Scaling a scene brings tons of goods and tons of evils, but “what are they optimizing for” is the question to ask of platforms. I think Substack optimizes for the right thing: paid subscriptions to writers and creators.

I worry that this seems like a “small thing”; among other things, it’s not visual! It doesn’t take the form of a novel interface, or a revolutionary interaction, or any other shiny, obvious thing that makes you feel like “something different is here.”

But having worked at a few of these places, I promise: the objective function is everything. It’s everything! It’s everything in part because in multi-sided marketplaces / networks, most developments are trade-offs. Whenever Twitter, for example, runs an experiment that

• increases time spent on Twitter but

• decreases longform reading, clicks to links, traffic to creator sites, etc;

they’re going to ship that change to 100% of their users every single time. Because it makes them more money! That’s their objective function: what keeps you seeing ads on Twitter. They will trade off anything against it.

In our case, that same experiment would be a fuckin bust; we’d lose money, because you’d lose money; we wouldn’t ship it. This is so simple that I completely understand if it seems underwhelming. But as I often say: if every time in the last 10 years that Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Google, and so on had to choose between “more time spent” and “better outcomes for creators,” they’d chosen the latter, the entire Internet would be different today. And that’s what we’re trying. It’s simple, but I think it could be cool. Who knows, though?!