Chris Best

You've built a system where you can, you know, if I'm that platform, I can value your time, but I can't really value what you value.

or at least that's not part of my economic equation.

And so if I go then build, let's say a feed algorithm and I'm running experiments and I'm trying to say, hey, how do I want this to work?

What's gonna be good?

What's gonna be bad?

How do I make my business successful?

I'm gonna optimize for how can I get as much of your time as possible

kind of regardless of how much you value it.

Like I might say, hey, I want you not to regret the time you spent, but in terms of raw economic reality, it's your time that matters.

When you take that

equation and you kind of like do the things that actually optimize that business, you end up pulling in these directions that create these, you know, hellish is probably the is the extreme way to put it.

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.