motivation. (I am paying primarily to give support, as is true for ~all my Patreon subscriptions also.)
One thing the comment section needs that it doesn't have (as far as I can see) is a Report button.
Count me on the list of people who would be happy to pay some small amount of money (~$1-2) a month for no specific benefit. I'm very happy you're back but don't love the idea of hidden ~~SSC~~ ACX content. $10/mo also feels like enough money that it comes with the sensation of *fealty*, and neither you nor any blogger deserves that (in both the positive and the negative sense).
I just read “Substack’s view of content moderation” and really dig it. I didn’t know they had a grand vision that I liked so much! After reading that I feel like moving to Substack was a great choice, and plan to see if I can find more writers here I like enough to subscribe to.
First and foremost, I'm very happy to see you blogging again, I've missed SSC and I have high high hopes for this one!
Second though, I'm a bit sad that my options eem to be either "support at double what I was paying on patreon" or "don't support". Am I right in guessing that there won't be the option to support via other platforms and forgo the subscriber content on here?
I am so pleased you're started blogging again! Subscribed and looking forward to the good times to come!
I am excited for your new beginnings and i love the efforts you're going to to make it a smooth experience for non subscribers. I think can't afford it currently but i will likely get it when being able to becomes an option.
Just so impressed all round with the way you do things, Scott
Thanks for the discount coupon. Life in Russia wth 6000$ annually is not that bad, but it's hard to support people in US.
"And I know some of you are concerned about the risk of corporate deplatforming."
What if Substack itself gets deplatformed? Are they reliant on AWS? Are they offering crypto as a payment option in case payment providers shut them off? Do they have a contingency plan in case Gmail starts marking all their emails as spam? (Example: I noticed that the only way to log into my account is to get a login email from them? It might be good to harden the service by doing a standard username+password login so they're a bit less vulnerable to deplatforming by email providers.) Are they publishing the address of an office that could be targeted by rioters? Are they doing all their own email infrastructure, so their email provider can't terminate the relationship and force them to rebuild the reputation of the IP address they're using to send email, etc.?
Yes, these measures might seem a little excessive now, but it does seem to me that there has been a sort of "boiling frog" effect from the deplatformers where what was once unthinkable gradually becomes thinkable and then it actually happens. "Only the paranoid survive."
I'm especially concerned that Substack will make some kind of controversial moderation call which will cause all the left-of-center Substackers to abandon the platform in protest (zillion witches effect), leaving a platform full of right-of-center Substackers who FAANG feel comfortable deplatforming.
These are all good points.
From my own perspective, I intend to use Substack as long as I can, get a cushion of savings, then switch to something else.
From society's perspective, I'm optimistic that the more deplatforming happens, the more people are incentivized to use the decentralized tools already available. Right now there's stuff like Mastodon and cryptocurrency, but the users are either very early-adopter techies, or far-right types on Gab or whatever's even more extreme than that. Nobody else has any incentive to get involved. I'm thinking of this as a combination technological, economic, and social problem. The technological problem is whether these tools exist, whether crypto can handle enough payments per second to handle big parts of the economy, etc. The economic problem is whether there are enough users that these services are profitable and it's profitable for top-notch companies to work on expanding them - this is solved in terms of crypto but maybe not in terms of Mastodon, decentralized DNS, etc. The social problem is whether doing decentralized things is so associated with the alt-right that everyone else would be scared / feel gross using them - I wanted to see what was going on on Gab but I was too scared to join under my real name (what if someone saw me and thought I was a real Gab user?).
If we're at the point where I'm getting deplatformed, probably people like Matt Yglesias or Glenn Greenwald are also getting deplatformed, and there's enough of a user base of people who like those kinds of writers that I expect the technological, economic, and social problems to get solved pretty quickly. In this sense the frog-boiling is on our side; it gives everyone enough time to see which way the wind is blowing and react. I'm still trying to figure out what I can do to speed the positive side of process up, but I'm optimistic about the relative speeds.
To be totally honest I'm not sure how I feel about decentralized everything. I'm not a free speech maximalist, and I think one could reasonably argue that our discourse was healthier before social media made it way easier for lots of people to speak. I remember reading panglossian editorials in the early days of the internet saying it was gonna revitalize democracy blah blah blah, and it didn't seem like that went as well as expected. I feel like the optimism around "decentralized everything" could be another case of people projecting vague ideals on to some new technology while ignoring the more important and difficult to predict question of the incentive structures the new technology will create.
