While I’m innovative in some ways, in many other ways I lag behind. That is certainly true for clothes, music, and furnishings. And it took me ever so long to admit that a smartphone was a good idea. And as I started blogging in 2006 at an independent website, perhaps you can understand why it has taken me so long to switch to Substack. But as of today, here I am.
I plan to blog here about as often as I did at my previous site, and on similar topics in a similar style. But I’m told that some of you are willing to pay extra for access to exclusive content, and I’m willing to do that once in a while. But I’m not sure what sort of content that should be. If you have some ideas, please to suggest them in the comments on this post.
Btw, while posts have been moved over from my previous site, comments haven’t moved yet. But hopefully they will get moved soon.
This was a bad change. The only thing Substack is good at is getting people to pay money; a killer feature if you need it like Scott, but you don't, presumably, intend to paywall OB. Otherwise, Substack is terrible blogging software: it struggles to do something as simple as super/subscript! (I think they might *just* have implemented that, 6 years and 100 employees later.) It also has nasty design: subscribe nagware all over the page, that horrible fullscreen ad that pops up after a little while, remarkably intense web browser load, aggressive collapsing of comment subthreads... You've broken a ton of OB functionality: the tags are all gone, browsing by month/year, the per-author post lists, the comment sidebar, and I've probably forgotten some other things inasmuch as there's no way to check now that the site is gone.
I think Arnold Kling has an interesting model. He hosts regular discussions with paying subscribers on Zoom, but all the written content remains free.