Ah. I thought that with 'b' and 'v' being next to each other on the keyboard that it was more likely a typo, as "subscribe drive" still has a nice ring, even without actually rhyming. But I could certainly have been wrong. I probably was wrong, so I'll delete my comment.
I could be wrong but I vaguely remember someone saying they misread it as subscrive drive last year and Scott said he may intentionally do that the next year
To quote Javier Miliei's recent speech at the WEF:
>I would like to leave a message for all business-people...Do not be intimidated...You are social benefactors. You’re heroes. You're the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen. Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being.
On the one hand, I agree that to the extent that Scott is well-compensated, it's because people actually feel he's providing something of value to them. People subscribe to his blog voluntarily because they think his work is worth the support, and he's gone out of his way to avoid pushing anyone to feel obligated to.
On the other hand, I think it's not without reason that people are skeptical of the notion expressed in that quote as a general principle. While economists may model economic activity as being driven by people seeking things they value, and businesses providing it to them, for generations advertisers have understood their work as being more successful when it *creates* a sense of need where one didn't exist before. For a classic example, if you want to sell mouthwash, you can sell people on the idea that without it, their breath will stink and people will judge them, creating an insecurity they didn't have before in order to capitalize it.
We can also look at things like the rise of microtransactions and gacha mechanics in the video game industry. Rather than seeing them as fulfilling a need that had previously been left wanting, most players actively hate developers' use of this business model. But developers use it because it allows them to make more money by exploiting addictive behaviors in a small fraction of users. Rather than selling a game for $50 to a million players, you can make more money distributing a game to a million players for free, where the median player pays a pittance, but the most addictive one percent of players are paying upwards of $10,000 each.
There are actually quite a lot of ways where maximizing income can depart from maximizing value to the public, and businesses compete over wealth accumulated, not value provided to society. So where some businesses find ways to increase revenue by doing something other than what's most socially valuable, it'll give them a systematic competitive advantage. The idea that wealth accumulation *necessarily* results from positive social value glosses over a lot of potentially harmful behavior.
Absolutely agreed. As an example, since I spent the past two days driving to Iowa from North Carolina, some gas stations are now making the lowest two grades of gasoline E-15 (meaning most vehicles' engines will be damaged by using them), forcing people to either pay for premium or go somewhere else, on the bet that most people will opt to buy premium gas even if they don't need it. This makes them money, but is also a dirty trick.
After 353 years it would be less than $80, down to about $79.94. But then the question becomes how much is worth begging for. Signs often say "any amount helps" but I'm not sure they mean it.
It would take about 570 years for it to be worth less than $1.
"The modern version of this is “if you subscribe once, you can read everything in the archives, but if you forget to unsubscribe afterwards, you’ll pay money every month forever”."
Emily Oster has made several hundred dollars from me this way
It would be nice if Substack gave you the option to not send this nag to existing paid-up subscribers.
I know it's not your fault. I'm just sayin; it's not fun to be nagged when I'm already paying. (I wish Wikipedia would learn this lesson and give me a damned cookie.)
In an alternate timeline where the blog stayed on SSC, I...probably wouldn't have become a "paid subscriber". On the one hand, it was certainly priced too low for the value, so my happy price would've been above $0. On the other hand, I'm less comfortable signing up for someone's personal site, no matter how micro-successful. Being tied to a major legitimizing platform is reassuring in a lindy way, as well as introducing various useful network effects. Like yeah, technically I could have discovered the other three blogs I subscribe to through the old blogroll or repeated high-quality comment references...but it seems not coincidental that such discovery + motivation to actually pay was made so much easier by Substack.
The interface still sucks ass though. Beyond "charmingly retro" to Inepticon territory. 1000 SSC comments load faster than 100 Substack ones, or damn near.
Not a precise choice of term, Taleb would be ashamed. I meant more the concept of "follow the winners".
Um...so like even though SSC was hosted on Wordpress, and they're no slouch in the market, it also relied on a kludge of old volunteer code that Scott didn't feel like wrestling with too much. And "subscriptions", such as they were, went through Patreon. Wordpress is one of those internet infrastructures that just hangs around and works, but it's not exactly revolutionary or rolling in money or high-salience prestige. Patreon had its media day once (Hatreon was a thing), but it's sorta in a similar place. And they pushed some big UI/app changes last year there were pretty unfortnate, making me less sanguine on future outlooks. (Hosting one's content directly on Patreon is about as clunky an experience as Substack.) All these considerations combine to reduce my theoretical pricing of paying for SSC, had it remained there - with subscriptions, one is *not* paying for existing goods and services rendered, but for an *ongoing relationship* where such content is continuously created. So paying a yearly sub when I'm not confident one or more major parts might break in that year = need a discount rate.
Substack's star is still ascendant though. I'm confident they'll come out ahead of the recent cancellation campaign; it's not the first and won't be the last, they don't attack you if they're not scared. All the Cool Kid writers are on it, in a correlated way that enhances the value of each further writer, superstar or not. (I love sometimes seeing cross-pollination between ACX, SB, FdB, not just in content but in comments and commenters. This becomes way more likely when everyone's on the same platform.) And it just feels more..."formal" paying for various Substack subscriptions versus an individual person's Patreon. Like the difference between donating to an established charity and backing a Kickstarter. That veneer of professionalism is attractive to former normies fleeing the mainstream media. It's a grokkable business model.
So those factors combined mean I have higher priors on Substack's continued success (and thus ACX), because there's real money and reputation riding on the line. It's not really lindy in the sense of, bet on long-lasting things continuing to last longer - that remains to be proven, like all New Media ecosystems. But I think it's useful to also consider the opposite counterfactual, if ACX had started off on a big visible platform and later left for its own independent domain. The me in that situation would find such indicators worrying, and likely drop an existing sub.
(I guess in some sense, SSC having existed in various forms for close to 20 years or whatever is indeed long-lasting for a blog. But the concept isn't really supposed to be applied to things limited by human lifespan, as I understand it, and a *particular* blog certainly is...unlike the infrastructure that supports it.)
It’s not a bad idea to use some of the other tools that Substack allows. Making more posts subscriber only, if only for a few days, will encourage more subs - particular those posts that give you half the content for free.
I sign up to Substacks I don’t even like to read some of these articles and to comment.
yes but i'm also not going to pay for subscriptions to everything and depending on the author they may want to have a free audience (Scott certainly does). I don't object to authors operating entirely/mostly behind a paywall but I vastly prefer a case of 1 free article a week and 4 paid to 3 free articles and 2 first paragraph articles.
I *far* prefer not doing half-free posts, and I don't subscribe to blogs that do this as a general rule. Half an article paywalled is annoying; some articles paywalled and others not is, to me, not even a tiny bit annoying. (Or all paywalled! Be you!)
I really prefer Scott's system and I would be sad if he abandoned it. I think the other way is a signal that [Cory Doctorow term] may occur in the future.
I honestly hate blogs that highly frequently do the teaser-preview thing. If it follows a logical system, like "extra controversial topics are paywalled" or "real classic post bangers that drive continuing high engagement are paywalled", then that's just smart business sense I can appreciate. But a ton of variable-quality posts, some of which are essential causal linkages to explaining other free posts, being partially readable is just annoying. Feels too much like a variable-rewards gamble. This is the main reason I won't give Noah Smith any money, despite generally liking his writing.
Relatedly, every blog that makes you subscribe not just to comment but even to just "like" a post is irritating.
No no no no no, please don't do the "half free, then BOOM paywall in your face!" thing. I absolutely hate seeing them, and wish I had an extension which would warn me about them in advance so that I don't start reading.
Sure you don’t like it, you want the free stuff, but it might make the author more money.
I’ve signed up to substacks to engage in the comments on articles I didn’t even like, to writers I didn’t like, to explain that I didn’t like the article and why in the comments.
I do not "want the free stuff", I want to avoid that experience entirely. Dishonestly dangling the promise of an article in order to trap people into that "haha, now you have to either pay some money or suffer the lingering unsatisfiable curiosity worse than any clickbait could inflict upon you!" is Bad. I'd certainly get myself off the email list if that happened, and try to work out some system to find specifically which articles don't push that mess upon people. It is very unpleasant.