I agree that it's not excessive to assume that the deplatforming ratchet will keep tightening. But your list of 'attack surfaces' is so long that I'm demotivated! I wonder if it isn't better to instead spend every penny and hour we have campaigning to give monopoly regulators a statutory duty to prevent "collusion to exclude from service" and the power to apply huge fines and even force providers to offer services on reasonable terms.
I've noticed that the new blog isn't licensed under CC-BY like SSC is. Is this an intentional decision, a condition of moving over to substack, or something that might change in the future?
I just wanted to add to the messages of gratefulness and support, and I'm excited to see what will come to be this blog in the coming years!
Being a student, I used the coupon code and I'm glad it's there, but it still feels as though I'm not paying my fair share, but here goes regardless.
100$ is very far out of my price range, considering everything else I'm already subscribed to. 5$ would be better...
My favorite articles were your calm insights into culture war topics, but 120$ (for a monthly subscription) would amount to a significant chunk out of my yearly income... I feel like this might defacto limit your content to readers from rich countries who can afford the cost.
(But I'm also not in a financial strain so I don't feel comfortable using the coupon.)
> 120$ (for a monthly subscription)
It's $10 per month. The $100 number is for a whole year. I believe the coupon is $2.5 per month.
Anyone know off the top of their head how to alter the Stylebot CSS to make the title bar not be sticky? I don't like how it re-appears when I scroll up, I'd prefer if it was just static at the top of the page.
Create a bookmarklet with the code below (1 line!), the a click on it should to the trick here and elsewhere, but not everywhere.
Needs a click again after page reload (good old Nuke Everything Enhanced, we miss you so!):
javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()
Credit and Thanks to who wrote it and who posted it in some SSC(-adjacent) place!
The last time I subscribed to a "news" anything was my senior year of college as a undergraduate, and the only reason I subscribed to an alleged "newspaper" was because as a college student I was somehow entitled to pay the staggering amount of one dollar per year for the school year subscription.
Implicitly that meant, I believe, I was only to receive the daily edition whenever the delivery person (who I swear was Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong) remembered to deliver it.
When it was delivered it was - politely - a disaster. It seems the cost of a proofreader was too much for the publication's budget and no one else could proofread before publishing so. . . And then the publisher/editor decided a sure-fire business idea was to insult, alienate, offend, and generally antagonize subscribers and advertisers alike by way of his weekly, poorly written screed in his capacity as Mr. Know It All. (I prefer the Rocky and Bullwinkle version of said expert, incidentally.)
The real world beckoned me, and working life kept me from having time to sit and read the newspaper in the morning or the evening, and I decided, after visiting a friend who had subscribed to a daily newspaper that amounted to an ink-stained impending avalanched in the corner of his living room, that spending money on a subscription a "news" anything was not a good investment.
I ask one thing, should I consider a subscription: Quality. Save the insults, the threats, the abuse, the antagonism for the sandbox, the litter box, or Fakebook or Twitter or whatever Social Media platform the cool kids, the in crowd, the fashionable folk frequent nowadays.
https://iamcolorado.substack.com/
As they say on tumblr IF👏YOU👏ACCEPT👏A👏STEADY👏DAY👏JOB👏AS👏A👏WRITER👏TO👏SUPPORT👏YOUR👏PIE-IN-THE-SKY👏DREAMS👏OF👏PRACTICING👏MEDICINE👏YOU👏ARE👏VALID
I am on the verge of subscribing after enjoying many years of wonderful content from S.S.C. Can someone please explain what differentiates the “founding member” option? Is this simply additional generosity to express one’s love of all things Scott Alexander, or is there a further benefit to the subscriber? Thanks
I was glad to subscribe!
Question though: is there a comfortable way to access stuff from the old blog?
The old blog is still up at slatestarcodex.com. While all the posts are there, it's a little barebones, but you can see the old version using archive.org.
But more importantly, congratulations on having comment id 1111111!
Glad to see you are back! Does the "light content" that is premium-only include future short stories and such? They were amazing, and I would be very sad to miss them.
Welcome back! I was missing you. I have two questions:
1. Is there a possibility to buy a bigger package than the $250 one?
2. Is there a chance to fix typography of quotes and apostrophes? It was working great on slatestar codex, so probably a substack problem...
