Evans: Substack sits between a pure tool and a recommendation network
Benedict Evans · The history of doom-scrolling · Jan 3, 2021 · at 10:20
Benedict Evans discusses platform taxonomy and whether Substack serves merely as infrastructure or as an audience discovery engine.
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“Substack is in this kind of interesting place in the middle where, like, on one level they are squares, they are a Squarespace or MailChimp, they're a tool, and you pay them, or if you're charging, you pay, if you're not charging, it's free, and that's it, which is what Squarespace is, but there's also, there's a leaderboard, And there is a substack.com. And there's a page where you go to which suggests stuff, and they're in this sort of ambivalent position of which are we?”
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