YouSaid · the spoken record

Casey Newton

lines on the record: 91
first: 2024-02-05
most recent: 2024-02-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“When you dig through the numbers, you'll also find that there are a lot of people that bought an annual subscription to platformer because their credit card was already on file with Substack and Substack made it a heck of a lot easier and maybe those people never would have bothered getting their credit card out of their wallet to enter it into platformers. So I'm sure all of those cases existed, but I can tell you when I was thinking about what is it.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I've heard from so many people in the aftermath of all this saying, Casey, I want to leave, but the network, the network. I'm like, trust me, go check out the paid conversion that you are getting from all of these folks who are signing up for your newsletter. It's probably not going to be that much. I ran the numbers, which I never should do because I'm bad at math. But I did run the numbers at the end of 2023. And as far as I can tell, despite adding 76,000 free subscribers to Platformer through this dark pattern on subStack in 2023, we ended up net 200 paid customers on the year. So in other words, we basically stayed flat for the entire year despite adding 75% to our free subscriber base. So look.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To my newsletter, maybe because you're just trying to get the pop up to go away, maybe you have no idea what's happening. My point is.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm so glad you asked this question because I have been spending a lot of time thinking about it, and there's one very tangible way where yes the network was valuable. And that was in adding free subscribers to platformers. So when I took my mailing list from the Verge, it was 24,000 people. When we moved from substack to Ghost three years later, it was about 176,000 people. In the last year, Loan Platformer added 76,000 free subscribers. I would love to tell you that was because we broke so much news last year. But that's not actually what happened. What happened was Substack built this recommendation product where if you started a substack, Nehi, and then hopefully you recommend my newsletter. The second that someone subscribes to you, before they've necessarily even read anything you've ever written, Substack shows this little pop-up that says, hey, Nehi also likes Casey Substack. You want to subscribe to that one? The box is already checked. And you click OK. Maybe because you want to subscribe.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was that network ever valuable for you? I feel like SubSex started and it was the best way to monetize a big Twitter following that had ever existed because Twitter had never figured it out on its own. And that was great. And then there was a moment when Twitter was in decline and SubStack's sort of internal referrals were working. And then that started to decline. Was the network ever really valuable enough for you to think twice?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leave, and so that problem of people are always kind of incentivized to leave Substack once they get successful, it just gets bigger.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I mean, you and I had talked about this over the years. Neither you nor I have ever been able to figure out what is substacks long-term play because you want to talk about perverse incentives. The more money you made on Substack, the more expensive it was to remain there. But the level of service remained exactly the same. And so if you thrived on the platform, Substack's bet was always, you will be making essentially so much money that you will not even notice the fact that we are taking 10%, but our network that we're going to build is so powerful and it's going to drive so much paid conversion that that is how we will keep you forever. I don't think that makes that much sense, but I also don't think it was a terrible bet. Like, I think it was like at least worth running the experiment. But yeah, now you're in this moment where people like me are looking around being like, you know what? Like, I don't actually need to be here. And we've started.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Winds up polarizing their entire user base and driving a lot of their users away. So if you want to know what is something that surprised me during this whole process, it was that.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they tend to be very dismissive of all of these controversies. They have weathered previous controversies about some very anti-trans folks on the platform, anti-vaxxers on the platform, and I think that they see these as a series of relatively minor moral panics that have not ultimately mattered to their business that much. One of the main things that I learned during this whole process was that at least I came to believe SumSec is much more of an ideological project than I had given it credit for when I joined the platform in 2020. I had thought in 2020 this is a startup like most of the other Y Combinator startups I've ever written about. They tried to make something people want. They're trying to grow at 10% a week and they're trying to become billionaires. What I learned as this whole thing unfolded in December and January was that some huge part of these guys I have to believe actually enjoys being part of a culture war and they like fighting it and they like arguing for their particular side of the culture war even if”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it feels like they're still insistent that they're going to figure out how to thread that needle. And I'm wondering if you think they ever can. My belief is that they cannot, and their insistence that they can will lead to disaster after disaster over time.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hamish response was really interesting, right? Because SubSec wants to be infrastructure, that response to me reads as, well, we're just Cloudflare. We're just AT&T. Like we're just in the background, just giving people the core tools they need to be on the internet. And it is unfair and inappropriate for you to ask us to do stuff. And then they have an app in the app store. And then there is a substack brand that is associated with the quote unquote intellectual dark web about which you can think whatever you want. But it is an editorial brand, right? And Hamish himself comes from the world of editorial. And I think he has to understand, oh, there's a vibe to substack that is opposed to the quote-unquote mainstream media and social networks and all this other stuff. I read that statement and I was like, you are trying to thread a needle that cannot be threaded.