Took another look at Substack. It ticks most of the boxes of what I want for Backstage and it’s ready to move in. It’s perhaps 90% of what I want. But, and that’s a huge BUT, it belongs to a company, a company in its growing stage. And I know what’s at the end of that growing stage: the sale at a high valuation. And then? So many companies were bought by the big players – you know who they are – and then they died a slow death. So I am hesitant and leaning towards building an addition to this old house, instead of moving into a shiny new rental that will be sold in a year or two.
Do you read or subscribe to any of the Substack offerings? How do you like the experience?
I avoided Substack for a long time. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s the name: it seemed pretentious to me.
In any case, the content on substack … at least the content I have had interaction with … is very very good. High quality.
The substack app on the iPhone (the mobile platform I use) is clunky. I especially do not like the fact that in order to move from an unpaid to a paid subscription for a given writer, I have to leave the substack environment in order to do payments. This is bad for a number of reasons, but most of all, technically, I ought to be able to do this within the Apple ecosystem like any other subscription. To force another path is just technically clunky. If I was to give a grade to the developers of the substack app on the iPhone, as a software engineering project, I’d give it a D.