Substack has entered the arena of the social network wars, taking it to Twitter head-on with a new product called Notes. It’s a short form feed style of posts that runs in a parallel track to your long form newsletter subscriptions (the Inbox), and looks remarkably similar to Twitter. But Substack’s big innovation here for a social network is capitalizing on their subscription-centric model — every other general-use social network on the internet to-date has been based on advertising. From the announcement, how Substack will differentiate:

By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money...

In his latest issue of The Diff, Byrne Hobart looks the economic models behind the boom in independent publishing and unbundling of analysis and journalism happening on platforms like Substack:

Bundles tend to grow until they reach a highly profitable mature state—at which point any change in the underlying audience, or the availability of competing products, seriously weakens their economics. The bigger a bundle gets, the more likely it is that a subset of users are all paying for basically one piece of the bundle, which could be...

📨 Disintermediating the media with… Substack?

Jerry Brito writes about the growth of independent writing on Substack, prompted by a Mike Solana tweet:

From a technical perspective, Substack does not belong on Solana’s list next to Bitcoin and Signal. Signal is a company, but they have almost no information about their users—no names, no messages. Bitcoin is not a company, but instead a permissionless decentralized network, and “it” can’t decide who can use it or for what. Substack, on the other hand, is a centralized service that permissions who’s allowed on and...

I saw Patrick O’Shaughnessy share this yesterday, a cool addition to his podcast:

Ok trying something new:

A detailed transcript, including some images, that is also segmented by topic.

Would love feedback on what you like and what you don’t, and any ideas on what else you’d want included. Will iterate in coming weeks

Here’s link:https://t.co/oTci0lyXT9

— Patrick OShaughnessy (@patrick_oshag) July 12, 2020

A ton of added work, but clearly an interesting way to add value.

This sort of thing would be an excellent addendum to...