Chris Best

And if you comment, other people can see it, including the author.

I think that's understood.

We originally actually had it where replying would leave a comment, and people did not understand that.

We would end up with a lot of things.

We ended up very quickly with a lot of things that were intended to be private that were posted, and we had to cut that out.

But the comments are often very good comments.

one of the things you can do is you have you don't have to but you have the option to have commenting be only for paying subscribers and the joke i sometimes use is that people will hate read something but they won't hate pay for it yeah and be honestly if they do hate if it's like i cared and i hated enough to come and give you my ten dollars to leave this angry message well maybe that's worth it or maybe that's that's interesting anyway but a lot of people on sub stack

The value they get from earnest commenters and earnest replies, the feeling of people engaging with the ideas and caring and talking about it is a big piece of what makes the thing kind of special.

And now that the people are in the app, it's much easier to comment.

It's much faster.

So you're getting a lot more of that.

And one thing that I've followed from like fear, the early internet blogosphere is a lot of the most interesting bloggers kind of like came out of comment sections.

Like a comment section can be like of a popular blog or a popular sub stack can be like its own scene where its own little universe of people that get to know each other and bounce ideas off each other and become known.

And then you can sort of get people that kind of grow up in the comment section of one thing and then go out and start their own.

My number one piece of advice I always give people is just start.

I think the most common failure mode for somebody who aspires to do a Substack is to think really hard about it, do a lot of planning and a lot of strategizing.

And by far the best thing you can do is just, it's easy to start, it's free, set it up, put something out there.

Don't worry about it being the perfect thing.

I also think different people take a different tax with this, but I think a good default is default to creating more and more frequently.

I think the internet in general and definitely Substack