Book recommendation time! I'm on an English history kick at the moment, having finally succumbed and read Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" trilogy (did it convince me Thomas Cromwell was a misunderstood woobie? it did not, but it did give me new insights on his character). After that, I got on to two biographies of Cromwell, one by Diarmaid MacCulloch, and that led me on to his 2003 book about the Reformation, titled (of course) "The Reformation: A History" https://www.amazon.com/Reformation-History-Diarmaid-MacCulloch/dp/014303538X.
As an aside, I need a good biography of (1) Thomas Cranmer - the only version of one by MacCulloch is in print - no e-book version so I'd have to read it like a caveperson or something! - and his character is a fascinating one which I want to see explored; he seemed to crumple like a wet paper bag when it came to giving in to Henry VIII (obligingly provided him the annulments for two of his wives) yet bravely went to the stake in Mary's reign, and I want to know more about him than simply "wrote the Book of Common Prayer which is beautiful English language" and (2) Henry VIII himself - there's something very slippery psychologically about him which makes it extremely tempting to go all Freudian on him, and he seemed to switch from "you are my bestest pal in all the world" to "send him/her to the headsman's block" in minutes. Descriptions of his marital shenanigans (poor guy managed to get himself not-really-marred THREE times) and the brutal way in which he discarded former favourites (had wife Number Three lined up to marry within two days of having Number Two, Anne Boleyn's head chopped off; married Number Five the same day as the annulment from Number Four was through) is breath-taking in its seeming psychopathy. I really want to know if anyone has had a good attempt at trying to see what made him tick.
So on to The Reformation. I deliberately picked MacCulloch because I knew he would have completely different views from my own (he's thoroughly Anglicised though of Scottish heritage, raised Anglican in a long-tailed clerical family, no longer in that or any tradition; I'm none of those) and although I'm only a couple of chapters in, I find it very good. I had no idea the Portuguese were so important, for instance. So can definitely recommend it.
I'd also recommend his Cromwell biography to let you see the rise and fall of this superstar fixer of the Henrician court. He overhauled the unwieldy mediaeval political structure to establish Parliament and how it operated on a firmer basis, unwittingly creating the one force which in later years and centuries could stand up to the king (who, under Henry and his underlings' reform of the church and state was now the sole spiritual and temporal authority who could rule over you body and soul) and drafted a raft of laws amongst other works; they really were New Men creating a New World and bringing about the birth of the modern world. The description of how he used those laws, particularly in the Boleyn affair, is very striking in how it anticipates some elements of the modern world - the way he went about picking victims and disposing of them is awfully (and I do mean that) reminiscent of Soviet show trials.
And then within four years of this great triumph of destroying Queen Anne, he himself went to the execution ground. Riding the tiger is a thrilling experience - until you fall off.
That should be "not-really-married" not "marred" and for those of you keeping a scorecard it goes:
(1) Katherine of Aragon, Number One: not-really-married because forget the dispensation we went to all that trouble to get, turns out she really was married to my brother first so me marrying her later was incest so not really a legit marriage. God and the Bible said so.
(2) Anne Boleyn, Number Two: turns out I was seduced and bewitched by means of spells and witchcraft into this one, so lack of consent means I was not really married. (The incest excuse for Katherine didn't get trotted out this time, even though it had been an objection raised by some back when Henry was first eager to wed Anne, given that he had taken her elder sister Mary as a mistress and possibly even fathered a son on her:
"Sir George recalled that he turned the King’s talk of his conscientious scruples in an even bolder direction than Temys: ‘I feared if ye did marry Queen Anne, your conscience would be more troubled at length, for that it is thought ye have meddled with the mother and the sister.’ Caught badly off guard by this breathtaking directness, the King retorted defensively, ‘Never with the mother,’ while Cromwell lashed out in an effort to save the situation, ‘Nor never with the sister neither, and therefore put that out of your mind.’
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cromwell (p. 167). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition."
(3) Anne of Cleves, Number Four: For some reason I didn't like her at first sight so the marriage was never consummated. This was embarrassing as there was gossip I was impotent (as if!) and that was why, when I wanted this one annulled, but luckily Anne was sensible and Cranmer did the needful. Everybody agreed that Anne had actually been pre-contracted to a different suitor, so technically she was married at the time so of course we couldn't be married, could we? So again I was not-really-married for a third time!
The Cranmer one is because of the Wife In A Box. His marital misadventures led to that joke by his enemies/Catholics, that he smuggled his wife around in a box.
