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.
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.