Exponential View

> "Substack is to newsletters what Spotify is to podcasts, Medium was to blogs, and what Google Reader was to RSS: an aggressive player that dominates an entire segment with artificial and unsustainable advantages in a risky bet."

As someone who is writing a reasonably popular Substack newsletter - and have used several newsletter platforms in the past - I have to disagree.

The biggest difference between Substack and Spotify/Medium/Google Reader is how, with Substack - and with Ghost, Beehiv and other newsletter platforms - the author owns the relationship with readers.

When you sign up for Substack, assuming you use a custom domain (which is a one-off $50 fee), you own:

- Your domain

- The email list of your subscribers

- Your content that you can easily export and migrate

- Your subscriptions: as you are not paid by Substack, but subscribers pay you via Stripe, and then you pay Substack

This makes your Substack content, "audience" and paid subscriptions fully portable, should you ever want to move to or from this platform. These days, migrating to and from platforms like Ghost is fairly trivial without losing anything (content, subscribers or SEO ratings).

This portability and owning of my content, and the connection with subscribers is why I am on Substack. It means that I have the freedom to leave to another platform.

It's also why there have been many publications that have left Substack - and then some came back. For example, the newsletter Expontential View…

It’s so totally misguided IMO that I feel like I am maybe not understanding that.

It seems to inspired or in the spirit of ‘The Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson.

“ It’s called Carbon Coin in the book, a Bitcoin-like currency that the Ministry gives out for carbon sequestration — that is, any project that sucks CO2 out of the air, whether it’s carbon capture or farmers rewilding their fields — at a rate of one coin to one ton. Oil companies get coins if they stop being oil companies, basically, leaving their assets in the ground for a century or so. Coins can then be bought and sold on currency exchanges like any other.”

The only argument I can see is that the sheer resource hunger will force our hand in using renewable energy. Of course, I am not saying this is a good argument at all.

There is no such thing as virtual energy. And the other forms of payment we use are a million times more energy effective.

What bothers me is that newsletters as this one who I believe are widely read serve this up as a good idea.

https://www.exponentialview.co/p/ev-315

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Some of my favorite ones are

- Exponential view for a fascinating insight into the world of tomorrow through today's developments in emerging technologies

http://www.exponentialview.co/

- "The download" by the MIT Technology review - great and brief newsworthy tidbits

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/

- For well-curated and high quality content revolving around blockchain topics, definitely "Token Economy"

https://tokeneconomy.co/

>despite at least a decade of people pointing at it being historically exponential and asking they don't assume the exponent will continue.

So crazy and true. Sources:

https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar-power-is-going-to-be-huge

https://www.exponentialview.co/p/the-forecasters-gap

7 years ago (!): https://xwpxpfefwalgifkr.quora.com/A-modest-proposal-to-the-International-Energy-Authority