I think if you pitched it less as a paid subscription and more as "If you want to support what I do, consider joining my paid tier." People do that often, though I'm not sure how effective that pitch is in generating paid subscribers.
You could also offer modest perks, like a monthly blog post that's just answering questions that paid subscribers submitted. Non-payers could see the answers too, but they wouldn't be able to ask questions.
The standard subscribe button that Substack provides thanks subscribers for supporting my work; I always edit that part of the text out because I don't see any meaningful sense in which it is true nor or would be true if I had a paid option. I have enough to live comfortably on and my work doesn't cost anything but time.
How would your calculations change if payments for a paid tier were for a cause of your choice rather than for you personally? The model could be either a declaration up front ("proceeds go to...") or a discretionary fund (so people are basically entrusting you to make decisions on their behalf about donations).
I considered that option; the cause would be the Institute for Justice, which I donate to every year. But the obvious response would be that the subscriber can donate to IJ himself, so why do it through me?
"Can" and "will get around to" are different things for some people. But I agree it might not make much of a difference, particularly for your target audience and since (I assume) you don't have access to a matching donation like some employers do.
A local phone number is no longer useful when evaluating calls for legitimacy; numbers are too easy to spoof and some use "neighbor spoofing" specifically to make you think they're local.
If I get a call that I think *could* be legitimate (for example they get some details right) but the caller is asking for any privileged information, I hang up and call the known-good number on my bill, credit card, policy, or whatever. If there's a real problem, they can address it. If there's not, I haven't given a scammer any information (and I've made them aware of a scam impersonating them, should they want to do anything with that information).
If I were to get a call from someone claiming to be a family member or friend in trouble (the "grandma, I'm stranded halfway across the world and need money" scam for instance), my response would be "tell me a secret". (Alternatively, "have you tried Aunt Zelda?", who doesn't exist, but when I'm teaching family members about this stuff I try to keep it simple.)
Subscribe: your call, ofc. I felt Bryan Caplan's approach to be reasonable ( betonit substack; free for long, still 99% free - he does some AMA for paid subscribers). - It is a signal, then. If zero is offered for "paid", I see no signal. I do pay-subscribe ACX, and not for the little extra-content, but Scott depends on the income and I want him to be well-off. Patr(e)onizing David Friedman? If you hit hard times, sure. But a dozen other fine substackers will find more marginal use in my subscription. Or would, if I'd afford a third.
> The fit between what the federal government wanted to make university administrators do and what the administrators wanted to be made to do was in part accidental, due to the shared political views of academics and the Democratic party, but only in part. In a world where elite universities get a substantial fraction of their income from the federal government the ability to get federal money was a key qualification for an administrator; it helped to have the same political views as the people handing out the money.
The other cause of this fit is that the government officials making these demands were frequently graduates of those universities, and were influenced by the same cultural Marxist ideas as the administrators.
Apropos of nothing in particular, Dr. Friedman, you might enjoy Jason Schreier’s history of Blizzard Entertainment, Play Nice. It covers the development of WOW, among other Blizzard titles.
I have a blog that used to be very active. I did not want to monetize it with advertising because I wanted it to be purely about the ideas and such that I was posting. Monetizing it would change the incentive structure for me. With a subscription, the change in incentives would be even stronger, since there would be an obligation to subscribers.
I think we see something like this with policy institutes and other NGOs. They begin with a mission of accomplishing something, but eventually fundraising becomes the raison d'etre.
Weak no on the paid subscription. Having paid subscribers might change your behaviour in favor of posting when you didn't have anything interesting to say, out of some kind of sense of obligation.
It might also lead to things like gaming Substack's recommendation algorithm and trending page. Which IMNSHO, is a form of weak dishonesty.
I already feel an obligation to post every third day at noon — it's a commitment strategy to pressure me into doing something I think I should do. I keep a backlog of a few posts for times when I can't think of anything new to write about. Yesterday's post was from the backlog, not because I didn't have anything to write about but because I haven't figured out just what to say how about the topic I was trying to write a post on.
I think determining if a person is or isn’t honest ultimately is going to be a function of your own value system. Going against their own tribe or audience, to me, counts as some evidence. But one could always do that for the engagement and to maintain the image. I read Noah’s piece as you described and agreed it wasn’t described accurately, but I think you can always say - probably accurately - that this person’s relationship with the truth is subordinated to some other goals they have. So from my perspective, anyone who endorses any goal (explicitly or implicitly) as being more important than the truth, is almost certainly dishonest and probably also dishonest with themselves about their relationship with truth. Actually being honest, I think, is way way harder than we like to imagine.
