Jon, we are dinosaurs at the last edge of extinction. You and I may still have some vague idea of what principles, integrity and decency is. Or that working and telling the truth is the right way. But that model is gone. And you know that it’s gone because our self-appointed leaders teach us this by their examples.
Jon, we are dinosaurs at the last edge of extinction. You and I may still have some vague idea of what principles, integrity and decency is. Or that working and telling the truth is the right way. But that model is gone. And you know that it’s gone because our self-appointed leaders teach us this by their examples.
You are right that releasing the “Free” demon was the starting point to bankrupt all values, tangible and other. We got so easily trained with it that we didn’t even notice how it will kill all markets and all jobs - except those held by the cult. I am not as optimistic as you. Writing for profit is gone. The worst preprogrammed content harvesting software (aka AI) is more productive than all writers combined. It lacks the analytical and cross-referencing skills (“connecting the dots”), but who will need it? Certainly not the leaders and not the media owners.
History is gone. We only have history rewriting. Once they digitize the archives and burn all paper publications, the new brave world. Sociology is gone. Social engineering is now the fun. Psychology is gone. Manipulation, PR, damage control and advertising are taking over. Medicine and law, you already know. The common denominator: short-term easily-changeable easily-sinkable tasks replace established values.
Substack is a great decoy on this way. Unfriendly to readers and authors alike, unfriendly to monetization, unfriendly to operate efficiently, with a crippled interface and extremely reduced formatting capacity some two decades old in design, with no proper search options, no saving options, no post to PDF printer, terrible for learning your readers from comments. As I see it, it is a honey trap to keep authors glued in one spot and make their content migration unbearable.
For the record: all so called platforms redirect all traffic from your name to the platform’s logo. You are no longer respected as www.jon-best-author.com - you have become merged into a heap of mixed-quality content. Every time you communicate with your readers, you advertise the platform (Substack, FB, YT, other…) - for free. They don’t pay you for it, don’t even mention it. And they can disappear all your work in an instant, nicely attributing it to software error or hacking or whatever. The platform has won over you. You are only a small cog, pretty much irrelevant next to 17,000 other authors in your field on the same platform…
No pessimism here. It’s just how things are being played these days.
You make some good points. As for losing all your content when Substack has a glitch (intentional or otherwise) - save your work on your own computer! And back it up.
I’d never risk creating posts (articles) directly on platforms. Waste of time due to limited editing capacity. So I write the complete article down to the last full stop, and then copy-paste it to the platform’s editor. This is the true “you get what you want to get”. Bonus: you have the “Complete Collected Works of Me and Myself” in a handy form :-)
Jon, we are dinosaurs at the last edge of extinction. You and I may still have some vague idea of what principles, integrity and decency is. Or that working and telling the truth is the right way. But that model is gone. And you know that it’s gone because our self-appointed leaders teach us this by their examples.
You are right that releasing the “Free” demon was the starting point to bankrupt all values, tangible and other. We got so easily trained with it that we didn’t even notice how it will kill all markets and all jobs - except those held by the cult. I am not as optimistic as you. Writing for profit is gone. The worst preprogrammed content harvesting software (aka AI) is more productive than all writers combined. It lacks the analytical and cross-referencing skills (“connecting the dots”), but who will need it? Certainly not the leaders and not the media owners.
History is gone. We only have history rewriting. Once they digitize the archives and burn all paper publications, the new brave world. Sociology is gone. Social engineering is now the fun. Psychology is gone. Manipulation, PR, damage control and advertising are taking over. Medicine and law, you already know. The common denominator: short-term easily-changeable easily-sinkable tasks replace established values.
Substack is a great decoy on this way. Unfriendly to readers and authors alike, unfriendly to monetization, unfriendly to operate efficiently, with a crippled interface and extremely reduced formatting capacity some two decades old in design, with no proper search options, no saving options, no post to PDF printer, terrible for learning your readers from comments. As I see it, it is a honey trap to keep authors glued in one spot and make their content migration unbearable.
For the record: all so called platforms redirect all traffic from your name to the platform’s logo. You are no longer respected as www.jon-best-author.com - you have become merged into a heap of mixed-quality content. Every time you communicate with your readers, you advertise the platform (Substack, FB, YT, other…) - for free. They don’t pay you for it, don’t even mention it. And they can disappear all your work in an instant, nicely attributing it to software error or hacking or whatever. The platform has won over you. You are only a small cog, pretty much irrelevant next to 17,000 other authors in your field on the same platform…
No pessimism here. It’s just how things are being played these days.
You make some good points. As for losing all your content when Substack has a glitch (intentional or otherwise) - save your work on your own computer! And back it up.
I’d never risk creating posts (articles) directly on platforms. Waste of time due to limited editing capacity. So I write the complete article down to the last full stop, and then copy-paste it to the platform’s editor. This is the true “you get what you want to get”. Bonus: you have the “Complete Collected Works of Me and Myself” in a handy form :-)