I invested in Substack, a media paradise for reading and socializing

Weekly 100th Issue Celebration Book Subscription Offer

"Blockchain Sociology Weekly" is about to usher in its 100th issue. From now until May 20, anyone who subscribes for 50 mg for one year will get Dong Qizhang's "Tiangong Kaiwu. Come to Life" NFT book, while supplies last.

Existing subscribers can also get the same discount if they extend their subscription for one year in advance.

👉Subscribe👈

Readers who know me know that I have always adhered to HP knowledge and refused to put any articles on the paywall. Therefore, I am often asked why I subscribe since I can read all articles for free. In this regard, I used to always write about Jiang Taigong, and those who wished to pay.

However, in order to prove that open content can also be eaten, and to give back to supporters, I decided not to follow Buddhism and introduce three major benefits for paying subscribers:

1. Get every Blockchain Sociology Weekly Writing NFT. NFT enables the separate realization of the reading right and ownership of digital content, allowing paid subscribers to own articles as "proof of support" without affecting the dissemination of knowledge, just like digital clippings, which can be kept as souvenirs and Conservation content.
2. Use "ChatCKX" human flesh AI to chat. If you can't beat others with high technology, you can still fight with low technology. Paid subscribers can ask all kinds of questions to the chatbot , and I can guarantee that ChatCKX is as capable of nonsense as ChatGPT.
3. Exclusive "Drifting Classroom Reading Club" (semi-Cantonese). Two years ago, I held a book club in the form of letters (not emails but paper letters) around the content of "Blockchain Sociology". Due to certain considerations that the content is not public, I am now making the letter available online for paying subscribers.

Three major benefits, only 5 mg per month, 50 mg per year, and an NFT book will be given during the discount period. If you want to provide greater support, you can choose an amount within 5,000 Mg to become a sponsor member, get commemorative NFT and participate in occasional exclusive activities, such as film bookings held in Hong Kong.

Please forgive me for selling advertisements. In addition to clearly explaining the meaning of subscription, I also took the opportunity to introduce the infrastructure for realizing the above subscription plan, the protagonist of this issue, Substack.

Let users become shareholders

Before pitching I have to declare an interest: I invested in Substack. Substack’s A and B rounds of investment are led by the prestigious a16z, and the valuation in 2021 will be as high as 650 million magnesium, but please don’t get me wrong. I’m a rich man. In fact, Substack invited authors on the platform to invest a month ago. Tool holdings only. This crowdfunding was conducted in Wefunder, with a valuation of 585 million Mg and an entry threshold of 100 Mg. I invested 5,000 Mg, which is insignificant for a business, and I can’t lose it all.

But what I want to talk about is not investment, at least not investment experience. In fact, my investment logic is very simple. I am interested in investing in products that I have been using and think are easy to use. It is good to make money. Once I lose money, I will treat it as crowdfunding to achieve something. It doesn’t feel bad. Although it sounds stupid, when I bought US stocks in the past, I just bought Apple and Google stocks with this stupid logic.

That's not how the typical investor thinks. Some people analyzed a long article, citing data and scolding Substack's crowdfunding as "stupid", looking for institutional investment failures to bury their hands in the author, clearly relying on harm.

Substack explains it this way :

We are serious about building Substack with writers, and this community round is a good way to concrete that ideal. We're doing this because the dynamics of a platform like Substack change if the people who are building their businesses on it are owners of it , too.

I'm not sure how sincere and how hypocritical Substack's statement is, but I'm a big advocate of this kind of cooperative-like logic, so I pay the bill. Whether I am a fan of the authorities or not, I will know in the future. Now please let me introduce what attracts me to Substack from two levels of reading and socializing.

Open Reader and Information Source

Substack is like the old blog WordPress.com. After the author registers, he will get a domain name like alice.substack.com and start writing immediately. Authors who want to master their personal brand can also pay a one-time payment of 50 mg to use a personal domain name such as alice.com.

On the basis of traditional blogs, Substack added several small innovations, and gradually developed into a "subscription network for independent writers and creators". As the name suggests, Substack first added a subscription function, similar to Patreon, which is familiar to Hong Kong people, or Ghost, which is relatively unpopular.

Substack's paid subscription function is similar to Patreon, but the reading experience is much better; I subscribe to multiple authors on Patreon, but all of them are out of support, and I actually don't want to read in the site's nondescript interface at all. Like most Internet services, Substack also uses Stripe as the bottom layer for charging, and supports almost all countries that can be named. Unfortunately, due to financial control, it does not support Taiwan. Therefore, Taiwanese authors need to set up a bank account in a foreign country to use Substack. Or find an overseas friend to collect the money on your behalf.

Another small but crucial innovation of Substack is to combine the blog and the e-newsletter into one. By default, every post is emailed to the subscribers. In other words, every article by the author will be sent to every reader. Social media, such as Facebook, which algorithmically filters and ranks content, is very different. Although many people today let thousands of emails accumulate in their inboxes, compared to Facebook's meager 100% reach rate, the 100% reach rate brought by email is already a tenfold improvement.

From the reader's point of view, whether you are a new generation who ignores emails, or an old-school netizen like me who never ignores any emails, you can regain the right to decide whether to read or not, and no longer transfer it to (spoon) feed. I don't even know how much I have read and how many subscriptions I have missed.

