I'd be curious to on the ways that twitter was better than say the blogosphere/rss days. I can buy that my perspective is too nostalgic here, and if that's a subject you want to cover in any future posts I'd eagerly read it.
I'd imagine that part of it is that the producer time commitment is more manageable and managing a larger set of contacts is easier. I've found these properties useful in twitter for transit advocacy. On the other hand, my RSS reader works for me and on social media I am the product and my attention is being optimized by a central set of engineers towards ends that are not my own.
You've got it exactly right, actually. Twitter originally billed itself as a microblogging site strictly to make link-sharing and light engagement/updates easier (IIRC, users contributed some of this stuff, like the @ and # etiquette). Substack functions surprisingly well as an RSS replacement but Peak RSS was vastly better. It's just that Peak RSS was enriched by blogging which ... just died as legacy media poached the central nodes. Twitter meant there were always new nodes and weird memes and low-friction updates.
Makes sense, though with the core advantage of substack being presumably that it offers an economic return that might justify being a producer at a level below that which gets poached by the legacy media. That said, there's still just going to be returns to all stars and first movers in a way that can be more distributed for microblogging.
It's a shame microtransactions never really worked out. I guess a strength of twitter was that the network effect benefits of following and retweeting were a tiny little network boost, combined with verification helping differentiate genuine products among those that get above a certain level. But the extent of the benefit is tied to the size of the network.
All and all, I think I'm just going to have to get used to paying more for good content. Which is manageable for me, given my time is the bigger limiter. I'd be willing to pay for a microsubstack that maybe charged a monthly fee but unlike twitter blue provided value & passed something to key producers or otherwise offered benefits to draw people despite a smaller network. But I haven't seen much by way of experiments like that.
The late Twitter usefulness you're describing is really a product of the early Twitter culture--essentially before the guys who made it had any idea whether it even could be monetized, they just knew it might be popular and/or useful. Reddit is starting on the same death spiral now--the dumb people in charge now need to try and figure out how to squeeze blood from its rock convincingly enough to make it through an IPO, after which they'll cash in and run. I think what made early Twitter generative compared to the blogosphere/RSS was that it was a new platform (so new entrants) plus you could share and consume high-value information with a light burden in terms of content labor whereas the blogosphere took more work (of a kind largely discounted by anybody who wasn't in it).
I'd be curious to on the ways that twitter was better than say the blogosphere/rss days. I can buy that my perspective is too nostalgic here, and if that's a subject you want to cover in any future posts I'd eagerly read it.
I'd imagine that part of it is that the producer time commitment is more manageable and managing a larger set of contacts is easier. I've found these properties useful in twitter for transit advocacy. On the other hand, my RSS reader works for me and on social media I am the product and my attention is being optimized by a central set of engineers towards ends that are not my own.
You've got it exactly right, actually. Twitter originally billed itself as a microblogging site strictly to make link-sharing and light engagement/updates easier (IIRC, users contributed some of this stuff, like the @ and # etiquette). Substack functions surprisingly well as an RSS replacement but Peak RSS was vastly better. It's just that Peak RSS was enriched by blogging which ... just died as legacy media poached the central nodes. Twitter meant there were always new nodes and weird memes and low-friction updates.
Makes sense, though with the core advantage of substack being presumably that it offers an economic return that might justify being a producer at a level below that which gets poached by the legacy media. That said, there's still just going to be returns to all stars and first movers in a way that can be more distributed for microblogging.
It's a shame microtransactions never really worked out. I guess a strength of twitter was that the network effect benefits of following and retweeting were a tiny little network boost, combined with verification helping differentiate genuine products among those that get above a certain level. But the extent of the benefit is tied to the size of the network.
All and all, I think I'm just going to have to get used to paying more for good content. Which is manageable for me, given my time is the bigger limiter. I'd be willing to pay for a microsubstack that maybe charged a monthly fee but unlike twitter blue provided value & passed something to key producers or otherwise offered benefits to draw people despite a smaller network. But I haven't seen much by way of experiments like that.
The late Twitter usefulness you're describing is really a product of the early Twitter culture--essentially before the guys who made it had any idea whether it even could be monetized, they just knew it might be popular and/or useful. Reddit is starting on the same death spiral now--the dumb people in charge now need to try and figure out how to squeeze blood from its rock convincingly enough to make it through an IPO, after which they'll cash in and run. I think what made early Twitter generative compared to the blogosphere/RSS was that it was a new platform (so new entrants) plus you could share and consume high-value information with a light burden in terms of content labor whereas the blogosphere took more work (of a kind largely discounted by anybody who wasn't in it).