[DamnInteresting]

> I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term

Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket. In the early days of Facebook we had a page with 20k+ followers, and we got a lot of engagement there, people followed us to be informed of when we published anything new. Then one day Facebook introduced 'boosting,' and overnight our posts were hidden from all but a fraction of our audience. Paying to boost each post would convert them into ads, which is not how we wanted to reach our readers. Our site traffic plummeted. I would have happily just paid FB a flat rate to retain access to our audience, but that option was not on offer.

I was already a proponent of the "own your platform" philosophy[1] (aka "Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms"[2]), but that misguided reliance on Facebook really cemented it. It's nigh impossible to own everything we rely on, but I'm reluctant to give any company that much power over my project again.

[1] https://www.chuck.is/platform/

[2] https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...

[apparent]

> Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket.

The risk with Substack seems much lower though, since you get to keep their email addresses and could export to another system if you become unhappy with Substack's methods in the future.

With FB, you didn't have email addresses, or a way to export your follower list to another platform, so the consequence of the platform misbehaving was much worse (which perhaps made it more likely the platform would misbehave, knowing that there were no escape hatches).

[PaulHoule]

Was kinda inevitable though. Before that everybody was making huge amounts of money off Facebook... except Facebook. Really spammy "publishers" like Zynga were cleaning up.

Was the end of the "if you build it they will come" era. Around that time Google's enclosure of the web was well underway and the black hat SEO masterminds I knew were switching to AdWords.

[DamnInteresting]

It's true that some kind of monetization change was inevitable, but I wished at the time they had executed differently. I just wanted fans who wished to see our posts to see our posts, no more, no less. The only options FB gave were to reach far fewer people (do nothing), or to push ourselves on an unwilling audience (boost posts into ads). No option to just pay a monthly fee to have it like it was.

So, while inevitable, I think it's still a good example of why one mustn't trust big corporations with one's work.

[PaulHoule]

From their viewpoint, Google and Facebook are not in the business of giving anybody traffic for free. Of course businesses divide into categories including ones that are trying to sell something directly who can pay more and those that are trying to get attention to place their own ads from the viewpoints of the platform that is an arbitrage play that they'd like to eliminate.

It's awful but true. I dropped out of large-scale web publishing around 2013 or so because I saw the writing on the wall.

[areoform]

Or, you could use Stripe and work with an agent to roll your own. It's overkill for this, but Claude Fable and Codex 5.6 Sol are surprisingly good at checking their work. So much so that they can be trusted with typesetting and image plating.

If anything, they could probably construct a static site that costs a fraction of the amount to run.

[MBCook]

You can do the same thing without them, others have, though I can’t remember any off the top of my head.

I think the model is a good one but I’m fully on board without wanting to risk being beholden to them or maybe patreon or others.