The term "honesty" has a lot of meaning. A loyal follower might only echo those of their tribal truths they believed to be true, while refraining from mentioning inconvenient facts that tended to demonstrate other tribal "truths" to be false. Doing this is at least minimally honest. Moreover, a non-member of their tribe can rely on them to point out cases where their tribe might actually have a point.
Pointing out flaws with their tribal truths might be a stronger sign of honesty. But it's also possible they simply don't identify with the tribe people see them as belonging to. Or they might be a shock jock, saying whatever is most likely to upset people, regardless of accuracy.
Finally, while there's an ethical difference between an ignoramus and a liar, both are equally useless for providing reliable information. How much do I care whether the proverbial uncle who wrecks Thanksgiving preaching at his relatives is knowingly stating falsehoods?
Other questions: does the person pay their bills? Is their spouse always wrong in any disagreement - at least to hear them tell the story? If they write about remotely academic subjects, do they show their work? (Footnotes? Access to data sets? Good summary of the existing state of the art?)
Finally, of course, if I catch them lying once, it's game over, even if they feel they are required to echo the management line when they know it's rubbish. They might be honest in other parts of their life, outside what they feel they need to do to keep their job, but I'm not motivated to put in effort finding out where their limits lie.
The line between acceptable and unacceptable lies is hazy and depends on context and audience. Do you tell your kids what they're getting for Christmas or their birthdays? Is a short simple summary a lie for leaving out lots of relevant detail?
If you want to spread your ideas more, it might be a good idea to try to game Substack's recommendation algorithm and trending page. I'm not sure if being paid is related to its algorithm. I think CartoonsHateHer is the account I've seen that best self-promotes and is good at going viral.
My suggestion is that you go ahead and offer a paid subscription option, but treat this as an experiment. Write down what should happen, if everyone were a perfectly rationale economic actor. Write down what you think will actually happen, based on your particular knowledge of yourself and your intuition of your audience. As part of your experimental design, decide if you want to reveal those predictions ahead of time for some reason, maybe transparency, or do not want to reveal those predictions ahead of time for some reason, maybe avoiding a bias induced by commitment effect. Also decide how long you want this experiment to run; many "drift" hypotheses would take quite some time to unfold. At the end, see what actually happened, reflect on what you learn, continue or adjust how you blog based on the results, and consider if you want to run a subsequent experiment.
That would be an interesting experiment but costly in expected utility terms, given the risk that it would result in fewer readers. If the extra income was important to me I would probably do it, but since it isn't I am not inclined to.
Peter has some interesting comments on why it might lose me readers.
TBH I've never understood the paid model on here if it's just to show support / tip, patreon / PayPal already exists for that. If you (figurative you, not you you) are writing for a living, I'm not interested in what you have to say sans the curation of a book or article in a bigger paid publication. I look at blogs as a sort of conversation and I'm not interested in paying for those generally speaking. If I want to pay someone to socialize I'll go to a "buy me drinky" club.
Blogs are just a replacement for Google+ IMO, a place for people to ponder for their own enjoyment, share their thoughts simply because they want to, and occasionally converse about them. The online equivalent of a random bar conversation. Just my two cents.
Once I'm paying figurative you to entertain me, the relationship changes including the tone and expected value.
Would the relationship change if other people were paying me by choosing a paid subscription but you were not?
Part of what interests me in this question is the idea that some people would be turned off by the existence of a paid option even if they could continue to read for free. That may connect to my general puzzle about the negative reaction to the use of money in a variety of contexts, something I may eventually do a post on.
Speaking only for myself, but for me even that changes the experience. Right now you and I are having a casual conversation, similar to if you and I had met in an elevator, a smoke pit, a plane, a bar, a crack house, or any other place where people have random, sometimes deep and meaningful, conversations with no obligations or expectation of either party outside good faith participation, it's a social relationship of equals and we are both getting the same thing out of it, joy; it's not prostitution.