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's here we should say that SubSec had changed a lot between 2020 when I joined the platform and the end of 2023 when this whole controversy unfolded. And the main way that it had changed was that it added all of these features. And it really took me back. And that was the day when I thought, okay, I actually have a problem.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at first, I wasn't too concerned about it, in part that's because I went to college with Jonathan McCatz and he was the cartoonist for the college newspaper when I was the editor. So most of my memories of Jonathan Katz are just trying to get him to finish a cartoon on deadline. So, when I heard that he had some thoughts about Substack, I was like, well, you know, that sounds like cats. You know, he's always been a bit of a pain in the ass. But in the aftermath of the article, and I'm teasing Jonathan a little bit, the article was very good, in the aftermath of it, around 250 substackers write this open letter to the company just basically saying like, hey, are you going to let literal 1930s Nazis operate on your platform?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Titled Substack has a Nazi problem. There's no shades of gray in that one. That's the title. It is true. Substack has a bunch of Nazis on its platform. You know, I asked Chris best on the show a long time ago. Are you going to moderate SubStack if there's overt racism? And his non-answer was very revealing. They're just not going to do it. How did you react to that Katz article in The Atlantic and how did that drive you to leaving substantially ghost?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a way, I feel like I have a classic entrepreneurial answer, which is that I mostly am trying to scratch my own itch, you know. Like I grew up reading a lot of media products that I loved and I live in a world where I see almost nothing that reminds me of that. I don't see stuff that has big, beautiful design. I don't see a lot of stuff that goes super in depth that feels like it has a lot of nuance, right? I see a lot of stuff that feels like screaming and like it's trying to manipulate me into feeling an emotion about everything, right? So it's like a lot of the way I make decisions is like, what feels good to me, a person who grew up on the internet that I grew up on and like what would be a media product that served that person? And that winds up informing a lot of like what we cover, how we cover it, like why I hired the people that I hired. So yeah, I think it kind of starts there.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so. I mean, and I think a 10 person business is just very different. I don't think platformer will ever be 10 people, like certainly not in its current configuration. I started first because I wanted to have a home for my own writing and reporting when it became possible to bring someone else on and do reporting in a similar vein. We did that. I can imagine that scaling up to maybe four or five people. Like I've sometimes talked about it as a Scooby gang. That's basically as big as I think it can be. But I want it to feel consistent. And also I don't want to have a website where we're publishing 10 stories a day because at that point, again, like I'm just a manager. Like that's not what I want to do. I want to write and report. So again, you're catching me in just the middle of a thought process that is not finished yet where I would love to be able to create more jobs in journalism, but not that many more. And I'm still not exactly sure how they fit into what I'm doing. So, you know, if you have any thoughts on the subject, I'm all ears.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Platform is very confident in self, but there's two of you, and you're saying that you need to generate subscriptions with your work. And it feels like that is page views in a different way and that works when it's two people and it might be very different when it's 10.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company that is important that the people that you are hiring are creating the conditions for you to be able to continue paying them, right? And I understand why a lot of reporters don't want to be in that position, right? Like I think you and I both wanted to live in a world where reporters could just roam free, write whatever they wanted and it would all just kind of work out in the end. And I think for a long time it did. I think we're now in this worse world where in order for the media businesses to work, whatever you're reporting and writing, somebody has to want to pay you 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks a year to read it. So I'm happy with the state of things for us, but I also acknowledge this is not the ideal state of tech media.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you were wonderful to me as you always were as my boss and created a role for me where I could report and write again. At platformer, there is that similar tension of, well, the business is doing well enough that we think we could hire another person. As somebody who's very nervous about the state of media, I would like to get a lot more money in the bank. Like, I don't think most media businesses work by wanting to have someone's entire salary in the bank before they hire them, but that's basically how I think about it. I do think that we could get there with Platformer this year, but I'm trying to spend a lot of time thinking about, okay, well, what does it mean when that person shows up? What do I actually want them to contribute to the business? One of the amazing things about hiring Zoe was that she joined right when Elon was buying Twitter. She broke and helped me to break a bunch of stories about that takeover. And that generated hundreds and hundreds of new subscriptions for us at Platformer. And for a very tiny media,”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I go back and forth on this all the time because I have had moments in my career when I was at the verge of being a manager and taking a step back from reporting and writing and working with people. And as you remember, I really didn't like that. And in fact, there was a moment where I considered leaving the Verge and going to work for a tech company because an offer kind of came out of nowhere. And fortunately, after I sat with it, I realized I don't want to go work for a tech company. I just don't want to manage people anymore.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that's like the ideal way to work, like, you have a tiny group of people, maybe not more than three or four even Who all intimately know each other's strengths and weaknesses and what we're trying to do, and we're just going to go off and build it. But to do anything more ambitious, you need more scale. Is that on your mind? Oh, I should scale to 10 people or 15 or 50?