Turning on paid subscription option to make the Substack algorithm happy
Hello to friends who receive these messages in their inbox and also those who don’t receive them (yet). I’m writing to explain why I turned on paid subscriptions. I hope the labels make clear that I’m NOT planning to charge for any content by putting anything behind paywalls. That would be weird! I haven’t written any bestsellers. And making money is not the point here. Everything will be free; nothing will be paywalled. Free subscriptions will continue to work just as before. So why did I turn on the option for paid subscriptions?
Well, one purpose of writing these articles is to set out ideas or a point of view for others to find. And it finally dawned on me, after about ten months of experimenting with Substack, that the company has an overwhelming financial incentive to minimize circulation of accounts with paid subscriptions turned off and to promote accounts with paid subscriptions turned on. Substack takes a cut of subscription revenue. Unless the accountholder has enabled readers to pay, Substack doesn’t make any money from the account. Therefore, I suspect that readers will see this account more often in their feeds if paid subscriptions are turned on, at least as an option.
Sometimes I think of these essays as voting for a version of reality (or vision of the future) within a certain community. In the first article I published here, I wrote about how people should feel about the meaning of their vote in elections, where everyone’s vote counts the same. In a nutshell, I wrote that one individual’s vote in an election is never outcome determinative, but it is a mostly necessary part of a winning coalition. It is also a joining together. Writing online can be like that, when a very large number of people post about something and a shared sense of understanding and direction emerges (for good and for bad). To keep participating, I’d like for people to find these articles once in a while, and that’s why I turned on the paid option for subscriptions.