Maybe they already do this. I wish they would offer volume discounts. So you could subscribe to 5 writers for the price of 3. Or 10 writers for the price of 5. The user gets to pick the bundle.
I don’t know enough about how substack works to make a proposal in detail.
I wonder if the writers themselves could work toward this.. Say John X. and Andrew Y. agree to offer a discount if you subscribe to both. This would let the writers team up.. Like McWhorter and Loury on their podcast..
100%. There are multiple people on substack right now that I would not pay their rates to read just them. However, if I could get several of them for slightly more than the cost of one (perhaps taking a similar approach as Astral Codex Ten with special content for paying members), then I would be much more willing.
I just want a publication written by my favorite columnists and not including the people I don’t like. Of course, what actually happens is more like with paying for cable, but wanting to only pay for the channels that you like, and then ending up paying for cable and a punch of streaming services.
This proposal is almost reinventing the newspaper or magazine. I get that you’d pick the bundle of authors that would make up your custom magazine, but wouldn’t you still recreate the joint reputation and collective action problems that plague the legacy press?
There was at least one, but it wasn’t user defined and they moved it to their own platform recently. I also don’t know if you could have gotten the individual contributors individually.
https://everything.substack.com/
Way back in the 1960s, John Kemeny talked up the future benefits of computers, and one of them was a daily personalized newspaper/magazine. Ever since, I’ve thought it was a good idea but I gather the economics has never worked out.
I guess the “Why not” is expressed in the last phrase of “We [substack] believe that writers, bloggers, thinkers, and creatives of every background should be able to pursue their curiosity, generating income directly from their own audiences and on their own terms.”
Should Amazon to offer you a discount for ordering 5 books instead of one? Why or why not?
Arnold should give us a microeconomic analysis of his plan. Because he can.
I agree with this – but the problem is that authors set their own rates and get a negotiated cut of the fees. Content producers would likely (?) have to coordinate with each other to make that work.
Is this what a Pajamas News subscription is like? I never tried it. I never tried any of the pay substacks either. I did support a couple of writers via Patreon until it went woke so it is not just the fact that I am a cheapskate, although guilty anyway. Reluctant to use online payment processors since they are woke now too. Nevertheless, I migrated from kindle to Kobo and bought Balzac’s 24,000 e-page Human Comedy so no need to buy anything else electronic for a while. For paper books I migrated to Alibris which has been a very pleasant surprise with better prices and selection than I expected.
I think a “Personalized” Substack News would be viable for Substack:
$5/month gives you 10 (15? 20?) substack subscriptions, and every day you get an email with summaries of all the free articles written by those chosen authors, with links to the full articles. The authors get proportional income.
Every $5 more gives you Full/premium from a chosen author plus 2 more free articles.
Logging into “Substack” you’d see 3 columns, the first two columns of which are from your chosen group, the third column has multiple headlines / paragraphs of Free content from other authors.
Those not subscribed to any would see 3 columns of Free content offered by Substack.
They need some better than reddit way to rate stories.
Everybody is looking for the most important stories, with the best writing, and the most accuracy – in the least amount of time. Time is the highly life-limited resource in all our lives.
FIT type leagues could help get more good intellectuals to be more widely read & supported by substack, but also by the media.
That doesn’t take into account Substack’s relationship/contract with it’s writers. Writers set the price and have a negotiated cut on the subscription fees.