Chris Best

And then Patreon is very interesting because Patreon is similar in some ways.

I've talked to Jack a few times and I think maybe early on I would have said,

Patreon was doing the thing where they were trying to be very pure.

And they're like, we're really just going to be about the payment relationship.

Jack's a musician.

He's like, I want to be so creator-focused and friendly that I'm never going to try to impute on the relationship at all.

So we're just going to...

handle the payment for you and we're kind of not going to do the rest.

And you're not really consuming the content on Patreon.

The prototypical thing is you're a musician or you're a YouTuber or you're somebody.

And they didn't want to do discovery.

They didn't want to help you grow because they felt like it would be sort of tarnishing the pureness of the thing.

And I've argued with Jack about that over the years.

My view is he's come around to my way of thinking.

And they're looking at Substack saying, oh, one of the most important things you can do for creators is help them grow and find an audience, especially new creators, especially the next generation of people who are trying to come up.

And now, again, I'm biased, but my view is they're just copying a lot of the things that Substack is doing, which I think are good ideas.

But in terms of like having a network that's a place on the internet that you go, I don't think Patreon has achieved that yet.

You can comment on posts, basically.

And you can also reply to the emails from very early on, which is a slightly different thing.

If you reply, it only goes to the author.