Half-free posts are terrible, I'd lose a lot of respect for Scott if he used that feature.
When you get the "preview" e-mail, it's not at all obvious it's a preview. Rather, you expect to read an article and then you get seemingly randomly paywalled. Nobody likes that sort of manipulation. If I knew it was a preview I could at least decide to skip it or to check it if and only if I'm potentially willing to pay for the full version. I don't have that option.
I don't have a problem with paywalls in general, but this particular approach is infuriating.
Half post is not a half valuable post, it's an advertisement disguased as a valuable post. And you probably did not subscribe to recieve ads, and you can't even unsub only for half-posts.
It's not a good reader experience, to put it short.
FWIW I am part of your "worrying" downward trend. I unsubscribed from all Substack content a few weeks ago, in response to Hamish McKenzie's post outlining his stance on monetizing Nazi content. Substack may be happy to fund this kind of content, and it is their right to make this choice; however, I am not happy funding it, and therefore cannot in good conscience give money to Substack.
Unfortunately, you are collateral damage, and I am sorry for that. That said, the slope on your graph is longterm and straight enough that I suspect my reasons for leaving are in the minority.
I am proud to suffer for the cause of fighting censorship (although I think they banned the offending blogs, so like most times people suffer for a noble cause, it was probably futile).
(FWIW I wouldn't object to them being hosted on Substack, I just don't want to feel like any of my money could be paying the authors. Which I suspect is even more of a minority stance, but hey.)
My impression is that if you subscribe to me (let's say for $100), then I get $90 and Substack gets $10.
If you subscribe to Hitler for $100, then Hitler gets $90 and Substack gets $10.
I don't think there's any way for subscribing to me to get money to Hitler - it's not like all the Substack money goes in a big pot and then gets distributed around. If I'm wrong about that I would actually like to know, since it sounds like something has gone very wrong somewhere, I haven't been following this controversy very hard, and I also don't want to personally fund Hitler.
Substack has schemes where they invest in writers - pay them an advance, before they have many / any subscribers; e.g. Substack Pro. They are not particularly transparent about these, so I can't be *certain* the $10 is being used to encourage more Nazis to write on the platform, but by the same token I cannot be sure it is not; and since Hamish's thesis is that Nazis should be funded just as much as anyone else...
I was under the impression that this was offered to something like a two-digit number of famous writers (disclaimer: including me), generally with a decent amount of thought beforehand (ie not algorithmically, usually because the Substack team is actively trying to cultivate that person's presence). Given that the investigation only found a few tiny Nazi blogs with a few dozen subscribers, I would be shocked (and willing to bet against you at 100:1 odds if you wanted) if they were involved in this.
Also, everyone I know lost money on these schemes (ie Substack offers you less than they think you'll make, you take the offer because you want security in case they're wrong, but they're always right) so if this happened it wouldn't cause Nazis to have more money on net than they would have otherwise.
You are floundering around for excuses to leave. People aren’t paid unless you subscribe to their specific stacks. This isn’t medium.
It’s mostly a campaign against Substack led by the Atlantic and others. Of all the thousands of stacks they identified 6 Nazi (or perhaps “Nazi”) of which 5 were banned.
Substack does pay some writers to publish through the platform, regardless of how many subscribers they have. I think they did this to convince some big name writers to join, and so promote the brand.
As far as I can tell, however, they are mostly spending investor money to do that, rather than subscriber money. It doesn't seem like Substack actually makes all that much money from the cut they take on subscriptions. In the long run I reckon that is a bigger threat to the platform than the current Nazi stuff.
Look, the taxes you pay support Nazi's age 65 receiving Social Security and Medicare, elderly and disabled Nazis living in low-cost housing, broke Nazis getting food stamps and Medicaid, education of the children of Nazis and of teenage budding Nazis, etc etc. I think you need to let go of the idea that you can be pure and free, knowing that no Nazis ever benefit from your money. Some Nazis do. Life's not simple.
If I were ever to unsubscribe for a reason like this, it would have a lot more to do with a few of the ACX grant recipients than with the twice-attenuated Substack Nazi connection.
Any time you spend any money some percentage of it ends up contributing to some unsavory cause, as money circulates through the global economy, and even if you view people publishing unsavory material as particularly evil, it doesn't seem you'd contribute much more by subscribing to this Substack than you contribute to hate speech by buying pens used to write it, or computers used to type it.
I don't know, man, the whole thing just seems way overblown. Besides the fundamental whack-a-mole nature of such heavy-handed campaigns, besides the impossibility (undesirability, even, from societal standpoint) of hermetic isolation from Wrongthought by Bad People, there...just isn't much there, there. A tiny slice of deeply unpopular unsuccessful content that no one had ever heard of, getting surfaced and signal-boosted by direct-competitor sourgrapes business models, leading to a cottage industry of overwrought quitting-Substack jeremiads, the exodus of such writers...then heads to other platforms *which also host Nazis* and are, in fact, even less capable of fencing them out. It sounds more like a hypothetical farcical thought experiment than a thing that really happened/is happening, but these are the times we live in.
Exactly. How many people were even aware of "Nazis" on Substack before? Well, they are now. And maybe some of them will go follow those "Nazis". So it's "there's no such thing as bad publicity", because now your name, Bad Think Blogger, is out there in the open for them as want to become part of your jackboot squad.
To be blunt, I don't think there is a Nazi problem on Substack. I think there *is* a 'Nazi' problem with the over-eager looking for 'Nazis' under every stone, and wanting to enforce their version of the Index of Proscribed Books. But that's not censorship, oh dear me no, we religiously publish the annual post about the bad rightwingers censoring and burning books, *we* are just stopping hate speech!
I don't think one even has to be overly eager, just to look at all. Did the Atlantic also do fishing expeditions at Reddit, Wordpress, Twit...okay that's a bad example, uh, Facebook? Go looking for Nazis (or anything objectionable, really) in a big enough community, and I'm certain they're there to be found...because popular platforms attract all kinds of people, and Nazis are a subset of "all kinds of people", so of course they're on the Internet somewhere. Just like they're in real life. So it's an error to assume that happening to stumble upon some Nazis means a place is secretly an SS safehouse.
I mean, heck, we get shoppers at our store with swastika 88 tattoos. Does that mean my (large, nationally representative, downmarket) grocery chain "serves Nazis"? No, it means that even in SF one can find Nazis, and obviously they buy groceries like everyone else. But I'd love to see someone try a campaign to not sell groceries to Nazis - starve the beast!
There's also how "Nazis" is thrown around to describe "this guy voted Republican in the last election" and the way 'fascism' has gone the same way as 'racism' - a term used to mean "badthink" or "person who is a bad person" which means "does not agree with what I believe".
I'm pretty sure that by some metrics, I could be described as a Nazi, and I don't consider myself such. But for Culture War topics, oh yeah, just come right out and heil the Fuhrer like you obviously want to, you bigot, Deiseach. Abortion, for instance:
"The National Library of Ireland formerly described Youth Defence as "a pro-life organisation and lobby group with strong neo-Nazi links". Far-right Irish nationalist Justin Barrett is a former Public Relations Officer and leader of the group. During the 2002 Second Treaty of Nice referendum it was revealed that Justin Barrett had attended and spoken at neo-nazi party events in Germany and Italy. He initially denied the charges, and threatened newspapers with libel suits, but later conceded that he had spoken at those events. Youth Defence denied having "any relationship whatsoever" with the National Democratic Party of Germany, calling it a "media smear campaign".
Censorship is never the solution. We need to glare down our noses at the Nazis marching in Skokie, but not paper over the problem.
However I think the larger problem, is I see The Atlantic pissing on their upstart competition (i.e. Substack) by inflating an almost non-existent problem. It turns out there were (I seem to recall) five subs, with collectively less than 100 subscribers, almost exclusively unpaid.
Yet again, why exactly do you hate Nazis and Nazi supporters, do you hold the same disdain for associates of today's Democrat Socialists of America types who today call for genocide of the Jews? Because truthfully, beyond name, I'm not seeing any difference between the DSA and Nazis. Both were/are animal rights loving, vegan friendly, gay friendly, violence espousing Jew haters.
