Back in the old days People wrote blogs and you read the best of them but most importantly you did not pay for the pleasure of reading them.
Then we had substack where people tried to commercialise on their success on writing blogs. The only problem was you had to pay for the pleasure of reading them.
If I might just add academics and journalists were the people who had a competitive advantage in writing blogs. They were writing on stories and concepts they kept up to date with because of their jobs, noah smith, Brad De Long and John Quiggin quickly come to mind as examples. The late Mark Colvin was a magnificent example on twitter.
The problem of substacks is twofold as I see it.
- If you subscribe to any it must reduce the avenues you have read on certain subject. None of us have so much money we can subscribe to all these substacks.
- If you commercialise your blog it must have high quality articles ALL the time. Sorry but this just does not happen. I do like noah smith for example but sometimes the articles are simply articles which are boring. This happens because sometimes there is little happening, sometimes your inventive juices are not working. You get the picture
Bah humbug I say to substacks. Can you imagine someone putting up a Dickey Betts guitar wonderland as I di yesrday. Nope. Anyone could look it up on youtube and so it cannot be commercialised.
Bring back the old blogs
No comments:
Post a Comment