Makes sense, though with the core advantage of substack being presumably that it offers an economic return that might justify being a producer at a level below that which gets poached by the legacy media. That said, there's still just going to be returns to all stars and first movers in a way that can be more distributed for microblogging.

It's a shame microtransactions never really worked out. I guess a strength of twitter was that the network effect benefits of following and retweeting were a tiny little network boost, combined with verification helping differentiate genuine products among those that get above a certain level. But the extent of the benefit is tied to the size of the network.

All and all, I think I'm just going to have to get used to paying more for good content. Which is manageable for me, given my time is the bigger limiter. I'd be willing to pay for a microsubstack that maybe charged a monthly fee but unlike twitter blue provided value & passed something to key producers or otherwise offered benefits to draw people despite a smaller network. But I haven't seen much by way of experiments like that.