Also in his original formulation “high status” environments are often simply nicer (especially to people who disproportionately care about material wealth and status). The people that do move to the developing world tend to be people that don’t mind inconveniences associated with [global] relative poverty like having to drink bottled water or everything else around then looking a tad scruffy.
Above all, Filipinos benchmark their wealth relative to other Filipinos (even if their dream involves a Green Card). Americans don’t start benchmarking themselves against Filipinos and start thinking that cars are exotic wealth just because they move to Manila
I’m particularly not sure I understand the concern that people might switch to other platforms with completely different audiences and feature sets.
Substack’s value is that it is a place to sell subscriptions to content, not that it has particularly innovative or well-designed features. It seems that if writers wished to make money from their content they would switch to Substack regardless of the quality of EA forum software, whereas if their priority was engaging with EAs, there would be little incentive to switch to a service with a different audience and a monetisation-focused ethos even if its editing tools were top notch