Once you introduce money though, even if it's donation only, you disrupt that on both sides as it creates expectations as well as evaluation of monetary value even if unintentional. I'm the sort of person that pays if asked (or suggested) as you wouldn't be asking if you didn't want it and as a free rider, I should respect your wishes given I value you but that's the problem as then I start doing math if I actually value you and if so, how much. And I'd feel bad if I knew others were paying and I didn't even if it was "optional" hence rather than pay, I'd just go somewhere else where I'm respected and not devalued.
I'm going to give two real world examples that will try exemplify this:
(1) Back when Meetup.com was a thing many groups would have meet ups such as yoga, crafting, etc but at some point when it (the platform as a business model) became big or reached a certain number of group members, what you seen is groups start to put out donation jars, etc and you would feel peer pressured, even if internal, to give. That changed the group dynamics from "we are ten guys that like to do yoga" to "we are nine guys paying someone to run a low cost yoga session and five of us have to pay more because of the other four freeloaders. Also three of us payers hate doing it because if we wanted a paid yoga club, well that already exists. We are here for the love of the activity and socializing, not for paid entertainment, and you just destroyed it" and what you see is the groups rapidly die. Meetup.com failed as a company for that reason, they pushed monetizing groups of peers just hanging out and that just got peoples gaw (or whatever that saying is, the exact wording is escaping me atm).
(2) The Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC), unlike Russian Orthodox Church, on certain major feast days, passes around the hat even though Orthodoxy itself generally has a long established funding mechanism (parish dues, an annual donation for Christmas (large too, basically take a years worth of tithing and give it at once because Orthodoxy doesn't tithe), bequests, and ad hoc donations each service into the candle box for "supplies" but really it's just whatever you want to drop in to include nothing when you grab a couple candles, some people drop twenties, others drop zero or fives) but what they don't do is pass the hat outside maybe a special collection for a family in need. Objectively they do it for a good reason, many of the attendees, like in all churches, are fundamentally C&E (Christmas and Easter) attendees (in Orthodoxy that's all 13 Great Feasts plus the two days before Easter so fifteen days a year but we still call them the C&E crowd) hence don't pay parish dues nor give for Christmas in a significant amount so it's way to capture their wallets to support the church remaining open (which they still attend, even if irregularly) but it galls the regular parishioners as the C&E folk give you the evil eye (rightly so, they think you are a C&E peer being a cheapskate) when you pass the hat empty and hence you end up throwing some money in anyways and it annoys you. After a couple times of this you end up going to the Greek Orthodox Church across town instead because of that Serbian practice and to a ROC member, both GOC/SOC are equally doctrinally valid (for arguments sake, let's ignore the recent schism) when you don't have a local ROC parish to attend. It doesn't matter if the SOC expected you to pay or not, the fact they are passing the hat means they opened that conversation and as such, you move on to a better place that treats you as an equal, not a john. It's why I don't like charities that actively ask for contributions either. If you want to run a marketing campaign, passively collect (i.e. ring a bell in front of a red kettle), or a fund drive fine, but if you are calling me asking for money weekly (or mailing me letters) you are no longer a charity but an obligation and that turns me off.
Also people tend to not like perceived regular charity by their subjective peers and that is the feel you would be creating, i.e. "Everyone has to pay but you because your poor hence inferior to us but we are magnanimous so don't worry about it as we will cover you. But we know you know" and it just grates on you over time. Also imagine if you went to lunch with whomever your regular friend group is and then all of a sudden Bob (making that name up) is like "Hey David, we have been friends for years but I tend to be the leader of this group / coordinator so from now on, how about you and Frank buy lunch for me for the honor of me sitting with you. You don't have to of course, Frank said he will just pay more if you don't, but you are inferior to me so why wouldn't you? After all my words are like mana from God to your ears". You probably thought Bob was just there as your peer and friend, a relationship of equals you both enjoyed passing the time jawjacking, not a (effectively) sex worker building his brand to suck you in and then charge you for the pleasure of his time once you were hooked. It's dishonest and ends relationships.
I probably could have articulated that all better but bit of a brain fog today so I apologize if it's a bit of a ramble. Basically as the old saying goes, money changes things but more accurately, I'd say obligations changes things.
I may want to quote some of this in a post I am working on dealing with the hostility to money payments in a variety of contexts. Do I have your permission to do so? If I do, would you prefer I link or not to the full text of your comment?
Quote away. I would rather you not link if I have my druthers and just say "a commenter" rather than credit me directly (I think you credited chartopia once recently) but I'm not asking for anonymity either. I would just rather not be in the forefront but if people find via a regular search or this post, that's fine as it is a public forum.
