I’ve been trying to work out if there’s a way to address Substack itself and the Substack community in general on the payment model. Notes and Chat don’t seem to talk to anyone but one’s own subscribers and Substack’s writers forums just seem to drown in noise - hundreds of replies but no way to sieve out by general topic.
Like most of us, I suspect, I have a limited budget of both money and time. I am interested in many more Substacks than I can afford to pay even a minimal amount for, and I certainly don’t have the time to read everyones’ contributions every day, even if they are all equally riveting.
Two proposals for Substack
1 - Payment
As an alternative to paying a sub to each Substack, could we have a global Substack subscription? I think Medium used to operate like this. The global subscription would buy you a certain number of tokens per week / month / year. Each Substack writer would set a price in tokens for their paid for essays. When a reader reads an essay their token account is charged and the writer gets their fee. (They can still publish free essays as they do now.) Tokens remain the property of the subscriber, less Substack’s commission, which it receives immediately. The value of the token or tokens less Substack’s commission is paid to the writer as and when their essay is read.
The advantages of this to me as a reader is that I can access anything I want on Substack, while limiting my overall spend to what I can afford.
I only have to go to one place to manage my subscription.
The writer gets revenue potentially from a much wider base than just their own committed subscribers ie from random or occasional visitors.
Substack has a more flexible and attractive offer to new readers.
2 - Finding relevant content - searching, selecting and categorising Substack content.
Enable searching within the Substack app for text in comments and essays.
Word clouds.
AI?
Show me all my or another subscriber’s comments.
Bringing me suggestions based on my comments, and Substacks I subscribe to.
Reduce noise (sometimes it just feels like Twitter out there).
Categorise comments by topic / theme (not just oldest/newest/top).
Option to hide off-topic or “empty” comments (like “great essay”, “fully agree”, “rubbish”).
Some people are obsessed eg about climate and will introduce their obsession into every discussion of an essay, and lots of other similarly obsessed/triggered readers then join in - flag / hide these excursions as irrelevant or off-topic, ideally with a descriptive label (I might be equally obsessed by the off-topic!)
Good ideas, hope Substack will do something along these lines.
I agree with almost all of what you suggest. I especially like the idea of rating a comment by its relevance to the topic under discussion.
I'd like to suggest a donation rather than subscription - or in other words an optional subscription.
This would allow new readers to try it out and would perhaps help monetise the system and keep the big advertisers at bay. One of the big problems we've seen recently has been the political influence of big ad accounts on social media. There might be other ways of avoiding this but not needing the money is an obvious one.