[throwaway5752]

Hi Matt, this is something that has interested me for personal and professional reasons. I've see a range of solutions from podcasting, youtube channels, self publishing, patreon, and independent companies (thinking TPM and their subscription model). It seems like a lot of the problem is the ad based revenue model, and the absolute bottom falling out text ad pricing combined with the unsuitability of video format to deeper/long form journalism. So I am happy for this. But as someone here noted, discoverability seems weak and - more generally - media benefits from networking effects. To not go on too long:

1. Presuming you buy into the networking argument, is Substack going to do any curation to ensure that the "Matt Taibbi" brand isn't hurt by "random crank pushing chemtrail mind control" content on the same site? That may be a bit extreme, but the same general phenomenon as FBA 3rd party seller counterfeiting hurting all sellers there or how Forbes blogs have gone downhill.

2. Is Substack going to enable cross-publishing to push content to other destinations/media? It's seems like it will be impossible to acquire the same number of eyeballs that is possible on ITunes, et al for audience acquisition.

[walterbell]

(random HN commenter opinion)

“Networking” and “cross pollination discovery of authors and readers” == community.

Community and free speech works with balanced diversity, where no one group can overwhelm another’s speech, especially during early childhood phases of a community’s development, before norms have emerged for the community to defend itself against threats external or internal.

[intended]

Diversity of what?

Opinions ? Facts ? Beliefs?

[walterbell]

Anything

[intended]

We can have diversity of hate speech. That would obviously be bad right?

In case I’m being overly obtuse - my point is that we are not allowed the generality of previous thinkers she. Discussing free speech and human communication.

Diversity is a great term, but it’s too broad since all positions(intersect)contexts are not equal.

We do not have the ability to touch upon ideas in some Newtonian or conceptual space. We have to very much work on them with human brains and their limits and weaknesses.

So when we say diversity - what diversity do we mean? Otherwise it’s the same as political speech where they want equality/growth/fairness and so on.

[walterbell]

Community means a limited, bounded context, by definition. Language, speech and norms are community specific. There are geographical and, thanks to the internet, non-geographical communitites.

To provide a contrived response to your contrived example, diversity of historical and fictional hate speech could be appropriate in an academic community focused on those topics.

To connect the topic to this AMA, many communities will emerge among the writers and readers of Substack and they will change over time due to audience growth and feedback loops within and between Substack communities.

[intended]

Diversity of what?

Opinions ? Facts ?