Also feel free to clean it up without permission if needed, it was a bit rambly and I know my speech mannerism leaves a bit to be desired for some.
Thanks. That is a very interesting response, interesting not just for this question but for my more general curiosity about the hostility to money in a variety of social situations.
Someone I know approached that problem (some people want to support me but some might be turned off by its existence) with a layer of separation. She posts everything publicly on her blog, and she publishes those same posts on Patreon. The support levels on Patreon are things like "$1/month I want to support you", "$2/month I really want to support you", etc. There are absolutely no Patreon-subscriber rewards (not even early access), just the ability to get those posts from Patreon instead of her blog. I read her blog directly and also support her on Patreon because it's important income for her. (I never read the Patreon email.) People reading her blog never need to interact with Patreon or its nudges.
For Patreon posts, which are a subset of what she posts on her blog, she does include a "this post supported by..." footer with a Patreon link. But it's not in your face. She's using Patreon for actual patronage, as opposed to a rewards tier or the like.
Point of history - blogs predate Google+. You can argue about whether LiveJournal was more of a blogging platform or more like more modern "social media", but either way it long predates Facebook, never mind Google+ - and those of us who used it back in the day referred to our activity as blogging.
I understand the history, I'm a Web 1.0 guy myself but that said, substack isn't a blog as it was understood back then. Blogs generally weren't interactive and were more akin to personal webpages though yes I'm sure some silicon valley guy somewhere was using early forum software like PHPBB as a pseudo interactive blog backend. Google+ is really what pushed blogs as we understand them today ala substack as it was the intellectual and professional version of MySpace complete with interactivity, i.e. the magic was in combining long form ramblings that could stand on their own (i.e. article/blog) with a slow-time interactive informal comment section (i.e. forum/BB) all ran and hosted by someone else with extremely low barriers to entry. Geocities webrings weren't social media as we use the term today nor were they blogs, Facebook was a place to talk to students and extended family, and MySpace was a place to get laid and high. Google+ was the first real singular joint place where both intellectuals and businesses build online branding and presences as we would understand it today, it was MySpace/Facebook/LiveJournal/BBS for grown ups and business.
I get the pedantries of it, my pet peeve on that is the word crytpo given I was an old cypherpunk with a background in actual cryptography but in this conversation I was speaking towards a more casual, not formal, use case. Most of the people on the Internet don't even remember MySpace, much less Google+ or Live Journal hence discussions around pre-Web 2.0 definitions doesn't really do anything here. BTW my other pet peeve in this vein is calling YouTube social media or pretending Discord is anything but IRCv2 but worse.
When I started using LiveJournal in 2001, if it had just be blogging as you describe it (a personal site, no interaction), it would have lost its shine very quickly. What hooked me was being able to interact with people around a post -- not the random chitchat that would later come with social media like Facebook and Twitter, but a post with attached threaded comments that quickly became many-to-many discussions (not many-to-author). You'd start to recognize commenters who usually had something interesting to say and go subscribe to *their* blogs, and meet more people in the comments, and pretty soon you're reading a couple hundred people, seven of whom you've ever met in person.
This was the early web in its heyday, and business branding and big walled gardens and feeds showing you only a subset (guided by an algorithm not by your expressed preferences) were a huge downgrade to me. Google+ early on (still several years after LJ and I think Dreamwidth) originally followed the "show me everything, in order" model and that was great; when it switched over to doing the feed thing, so you missed half the stuff from people you cared about, I stopped using it.
Substack gets a portion of all subscriptions. I feel a bit guilty of using the service for free, but it's not intended as a revenue stream, and I can't imagine anyone thinking my thoughts are worth spending money on.
I think if you pitched it less as a paid subscription and more as "If you want to support what I do, consider joining my paid tier." People do that often, though I'm not sure how effective that pitch is in generating paid subscribers.
You could also offer modest perks, like a monthly blog post that's just answering questions that paid subscribers submitted. Non-payers could see the answers too, but they wouldn't be able to ask questions.
I think if you pitched it less as a paid subscription and more as "If you want to support what I do, consider joining my paid tier." People do that often, though I'm not sure how effective that pitch is in generating paid subscribers.
You could also offer modest perks, like a monthly blog post that's just answering questions that paid subscribers submitted. Non-payers could see the answers too, but they wouldn't be able to ask questions.
