I’ve been recently messaged/pinged about a suggestion of starting something like a Substack newsletter which after thinking about, I politely declined (this goes similarly for using Medium). The reasons for that are things I’ve noted recently including self de-platforming along with how I write in this very unstructured/stream of conscious style format that is often times verbose run ons (and often times published with misspellings and poor grammar — I do fix them later). In short, I wouldn’t be good at doing a newsletter format (I’m not even good with blogging).
Substack is of course another online platform (similar to Medium but without an algorithm) for content creators that allows for the self-publishing of written, multimedia, and podcast style content that can be monetized via paid subscriptions (Substack takes 10% of that revenue where the creator sets the amount for premium content). For readers, they can follow, interact with (via comments and real time chat for live streaming), and be notified when anything new is published. It’s focus is primarily newsletter style content (it can do video and live streaming but is not the best).
Substack is also writer driven (the creator has 100% ownership of their audience; aka the e-mail list for followers/subs) whereas Medium, engagement drives your revenues via their partner program (similar to most other social media sites where once monetized, you earn a small percentage). Medium offers far more flexibility to do custom design/layouts along with hybrid content (it will handle audio/video style podcasts a lot better than Substack for example); just with an algorithm that drives feeds and thus, reach of ones signal. Medium charges either $5/month or $50 annual subscription for unlimited access to content.
On a quick side note, Substack’s system can be used to farm for e-mail addresses by entities that simply want to have a list to sell to advertisers (thus one needs to be mindful of using a burner or aliased address when following accounts on the site). The other issue is they also platform and make money from those who create extremist Nazi content (newsletters).
I do realize they do not want to engage in censorship by dictating the type of allowable content (outside of ones that are clearly illegal) as per what the founder was quoted in the article. Extremist/hate content should not be tolerated IMHO. If I were considering it as a platform, my choice would be to not to utilize it even though I know many established journalists (who have gone independent from corporate media) have made it their primary publishing platform.
In the end though, my objectives are different from that of the usual creator (where their priority is gaining an audience). Additionally, the monetization part is something that I’ve long mentioned as being something that I am not interested in. I don’t need the money; plus as a content creator (at least how I feel about the monetization part), taking any form of compensation involves a level of obligation with that content (regardless of whatever form it is in).
Like I would feel very obligated to put out a certain amount of newsletters/information and doing all of that with as professional a presentation as possible. Basically it starts turning into work at that point while with this site, it is “what you see is what you get”. I realize it’s not as easy to follow blogs like this besides as an RSS feed (which initially, I did not re-enable). Additionally, since I have comments disabled, that engagement component is missing (it’s also not something I want to return to because that itself can turn into a massive time sink).
This is why I haven’t yet enabled ActivityPub functionality for this site (it’s only active on the media hub). Fundamentally, I want to retain this level of control I have for my data (where platforming again on something like Substack, conflicts with my self de-platforming objectives). I understand the engagement part of that type of setup, but it is not where I want to be at this time. This site is very much a hobby and outlet, not something to garner an audience which usually means monetizing it (doing it this way works for that hobbyist goal).
Reiterating what I’ve written previously, it’s why I blog the way I do. There’s also only 24 hours in a day and just so many subject matter that I could put into writing (which I actually do, but lot of it often times sits unpublished in a very rough draft state; like there are currently 68 drafts – many of which I may never end up editing/publishing — it took me several months to finally finish the American Propaganda one since it was very relevant to current geopolitical events).
I am also VERY hesitant about getting back into that larger “current events” coverage format as I had done in the past on the old media portal site I ran in Japan (it was also easier back then because I had a full time assistant). True, there have been recent occasions where I had that natural urge to move back into that mode again, but then remembered how it led to feeling burnt out (which isn’t the objective for something that you want to treat as a hobby).
I’m also very much trying to keep a limit on the amount of time spent on this geopolitical related news (which on the flip side, is also becoming difficult to do since we do live in a global economy where what is happening, affects everyone). At the moment, I’ve been performing this balancing act doing some of these posts while trying my best at reducing my time online (sort of catch-22 when it comes to researching and validating/vetting information which requires me to spend more time online).
tl;dr: the short version is that in the end, Substack (or Medium) doesn’t fit into my objectives of simply writing to purge.
