We’re thinking of moving the Forum digest, and probably eventually the EA Newsletter to Substack. We’re at least planning to try this out, hopefully starting with the next digest issue on the 23rd. Here’s an internal doc with our reasoning behind this (not tailored for public consumption, but you should be able to follow the thread).
I’m interested in any takes people have on this. I’m not super familiar with Substack from an author perspective so if you have any crucial considerations about how the platform works that would be very helpful. General takes and agree/disagree (with the decision to move the digest to Substack) votes are also appreciated.
Sounds like a good move! In my experience (both as an author and a reader), Substack is very simple and convenient, and the network effects (e.g. obtaining new readers via substack’s “recommendations” feature) are much larger than I would have predicted in advance.
I like the idea of past editions living somewhere (do they now?) to avoid link rot and allow looking at the history of things and etc. Maybe I’d advocate for putting them all somewhere CEA owns as well in case substack stops being the right place.
Substack has a good recommendations algorithm, which will hopefully recommend people other EA relevant content (this feels complementary with the thing above, where it’s facilitating some cross-flow of users between our owned channels and substack)
This same recommendation algorithm, combined with their deliberately permissive approach to moderation, is the reason why a number of prominent publications have left Substack; they don’t want to be recommended to neo-Nazis or have neo-Nazis recommended to them. Here’s Casey Newton’s full explanation, which I think is reasonable and was well-received by his largely normal, largely popular audience. Despite Substack’s popularity in these circles, I think that it is directly valuable to not have these recommendation effects, as well as indirectly valuable from an optics perspective. (Regardless, I figured you might not be aware of this controversy at all).
In the same vein as Casey, I think that you could achieve almost all of the benefits outlined in that document with a different provider, such as Ghost.
We’re thinking of moving the Forum digest, and probably eventually the EA Newsletter to Substack. We’re at least planning to try this out, hopefully starting with the next digest issue on the 23rd. Here’s an internal doc with our reasoning behind this (not tailored for public consumption, but you should be able to follow the thread).
I’m interested in any takes people have on this. I’m not super familiar with Substack from an author perspective so if you have any crucial considerations about how the platform works that would be very helpful. General takes and agree/disagree (with the decision to move the digest to Substack) votes are also appreciated.
Sounds like a good move! In my experience (both as an author and a reader), Substack is very simple and convenient, and the network effects (e.g. obtaining new readers via substack’s “recommendations” feature) are much larger than I would have predicted in advance.
I like the idea of past editions living somewhere (do they now?) to avoid link rot and allow looking at the history of things and etc. Maybe I’d advocate for putting them all somewhere CEA owns as well in case substack stops being the right place.
They do… as an exercise try and find them
Seems reasonable 👍
Oh, that’s an interesting idea. In general seems good to take newsletters and digests and summaries and use other platforms for additional reach.
Thanks for the comments everyone. This won’t be done in time for this week’s edition, but hopefully the next one
This same recommendation algorithm, combined with their deliberately permissive approach to moderation, is the reason why a number of prominent publications have left Substack; they don’t want to be recommended to neo-Nazis or have neo-Nazis recommended to them. Here’s Casey Newton’s full explanation, which I think is reasonable and was well-received by his largely normal, largely popular audience. Despite Substack’s popularity in these circles, I think that it is directly valuable to not have these recommendation effects, as well as indirectly valuable from an optics perspective. (Regardless, I figured you might not be aware of this controversy at all).
In the same vein as Casey, I think that you could achieve almost all of the benefits outlined in that document with a different provider, such as Ghost.