We have this debate any time there's a new gravy train for online writing, and it's getting exasperating. Every new platform will reward a set of star writers in a POWER CLAW distribution, the early will cash in, and discovery is the unsolvable problem.
https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1373392942170132480
Everybody wants to write. But no one has the time to sift through all the stuff by unknowns, let alone pay for it. There is not going to be a world where ten million writers each make a comfortable living off of a modest 1000-reader paid newsletter. Ask your local indie band.
The way to make a living off writing online will remain the same as ever—try to be an early arrival on whatever new platform is willing to take huge losses to win readership, whether it's Blogger, Medium, Substack, or the next one. Good luck beating the winners from last time!
The overall level of whining about writers not being able to make a living from it is incredible. We live in an era where anyone can publish! It's amazing! You used to have to go hat in hand to publishers, or pay for a vanity press. Now you can just do it! Quit your griping.
Now Substack (or whatever follows it) is going to laboriously reinvent editors, magazines, copyeditors and the newsstand, in the same way Uber eventually first-principled its way to inventing the bus. But the genuine revolution of this era is You! Can! Publish! Anything! Online!
What rankles me in the Great Wheel of Online Publishing is not that we repeat the same debates about it each time, but that when these bloated platforms inevitably disappear they take entire communities and comment histories with them. And those have more value than the writing
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