People are pattern-matching what I've said to censorship, but I do think there is a difference between allowing someone to speak and encouraging them to / rewarding them for it. I hadn't actually come across the Atlantic stuff until the replies here - my entire beef is with Hamish's firm commitment to paying Nazis for their output. If the marketplace of ideas is to work the way people want - by allowing ideas to be shared freely and judged on their own merit - we do have to actually do the bit where we judge the bad ideas.
Still, I think the sheer weight of responses here shows mine is a minority stance, so I'll shut up now :)
"Nazis" used to refer to supporters of the NSDAP, or at least people reasonably and non-hyperbolically believed to be such. Now, that definition only applies if someone is defending the Motte.
The DSA seems to be successfully shooting itself in both feet, so it'll probably sink back into the obscurity from whence it came with the attendant burst of publicity around AOC.
"In DSA, “the boss” is fellow working-class activists who contribute a portion of our salary to pay for staff’s, as well as our limited free time to build the organization side-by-side with them."
Ah yes, the October Revolution had to be pencilled in around Lenin's taekwondo classes, as I recall. *You* try juggling being a revolutionary hero of the proletariat with a personal life and the requirements for much needed mental health breaks!
Yes, I'm laughing about this because I am a mean and heartless person 😁
This is factually false. While gay sex was already punishable by prison even before the Nazis, the Nazis were criminalizing even more acts and also sending gays to concentration camps. (Roehm, the head of the SA, was alleged to be gay, and I can totally believe the NSDAP turning a blind eye to that while he was in favor. That does not make the NSDAP the gay party.)
Neither were animal rights or veganism the main points of the NSDAP. Hitler was famously vegetarian, I think, and the Nazis passed some laws against vivisection of animals, but that was hardly their main platform.
Your argument reads a bit like "I'm not seeing a difference between a VW and an Airbus. Both have wheels (true), are powered by gasoline (debatable), have a person steering them (mostly true), serve to transport people (true), contain live vests (false) and are produced in Germany (debatable)".
Regarding the Nazi blogs: Can anyone give me a link to one of them, or the name of the author or some other clue for finding it? I would like to have a look at one. A google search for 'substack nazi blogs' turned up lots of articles about the issue, but none naming the blogs -- presumably because the articles' authors are worried that anyone who samples that great Nazi point of view will be seduced into raving anti-semitism, etc.
Personally, I think there are different level of commercial interaction with Nazis. If a supermarket sells food to the general population, some of which are invariably Nazis, that is okay by me.
What would bother me is
(a) if a company specifically courts Nazis
(b) if a company itself restricts its selection of business partners in other ways, but does not restrict them for being Nazis.
(c) if the company mainly benefits Nazis because they make up a huge fraction of its customer base or shareholders
To my knowledge, nobody claims (a) or (c) with regard to Substack.
From their content policy, the two things which they disallow are porn (probably because payment providers really don't like it) and incitements to crime, especially violence. This leaves the door wide open for all sorts of speech which I would find distasteful. All sorts of mutually incompatible ideologies including ethnic supremism, soviet style communism, religious extremism, territorial revanchism and so on.
In my experience, the people who want to get rid of the swastikas on web sites are rarely satisfied once the swastikas are gone, but will move on to the next lowest hanging fruit. Probably people claiming that there are group differences in intelligence or something.
To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, 'First they came for the pornographers, and I said nothing because I was not a pornographer. Then they came for the Nazis and I said nothing because I was not a Nazi' et cetera. (Or if you prefer an actual quote, H.L.Mencken: "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.")
I am sure there are people on the left who would want to cancel Scott. Certainly only after they have cancelled the Nazis, HBD proponents, Manosphere activists and so on, but they would get to him eventually.
I think the political savvy thing for Substack to do would have been to keep the Nazi stacks, but pledge to donate the profits they make from them to some uncontroversial anti-Nazi cause (say helping former Neonazis who want to exit their Nazi groups). That would show a commitment to free speech while also defusing the accusation that they make money from Nazi content, without costing them overly much (because Nazi content generates ~0% of their income).
You probably don’t need to hear this, let alone from an Internet stranger but: You have kids now and shouldn’t feel any embarrassment about making money to set aside for them.
Also, for whatever it’s worth, I like your short fiction quite a lot and if I wasn’t already subscribed that would probably tip me over.
I converted to paid subscriber. Not because I wanted to support you but because your book reviews are amazing and I wanted to read your posts on Cyropaedia, America against America & Paper Belt on Fire.
Thank you - seems like the teasers are working. I recently discovered the Psmiths blog (https://www.thepsmiths.com/), who also have good book reviews including a Cyropaedia one.
I wonder how much Slatestarcodex/Astralcodexten follow the common trajectory of blog popularity - logistic curve to a top, then slow exponential decay. A pattern I noticed and posted some graphs here:
Just read #7: Psychology of Fantasy and I got to thinking about the Wheel of Time in this lens (I’m currently reading and on book 11). Robert Jordan did something unusual in making the main main Chosen One character really agentic—he’s sort of thrown into adventure in books 1 and 2 but then he basically drives events from then on, he’s picking fights with the dark apostles of evil and he’s invading with his armies, not the other way around. But the tradeoff is that the main main character’s perspective isn’t the majority of the books’ word count and the other main characters aren’t so agentic. One of them is pretty much the agencyless isekai hero who is given military knowledge without effort (though not without cost) and accidentally becomes a great general, etc. It’s played for contrast with the other. But it seems Jordan could not write a fantasy world with all agentic heroes!
I say this with all respect in the world, but I think the decline is not due to some artificial cause but simply that post quality itself has been declining. Of course having children will slow you down, but I think that just compounds the issue
I enjoy reading this blog. I think it's got an important perspective that deserves more voice in the world. It occasionally informs me or provokes insights I wouldn't have had on my own [categories made for man] - though admittedly this happens less frequently recently than with some of the older posts.
When I saw the subject line in the email, I in fact thought "You know what, I should pay & support. Getting a few extra posts out of the deal would feel like a nice incentive."
However, on clicking through and seeing the ask for $10/mo., I balked at that amount. I enjoy reading - but I don't feel like I get $10/mo. of value. And as I consider my other price anchors for monthly subscriptions, I feel like other subscriptions in the $10-$20 range tend to have more content, and more resources behind that content. I did a gut check, and felt like maybe $40/year was what I wouldn't feel bad about subscribing for.
To be clear, I'm _able_ to afford an individual, marginal $100/year subscription, I'm not a student nor under-employed. But if I attempted to donate to the entirety of the various authors and video producers and volunteer open-source developers I enjoy the work of, _at the ratio_ that $100:ACX implies, I would not be able to afford that.
I don't fault you for setting the price where you have, nor for not offering more flexible pricing. It's quite plausible that your current strategy maximizes revenue. I'm glad that other people support the blog sufficient to keep your time and attention on it. I'm just offering a point of anecdata from someone who was not a paid subscriber, and is failing to convert to a paid subscriber at this time.
I pay for the Society of Economic Geology to access journal articles for research and professional education. Some Aussies want me to visit southern Nevada to look at pretty rocks. I've not been there, so I read a few papers on La Cordillera and the assembly of the western states with respect to this region, a few on different geomorphology events, a few on metamorphic events, a few on mines in the region. I have twenty-odd papers I've skimmed. Each paper costs between twenty to forty dollars from Elsevier or Springer, very few show up for free.
I am a retired software designer. I have many varied interests. Currently urban design is a hot button for me. Frequently journal articles pop up when I'm googling for information. Since I am not compelled for professional reasons to read these journal articles, I choose not to pay $20 to $40 to read them.
Now how does it benefit the world to keep a lot of lay persons from reading these articles?
Usually, universities in the US will set up a mass subscription so that all of their students/professors/adjuncts have access to every article. It's unfortunate for those not affiliated with such a university.
This is fair. It is a high amount. Substack recommended it as what they thought would maximize my income, and they're experts on this and I believe them, but I think lots of people are in your boat.