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I own a platformer a couple years ago. I did hire Zoe Schiffer. She has the title of Managing Editor. And because we are so small, like many very small companies, people wear a lot of hats where in any given day I'm doing a little bit of reporting, I'm probably writing a column. I'm probably responding to some reader emails, maybe doing a little bit of customer support. Zoe is doing the same thing. The work balance and load just changes as the problems change. So we're in the middle of this platform transition that I'm sure we'll get into. That has created a lot of customer support issues. And Zoe has been amazing at just sort of grabbing that problem with both of her hands and waiting into it. But the nice thing about being two full-time employees is that everything is just a conversation.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I often say that my ideal job is being an overpriced featurist writer at the Verge. That would be great if I could just do that. But I need the Verge to exist to do that. And so management, it is. Right. You know, and if the Verge table, then at least a lot of other people can be features writers at Verge. The piece of the puzzle where you had to balance your time led to writing a little less, and then you hired some people and you're able to write more. I guess that comes to like the classic decoder question here, and it's very funny. I'm asking you this question. I don't know if the audience can tell, I am very amused by the fact that I'm interviewing my friend on my own podcast. I'm excited about it.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Overestimated for a long time how many other people were going to want to do this because to me it sort of felt very simple. It was like, well, if you love journalism and want to do it forever and you want to live the life that you want financially, you now have more tools to be able to do that than you have ever had before. Everything I'm doing today I could not have done in 2002 when I left college, right? Or if I was doing some version of it, I mean, it would look radically different, right? I think what I underestimated though, and I say this with true love and affection and empathy, is most people just want a job. Most people want to go to an office or stay at home and they want to do their work and they want to not think about it and they want to be able to buy a house and raise a family. And I want that for everyone who wants it. Like I truly do. I just became convinced that there was not going to be the world that I lived in anytime soon. And so I was just going to have to approach it differently.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you The part of you that had to be entrepreneurial, and you have always been very entrepreneurial, you've always been driven to be like, what is the future of the business I'm in? That seems like the thing that keeps most people from going and starting a newsletter business. You want to write a newsletter. You want an audience. You want to be a reporter. You want to get scoops. That is one type of very focused work. You need to figure out what your audience wants and grow a business and do email marketing and all the rest of it is a very different kind of work. How are you balancing the two?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The good thing about it, and that I want every journalist in the world to take into their heart is if you break news people will pay you money. And if you're doing it in a newsletter that you own, there is no limit to the amount of money that you can make. That is basically the single most empowering thing that I've learned about journalism since I started Platformer, right? The way that it cuts both ways though is there's a lot of days when I don't have scoops. In fact, most days I don't have a scoop. And when it has been a bit of a dry spell and you're just kind of not getting anything, it can be scary because something else you learn in this business is that your customers will churn. There is somebody who will pay you $10 to say, hey, great scoop. And then they will unsubscribe from you once they realize that they don't actually want to spend three or four days a week with you in their inbox.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly it has gone great. Although in basically every way, it did not go totally according to my expectations. As you mentioned, I had been doing a newsletter at the Verge. I've been writing it five days a week. Vox Media was incredible to me. I was able to take my mailing list with me when I left. That gave me a huge head start. That's something a lot of other folks who start newsletters don't have. And so I was convinced that I would basically flip a switch after I started platformer. 10% of my readers would subscribe and I would be thriving. And it is true that enough people subscribe basically right away that I could breathe a sigh of relief and feel like, okay, this is just my job now. But it's also true I was not making as much money as I had been at the Verge. And so that meant I had to go and figure out what the business was. And I would say what I learned over that first year in particular was the business really is scoops. And this kind of cuts both ways.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because what have we I want to come back to that coming ahead and then choosing to grow up or not grow up and you leaving. But I feel like no one ever talks about Act two. There's Act one, which is we started a band in the garage and there's Act three. I'm Casey Newton, the founder and editor of Platformer and I host Hard Fork. Act two is the hard part, right? No one ever talks about it. How did that first year go? How did that second year go? You hired Zoe Schiffer. You have a third person on staff now. What was that ramp like for you?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think at first, I considered the way they would talk about the company as mostly marketing and branding. They did talk about it from very nearly the beginning as corrective to the world created by social networks that they were going to do less moderation. They wanted to be a place for the free exchange of ideas. They were going to take a really light touch with moderation. And because at the time, they really were just a SaaS company, like you say, it didn't stress me out too much. You know, I use a lot of infrastructure that is also used by horrible people. And so I just wasn't too pressed about it. I also assumed that if they had a problem that got worse and worse and started to threaten their business, they would grow up because what have we seen over and over again, Neil? Like these companies often start in a similar position of, well, we don't want to get involved. Eventually they have to get involved and they start to do content moderation.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've talked to Chris Best a lot, famously on the show. I asked him why aren't you going to moderate the racist way? He did a horrible job of answering that question by basically saying, I'm not going to. You could see it early, right? Oh, you're going to have to deal with this. How did it get from there to, oh, it boiled all the way over and now a lot of prominent people are leaving our platform?