Reciprocity

I’m trying to pull away from places where I’m the Product and stick with places where I’m the Customer. Substack has become a Productifier since it started Notes.

Just now I totaled up the subscription payments over the last month, and it came to exactly $100. That’s a lot of money for not much pleasure. Time to start paring it down, getting rid of the unrewarded tips and keeping a few sources of Frequent and Solid prose.

The rules for Frequent and Solid are based on Equipoise. Frequent: On average I turn out 3 random peeves per day here, and one researched tech history piece per week. A paid writer should be producing more than I’m producing for free, in both the Random Peeve and Researched Piece departments. Solid: A paid writer should be giving me more insights and experience-based knowledge than I can develop on my own.

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Substack’s real purpose is showing up more clearly now. It’s a word that sort of rhymes with substack. Sabbatical.

Substack is a place where superstars who get bored with the restrictions of mainstream media can relax for a while, say exactly the same orthodox crap they were saying inside MSM, develop an independent audience for the same orthodox crap, and leverage the independent audience to return to MSM with more power over the bosses. If the return doesn’t succeed, they still own the audience, and they’re receiving a MUCH larger percentage of the income than they got from MSM.