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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.