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I want to come back to those things. Those are things that de risk a small business, particularly healthcare. And then if you're in the media, someone mad sues you out of existence. Those are existential risks on a personal level and a sort of media business level. I want to come back to them and how you're thinking about them now that you're more established and you went to the platform ghost. But you start with Substack. Substack is giving out these deals with various terms to various writers. The idea is all these writers will start small businesses that will grow to big businesses. Substack will take 10% of those businesses' revenues. And they'll have a huge platform business. And you kind of look at that from the outside and you say, okay, that's a SaaS company. Like you're a mail chimp. But even from the beginning, substack thought of itself as something very different. And I think that self-image of substack is what led to the current, oh boy, there's a lot of Nazis controversy here. I feel like.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“SubSac was also giving advances to writers to entice them to leave. I wound up not taking an advance, but it did help me financially with a couple of things. It paid for a designer to create the platform or logo that we still use today. It gave me a healthcare subsidy and more importantly just sort of helped me figure out how to get healthcare as a freelancer, something I never had to do before. And probably the most important thing was it said if you get sued by a litigious”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really exciting. Substock itself had been inspired by a couple of newsletters that I read religiously and inspired me, so Ben Thompson, Stratekery, Matt Levine's Money Stuff in Bloomberg, and SubSock came along and said, these folks writing newsletters seems to be really successful, particularly Ben, also Bill Bishop, who writes a newsletter called cynicism about China. They had clearly built pretty amazing businesses writing their newsletters. And Substack came along and said, well, what if we just made that easy for anybody? So anybody who wanted to take a crack at this could plug into some simple to use infrastructure, have some great software that emails your reporting, your analysis out to as many people who will subscribe. And SubStack would take a 10% cut of that and build a business. And as I was considering my options in 2020, SubStack really was the best. It let me move very quickly. It basically took care of the entire design process at this time.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you leave, you start platformer, a big part of the story is this is also the substack moment. And we are going to end up talking about substack and your reliance on them as a platform, that relationship has come to an end, but there was a big reliance on substack as a platform in there. I feel like when you started, you understood that you were reliant on a little bit of substack larges and you were on the rocket ride with them as a platform in that relationship and that dynamic really changed. But what was it like at the beginning?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was buying groceries twice a week, living in Kara Swisher's cottage, and I truly was never going to spend less money. And I thought, you know, I have a little bit of savings. I could try this thing. And if I fall super hard on my face, I can at least make it like six months. But if I'm ever going to start a company, now's the moment. So it was kind of like the combination of those two things that led me to jump.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can talk about it a bunch of different ways, but one is in the way that I have always tried to manage my career defensively. I used to work for a newspaper, and then the web came along and it disrupted newspapers, and I basically had to find a new job. Then the web was thriving, right? Like the early days of Oxmedia, I was like, wow, there's like this huge, amazing new opportunity here. And then the social networks came along and they started to eat the web a little bit. And I thought, man, I love what I do so much. If I want to be able to do it forever, what is the way that I could have the maximum feeling of sustainability? And I just started to think more about maybe going out on my own. And instead of asking the CEO of media company to pay me, asking readers to pay me directly. The second important thing was it was 2020. It was basically the middle of that pandemic year. I had never been living more cheaply in my entire life.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you were at the Verge, you had a successful newsletter here called The Interface. It was about platforms and democracy. You saw this opportunity to go take that elsewhere. Talk about that decision really quickly. And then I want to check in on how platformers do now.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it feels like there's a real connection between those things. And I'm also curious for your thoughts on how on earth we can maintain a healthy media ecosystem. Because right now, it doesn't seem like any of the people in charge know what to do.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really excited to talk to you. I want to talk about Platformer. I feel like understanding how a successful small newsletter business works is very important in 2024 because the other thing I want to talk to you about is that the rest of the media industry is exploding.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanted to talk about Substack. Platformers started on Substack, and Substack itself started by promising a newsletter revolution that would create a new kind of journalism. Instead, the company seems beset by financial problems inherent to its business model, and it's faced an ever-increasing number of content moderation problems, including most recently when the company's decision to allow Nazis to monetize on its platform pushed a number of its customers away, including Casey and Platformer. And Casey was right in the middle of this particular controversy. He covered it in platformer as he was deciding to switch away from Substack, and you'll hear him make the convincing argument that Substack's founders actually relish the fights they've gotten into over moderation, that the company is much more ideologically driven than he ever expected. And you'll hear him talk about the economics of leaving Substack, switching to rival email platform Ghost has actually saved platformer quite a bit of money.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 or 12 month plan required, $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 GBR is busy C terms.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT