
Don’t Judge a Substack by Its Cover - secondbreakfast
https://secondbreakfast.co/don-t-judge-a-substack-by-its-cover
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lbotos
> Lowering the bar for online publishing is fantastic. I am cheering for them.

> But I hope I don’t find myself groaning when I click on Substack links.

> Medium became a victim of its own success. Too much noise, not enough
> signal. I wonder how Substack can avoid the same fate.

Isn't this a problem of "network effects"? As the network grows, the quality
lowers? To remain high quality you need strong filters which ultimately
shrinks the network.

Substack is gonna be exposed to a similar problem as medium, and they may be
able to solve it, but I don't expect so, because they aren't building a
"magazine" but a "publishing platform".

~~~
secondbreakfast
Yeah, that's what I'm wondering. I hope they're able to avoid the same outcome
of Medium. I think the paid feature and the email-first feature change the
dynamics a little bit. The similar brand matters less when all your
subscribers are just getting your posts via email, and the subscribe/pay
features can serve as signals to show which Substacks are worth paying more
attention to.

We'll see!

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dannyfraser
> “Oh this person just throws stuff on Medium? Probably not worth my time.”

This is just the worst attitude. Someone's not worth your time because they
don't have the knowledge or time to stand up a website on their own domain?
People who aren't web developers might still have something interesting to
say.

~~~
CodeyWhizzBang
For me, it's not that they can't stand up a website, but that there's very
little barrier to entry. An article on the New Yorker, say, tends to be better
than one on Medium not because the writer can make a website but because they
have a strong editorial team that only publish content of a certain quality
and edit it to improve it. An article on Medium may not even have been
proofread.

~~~
dannyfraser
I don't think that's a fair comparison. The New Yorker is a magazine that
curates and publishes articles by people who write for a living and stakes its
reputation on only publishing pieces of a high quality.

The distinction here really is if someone publishes on joesblog.com or on
medium.com/joesblog. Both are self-published rather than selected for
publication, but the OP was of the opinion that joesblog.com is an indicator
of higher quality of content, which I don't think is true. All it indicates is
that someone has been able to set up a website.