Another advantage of automatically distributing each post by email is that it combines the traditional process of "post first, then distribute" to avoid duplication. The author directly writes articles in Substack's concise editor. After publishing, not only the posting page is stable, but the automatically sent emails can also be read normally on most mailboxes and devices. Although it seems to be taken for granted, marketers who have used tools such as Mailchimp will surely understand the trouble of editing "edm" and the pain of taking care of various browsers and email software.

Distributing every article is important, but choosing email itself is also a major focus, not because of my personal usage habits, but because email is an open standard. Using email distribution means that readers will not be locked in a specific website or application, but can choose reading tools, screening mechanisms, priorities, and even use advanced functions such as tagging and automatic processing.

When it comes to open standards, I have to mention RSS. Substack automatically adds RSS to each newsletter for RSS readers to track new posts. For example, the RSS feed of this week's newsletter is https://weekly.dhk.org/feed . Conversely, any third-party media that supports RSS (such as all WordPress sites) can be imported into the Substack reader for display and storage, breaking the barriers of closed gardens.

The following lists several citizen media. Readers are strongly advised to create a Substack account, and then import them into the reader one by one through the Add RSS feed function on the web interface, trying to regain the dominance of information discovery from the algorithm. In the future, I will introduce more independent media in another article to promote another meaning of "distributed publishing".

• Reporter: https://www.twreporter.org/
• Openbook reading log: https://www.openbook.org.tw/rss.xml
• Independent Media: https://www.inmediahk.net/rss.xml
• Courtline: https://thewitnesshk.com/
• Collective: https://thecollectivehk.com/
• Court Newsletter: https://hkcourtnews.com/
• Wave Pop Culture: https://wavezinehk.com/

Make friends with literature and socialize lightly

Through the two major standards of email and RSS, Substack provides an open and smooth experience, allowing users to quietly read articles from all directions. After laying the foundation, Substack launched the Reader app last year and gradually added light social elements.

Although Substack also has a social standard package "CLS" Comment, Like, and Share, the "light social" I am referring to is another kind of communication that is more subtle and "meeting friends through writing". First of all, Substack's interface encourages independent authors to recommend each other, curated by real people rather than algorithms, helping readers discover authors and authors finding readers.

I don't have the data, but I can clearly feel that Substack has grown steadily in the past one or two years, and independent authors who are advanced in Substack can enjoy the "user bonus", especially in the Chinese market. According to the official data of Substack, 40% of the subscriptions on the platform are generated by referrals. Many readers of this week’s report are introduced from the block trend that also uses Substack since January 2020, and I also introduced Shanxing pay it forward. Many readers have come to Block Potential and other independent authors.

Another social function of Substack is Chat. To be honest, it is not suitable for me who is reticent. However, since Substack Chat is based on the subscription relationship of the newsletter, the author can set the degree of openness by himself, from the broadest to everyone to the narrowest to only the author's one-way publication. Authors who focus on the quality of chatting can narrow the circle of participation, screen out acid people from all directions, and focus on talking to paying users. Because I don't know how to chat, I just turned on the Chat function a few days ago and set it to be readable by everyone, but only paying users can post new topics, which becomes a subscriber benefit "ChatCKX".

The last social feature is the recently announced Notes that could drastically change the face of Substack. Notes allows authors to share short content such as a few words, photos, and article links, and it is only displayed on the feed of the website and app instead of being published by email like an e-newsletter. Simply put, it is the Substack version of Twitter, and it is suspected of causing the latter to suppress it.

While I'm not a small talker, I really like the design of Substack Notes. I often want to share all kinds of news or incomplete ideas. If these fragmentary information are put into the e-newsletter, it will not meet the atmosphere of in-depth discussion, and secondly, too many emails will bring a burden to readers. Notes just makes up for this space. Twitter, which was originally the king of short message sharing, quickly collapsed after being acquired by Elon Musk and became nondescript. Although Notes is a new product, because it inherits the subscription relationship of the e-newsletter, the author not only does not need to start from scratch, but also deepens the same group of users. Communication and relationship, killing two birds with one stone, is another small but breakthrough innovation.

Through Substack Notes, I expect to be able to communicate with more than 19,000 subscribers on a daily basis. Although it is unknown whether readers will read Notes or even open Substack, at least it is an independent decision rather than the result of an algorithm.

In general, Substack embraces open standards and balances reading and social interaction, allowing readers to communicate with authors and other readers while reading quietly, and occasionally discover new content. As for the author, in addition to obtaining a simple and easy-to-use writing space for free, he can also continue to accumulate readership and establish direct contact in a light social environment.

It is strongly recommended that independent authors and journalists enter Substack , and let themselves and readers gradually reduce their reliance on algorithms.

Weekly 100th Anniversary Celebration Book Subscription Offer

From now until May 20th, anyone who subscribes to "Blockchain Sociology Weekly" for one year with 50 Mg will get Dong Qizhang's "Tiangong Kaiwu. Come to Life" NFT book, while supplies last.

Existing subscribers can also get the same discount if they extend their subscription for one year in advance.

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Original link: chungkin Express