Chris Best

“And so he saw us launching this feed as kind of, I think, a declaration of war, and he banned all mention of Substack on Twitter. There was a week where not only could you not share a Substack link, if you just said the word Substack, nobody would see your thing. And if you search for you literally, you'd search for Substack on Twitter, it would say, no results. Like, doesn't exist. We were like Voldemort. You can't say the name.”

“One of the things you can do is you have you don't have to, but you have the option to have commenting be only for paying subscribers. And the joke I sometimes use is that people will hate read something, but they won't hate pay for it. And the honestly, if they do hate me, if it's like, I cared and I hated enough to come and give you my $10 to leave this angry message, well, maybe that's worth it.”

“I think this is often this is how countercultures work, I think, is that you have things that are sort of the that start out as sort of rebels or challengers from the outside. It's not that the mainstream becomes the counterculture. It's that the counterculture becomes the mainstream. Like the the upstart, the rival elite, the people who are making the new thing, it it kind of wins.”

“The problem of algorithms is that is the same as the power. It's they're good at whatever you ask them to do. And so if you're a platform that's has an algorithmic discovery feed and your goal is to get people to spend the maximum amount of time there, it can be very, very good at that. And if you push that goal to the extreme, it'll end up being good at that in a way that is exclusive of you feeling like you're using your time well, or maybe staying sane.”

“We found the percentage that you can expect varies quite widely. In those early days, we often saw kind of, like, five to ten percent of people converting depending on sort of where your audience was coming from. But it was maybe the common theme was it was often much higher than people had expected. And I would say, even to this day, people probably slightly overrate the ads business that they could have, and then they dramatically underrate the subscription business they could have.”