[bawolff]

Maybe this varries depending on interest niche, but for me personally, there is so much quality writing that is available for free, much more than i am reasonably able to consume, its hard to imagine paying a subscription for writing.

[fxtentacle]

In my experience, it's even worse: those people who spend time and effort into becoming famous on the internet tend to have less interesting content than those who just silently post to their own blog and then move on to their next adventure.

That's why I like HackerNews, because users can recommend someone unrelated to the community purely for their content.

Substack kind of reverses the incentive here, because there's no money to be made in sending visitors off their platform. So either, it'll be a little echo chamber where Substack users only link to other Substack users, or even worse it creates an incentive for Substack's "creators" to copy content from people who didn't join.

[luckylion]

You might pay for the curation. Finding what's interesting takes time as well, even if it's just scrolling through HN, and you will miss some things. If somebody saves you that time, that's probably well worth a few bucks a month, isn't it?

[twic]

If it was a one-stop shop that fed me all the reading i could do, i would happily pay £10 a month for it. Maybe a bit more.

But if it's narrowly focused, the value is proportionally less. If someone does really good curation of obscure Soviet aerospace technology, i'm interested, but that's no more than 5% of my reading.

But then, i am a generalist, and fairly stingy. It seems like a repeat of a very old story to say that niche curators will have to find either price-insensitive generalists ("whales"), or focused obsessives.