About self-publishing newsletters, nazis, and content management

Philippe MEDA -

The very successful "Platformer" newsletter from Casey Newton (270,000 subscribers) leaves Substack for the nonprofit, open-source Ghost platform.

Why Platformer is leaving Substack
We’ve seen this movie before — and we won’t stick around to watch it play out
PlatformerCasey Newton

Having transitioned our much more modest online activities from WordPress (aka "hot mess") to Ghost more than a year ago now, I must say that the way Substack has handled "free speech" lately has been beyond dreadful. But even before that, when shopping for a new platform, the very business model of Substack and how they deal with your content were non-starters for me (same as Medium).

Substack, just another Ponzi schemes on society
It’s 2023, and we still haven’t learned much about social media or what is called in Silicon Valley lingo “tech” platforms. We got used to personal data leaks, bots posing as your friends, election meddling, hate speech, and far more. From Facebook to Twitter or TikTok, the assumption is that
innovation copilotsPhilippe MEDA

It's interesting to see that this corner of the internet, from the old-school blog to the more recent newsletter trend, is still struggling to find a proper business model and, on average, a respectful way to deal with content. Not to mention there's overall very little value in the trillions of words published on the internet every minute (second?), which doesn't make creating a content management platform easy.

🟢 The conflicting business model of subscription
While Meta just announced a paying blue mark subscription for Facebook and Meta, it’s worth questioning their logic, if there’s a real strategy at play, and what subscription is as a business model anyway.
innovation copilotsPhilippe MEDA

In that regard, AI and LLMs rushing in with artificial content will worsen the problem on one side while hopefully bringing even more value to the few real content producers remaining and managing to craft interesting/original content.

What do influencers losing jobs to AI say about branding?
Influencers being replaced by AI is the least surprising thing about our current times. The final evolution of an always-on public figure frenetically posting more or less doctored pictures of products, places, and events with carefully curated comments was always a bot. For the brands, it also means unmitigated control
innovation copilotsPhilippe MEDA

The team at Ghost has always been wonderful when interacting with them, and their concierge service made it pure joy (well, close enough) to handle all our content transition from WordPress to them.

Yes, you can consider this a well-deserved free advertisement ❤️.