teddit

observations*:

people are starting to care about decentralization and ownership, apparent in articles about BlueSky and in user reactions to Reddit selling data to OpenAI

majority of crypto twitter does not care about decentralization, they care about making money

majority of people do not care about or for crypto

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knew someone was going to respond with this and honestly feel that it overlooks a quiet trend away from "attention" and towards "authorship" (another form of ownership). sure, easy to say Bluesky is "stated" but how do you explain Substack's sustained growth over the past years?

eh, i do see substack growth as closely tied to rise of independent publishing movement. they definitely rode the newsletter boom, which in large part was due to manifestation of independent publishing values. writers want full control over what they say, how they say it, and how they monetize.

agree substack didn't invent this, but productized the idea, lowered the barrier to entry, and created a strong ecosystem with strong social proof of big names who do care about those philosophical principles (bari weiss, matt taibi, etc.)

i don't read substack's growth as based on those philosophical principles. the main ownership component is that you can export your email list, which is great but not new/unique to substack. 

so the growth imo is due to a great product they built for newsletter writers alongside community mgmt and Notes, which is also downstream of a high-quality network of writers and readers, which also is in part due to BD getting writers to move to substack. 

might be misinterpreting your authorship <> ownership link tho as not fully following there