Chris Best

And I think that's one of those, you know, just like an emotional thing that gets a lot of pushback and you tie it back.

But to their credit, one thing that I think has been happening recently is there's been a big discussion about links on Twitter in general.

And one of the things that the hardcore users have complained about is this long decline of interesting things linked out.

And they're actually testing new features now that help somewhat.

And we've seen an increase of traffic in the last few weeks.

So I have some optimism that they're working to fix that.

So the biggest difference from Medium is the business model.

My view of Medium is they took sort of the underpants gnome theory of building one of these things, which is like step one, get a bunch of attention, question mark, question mark, question mark, step three, profit.

And so they sort of had this period of trying out a bunch of different business models, one of which was very similar to the Substack business model.

But through most of Medium's history, there hasn't been any idea of like direct connection or ownership as a creator, as a writer.

And so like on Medium, you'd pay five bucks a month for all of Medium and it would be sort of Netflix style.

It would like give you some slice of the thing if you clicked on a thing.

And what that means is if you're making stuff on Medium, you're kind of like...

playing to the algorithm all the time to get anywhere.

And very early in, when we were still in YC actually, Medium used to publish, here's what the top earning writer on Medium made last month.

And we would look at it and be like, there's people on Substack that are making more than that.

And they're not making more than that because they had the one hit that they could never replicate that happened to get a gajillion clicks and then the algorithm doled out a big paycheck.

They've got that because they've got a loyal audience of people who value what they do.

It's just such a better deal creatively and financially to have some connection with your audience and to have people who are showing up and paying for you.

And so I think it was able to attract a much better caliber of writer over time.