( Often, it’s not.) But by building an app that actively encourages people to stop receiving your messages over email, they’ve added seams, and as soon as they leave the platform, it adds friction that wasn’t there before. Leaving Substack is something that should be seamless. Sure, it’s about improving the reading experience, but let’s be straight here: It’s really about closing off anyone else that didn’t buy into Substack’s specific vision of email newsletters.Īnd this doesn’t even get into the problems this potentially creates for newsletter authors.
In some ways, this is sort of like Apple building in a tiny new feature that destroys someone else’s entire business model. But it’s obviously not the best version of that reading experience.”īut here’s the thing: When you reach a certain size or scale, as Substack arguably has, any attempt to push away from the original medium needs to be seen as an attempt to harm competitors, which in this case would be anyone else that distributes a newsletter on a platform that is not Substack. It’s this direct connection where you can reach out, unmediated by the algorithm. “Email is great for all of the reasons it has always been great,” Best told Newton. In an interview with Casey Newton’s Platformer, Substack CEO Chris Best attempted to take steps to clarify the company’s stance on email, which sort of feels like a way of justifying why an app like this needs to exist. No, the problem here is that Substack is finally starting to put up gates on the walled garden it created around the open platform, and for any publishers that rely on Substack, that is not the place that they want to be. Let’s be clear: The issue here is not with where people access your content if someone wants to read your newsletter in an RSS feed or a newsletter reader app, let them. Perhaps because of backlash exemplified by pieces like this one?) (Edit: They appear to have changed this opt-in to an opt-out. The app itself seems like a small gesture, whatever, every other company has an app, too, right? But when you load the app, it does something that makes you immediately questions its motives-it discourages readers from continuing to get messages in their email, instead relying on the app to read those messages.
0 kommentar(er)
