Chris Best

And then I think in other ways it falls short.

Yeah, it's just okay.

I'm curious if this resonates for you, but I've heard people who are sometimes very successful people on YouTube who say, I have an idea for a thing I would like to make.

I know it will be great.

And I know there's an audience who would love it, but I can't distribute it.

Like it won't work on YouTube because the algorithm won't like it.

I see.

And I think that's too bad because it's sort of that limits your ability to take a creative risk, I think.

I think people probably underrate the pluses because algorithms are just technology.

They are a way to amplify the will of the maker of the thing.

And having an algorithm allows for really superhuman matching of people to things that they want to find.

And when it works well, it can create serendipity.

I think it can help something find an audience that loves it in a way that would have been impossible if you were trying to rely on only manual curation or only commercial discovery or something else.

The reason I think email was one of two things that we could have used at the time, because the basic theory behind it was,

The thing you want out of Substack as a creator is a direct connection to your audience.

When people subscribe to you, the social contract of that is saying, hey, I'm putting enough trust in you that I'm giving you the right to come reach out and tap me on the shoulder.

And that's the thing that allows you to take a creative risk and presume upon that and say, hey, this might not have found you otherwise, but because you have subscribed to me, I'm going to presume upon that and send you this.

So the direct connection was the key thing we wanted to enable.

And then we were living in a smartphone age where my view is there's a limited number of rectangles on your home screen that you have.

And most people have three to seven that they actually go to.