Because he was (a) married then bereaved in early life and only was ordained after he was a widower (b) was a bishop and ordained in the (Roman) Catholic church at the time so had taken a vow of celibacy (c) even in the meddling Henry did with the church, he was severely on the side of clerical celibacy, so it was embarrassing and inconvenient, to say the least, and had potential severe down-sides if he found out any of his clergy were married (d) all that aside, when Cranmer (who was already of Reformed/Lutheran sympathies) was appointed ambassador to the court of Charles V, he travelled to Nuremberg, met with Lutheran clergy there and got on swimmingly with one of them, Andreas Osiander. So swimmingly, that he married Osiander's niece, despite the fact that he didn't speak German and she didn't speak English OH YEAH AND HE WAS A PRIEST WHO WASN'T DISPENSED FROM HIS VOW OF CELIBACY.
Cranmer comes home to England about a year later, and sends for his wife - I'm not too sure if she only joins him two years after the marriage. They have to live discreetly - he seems to have shuttled her off to one of his episcopal palaces down the country - and this is where the rumour about "he carried her around in a box on his journeys" came from. I can't imagine it was much fun for Mrs. Cranmer being stuck in a foreign country with little knowledge of the language and nobody can be told that he's your husband because it will get you all into trouble. About six years later (1538 or so) Henry gets his Six Articles pushed through, one of which reaffirms clerical celibacy, so Mrs. Cranmer gets sent home to Germany until it's safe for the Archbishop to come out as married, which doesn't happen until 1547 when Henry dies and his son Edward, who is moulded by his advisors/regents as a thoroughly Protestant monarch, succeeds.
I genuinely do wonder if the marriage was less about "fell in love" and more about "cementing close links with the Lutheran theologians by way of marriage" as was the custom for alliances.
https://www.kyrackramer.com/2015/07/09/welcoming-beth-von-staats-author-of-thomas-cranmer-in-a-nutshell/
"Thomas Cranmer, “Smuggler of the Lutheran Nobsey”
Exactly when Thomas Cranmer’s second wife Margarete stepped on English soil is not known, but all indications are that she arrived after her husband’s return from Europe to accept his appointment as archbishop. Where did she live? A closely guarded secret successfully kept, her location was and still is unknown. Margarete certainly was not either at Lambeth Palace, where a German woman’s presence would elicit curiosity — nor as humorously and commonly believed, hidden in a large wooden box.
In December 1543, Thomas Cranmer endured the personal tragedy of his palace at Canterbury being destroyed by fire. One of his brothers-in-law and several of his faithful servants were killed. Saved from the fire was a precious box owned by the archbishop, the contents within unknown. This in turn evolved into a story commonly enjoyed and told repeatedly by Roman Catholics during the reigns of Queens Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. Margarete was hiding in that box. Well, of course she was!
Shortly after Thomas Cranmer’s martyrdom, detractors published a widely distributed and humorous story weaving a plot where during the reign of King Henry VIII, Cranmer travelled throughout England with his wife, carefully hidden in a large crate with breathing holes. Later versions of the story portray His Grace anxiously praying for the safe retrieval of a precious wooden crate during the Canterbury Palace fire, the box of course containing “this pretty nobsey”.Unfortunately, this is our only hint of Margarete Cranmer’s appearance.
In reality, a complete silence enveloped Margarete Cranmer during her stay in England throughout the 1530’s. For all intents and purposes, she was invisible. For the politically naive Thomas Cranmer, this was an outstanding accomplishment. In fact, the feat was “astonishing”, claims historian Diarmaid MacCulloch. With conservative detractors seeking any way possible to upend him for good, His Grace’s ability to keep his wife and later also his daughter safe speaks to his steadfast commitment to his family and his remarkable resourcefulness.
Unfortunately, even with Thomas Cranmer’s great caution, by 1539 it became too dangerous for his wife Margarete and their young daughter Margaret to remain in England. The passage of the The Six Articles of 1539 through Parliament, which included a mandate of strict adherence to clerical celibacy, imposed all married clergy put away their wives. The risk to his family now untenable, he arranged for their exile in Europe.
Thus, His Grace was separated from his family for the remaining eight long years of King Henry VIII’s reign."
Strong second to the MacCulloch recommendations.
I made heavy use of MaCulloch for my podcast episodes on the Reformation. The Cranmer episode, which focused on the execution, "Mimetic Disaster," is the most popular one for me by a long ways.