Every time people said that inflation doesn't matter because your wages go up equally fast, I looked kind of nervously at my fixed pricing scheme. But I hope there are lots of people like you for whom $10 seems too high today but maybe after a few more rounds of inflation it will seem reasonable.
Wouldn't it be good for both authors and readers if Substack allowed for a la carte purchases in addition to subscriptions? There have been many dozens of posts from dozens of different authors that I would have paid a few dollars (each) to read, but I did not want to commit to paying for dozens of subscriptions - and not just for financial reasons. I imagine particularly popular posts could garner thousands of small (note: not "micro") payments that would provide significant value to authors - potentially many thousands of dollars. In general, the lack of innovation and options in Substack payment models is frustrating.
This is a complete fallacy. My wife and I bought our first house (in Sacramento), and paid off a new car loan, on two people earning minimum wage.
The components of the consumer price index, i.e. inflation measurement has been reformulated many times, in order to provide the politicians the pretty numbers they need to polish their administration.
The basic fact is, even last two years published inflation was 8%, yet no one saw their wages go up anywhere near 8%, especially the people on the bottom, who are hit the hardest.
This is clearly correct. The decision about how to measure inflation is always going to be somewhat political, and distorted.
For instance food is about 20% of the basket of goods, as measured for the purposes of inflation. This is, presumably, what the median household spends on food. However food is an essential and if the bottom 25% are paying 30-40% in food in good times, inflation hits food products in a bigger fashion than other products, then it’s really gonna hurt that percentile – and of course, even after inflation abate these prices are often locked in.
You could say the same for rent and housing costs - many many people on their homes out right, many are paying relatively no mortgages. However for people in the rental sector increases in rent which are not really accounted for in the statistics - not to any large extent, anyway - are disastrous.
I think I’ve paid the whole last year. Probably due to inertia. In the previous year I paid $50 or so as I unsubscribed every so often. This is something that I do with Netflix, Apple TV, and other streaming services - swap them in and out.
I think most people here could do that. Otherwise - since I am not really paying for the subscriber content but all content - I feel a bit like I’m subsidising you.
On the other side, if you managed to get all of us subscribers to become paid subscribers, you could make $12 million a year. I imagine you'd give a lot of it away, I wonder where?
"The modern version of this is “if you subscribe once, you can read everything in the archives, but if you forget to unsubscribe afterwards, you’ll pay money every month forever”.
Spoilers for a one hundred and eighteen year old book, but that is the plot of one of the Eugene Valmont stories from 1906 collection (the story itself is set in 1896):
"I noticed on Mr. Macpherson's current list the name of Lord Semptam, an eccentric old nobleman whom I knew slightly. Then turning to the list immediately before the current one the name was still there; I traced it back through list after list until I found the first entry, which was no less than three years previous, and there Lord Semptam was down for a piece of furniture costing fifty pounds, and on that account he had paid a pound a week for more than three years, totalling a hundred and seventy pounds at the least, and instantly the glorious simplicity of the scheme dawned upon me, and I became so interested in the swindle that I lit the gas, fearing my little lamp would be exhausted before my investigation ended, for it promised to be a long one.
In several instances the intended victim proved shrewder than old Simpson had counted upon, and the word 'Settled' had been written on the line carrying the name when the exact number of instalments was paid. But as these shrewd persons dropped out, others took their places, and Simpson's dependence on their absent-mindedness seemed to be justified in nine cases out of ten. His collectors were collecting long after the debt had been paid. In Lord Semptam's case, the payment had evidently become chronic, and the old man was giving away his pound a week to the suave Macpherson two years after his debt had been liquidated."
Hey Scott, I have taken advantage of the poor people's discount, and I make around %40 of the median income of a typical ACX reader. Hopefully that qualifies as a legitimate excuse.
"All 'important' content will be freely available regardless of subscription status, but subscribers will get a little extra. In particular, there will be one subscribers-only Open Thread a week (on Wednesdays), along with the normal free Open Thread on Sundays, and occasional subscriber-only AMA (ask me anything) threads. I also plan to occasionally post shorter or lighter content for subscribers only, maybe once or twice a month. This would be along the lines of SSC posts like If Only Turing Was Alive To See This or Bulls**t Jobs (Part 1 of ∞). I might also paywall a few very impulsive Culture War posts, just to prevent them from going viral. I predict this will be less than 10% of content, and less than 1% of content weighted by some measure of importance. "
On the other hand, in addition to writing about "important" subjects, you are also a very entertaining writer, and I think the locked posts are disproportionally more entertaining. :-)
My casual impression is that Scott provides a larger proportion of his material for free then anyone else I have seen on Substack. Of those writers who have some paid content. A few authors provide everything for free, which is nice, but I don't expect that.
I have the same issue, both on my phone and on my desktop, with the browser tab taking long to render and being unresponsive for a few seconds. There should really be an easy way to hide comments.
Totally fair, I sometimes tell them this offhandedly but I'm collecting complaints like this to give them in a big email and I'll add yours to the list..
Switching from this tab to another and then switching back incurs a >3 second lag on both Firefox and Chrome on CoreI7/16GB. This really is sub-par. Do pass this on: Your content more than makes up for it, so I'll Suffer Through as it were ;)
Here's another for your collection: the deletion of comments is even more of a problem than I thought. In addition to making older comment threads unreadable, now someone has figured out that they can post nasty comments and immediately delete them, leaving nothing but an email notification. I've personally exploited this mechanism to exchange contact information, but that's probably going to be an insignificant use case. (Given the existence of comment editing, a complete fix may be difficult, but at least there'd be more of a record.)
Fixing that is easy enough. A daily or hourly delete limit. Once people realise that their bad faith comments might stay around for a while they will be more reluctant to trash post.
But would that rhyme?
Ah. I thought that with 'b' and 'v' being next to each other on the keyboard that it was more likely a typo, as "subscribe drive" still has a nice ring, even without actually rhyming. But I could certainly have been wrong. I probably was wrong, so I'll delete my comment.
I now realize that Byron addresses just this controversy in his notes to Don Juan:
'I…must say, as Ben Jonson did to Sylvester, who challenged him to rhyme with—
”I, John Sylvester,
Lay with your sister.”
Jonson answered, “I, Ben Jonson, lay with your wife.” Sylvester answered, “That is not rhyme.”—“No,” said Ben Jonson; ‘“but it is true.”'
I could be wrong but I vaguely remember someone saying they misread it as subscrive drive last year and Scott said he may intentionally do that the next year
Not that I can see: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/2023-subscription-drive-free-unlocked.
I must’ve misremembered then
He's the scrivener and we're all subscriveners.
The third post is still paywalled
Sorry, should be fixed now.
It still seems to be paywalled 44 minutes after? Although it could just be a cache issue that will be fixed within a few hours.
Actually, it looks like I was looking at the third overall post, not the third bolded post...
>I make an embarrassingly large amount of money from this blog
Why be embarrassed about providing a good that so many people are willing to pay to enjoy? I'd be quite proud of such an accomplishment.
I see this point was raised last year: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/2023-subscription-drive-free-unlocked/comment/11881753.
To quote Javier Miliei's recent speech at the WEF:
>I would like to leave a message for all business-people...Do not be intimidated...You are social benefactors. You’re heroes. You're the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen. Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being.
I second that emotion.
On the one hand, I agree that to the extent that Scott is well-compensated, it's because people actually feel he's providing something of value to them. People subscribe to his blog voluntarily because they think his work is worth the support, and he's gone out of his way to avoid pushing anyone to feel obligated to.
On the other hand, I think it's not without reason that people are skeptical of the notion expressed in that quote as a general principle. While economists may model economic activity as being driven by people seeking things they value, and businesses providing it to them, for generations advertisers have understood their work as being more successful when it *creates* a sense of need where one didn't exist before. For a classic example, if you want to sell mouthwash, you can sell people on the idea that without it, their breath will stink and people will judge them, creating an insecurity they didn't have before in order to capitalize it.
We can also look at things like the rise of microtransactions and gacha mechanics in the video game industry. Rather than seeing them as fulfilling a need that had previously been left wanting, most players actively hate developers' use of this business model. But developers use it because it allows them to make more money by exploiting addictive behaviors in a small fraction of users. Rather than selling a game for $50 to a million players, you can make more money distributing a game to a million players for free, where the median player pays a pittance, but the most addictive one percent of players are paying upwards of $10,000 each.
There are actually quite a lot of ways where maximizing income can depart from maximizing value to the public, and businesses compete over wealth accumulated, not value provided to society. So where some businesses find ways to increase revenue by doing something other than what's most socially valuable, it'll give them a systematic competitive advantage. The idea that wealth accumulation *necessarily* results from positive social value glosses over a lot of potentially harmful behavior.
Absolutely agreed. As an example, since I spent the past two days driving to Iowa from North Carolina, some gas stations are now making the lowest two grades of gasoline E-15 (meaning most vehicles' engines will be damaged by using them), forcing people to either pay for premium or go somewhere else, on the bet that most people will opt to buy premium gas even if they don't need it. This makes them money, but is also a dirty trick.
Perhaps "A sufficiently large amount of money that it is embarrassing to beg, or to do something vaguely reminiscent of begging, for more".
I can see where he's coming from. But also, in the words of Monty Burns, "I dread the day when one hundred thousand dollars isn't worth begging for".
The day is coming, with inflation. At 2% annual inflation, I calculate $100,000 will have a present value of $99.84 in about 342 years.
I haven't had anyone ask for $100, but I have literally heard someone ask for $80 "for a phone". So it might take slightly longer?
After 353 years it would be less than $80, down to about $79.94. But then the question becomes how much is worth begging for. Signs often say "any amount helps" but I'm not sure they mean it.
It would take about 570 years for it to be worth less than $1.
"The modern version of this is “if you subscribe once, you can read everything in the archives, but if you forget to unsubscribe afterwards, you’ll pay money every month forever”."
Emily Oster has made several hundred dollars from me this way
Emily Oster the person that writes about how to raise children?
It would be nice if Substack gave you the option to not send this nag to existing paid-up subscribers.
I know it's not your fault. I'm just sayin; it's not fun to be nagged when I'm already paying. (I wish Wikipedia would learn this lesson and give me a damned cookie.)
what would be nice if the entire blog wasn't on substack
In an alternate timeline where the blog stayed on SSC, I...probably wouldn't have become a "paid subscriber". On the one hand, it was certainly priced too low for the value, so my happy price would've been above $0. On the other hand, I'm less comfortable signing up for someone's personal site, no matter how micro-successful. Being tied to a major legitimizing platform is reassuring in a lindy way, as well as introducing various useful network effects. Like yeah, technically I could have discovered the other three blogs I subscribe to through the old blogroll or repeated high-quality comment references...but it seems not coincidental that such discovery + motivation to actually pay was made so much easier by Substack.
The interface still sucks ass though. Beyond "charmingly retro" to Inepticon territory. 1000 SSC comments load faster than 100 Substack ones, or damn near.
Could you please unpack 'in a lindy way'? It sounds interesting but I'm struggling to make the reference / connection.
Not a precise choice of term, Taleb would be ashamed. I meant more the concept of "follow the winners".
Um...so like even though SSC was hosted on Wordpress, and they're no slouch in the market, it also relied on a kludge of old volunteer code that Scott didn't feel like wrestling with too much. And "subscriptions", such as they were, went through Patreon. Wordpress is one of those internet infrastructures that just hangs around and works, but it's not exactly revolutionary or rolling in money or high-salience prestige. Patreon had its media day once (Hatreon was a thing), but it's sorta in a similar place. And they pushed some big UI/app changes last year there were pretty unfortnate, making me less sanguine on future outlooks. (Hosting one's content directly on Patreon is about as clunky an experience as Substack.) All these considerations combine to reduce my theoretical pricing of paying for SSC, had it remained there - with subscriptions, one is *not* paying for existing goods and services rendered, but for an *ongoing relationship* where such content is continuously created. So paying a yearly sub when I'm not confident one or more major parts might break in that year = need a discount rate.
Substack's star is still ascendant though. I'm confident they'll come out ahead of the recent cancellation campaign; it's not the first and won't be the last, they don't attack you if they're not scared. All the Cool Kid writers are on it, in a correlated way that enhances the value of each further writer, superstar or not. (I love sometimes seeing cross-pollination between ACX, SB, FdB, not just in content but in comments and commenters. This becomes way more likely when everyone's on the same platform.) And it just feels more..."formal" paying for various Substack subscriptions versus an individual person's Patreon. Like the difference between donating to an established charity and backing a Kickstarter. That veneer of professionalism is attractive to former normies fleeing the mainstream media. It's a grokkable business model.
So those factors combined mean I have higher priors on Substack's continued success (and thus ACX), because there's real money and reputation riding on the line. It's not really lindy in the sense of, bet on long-lasting things continuing to last longer - that remains to be proven, like all New Media ecosystems. But I think it's useful to also consider the opposite counterfactual, if ACX had started off on a big visible platform and later left for its own independent domain. The me in that situation would find such indicators worrying, and likely drop an existing sub.
(I guess in some sense, SSC having existed in various forms for close to 20 years or whatever is indeed long-lasting for a blog. But the concept isn't really supposed to be applied to things limited by human lifespan, as I understand it, and a *particular* blog certainly is...unlike the infrastructure that supports it.)
That was very in-depth and helpful, thank you!
It’s not a bad idea to use some of the other tools that Substack allows. Making more posts subscriber only, if only for a few days, will encourage more subs - particular those posts that give you half the content for free.
I sign up to Substacks I don’t even like to read some of these articles and to comment.
I unsubscribe from substacks that send too many previews of paid posts so ymmv.
You unsubscribe from the free layer, though, or you wouldn't see that. Not everything can be free.
yes but i'm also not going to pay for subscriptions to everything and depending on the author they may want to have a free audience (Scott certainly does). I don't object to authors operating entirely/mostly behind a paywall but I vastly prefer a case of 1 free article a week and 4 paid to 3 free articles and 2 first paragraph articles.
I *far* prefer not doing half-free posts, and I don't subscribe to blogs that do this as a general rule. Half an article paywalled is annoying; some articles paywalled and others not is, to me, not even a tiny bit annoying. (Or all paywalled! Be you!)
I really prefer Scott's system and I would be sad if he abandoned it. I think the other way is a signal that [Cory Doctorow term] may occur in the future.
I honestly hate blogs that highly frequently do the teaser-preview thing. If it follows a logical system, like "extra controversial topics are paywalled" or "real classic post bangers that drive continuing high engagement are paywalled", then that's just smart business sense I can appreciate. But a ton of variable-quality posts, some of which are essential causal linkages to explaining other free posts, being partially readable is just annoying. Feels too much like a variable-rewards gamble. This is the main reason I won't give Noah Smith any money, despite generally liking his writing.
Relatedly, every blog that makes you subscribe not just to comment but even to just "like" a post is irritating.
No no no no no, please don't do the "half free, then BOOM paywall in your face!" thing. I absolutely hate seeing them, and wish I had an extension which would warn me about them in advance so that I don't start reading.
Sure you don’t like it, you want the free stuff, but it might make the author more money.
I’ve signed up to substacks to engage in the comments on articles I didn’t even like, to writers I didn’t like, to explain that I didn’t like the article and why in the comments.
I do not "want the free stuff", I want to avoid that experience entirely. Dishonestly dangling the promise of an article in order to trap people into that "haha, now you have to either pay some money or suffer the lingering unsatisfiable curiosity worse than any clickbait could inflict upon you!" is Bad. I'd certainly get myself off the email list if that happened, and try to work out some system to find specifically which articles don't push that mess upon people. It is very unpleasant.
It's annoying from the user end, but converts pretty effectively to money
Half-free posts are terrible, I'd lose a lot of respect for Scott if he used that feature.
When you get the "preview" e-mail, it's not at all obvious it's a preview. Rather, you expect to read an article and then you get seemingly randomly paywalled. Nobody likes that sort of manipulation. If I knew it was a preview I could at least decide to skip it or to check it if and only if I'm potentially willing to pay for the full version. I don't have that option.
I don't have a problem with paywalls in general, but this particular approach is infuriating.
Half post is not a half valuable post, it's an advertisement disguased as a valuable post. And you probably did not subscribe to recieve ads, and you can't even unsub only for half-posts.
It's not a good reader experience, to put it short.
Seconding the idea of even free posts being subscriber-only for 1? 3? 7? days; would likely do wonders for the quality of the comment sections.
Although given the existence of the HOTs, leaving the OTs open from the get go would be a reasonable exception.
FWIW I am part of your "worrying" downward trend. I unsubscribed from all Substack content a few weeks ago, in response to Hamish McKenzie's post outlining his stance on monetizing Nazi content. Substack may be happy to fund this kind of content, and it is their right to make this choice; however, I am not happy funding it, and therefore cannot in good conscience give money to Substack.
Unfortunately, you are collateral damage, and I am sorry for that. That said, the slope on your graph is longterm and straight enough that I suspect my reasons for leaving are in the minority.
I am proud to suffer for the cause of fighting censorship (although I think they banned the offending blogs, so like most times people suffer for a noble cause, it was probably futile).
(FWIW I wouldn't object to them being hosted on Substack, I just don't want to feel like any of my money could be paying the authors. Which I suspect is even more of a minority stance, but hey.)
My impression is that if you subscribe to me (let's say for $100), then I get $90 and Substack gets $10.
If you subscribe to Hitler for $100, then Hitler gets $90 and Substack gets $10.
I don't think there's any way for subscribing to me to get money to Hitler - it's not like all the Substack money goes in a big pot and then gets distributed around. If I'm wrong about that I would actually like to know, since it sounds like something has gone very wrong somewhere, I haven't been following this controversy very hard, and I also don't want to personally fund Hitler.
Substack has schemes where they invest in writers - pay them an advance, before they have many / any subscribers; e.g. Substack Pro. They are not particularly transparent about these, so I can't be *certain* the $10 is being used to encourage more Nazis to write on the platform, but by the same token I cannot be sure it is not; and since Hamish's thesis is that Nazis should be funded just as much as anyone else...
I was under the impression that this was offered to something like a two-digit number of famous writers (disclaimer: including me), generally with a decent amount of thought beforehand (ie not algorithmically, usually because the Substack team is actively trying to cultivate that person's presence). Given that the investigation only found a few tiny Nazi blogs with a few dozen subscribers, I would be shocked (and willing to bet against you at 100:1 odds if you wanted) if they were involved in this.
Also, everyone I know lost money on these schemes (ie Substack offers you less than they think you'll make, you take the offer because you want security in case they're wrong, but they're always right) so if this happened it wouldn't cause Nazis to have more money on net than they would have otherwise.
You are floundering around for excuses to leave. People aren’t paid unless you subscribe to their specific stacks. This isn’t medium.
It’s mostly a campaign against Substack led by the Atlantic and others. Of all the thousands of stacks they identified 6 Nazi (or perhaps “Nazi”) of which 5 were banned.
Substack does pay some writers to publish through the platform, regardless of how many subscribers they have. I think they did this to convince some big name writers to join, and so promote the brand.
As far as I can tell, however, they are mostly spending investor money to do that, rather than subscriber money. It doesn't seem like Substack actually makes all that much money from the cut they take on subscriptions. In the long run I reckon that is a bigger threat to the platform than the current Nazi stuff.
Look, the taxes you pay support Nazi's age 65 receiving Social Security and Medicare, elderly and disabled Nazis living in low-cost housing, broke Nazis getting food stamps and Medicaid, education of the children of Nazis and of teenage budding Nazis, etc etc. I think you need to let go of the idea that you can be pure and free, knowing that no Nazis ever benefit from your money. Some Nazis do. Life's not simple.
Well said. I thought Hamish wrote an excellent rebuttal to an absurd hysteria over a handful of writers.
Who knows, Hamish might have been secretly funneling money to Stormfront all along?
If I were ever to unsubscribe for a reason like this, it would have a lot more to do with a few of the ACX grant recipients than with the twice-attenuated Substack Nazi connection.
>however, I am not happy funding it, and therefore cannot in good conscience give money to Substack.
But you wouldn't really be funding it, since such content gets basically no money (https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/there-are-major-factual-issues-with).
Any time you spend any money some percentage of it ends up contributing to some unsavory cause, as money circulates through the global economy, and even if you view people publishing unsavory material as particularly evil, it doesn't seem you'd contribute much more by subscribing to this Substack than you contribute to hate speech by buying pens used to write it, or computers used to type it.
If it helps from what I can tell the total amount of money they were passing around was something in the order of a few dozen dollars.
Honestly this comment might make me mad enough to subscribe to Scott purely to negate the effect.
I don't know, man, the whole thing just seems way overblown. Besides the fundamental whack-a-mole nature of such heavy-handed campaigns, besides the impossibility (undesirability, even, from societal standpoint) of hermetic isolation from Wrongthought by Bad People, there...just isn't much there, there. A tiny slice of deeply unpopular unsuccessful content that no one had ever heard of, getting surfaced and signal-boosted by direct-competitor sourgrapes business models, leading to a cottage industry of overwrought quitting-Substack jeremiads, the exodus of such writers...then heads to other platforms *which also host Nazis* and are, in fact, even less capable of fencing them out. It sounds more like a hypothetical farcical thought experiment than a thing that really happened/is happening, but these are the times we live in.
FdB's post on the subject was, incidentally, a real banger and gave me my value quota for 2024: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/these-rules-about-platforming-nazis
Exactly. How many people were even aware of "Nazis" on Substack before? Well, they are now. And maybe some of them will go follow those "Nazis". So it's "there's no such thing as bad publicity", because now your name, Bad Think Blogger, is out there in the open for them as want to become part of your jackboot squad.
To be blunt, I don't think there is a Nazi problem on Substack. I think there *is* a 'Nazi' problem with the over-eager looking for 'Nazis' under every stone, and wanting to enforce their version of the Index of Proscribed Books. But that's not censorship, oh dear me no, we religiously publish the annual post about the bad rightwingers censoring and burning books, *we* are just stopping hate speech!
I don't think one even has to be overly eager, just to look at all. Did the Atlantic also do fishing expeditions at Reddit, Wordpress, Twit...okay that's a bad example, uh, Facebook? Go looking for Nazis (or anything objectionable, really) in a big enough community, and I'm certain they're there to be found...because popular platforms attract all kinds of people, and Nazis are a subset of "all kinds of people", so of course they're on the Internet somewhere. Just like they're in real life. So it's an error to assume that happening to stumble upon some Nazis means a place is secretly an SS safehouse.
I mean, heck, we get shoppers at our store with swastika 88 tattoos. Does that mean my (large, nationally representative, downmarket) grocery chain "serves Nazis"? No, it means that even in SF one can find Nazis, and obviously they buy groceries like everyone else. But I'd love to see someone try a campaign to not sell groceries to Nazis - starve the beast!
There's also how "Nazis" is thrown around to describe "this guy voted Republican in the last election" and the way 'fascism' has gone the same way as 'racism' - a term used to mean "badthink" or "person who is a bad person" which means "does not agree with what I believe".
I'm pretty sure that by some metrics, I could be described as a Nazi, and I don't consider myself such. But for Culture War topics, oh yeah, just come right out and heil the Fuhrer like you obviously want to, you bigot, Deiseach. Abortion, for instance:
Genuine historical Nazi example
https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=2048
Gets you to this
https://www.quora.com/Do-conservatives-realize-the-Nazis-were-pro-life-and-outlawed-abortion-for-Aryans
And this
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/gloria-steinem-compares-pro-lifers-to-nazis-hitler-campaigned-against-abortion
And this
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-tackle-nazi-era-abortion-law-women-warn-growing-obstacle/
And in the Irish context, this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_Defence
"The National Library of Ireland formerly described Youth Defence as "a pro-life organisation and lobby group with strong neo-Nazi links". Far-right Irish nationalist Justin Barrett is a former Public Relations Officer and leader of the group. During the 2002 Second Treaty of Nice referendum it was revealed that Justin Barrett had attended and spoken at neo-nazi party events in Germany and Italy. He initially denied the charges, and threatened newspapers with libel suits, but later conceded that he had spoken at those events. Youth Defence denied having "any relationship whatsoever" with the National Democratic Party of Germany, calling it a "media smear campaign".
