Things Let’s Try Not to Import from the Last Platform
Quick note: If you’ve been on the fence about buying either of my books, you can get either or both for half price this week with the sales code SPRINGSALE23 if you buy them directly from Belt. You can also buy any number of other really good and valuable books — Vivian Gibson’s Last Children of Mill Creek, Raechel Jolie’s Rust Belt Femme, Anne Trubek’s So You Want to Publish a Book, John Warner’s Sustainable. Resilient. Free: The Future of Public Higher Education, Mark Athitakis’s The New Midwest, Ted McClelland’s several books on the Midwest, Elizabeth Catte’s books, Zach Mortice’s gorgeously produced and normally very expensive coffee-table masterpiece Midwest Architecture Journeys, just so much good shit. All half off. Belt is kept alive by direct online sales through its own website, so you’re doing a small publisher a solid while saving a ton of money on books you definitely want to have. (Anne breaks down how this works in an interesting way in the second graf here.)
Substack now allows you to write these things that are basically Tweets. They look almost identical to Twitter. (I’ve used the feature myself, a bit. Oddly enough, I find myself instinctively adopting a slightly more professional-sounding persona in Notes, capitalizing nouns at the beginning of the sentence, abandoning the studied insouciance that it took me years to adopt on Twitter, and which I did adopt because it struck me as a funnier and more interesting mode, all things considered, than the earnest grown-up mode. Neither mode, of course, is particularly interesting; but in the context of the medium …)
If Notes takes off, it could be the thing that finally finishes Twitter — not in a “the site disappears” sense, but in the sense that it becomes like MySpace in 2012 or so, or Friendster in 2008. (You don’t remember Friendster. I don’t remember Friendster. Nevertheless it existed.) People will not so much delete their accounts as forget their accounts exist; Musks’s attempts to monetize the thing will get sillier and sillier; it will get sold and there’ll be a series of “Challenges face new CEO” stories and it’ll change hands quickly a few more times as the billionaire class (then the multimillionaire class) tries to figure out what it’s actually worth through high-stakes haggling, etc. The reason I see this platform and that one as linked is that, every time it looks like the collapse of Twitter is imminent, I suddenly get a lot of subscribers, and some of them even convert to paid eventually. At this point I am in a position to materially benefit, ever so slightly, from Twitter’s misfortune, which makes it funny that I still post there some days. I am not a rational utility maximizer, and I’m not sure I’d want to meet one.
I am working on a longer post about the differences between Substack and “Web 2.0”-era social media (the short, frequent posting style of Twitter/Facebook) and between those and blogging. (I already have started thinking through that in one section of this piece from this weekend, my first ever for Slate. As long as I’m dropping links, my most recent book column dropped yesterday.) At the moment, though, I’m just going to drop a probably pointlessly quixotic list of things that I would like to see less of on this platform as compared to the last one.