This is neat; I had no idea Cranmer was ever married, and I might have to put MacCulloch's book on my reading list. I haven't been doing much history lately, but I am in the middle of Servais Pinckaers' Morality: A Catholic View atm. I've also been reading a bunch of John Bellairs books lately. I'm planning on giving Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates a go next.
A couple of points, possibly already made as I admit I haven't gone through all the comments...
I think we are all aware of the kind of content we are going to receive from Scott (and the kind of discussion we are going to get from his followers). Most of us are here because we like what Scott has to say, and simply want him to continue saying it.
The comparison to buying a book by someone who has spent a year researching it is unfair. This is a book Scott has been continuously writing since he began blogging. What he has written every year could easily fill a book, so let's ask how many books Scott has written that we have read for free over the years?
To me, the 10 dollars I have happily paid is as much indicative of my support for what Scott is doing with his medical practice, his decision to leave his job and pursue it, and the continuance of his blogging practice. That is: I support his content creation, yes, but I also support Scott and his choices. I think we are all aware of the value Scott adds to our lives through his writing. The ideas, maybe we could get elsewhere (maybe), but his digestion and regurgitation of them we cannot. That’s what I am happily paying for.
Uhh....why would they deplatform you? You're not a deplorable. I don't get it.
I might be a minority here, but I want to make sure there's still psychiatry blogging. I've really missed you digging through metanalyses and discussing chemical pathways.
I can't be the only one terrified that a "like" system in the comments will completely change the quality and character of the discussions here. I'd predict a lot more dunking and Reddit style pithiness because with any points system, the discussion necessarily becomes a competition.
I want to like this comment, but am choosing to not do so out of principle.
JVL sent me and I subscribed.
Thanks alot for the coupon option! I really wanted to contribute, but 10$ was a bit too high for me, and the reduced option is perfect :)
I suspect that even giving subscribers "advanced access" to "culture war" posts would help alleviate the dangers of going viral, both because the initial audience would be generally familiar with your work and sympathetic to your opinions and your style, and because you'd have an opportunity to edit the more emotional bits before making these posts public.
Another group to shill: some rationalist / LW sphere people decided they were going to try to replicate GPT-3 and release it to the world, because why not? Six months later they’ve secured funding, have a viable plan for achieving the goal, and have two (not directly related) NLP papers under review. Check them out at www.eleuther.ai
Is there any chance that healthcare providers might be able to get continuing education credits for your psychiatry posts? I don't know how hard it is to set up for that. It would definitely be cool.
I have two suggestions:
1. You said "I might also paywall a few very impulsive Culture War posts, just to prevent them from going viral." Please consider not doing this. It's fine if you want to prevent them from going viral in some other way, but please consider providing people with someone to view these posts for free, like by logging in or something.
2. You said Substack has "agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers". Please consider changing it so that people who want to see the titles of subscription-only posts can do so, even if the list doesn't show up on Google search results.
> After talking to Substack about this concern, they've agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers
This does not seem true at the moment. I see "Hidden Open Thread 157.5 Subscriber-only open thread" in the links and in the RSS feed.
I'm also seeing that post in the "Top" section at the bottom of the page (from a mobile browser).
"I might also paywall a few very impulsive Culture War posts, just to prevent them from going viral."
It's a nice thought, but this will not work and you know it. Instead of reading your controversial statements for themselves, people will just take the word of whoever is misquoting you.
Glad to have you back!
FYI at the bottom of your posts there is a link to a Hidden Open Thread. I am a non-subscriber. When I click the link it takes me to a "this post is for paying subscribers" page. The link looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/wfCBQYi
Just sharing in case this is a thing you want to change.
Paywalled posts show up in the RSS feed (which I view with Feedly). Not a big issue for me, but figured you'd want to know about it.
"After talking to Substack about this concern, they've agreed not to display any hint of subscription-only posts to nonsubscribers. I might occasionally remind you that they exist, but you won't get teased by the titles or see stubs that cut off halfway. If you do see these, something has gone wrong and you should let me know."
Just got one of these for the "Technocracy-Zilla: Origins" post. It showed up in my RSS feed as just a link, when I clicked through I got the teaser followed by the "this post is for paying subscribers, subscribe" banner.
Test comment.
Test reply.
*italics* and
>blocks
and [links](www.google.com), oh my!