The standard subscribe button that Substack provides thanks subscribers for supporting my work; I always edit that part of the text out because I don't see any meaningful sense in which it is true nor or would be true if I had a paid option. I have enough to live comfortably on and my work doesn't cost anything but time.
How would your calculations change if payments for a paid tier were for a cause of your choice rather than for you personally? The model could be either a declaration up front ("proceeds go to...") or a discretionary fund (so people are basically entrusting you to make decisions on their behalf about donations).
I considered that option; the cause would be the Institute for Justice, which I donate to every year. But the obvious response would be that the subscriber can donate to IJ himself, so why do it through me?
Glad to learn you donate to the IFJ!
"Can" and "will get around to" are different things for some people. But I agree it might not make much of a difference, particularly for your target audience and since (I assume) you don't have access to a matching donation like some employers do.
Agree!
A local phone number is no longer useful when evaluating calls for legitimacy; numbers are too easy to spoof and some use "neighbor spoofing" specifically to make you think they're local.
If I get a call that I think *could* be legitimate (for example they get some details right) but the caller is asking for any privileged information, I hang up and call the known-good number on my bill, credit card, policy, or whatever. If there's a real problem, they can address it. If there's not, I haven't given a scammer any information (and I've made them aware of a scam impersonating them, should they want to do anything with that information).
If I were to get a call from someone claiming to be a family member or friend in trouble (the "grandma, I'm stranded halfway across the world and need money" scam for instance), my response would be "tell me a secret". (Alternatively, "have you tried Aunt Zelda?", who doesn't exist, but when I'm teaching family members about this stuff I try to keep it simple.)
Subscribe: your call, ofc. I felt Bryan Caplan's approach to be reasonable ( betonit substack; free for long, still 99% free - he does some AMA for paid subscribers). - It is a signal, then. If zero is offered for "paid", I see no signal. I do pay-subscribe ACX, and not for the little extra-content, but Scott depends on the income and I want him to be well-off. Patr(e)onizing David Friedman? If you hit hard times, sure. But a dozen other fine substackers will find more marginal use in my subscription. Or would, if I'd afford a third.
> The fit between what the federal government wanted to make university administrators do and what the administrators wanted to be made to do was in part accidental, due to the shared political views of academics and the Democratic party, but only in part. In a world where elite universities get a substantial fraction of their income from the federal government the ability to get federal money was a key qualification for an administrator; it helped to have the same political views as the people handing out the money.
The other cause of this fit is that the government officials making these demands were frequently graduates of those universities, and were influenced by the same cultural Marxist ideas as the administrators.
Apropos of nothing in particular, Dr. Friedman, you might enjoy Jason Schreier’s history of Blizzard Entertainment, Play Nice. It covers the development of WOW, among other Blizzard titles.
This seems the appropriate post for an apropos of nothing in particular comment.
re: spam. my voicemail is "I do not answer calls from non [local area code] numbers. Please text me the reason for your call and I will call back."
I have a blog that used to be very active. I did not want to monetize it with advertising because I wanted it to be purely about the ideas and such that I was posting. Monetizing it would change the incentive structure for me. With a subscription, the change in incentives would be even stronger, since there would be an obligation to subscribers.
I think we see something like this with policy institutes and other NGOs. They begin with a mission of accomplishing something, but eventually fundraising becomes the raison d'etre.
Weak no on the paid subscription. Having paid subscribers might change your behaviour in favor of posting when you didn't have anything interesting to say, out of some kind of sense of obligation.
It might also lead to things like gaming Substack's recommendation algorithm and trending page. Which IMNSHO, is a form of weak dishonesty.
I already feel an obligation to post every third day at noon — it's a commitment strategy to pressure me into doing something I think I should do. I keep a backlog of a few posts for times when I can't think of anything new to write about. Yesterday's post was from the backlog, not because I didn't have anything to write about but because I haven't figured out just what to say how about the topic I was trying to write a post on.
I think determining if a person is or isn’t honest ultimately is going to be a function of your own value system. Going against their own tribe or audience, to me, counts as some evidence. But one could always do that for the engagement and to maintain the image. I read Noah’s piece as you described and agreed it wasn’t described accurately, but I think you can always say - probably accurately - that this person’s relationship with the truth is subordinated to some other goals they have. So from my perspective, anyone who endorses any goal (explicitly or implicitly) as being more important than the truth, is almost certainly dishonest and probably also dishonest with themselves about their relationship with truth. Actually being honest, I think, is way way harder than we like to imagine.
