Chris Best

One is because now you're still downstream from the incentives on those platforms.

But if we're saying, hey, we want to create an alternative to the attention economy, but if you want to participate in it, you still have to be really, really good at Twitter, there's a contradiction there.

And the other thing is that, you know, those other platforms don't necessarily want you to be able to connect directly with your audience and take them with you, right?

If, you know, we got in a big spat with Elon around the launch of Notes and he briefly banned mentioning the word Substack and crushed the links.

But other, like even, you know, Mark Zuckerberg spent five years mad about the sort of fallout from the Cambridge Analytica thing and sort of, you know, turned, heavily turned down the dial of politics on Facebook, right?

And that's a fair thing to do.

But if you're a political journalist who wants to grow on Facebook, that's really tough for you.

And so there's all of these other networks that creators, writers depend on.

We want them to be able to use them to their maximum.

But unless there's one place that actually –

shares their interest and makes money when they make money and believes in their success and thinks that they should own their connection to their audience.

Like, if we could create a place like that, that would add so much value.

That would, you know, and that would start to become this place on the internet where you could go and...

choose to take back your mind, choose to spend your time on the stuff that you actually value and find interesting rather than just the things that distract you.

I would say it's an obviously valuable thing to do and a really hard thing to do.

And it actually took us a few years to get it going.

And there was a lot of, we built this app and we experimented with all the stuff and we kind of eventually got it to the place now where it's the right balance of

There's short-form discussion stuff flying around.

There's long-form stuff in there.

Those two things feed off and drive each other, and it's a really good experience.