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Ultricies leo integer malesuada nunc vel. Quam vulputate dignissim suspendisse in est ante in nibh mauris. Porttitor rhoncus dolor purus non. Quis auctor elit sed vulputate mi sit. Blandit massa enim nec dui. Euismod elementum nisi quis eleifend quam adipiscing. Odio ut sem nulla pharetra diam sit amet. Vel risus commodo viverra maecenas accumsan lacus vel facilisis volutpat. Faucibus scelerisque eleifend donec pretium vulputate sapien nec sagittis. Orci eu lobortis elementum nibh tellus molestie nunc non. Metus dictum at tempor commodo ullamcorper a lacus. Maecenas sed enim ut sem viverra aliquet eget.
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Felis bibendum ut tristique et egestas quis ipsum suspendisse. Condimentum id venenatis a condimentum vitae sapien pellentesque habitant. Consectetur adipiscing elit pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus. Diam volutpat commodo sed egestas egestas fringilla phasellus faucibus. Sit amet mauris commodo quis imperdiet massa tincidunt nunc pulvinar. Purus ut faucibus pulvinar elementum. Felis eget nunc lobortis mattis aliquam faucibus purus in massa. Gravida quis blandit turpis cursus. Faucibus et molestie ac feugiat sed lectus vestibulum mattis ullamcorper. Non curabitur gravida arcu ac tortor dignissim convallis. Commodo nulla facilisi nullam vehicula ipsum a. Tristique et egestas quis ipsum suspendisse. A diam maecenas sed enim ut. Dui faucibus in ornare quam viverra orci sagittis eu. Nullam ac tortor vitae purus faucibus ornare suspendisse. Bibendum at varius vel pharetra vel turpis nunc. Porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id eu. Nulla pharetra diam sit amet nisl suscipit. Laoreet non curabitur gravida arcu ac tortor dignissim.
Tincidunt eget nullam non nisi est sit amet. Sit amet justo donec enim diam. Iaculis at erat pellentesque adipiscing commodo elit at. Eu non diam phasellus vestibulum lorem. Commodo elit at imperdiet dui accumsan sit amet nulla facilisi. Nulla facilisi etiam dignissim diam quis enim. Euismod in pellentesque massa placerat duis.
What about now
Second test reply.
delete test
Third test reply.
This is reply with long version number 3.1
> This is a blockquote.
>This is another.
> This is also a blockquote.
With two sentences.
> This is a really long quote that will no doubt span multiple lines. Depending on how wide your screen is, this might have to be really long in order to do that. I guess I'd better add another sentence to make sure. Maybe one more? Okay this is the last one.
Some *formatting tests* _are done here_ -possibly struck through-. ~Tildes~ are fun. **Lots** of __emphasis__.
This is a [link test](www.example.com).
Bare link https://www.example.com.
Email test@example.com.
www.example.com/thingWith"InIt
https://example.com\ \amorestuffhere
[link test](www.example.com/thingWith"InIt)
> > Double quote test
> Why would you want that?
Some text here.
> Line 1
> Line 2
>> Line 3
> > Line 4
_> combined_
Test 123
Hello.
I attempted to reply to a comment on the "List of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned by the SEC" post. After spending 5 minutes typing up my reply and setting up my account, I was told that only paid subscribers could comment on that post.
I did not see any warning that comments were subscriber-only until I hit Post.
I am not sure whether this is a bug or an intended feature. I do know that it is frustrating to have to put effort into a post *before* knowing whether one is wasting said effort.
After the NYT piece i would hope that the discussion flourishes on both sides and that evolving SSC platform grows with the new home. NYT probably is not going anywhere and in general, their approach to the news is of value. I knew nothing about SSC until the Times starting probing the story. IMO its all very interesting , valuable ideas.
I probably would have found you again eventually, but I am here today because of he-who-must-not-be-naned at NYT. I will suscribe in two weeks. Peter Robinson
Suggestion for a book review: https://the-power-of-capitalism.com ! by. Dr. Dr. Rainer Zitelmann
More Substack bug reports:
- subscriber-only posts show up on the Archive pages
- when viewing comments in "Chronological" order, the buttons to show new comments seem to work strangely (I can't figure out the exact details of how they're going wrong, but they're going very wrong and this should be obvious to any Substack dev who spends a couple minutes playing around with them - my best guess is "inheriting functionality from Newest First mode")