Chris Best

But these, you know, these traps, these these these negative sort of spirals as a consequence of the underlying business model and the economic incentive.

It's not because the people are bad and you might even put in rules or you might even put in systems to try to like mitigate that.

You might say, oh, I want to dial down some of this problem or I want to do this thing to make people feel better.

But you've got this underlying problem where the economic incentive that drives your business is pulling in a way that is at odds with the human beings who are using the platform you make.

And so the approach we've tried to take at Substack, once you're in that position, it's impossible either way, I think.

If you say, hey, making a great product great in this developed multiplayer way or be a successful business, there's no good choice there because even if you choose to make a great product at the expense of being a successful business, now you're not going to matter.

You're not going to be able to grow and make the thing.

And so the underlying theory of Substack is, look, let's try to align these things better.

We're going to set up a situation where people are only going to pay for stuff on Substack if they actually care about it and value it.

And then we as a platform are only going to make money when the writers and creators make money.

This is why we take a percentage fee because it's like for every dollar Substack makes, the creators make nine.

Right.

It's it's we can literally only succeed as a business if we are helping people make money, do the work they believe in.

And then those people can only make money if they're if they're making something that's really good enough that, you know, people are choosing to pay for it.

And so, you know, when we you know, we still have a short form content, we still have a feed with an algorithm.

But when we run an experiment and we're asking, like, how do we make this algorithm better?

Right.

If we run a test that says, hey, we got people to spend more time and scroll more and see more things such that if you were serving ads, they would have seen more of them, but they read less or they spent less time watching a long-form thing.

For us, that's a loser because we know that finding you something that you deeply value is –

the way to get you to fall in love with it that you might pay.