Thinking again about that post about the idea about how Substack could offer “buying an article”, for people who didn’t want to, like, full-on subscribe to someone’s writing, but were willing to pay to read one article. This would also benefit the writers on here, as well as Substack itself, because people are more likely to purchase articles before taking the full dive into subscribing, and even if they don’t make that choice, they still spent however much money they did. I am pretty sure that there are also elements of psychology involved that would make people spend more money on something than that they would have spent on just subscribing, though I lack the specific terminology to name it? My Google-fu fails me.

I suppose that such economic honesty could very well be the reason why Substack doesn’t offer that, though even though it incentivises poor consumer behaviour, as one (who would probably engage in such) I still would rather it be an option. Maybe there could be some kind of warning system put in place, if Substack is so devoted to such honesty, providing a sort of “hey! It would cost less to just subscribe!” popup or something? I don’t want to have that as a feature, but I would prefer to go through it if it meant that I could pay for individual posts/articles.