The term "honesty" has a lot of meaning. A loyal follower might only echo those of their tribal truths they believed to be true, while refraining from mentioning inconvenient facts that tended to demonstrate other tribal "truths" to be false. Doing this is at least minimally honest. Moreover, a non-member of their tribe can rely on them to point out cases where their tribe might actually have a point.
Pointing out flaws with their tribal truths might be a stronger sign of honesty. But it's also possible they simply don't identify with the tribe people see them as belonging to. Or they might be a shock jock, saying whatever is most likely to upset people, regardless of accuracy.
Finally, while there's an ethical difference between an ignoramus and a liar, both are equally useless for providing reliable information. How much do I care whether the proverbial uncle who wrecks Thanksgiving preaching at his relatives is knowingly stating falsehoods?
Other questions: does the person pay their bills? Is their spouse always wrong in any disagreement - at least to hear them tell the story? If they write about remotely academic subjects, do they show their work? (Footnotes? Access to data sets? Good summary of the existing state of the art?)
Finally, of course, if I catch them lying once, it's game over, even if they feel they are required to echo the management line when they know it's rubbish. They might be honest in other parts of their life, outside what they feel they need to do to keep their job, but I'm not motivated to put in effort finding out where their limits lie.
The line between acceptable and unacceptable lies is hazy and depends on context and audience. Do you tell your kids what they're getting for Christmas or their birthdays? Is a short simple summary a lie for leaving out lots of relevant detail?
"The captain was sober today."
If you want to spread your ideas more, it might be a good idea to try to game Substack's recommendation algorithm and trending page. I'm not sure if being paid is related to its algorithm. I think CartoonsHateHer is the account I've seen that best self-promotes and is good at going viral.
My suggestion is that you go ahead and offer a paid subscription option, but treat this as an experiment. Write down what should happen, if everyone were a perfectly rationale economic actor. Write down what you think will actually happen, based on your particular knowledge of yourself and your intuition of your audience. As part of your experimental design, decide if you want to reveal those predictions ahead of time for some reason, maybe transparency, or do not want to reveal those predictions ahead of time for some reason, maybe avoiding a bias induced by commitment effect. Also decide how long you want this experiment to run; many "drift" hypotheses would take quite some time to unfold. At the end, see what actually happened, reflect on what you learn, continue or adjust how you blog based on the results, and consider if you want to run a subsequent experiment.
That would be an interesting experiment but costly in expected utility terms, given the risk that it would result in fewer readers. If the extra income was important to me I would probably do it, but since it isn't I am not inclined to.
Peter has some interesting comments on why it might lose me readers.
TBH I've never understood the paid model on here if it's just to show support / tip, patreon / PayPal already exists for that. If you (figurative you, not you you) are writing for a living, I'm not interested in what you have to say sans the curation of a book or article in a bigger paid publication. I look at blogs as a sort of conversation and I'm not interested in paying for those generally speaking. If I want to pay someone to socialize I'll go to a "buy me drinky" club.
Blogs are just a replacement for Google+ IMO, a place for people to ponder for their own enjoyment, share their thoughts simply because they want to, and occasionally converse about them. The online equivalent of a random bar conversation. Just my two cents.
Once I'm paying figurative you to entertain me, the relationship changes including the tone and expected value.
Would the relationship change if other people were paying me by choosing a paid subscription but you were not?
Part of what interests me in this question is the idea that some people would be turned off by the existence of a paid option even if they could continue to read for free. That may connect to my general puzzle about the negative reaction to the use of money in a variety of contexts, something I may eventually do a post on.
Speaking only for myself, but for me even that changes the experience. Right now you and I are having a casual conversation, similar to if you and I had met in an elevator, a smoke pit, a plane, a bar, a crack house, or any other place where people have random, sometimes deep and meaningful, conversations with no obligations or expectation of either party outside good faith participation, it's a social relationship of equals and we are both getting the same thing out of it, joy; it's not prostitution.
