alt Hacker NewsI've always understood platforms like Substack or Patreon to really be a solution to the payment processing problem first and foremost.
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pibaker • last Tuesday at 10:14 PM
This is true for patreon but not substack. I personally know people who blog on substack not because they care about monetization — I mean, they hardly get any readers who are not a friend already — but because it is "the place" to put long form writing. I can't see the exact subscription number of substack, but if Pareto principle holds, I'd suspect most substack blogs don't have a monetization problem to solve because no one pay for them.
That’s exactly right. Finding ways to get paid for your work, and all the very complicated way taxes interact with it all, unless you’re going all-in on ads, is a messy problem that people will happily centralize for.
And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.