Censorship is never the solution. We need to glare down our noses at the Nazis marching in Skokie, but not paper over the problem.
However I think the larger problem, is I see The Atlantic pissing on their upstart competition (i.e. Substack) by inflating an almost non-existent problem. It turns out there were (I seem to recall) five subs, with collectively less than 100 subscribers, almost exclusively unpaid.
Yet again, why exactly do you hate Nazis and Nazi supporters, do you hold the same disdain for associates of today's Democrat Socialists of America types who today call for genocide of the Jews? Because truthfully, beyond name, I'm not seeing any difference between the DSA and Nazis. Both were/are animal rights loving, vegan friendly, gay friendly, violence espousing Jew haters.
People are pattern-matching what I've said to censorship, but I do think there is a difference between allowing someone to speak and encouraging them to / rewarding them for it. I hadn't actually come across the Atlantic stuff until the replies here - my entire beef is with Hamish's firm commitment to paying Nazis for their output. If the marketplace of ideas is to work the way people want - by allowing ideas to be shared freely and judged on their own merit - we do have to actually do the bit where we judge the bad ideas.
Still, I think the sheer weight of responses here shows mine is a minority stance, so I'll shut up now :)
"Nazis" used to refer to supporters of the NSDAP, or at least people reasonably and non-hyperbolically believed to be such. Now, that definition only applies if someone is defending the Motte.
We're not subsidizing anyone except for who we directly subsidize. Thus the idea that we're somehow subsidizing Nazis is nonsense.
That someone you or I disagree with is subsidized by their friends/followers is of no concern to us.
There is much more to fear in us pressing our boot on someone else's neck.
The DSA seems to be successfully shooting itself in both feet, so it'll probably sink back into the obscurity from whence it came with the attendant burst of publicity around AOC.
https://socialistcall.com/news/a-temporary-stopgap-to-protect-the-future-of-dsa/
"In DSA, “the boss” is fellow working-class activists who contribute a portion of our salary to pay for staff’s, as well as our limited free time to build the organization side-by-side with them."
Ah yes, the October Revolution had to be pencilled in around Lenin's taekwondo classes, as I recall. *You* try juggling being a revolutionary hero of the proletariat with a personal life and the requirements for much needed mental health breaks!
Yes, I'm laughing about this because I am a mean and heartless person 😁
> gay friendly
This is factually false. While gay sex was already punishable by prison even before the Nazis, the Nazis were criminalizing even more acts and also sending gays to concentration camps. (Roehm, the head of the SA, was alleged to be gay, and I can totally believe the NSDAP turning a blind eye to that while he was in favor. That does not make the NSDAP the gay party.)
Neither were animal rights or veganism the main points of the NSDAP. Hitler was famously vegetarian, I think, and the Nazis passed some laws against vivisection of animals, but that was hardly their main platform.
Your argument reads a bit like "I'm not seeing a difference between a VW and an Airbus. Both have wheels (true), are powered by gasoline (debatable), have a person steering them (mostly true), serve to transport people (true), contain live vests (false) and are produced in Germany (debatable)".
Regarding the Nazi blogs: Can anyone give me a link to one of them, or the name of the author or some other clue for finding it? I would like to have a look at one. A google search for 'substack nazi blogs' turned up lots of articles about the issue, but none naming the blogs -- presumably because the articles' authors are worried that anyone who samples that great Nazi point of view will be seduced into raving anti-semitism, etc.
Personally, I think there are different level of commercial interaction with Nazis. If a supermarket sells food to the general population, some of which are invariably Nazis, that is okay by me.
What would bother me is
(a) if a company specifically courts Nazis
(b) if a company itself restricts its selection of business partners in other ways, but does not restrict them for being Nazis.
(c) if the company mainly benefits Nazis because they make up a huge fraction of its customer base or shareholders
To my knowledge, nobody claims (a) or (c) with regard to Substack.
From their content policy, the two things which they disallow are porn (probably because payment providers really don't like it) and incitements to crime, especially violence. This leaves the door wide open for all sorts of speech which I would find distasteful. All sorts of mutually incompatible ideologies including ethnic supremism, soviet style communism, religious extremism, territorial revanchism and so on.
In my experience, the people who want to get rid of the swastikas on web sites are rarely satisfied once the swastikas are gone, but will move on to the next lowest hanging fruit. Probably people claiming that there are group differences in intelligence or something.
To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, 'First they came for the pornographers, and I said nothing because I was not a pornographer. Then they came for the Nazis and I said nothing because I was not a Nazi' et cetera. (Or if you prefer an actual quote, H.L.Mencken: "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.")
I am sure there are people on the left who would want to cancel Scott. Certainly only after they have cancelled the Nazis, HBD proponents, Manosphere activists and so on, but they would get to him eventually.
I think the political savvy thing for Substack to do would have been to keep the Nazi stacks, but pledge to donate the profits they make from them to some uncontroversial anti-Nazi cause (say helping former Neonazis who want to exit their Nazi groups). That would show a commitment to free speech while also defusing the accusation that they make money from Nazi content, without costing them overly much (because Nazi content generates ~0% of their income).
You probably don’t need to hear this, let alone from an Internet stranger but: You have kids now and shouldn’t feel any embarrassment about making money to set aside for them.
Also, for whatever it’s worth, I like your short fiction quite a lot and if I wasn’t already subscribed that would probably tip me over.
i was on the fence about staying subscribed. the kids announcement led to the re-up.
I would subscribe to more because I like to support discourse but my wife is hysterically cheap.
I converted to paid subscriber. Not because I wanted to support you but because your book reviews are amazing and I wanted to read your posts on Cyropaedia, America against America & Paper Belt on Fire.
Thank you - seems like the teasers are working. I recently discovered the Psmiths blog (https://www.thepsmiths.com/), who also have good book reviews including a Cyropaedia one.
Yep fan of their reviews as well. Thanks for the rec anyways :)
I wonder how much Slatestarcodex/Astralcodexten follow the common trajectory of blog popularity - logistic curve to a top, then slow exponential decay. A pattern I noticed and posted some graphs here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8szBqBMqGJApFFsew/gunnar_zarncke-s-shortform?commentId=MzhHJQmchELQAkLQj
Just read #7: Psychology of Fantasy and I got to thinking about the Wheel of Time in this lens (I’m currently reading and on book 11). Robert Jordan did something unusual in making the main main Chosen One character really agentic—he’s sort of thrown into adventure in books 1 and 2 but then he basically drives events from then on, he’s picking fights with the dark apostles of evil and he’s invading with his armies, not the other way around. But the tradeoff is that the main main character’s perspective isn’t the majority of the books’ word count and the other main characters aren’t so agentic. One of them is pretty much the agencyless isekai hero who is given military knowledge without effort (though not without cost) and accidentally becomes a great general, etc. It’s played for contrast with the other. But it seems Jordan could not write a fantasy world with all agentic heroes!
I say this with all respect in the world, but I think the decline is not due to some artificial cause but simply that post quality itself has been declining. Of course having children will slow you down, but I think that just compounds the issue
I am not going to subscribe at this time.
I enjoy reading this blog. I think it's got an important perspective that deserves more voice in the world. It occasionally informs me or provokes insights I wouldn't have had on my own [categories made for man] - though admittedly this happens less frequently recently than with some of the older posts.
When I saw the subject line in the email, I in fact thought "You know what, I should pay & support. Getting a few extra posts out of the deal would feel like a nice incentive."
However, on clicking through and seeing the ask for $10/mo., I balked at that amount. I enjoy reading - but I don't feel like I get $10/mo. of value. And as I consider my other price anchors for monthly subscriptions, I feel like other subscriptions in the $10-$20 range tend to have more content, and more resources behind that content. I did a gut check, and felt like maybe $40/year was what I wouldn't feel bad about subscribing for.