Once you introduce money though, even if it's donation only, you disrupt that on both sides as it creates expectations as well as evaluation of monetary value even if unintentional. I'm the sort of person that pays if asked (or suggested) as you wouldn't be asking if you didn't want it and as a free rider, I should respect your wishes given I value you but that's the problem as then I start doing math if I actually value you and if so, how much. And I'd feel bad if I knew others were paying and I didn't even if it was "optional" hence rather than pay, I'd just go somewhere else where I'm respected and not devalued.
I'm going to give two real world examples that will try exemplify this:
(1) Back when Meetup.com was a thing many groups would have meet ups such as yoga, crafting, etc but at some point when it (the platform as a business model) became big or reached a certain number of group members, what you seen is groups start to put out donation jars, etc and you would feel peer pressured, even if internal, to give. That changed the group dynamics from "we are ten guys that like to do yoga" to "we are nine guys paying someone to run a low cost yoga session and five of us have to pay more because of the other four freeloaders. Also three of us payers hate doing it because if we wanted a paid yoga club, well that already exists. We are here for the love of the activity and socializing, not for paid entertainment, and you just destroyed it" and what you see is the groups rapidly die. Meetup.com failed as a company for that reason, they pushed monetizing groups of peers just hanging out and that just got peoples gaw (or whatever that saying is, the exact wording is escaping me atm).
(2) The Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC), unlike Russian Orthodox Church, on certain major feast days, passes around the hat even though Orthodoxy itself generally has a long established funding mechanism (parish dues, an annual donation for Christmas (large too, basically take a years worth of tithing and give it at once because Orthodoxy doesn't tithe), bequests, and ad hoc donations each service into the candle box for "supplies" but really it's just whatever you want to drop in to include nothing when you grab a couple candles, some people drop twenties, others drop zero or fives) but what they don't do is pass the hat outside maybe a special collection for a family in need. Objectively they do it for a good reason, many of the attendees, like in all churches, are fundamentally C&E (Christmas and Easter) attendees (in Orthodoxy that's all 13 Great Feasts plus the two days before Easter so fifteen days a year but we still call them the C&E crowd) hence don't pay parish dues nor give for Christmas in a significant amount so it's way to capture their wallets to support the church remaining open (which they still attend, even if irregularly) but it galls the regular parishioners as the C&E folk give you the evil eye (rightly so, they think you are a C&E peer being a cheapskate) when you pass the hat empty and hence you end up throwing some money in anyways and it annoys you. After a couple times of this you end up going to the Greek Orthodox Church across town instead because of that Serbian practice and to a ROC member, both GOC/SOC are equally doctrinally valid (for arguments sake, let's ignore the recent schism) when you don't have a local ROC parish to attend. It doesn't matter if the SOC expected you to pay or not, the fact they are passing the hat means they opened that conversation and as such, you move on to a better place that treats you as an equal, not a john. It's why I don't like charities that actively ask for contributions either. If you want to run a marketing campaign, passively collect (i.e. ring a bell in front of a red kettle), or a fund drive fine, but if you are calling me asking for money weekly (or mailing me letters) you are no longer a charity but an obligation and that turns me off.
Also people tend to not like perceived regular charity by their subjective peers and that is the feel you would be creating, i.e. "Everyone has to pay but you because your poor hence inferior to us but we are magnanimous so don't worry about it as we will cover you. But we know you know" and it just grates on you over time. Also imagine if you went to lunch with whomever your regular friend group is and then all of a sudden Bob (making that name up) is like "Hey David, we have been friends for years but I tend to be the leader of this group / coordinator so from now on, how about you and Frank buy lunch for me for the honor of me sitting with you. You don't have to of course, Frank said he will just pay more if you don't, but you are inferior to me so why wouldn't you? After all my words are like mana from God to your ears". You probably thought Bob was just there as your peer and friend, a relationship of equals you both enjoyed passing the time jawjacking, not a (effectively) sex worker building his brand to suck you in and then charge you for the pleasure of his time once you were hooked. It's dishonest and ends relationships.
I probably could have articulated that all better but bit of a brain fog today so I apologize if it's a bit of a ramble. Basically as the old saying goes, money changes things but more accurately, I'd say obligations changes things.
I may want to quote some of this in a post I am working on dealing with the hostility to money payments in a variety of contexts. Do I have your permission to do so? If I do, would you prefer I link or not to the full text of your comment?
Quote away. I would rather you not link if I have my druthers and just say "a commenter" rather than credit me directly (I think you credited chartopia once recently) but I'm not asking for anonymity either. I would just rather not be in the forefront but if people find via a regular search or this post, that's fine as it is a public forum.
