Honestly the paywall has trained me to avoid clicking on anything from medium.com… I wish it was more nuanced than that, but the reality is that the content is not essential enough to justify a subscription.
The Substack model is more sustainable, but something about their incentive model or community design seems to result in impenetrable 9000 word essays.
In either case, "what if blog posts cost money" is a tough business—I wish you luck!
It sounds like you have a casual interest in longform articles. These subscription-driven publications are making their content more appealing to people who value longform enough to pay, which means the articles/emails are becoming really longform to appeal to those who like it the most.
That’s probably an accurate assessment—both of the market forces and my interest in longform. I love long reads from traditional media (eg NYT) so perhaps I just haven’t found the right Substacks for me—discovery seems to be a tricky issue in this space.
Same for me. I end up subscribing through a lot and then picking through feeds with keyboard shortcuts and keyword filters to speed it up. Could be better--and those methods aren't solutions for large subscriber bases.
The Substack model is more sustainable, but something about their incentive model or community design seems to result in impenetrable 9000 word essays.
In either case, "what if blog posts cost money" is a tough business—I wish you luck!