To be clear, I'm _able_ to afford an individual, marginal $100/year subscription, I'm not a student nor under-employed. But if I attempted to donate to the entirety of the various authors and video producers and volunteer open-source developers I enjoy the work of, _at the ratio_ that $100:ACX implies, I would not be able to afford that.
I don't fault you for setting the price where you have, nor for not offering more flexible pricing. It's quite plausible that your current strategy maximizes revenue. I'm glad that other people support the blog sufficient to keep your time and attention on it. I'm just offering a point of anecdata from someone who was not a paid subscriber, and is failing to convert to a paid subscriber at this time.
$100 covers 2 or 3 journal articles. you are getting much more than that from this.
...Why the hell would anyone pay for journal articles?
Professional education and research.
I pay for the Society of Economic Geology to access journal articles for research and professional education. Some Aussies want me to visit southern Nevada to look at pretty rocks. I've not been there, so I read a few papers on La Cordillera and the assembly of the western states with respect to this region, a few on different geomorphology events, a few on metamorphic events, a few on mines in the region. I have twenty-odd papers I've skimmed. Each paper costs between twenty to forty dollars from Elsevier or Springer, very few show up for free.
I am a retired software designer. I have many varied interests. Currently urban design is a hot button for me. Frequently journal articles pop up when I'm googling for information. Since I am not compelled for professional reasons to read these journal articles, I choose not to pay $20 to $40 to read them.
Now how does it benefit the world to keep a lot of lay persons from reading these articles?
Usually, universities in the US will set up a mass subscription so that all of their students/professors/adjuncts have access to every article. It's unfortunate for those not affiliated with such a university.
Yes, Mine ran out about a year ago. It hung on for three years after graduation though.
This is fair. It is a high amount. Substack recommended it as what they thought would maximize my income, and they're experts on this and I believe them, but I think lots of people are in your boat.
Every time people said that inflation doesn't matter because your wages go up equally fast, I looked kind of nervously at my fixed pricing scheme. But I hope there are lots of people like you for whom $10 seems too high today but maybe after a few more rounds of inflation it will seem reasonable.
Wouldn't it be good for both authors and readers if Substack allowed for a la carte purchases in addition to subscriptions? There have been many dozens of posts from dozens of different authors that I would have paid a few dollars (each) to read, but I did not want to commit to paying for dozens of subscriptions - and not just for financial reasons. I imagine particularly popular posts could garner thousands of small (note: not "micro") payments that would provide significant value to authors - potentially many thousands of dollars. In general, the lack of innovation and options in Substack payment models is frustrating.
"your wages go up equally fast"
This is a complete fallacy. My wife and I bought our first house (in Sacramento), and paid off a new car loan, on two people earning minimum wage.
The components of the consumer price index, i.e. inflation measurement has been reformulated many times, in order to provide the politicians the pretty numbers they need to polish their administration.
The basic fact is, even last two years published inflation was 8%, yet no one saw their wages go up anywhere near 8%, especially the people on the bottom, who are hit the hardest.
This is clearly correct. The decision about how to measure inflation is always going to be somewhat political, and distorted.
For instance food is about 20% of the basket of goods, as measured for the purposes of inflation. This is, presumably, what the median household spends on food. However food is an essential and if the bottom 25% are paying 30-40% in food in good times, inflation hits food products in a bigger fashion than other products, then it’s really gonna hurt that percentile – and of course, even after inflation abate these prices are often locked in.
You could say the same for rent and housing costs - many many people on their homes out right, many are paying relatively no mortgages. However for people in the rental sector increases in rent which are not really accounted for in the statistics - not to any large extent, anyway - are disastrous.
I really wish we had the BAT model working.
I think I’ve paid the whole last year. Probably due to inertia. In the previous year I paid $50 or so as I unsubscribed every so often. This is something that I do with Netflix, Apple TV, and other streaming services - swap them in and out.
I think most people here could do that. Otherwise - since I am not really paying for the subscriber content but all content - I feel a bit like I’m subsidising you.
On the other side, if you managed to get all of us subscribers to become paid subscribers, you could make $12 million a year. I imagine you'd give a lot of it away, I wonder where?
"The modern version of this is “if you subscribe once, you can read everything in the archives, but if you forget to unsubscribe afterwards, you’ll pay money every month forever”.
Spoilers for a one hundred and eighteen year old book, but that is the plot of one of the Eugene Valmont stories from 1906 collection (the story itself is set in 1896):
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19369/19369-h/19369-h.htm#The_Absent-Minded_Coterie
"I noticed on Mr. Macpherson's current list the name of Lord Semptam, an eccentric old nobleman whom I knew slightly. Then turning to the list immediately before the current one the name was still there; I traced it back through list after list until I found the first entry, which was no less than three years previous, and there Lord Semptam was down for a piece of furniture costing fifty pounds, and on that account he had paid a pound a week for more than three years, totalling a hundred and seventy pounds at the least, and instantly the glorious simplicity of the scheme dawned upon me, and I became so interested in the swindle that I lit the gas, fearing my little lamp would be exhausted before my investigation ended, for it promised to be a long one.
In several instances the intended victim proved shrewder than old Simpson had counted upon, and the word 'Settled' had been written on the line carrying the name when the exact number of instalments was paid. But as these shrewd persons dropped out, others took their places, and Simpson's dependence on their absent-mindedness seemed to be justified in nine cases out of ten. His collectors were collecting long after the debt had been paid. In Lord Semptam's case, the payment had evidently become chronic, and the old man was giving away his pound a week to the suave Macpherson two years after his debt had been liquidated."
Hey Scott, I have taken advantage of the poor people's discount, and I make around %40 of the median income of a typical ACX reader. Hopefully that qualifies as a legitimate excuse.
Sounds good, thank you for subscribing!
Didn't you initially say you weren't going to paywall any posts except some of the open threads?
I don't think so - from the second ever post on the blog (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/logistics):
"All 'important' content will be freely available regardless of subscription status, but subscribers will get a little extra. In particular, there will be one subscribers-only Open Thread a week (on Wednesdays), along with the normal free Open Thread on Sundays, and occasional subscriber-only AMA (ask me anything) threads. I also plan to occasionally post shorter or lighter content for subscribers only, maybe once or twice a month. This would be along the lines of SSC posts like If Only Turing Was Alive To See This or Bulls**t Jobs (Part 1 of ∞). I might also paywall a few very impulsive Culture War posts, just to prevent them from going viral. I predict this will be less than 10% of content, and less than 1% of content weighted by some measure of importance. "
On the other hand, in addition to writing about "important" subjects, you are also a very entertaining writer, and I think the locked posts are disproportionally more entertaining. :-)
My casual impression is that Scott provides a larger proportion of his material for free then anyone else I have seen on Substack. Of those writers who have some paid content. A few authors provide everything for free, which is nice, but I don't expect that.
I would subscribe is Substack wasn't such a trash platform. It's the only site that locks up my phone, especially when there are hundreds of comments.
I have the same issue, both on my phone and on my desktop, with the browser tab taking long to render and being unresponsive for a few seconds. There should really be an easy way to hide comments.
Totally fair, I sometimes tell them this offhandedly but I'm collecting complaints like this to give them in a big email and I'll add yours to the list..
Switching from this tab to another and then switching back incurs a >3 second lag on both Firefox and Chrome on CoreI7/16GB. This really is sub-par. Do pass this on: Your content more than makes up for it, so I'll Suffer Through as it were ;)
Here's another for your collection: the deletion of comments is even more of a problem than I thought. In addition to making older comment threads unreadable, now someone has figured out that they can post nasty comments and immediately delete them, leaving nothing but an email notification. I've personally exploited this mechanism to exchange contact information, but that's probably going to be an insignificant use case. (Given the existence of comment editing, a complete fix may be difficult, but at least there'd be more of a record.)
Fixing that is easy enough. A daily or hourly delete limit. Once people realise that their bad faith comments might stay around for a while they will be more reluctant to trash post.