Also feel free to clean it up without permission if needed, it was a bit rambly and I know my speech mannerism leaves a bit to be desired for some.
Thanks. That is a very interesting response, interesting not just for this question but for my more general curiosity about the hostility to money in a variety of social situations.
Someone I know approached that problem (some people want to support me but some might be turned off by its existence) with a layer of separation. She posts everything publicly on her blog, and she publishes those same posts on Patreon. The support levels on Patreon are things like "$1/month I want to support you", "$2/month I really want to support you", etc. There are absolutely no Patreon-subscriber rewards (not even early access), just the ability to get those posts from Patreon instead of her blog. I read her blog directly and also support her on Patreon because it's important income for her. (I never read the Patreon email.) People reading her blog never need to interact with Patreon or its nudges.
For Patreon posts, which are a subset of what she posts on her blog, she does include a "this post supported by..." footer with a Patreon link. But it's not in your face. She's using Patreon for actual patronage, as opposed to a rewards tier or the like.
Not advice, just information about one case.
Point of history - blogs predate Google+. You can argue about whether LiveJournal was more of a blogging platform or more like more modern "social media", but either way it long predates Facebook, never mind Google+ - and those of us who used it back in the day referred to our activity as blogging.
I understand the history, I'm a Web 1.0 guy myself but that said, substack isn't a blog as it was understood back then. Blogs generally weren't interactive and were more akin to personal webpages though yes I'm sure some silicon valley guy somewhere was using early forum software like PHPBB as a pseudo interactive blog backend. Google+ is really what pushed blogs as we understand them today ala substack as it was the intellectual and professional version of MySpace complete with interactivity, i.e. the magic was in combining long form ramblings that could stand on their own (i.e. article/blog) with a slow-time interactive informal comment section (i.e. forum/BB) all ran and hosted by someone else with extremely low barriers to entry. Geocities webrings weren't social media as we use the term today nor were they blogs, Facebook was a place to talk to students and extended family, and MySpace was a place to get laid and high. Google+ was the first real singular joint place where both intellectuals and businesses build online branding and presences as we would understand it today, it was MySpace/Facebook/LiveJournal/BBS for grown ups and business.
I get the pedantries of it, my pet peeve on that is the word crytpo given I was an old cypherpunk with a background in actual cryptography but in this conversation I was speaking towards a more casual, not formal, use case. Most of the people on the Internet don't even remember MySpace, much less Google+ or Live Journal hence discussions around pre-Web 2.0 definitions doesn't really do anything here. BTW my other pet peeve in this vein is calling YouTube social media or pretending Discord is anything but IRCv2 but worse.
My blog on blogspot started in 2005. My first post accumulated fifty comments, with interactions between me and commenters in the comment thread.
Google+ was started in 2011.
When I started using LiveJournal in 2001, if it had just be blogging as you describe it (a personal site, no interaction), it would have lost its shine very quickly. What hooked me was being able to interact with people around a post -- not the random chitchat that would later come with social media like Facebook and Twitter, but a post with attached threaded comments that quickly became many-to-many discussions (not many-to-author). You'd start to recognize commenters who usually had something interesting to say and go subscribe to *their* blogs, and meet more people in the comments, and pretty soon you're reading a couple hundred people, seven of whom you've ever met in person.
This was the early web in its heyday, and business branding and big walled gardens and feeds showing you only a subset (guided by an algorithm not by your expressed preferences) were a huge downgrade to me. Google+ early on (still several years after LJ and I think Dreamwidth) originally followed the "show me everything, in order" model and that was great; when it switched over to doing the feed thing, so you missed half the stuff from people you cared about, I stopped using it.
Substack gets a portion of all subscriptions. I feel a bit guilty of using the service for free, but it's not intended as a revenue stream, and I can't imagine anyone thinking my thoughts are worth spending money on.
I think if you pitched it less as a paid subscription and more as "If you want to support what I do, consider joining my paid tier." People do that often, though I'm not sure how effective that pitch is in generating paid subscribers.
You could also offer modest perks, like a monthly blog post that's just answering questions that paid subscribers submitted. Non-payers could see the answers too, but they wouldn't be able to ask questions.
You'll probably be motivated, consciously or unconsciously, to respond to paid subscribers vs. unpaid subscribers.
I would be unlikely to know which are which.