The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: Newsletter platforms will inevitably need algorithmic feeds as they scale
“What is it going to look like when you've got 10,000 people on your platform, and everybody's got signed up to 200 newsletters, You're going to have an algorithm. You are. Or you're going to be MailChimp, and you're going to say, that's not my problem, in whic…”
Evans: Substack is a publishing platform that disrupted Medium
“Substack has basically massively disrupted Medium. Substack has done what Medium was supposed to do. It's a publishing platform. It's not actually a newsletter platform. It's a blog post by email platform.”
Evans: Substack will support thousands of writers, not millions like Instagram
“I also feel like how many people can write that much once a week? How big is that going to be? I feel like that's thousands of writers, not millions of writers, whereas Instagram is millions, can be millions of creators.”
Cairn-Brown: Platforms beyond pure software must make content moderation central
“Because if you're just the software, then I don't think you ever have to worry that much about content moderation. But the moment that you're a little bit more, in my opinion, than just the software, then the content moderation piece is a huge part of your bus…”
Evans: Entertaining ten-year-olds generates far more money than niche newsletters
“Email newsletters for, like, insidery gossip around newspapers and tech strategy are, like, a super micro niche.
Entertaining ten-year-olds, that's where the money's at.”
Evans: Top Substack writers built their audiences in journalism decades ago
“Look at all the people on the leaderboard on Substack. You know, they're all well-established big brand, big names. Yeah, all white men, which is basically because they all entered journalism 30 years ago. So they're all people who have a pre-existing audience…”
Cairn-Brown: Substack hasn't reinvented anything despite the hype
“I have to say there's something there for me that, I don't know, it's been top of mind for me of why, why all the hype around Substack, because it hasn't reinvented anything, to your point, and it came top of mind for us because they just announced that they'v…”
Kevins: Startups will unbundle Shopify by simplifying niche vertical workflows
“And then 10 people will do that to Shopify. Like, theoretically, I could sell a subscription newsletter in Shopify, except no, it's a lot easier to do it the way that I, in Substack or Memberful, depending on what you wanted to do. And I'm, there's a lot of pe…”
Evans: Substack has effectively become Twitter's paywall for creators
“Substack comes along and builds an email newsletter platform, and the joke was always, has been Substack is Twitter's Playwall, because you build your user base on Twitter, and then you monetize it on, on Substack. So if I've got 300,000 Twitter followers, I c…”
Evans: Substack and Clubhouse relied on Twitter audience funnels
“Clubhouse, while you were driving people to Clubhouse from your Twitter account. To begin with, because it didn't really have a network, and it was, you know, that was one of the things they had to try and build, was to build a network. And the same thing with…”
Evans: Substack and Clubhouse stars succeed by importing existing audiences
“And they spent 20 years, like, building that audience, and then they can take, put that audience in the knapsack and take it to Clubhouse, and take it to Sostak.”
Evans: Substack sits between a pure tool and a recommendation network
“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, whi…”