Two writers on Substack get money from me, one because I genuinely wish to support them, the other because I find what they write valuable and they abandoned first their print subscriptions and then their website. All the rest, and there are a fair few, probably never will. Obviously, despite their best efforts, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
Occasionally I try gently to prod the two beneficiaries into trying somewhere else, but inertia is against me. Also, I don’t actually have a solid alternative home to suggest. I’m still in the stone age with my website and mailing list free to all and requiring a bit of technological skill from me.
That’s a luxury I can afford, and it makes me even more grateful to the people who do make a donation, because it helps to keep what I produce free at the point of delivery.
Still, that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes look around to assess my options. After reading a piece about how Medium’s CEO turned the business around, the site recommended me Medium versus Substack: Six reasons writers pick Medium by Zulie @ Medium. On the one hand, given that she is a product storyteller at Medium, she would think that, wouldn’t she? On the other, most of the arguments seem sound to my interested outsider’s perspective. So if I did want another outlet, I might now be tempted to try Medium.
Medium does not currently get any money from me, so I suppose that's one up to Substack. I think that might be because I've never been exposed to Medium articles that address my core interests directly enough and with enough content to make me feel it would be worthwhile. I did just search the site using some favoured phrases, but nothing absolutely leapt out at me. And yet, if they are there, a single subscription at half the cost of my existing Substack subscriptions would be easy to justify.
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Webmentions
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