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I’m going to say something that shouldn’t be controversial but will be. If you are a Christian, you can support border control and immigration being legal vs illegal. You CANNOT celebrate deportations and get off on the cruelty, and be a real Christ follower. Period
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You always own your intellectual property, mailing list, and subscriber payments. With full editorial control and no gatekeepers, you can do the work you most believe in.
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I refuse to be the kind of person who loses their mind over a delayed train or lets a spilled coffee set the tone for the whole day.
I want to be the one who stays composed, who sees the good even when things don’t go as planned. The kind of person who breathes through the little chaos and still finds beauty in how the day unfolds.
I want to be soft. I want to be steady.
The big problem about Substack is that there isn't an open subscription, whereby you just pay one subscription, and it is divvied up between everyone you read. lt is really just impractical and impossibly expensive to maintain subscriptions to more than one or two individual substacks. If there were one subscription (eg $25/month ) Substack could keep track of all my reading and divide my subscription between those whom I read. But I've been burned in the past by subscribing to different writer…
The three main problems I see with this proposal are:
1) Substack has skin in the game. They take a 10% cut. So they may change their algorithms to direct readers to content that makes them most money, not what readers might wish to discover.
2) Network effects will still push readers and money towards the big hitters. The long tail of unpaid publishers will remain.
3) The overheads and fees for the 'internal' redistribution of subscriptions (plus any weightings - some popular authors will demand …
Well, of course Substack has "skin in the game". So do newspapers. And they take a lot more than the 10% subscription I pay to a newspaper for my favourite writers or opinions. Plus the editor dispenses other views I don't like. I don't see the difference. But with Substack at least I don't miss the writers I like - unlike with newspapers, where the editor can spike columns.
The difference is a newspaper is the output from a sole publisher - even a sole proprietor with their own steer. Whereas Substack isn't. We're the publishers here. Millions of us. Producing just as many blogs, journals, magazines...