EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

I’m old enough to know that I’m beholden to all kinds of institutions for my basic needs, sometimes my social ones, that also serve people who are ideologically repugnant to me, but their use isn’t in direct service of those beliefs.

If you were publishing a zine and the last guy, doing the same, is at the same copy shop and they keep flashing their swastika-heavy shit around the store and accidentally keep leaving gross stuff on the copier, maybe you tell the store what they’re doing or you find a new place to do your work if they don’t give a shit

sad subtext to this story re people relying on substack for their livelihoods is as a venture funded company it will prob not last very long, even tho charging for newsletters is a good idea and prob could be a good business we know that their investors wont be satisfied with a good business, you can already see it in how theyre grafting all this social stuff onto the core product

yeah that’s the wild thing, it’s a commodity service readily replicated

the other thing they risk is people actually deciding it’s a moral hazard and killing their ability to send the newsletters via email. not sure how many people read in email versus the app versus website, but getting added to an email blocklist is possible

not sure how many people read in email versus the app versus website

Speaking only for myself, my latest post was read 96% via email (and the open rate was 48%, which is a little below average; I usually get 50-53%), 3% via the app.

monetizing writing in any way is such a shitshow right now and I wouldn’t be surprised if substack’s got some goal of getting a subset of their approved work aggregated into something like the paid Apple News+ plan or whatever else some people pay for and they won’t get that if they have this problem

there are no real numbers but it looks like Apple News+ pulls somewhere near 5x the number of paying subscribers, presumably giving a cut to what people actually click on and read as opposed to the newsletter-specific substack opt-in model

xp yeah so you have next to zero incentive to use substack over something else

fwiw molly white rolled her own, although it is apparently quite technical: https://citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost

if theres nothing thats as easy and cheap to set up and use as substack im sure there will be soon

question is how valuable there other non email stuff is, social, growth things, ive heard conflicting reports

David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

But what substack did was something better - over the last few years it built a referral engine that worked pretty well. A network of blogs that built audience for each other. It was a good product. Attractive. Easy to manage. Interconnected. With growth from mid-list to significant possible. /2

https://bsky.app/profile/lollardfish.bsky.social/post/3kis24vxje32a

yeah it varies pretty wildly

I think every substack I’ve subscribed to, def the paid ones, have been from following someone on social media or a podcast to their newsletter. I might be a total outlier

Adding unperson to my spreadsheet

nice man

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:mgisghjyeuqzvb5l6kyurqma/bafkreiehofm3ctwtnmoncgtsvw3qptfqsvd6lf6lxijgvblcna2th4p5mq@jpeg

sez the guy who's his own boss

the ubermenschs drive to podcast

Weirdly, I've come around to liking Ezra Klein's podcast a lot. Yes, it has a bit of a chin-stroking, this-is-NPR tone, but it's sharp.

one of us!

yeah he’s clearly a cut above the yglesias/chait class that people still mistakenly group him with

https://i.imgur.com/XPuwv94.gif

lagoon similar to our suns/wolves debate you need to take the L on this one. to be clear I don’t think he’s anything special! but he’s different than those sorts of hacks

I don’t think he’s anything special! is not an acclamation

k3v how many podcasts do you listen to?

ehem sir you must take the L regarding the podcast i listen to where a dipshit interviews airport book authors

I mean I’m not saying it’s on the level of Two Dirtbag Leftists One Cup, but sometimes it has its moments, ya know?

what are you even talking about

You either interview the airport book writers or you read passages from airport books and mock them

The cool thing is you can listen to both

In an airport

or neither

while reading them

Are you guys doing a Printer play

*Pinter

more of an Arthur Hailey novel

k3v how many podcasts do you listen to?

― mookieproof, Thursday, May 9, 2024 1:37 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ha not very many tbh, and I haven’t listened to one of his pods in prob 6 months or so. I just think lumping him in with obvious hacks is silly…you could argue his version of lib trojan horsing is even more pernicious if anything

i mean in the big scheme of things they arent that different, in the small scheme of coming up in the blogosphere, "founding" vox.com together, and being hacks, sure there are differences i guess thats what the threads about tho

the thing is he’s just obv a lot smarter and more contemplative and curious than those other guys. but again maybe that’s my hang up

hes very contemplative and curious and never ever reaches a conclusion that might threaten his continued employment at the nytimes

hes very contemplative and curious and never ever reaches a conclusion that might threaten his continued employment at the nytimes

― lag∞n, Thursday, 9 May 2024 12:20 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

nah nyt needs klein more than he needs them. he has a huge audience and would bring lots of readers/listeners with him if he left for the atlantic or set up a substack or patreon or whatever. no doubt they’re paying him a fortune but he’d probably make even more if he went solo. yglesias is making seven figures and is much less popular than klein, and there’s no way ezra is making that much from nyt. he’d have both more money and more editorial freedom if he left the times, imo the reason he takes the pay cut is cause he likes having the nyt audience and values the prestige

if anything writing/podding for nyt makes ezra shade his takes left relative to his “true” personal opinions

the nytimes does not need ezra klein lol, and yeah im sure substack would pay him more, but the whole thing about being a good careerist is well thinking about your career, he likes having the nyt audience and values the prestige yeah those are good career things, cashing out via substack is just cashing out but theres no guarantee of that being a lasting way to make money or advance yr career

yglesias is making seven figures

You think??? This is really hard for me to imagine.

Like, from what?

sadly its from people paying to read his newsletter

Now he’s struck gold on the newsletter platform Substack, where at least 13,000 people each pay Matt Yglesias an average of $80 a year for access to his Yglesiasms https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/01/11/matt-yglesias-slow-boring-in-bidens-washington/

yglesias is making seven figures

You think??? This is really hard for me to imagine.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, 9 May 2024 3:35 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

last time i saw numbers (which was over a year ago) he had about 13,000 paying subscribers, paying about 110$ per year. i assume he has quite a bit more than that now

cashing out via substack is just cashing out but theres no guarantee of that being a lasting way to make money or advance yr career

― lag∞n, Thursday, 9 May 2024 3:25 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

idk a few years ago i would’ve said it’s a risk but by now it seems pretty sustainable

in a way it’s sweet that you think that klein secretly holds consensus shattering opinions that would get him fired from the nyt but holds back due to financial incentives. i prefer the occam’s razor explanation and think that his writing from the past 15 years is an accurate depiction of his true ideology

in a way it’s sweet that you think that klein secretly holds consensus shattering opinions

― flopson, Thursday, May 9, 2024 3:45 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

first of all suck my dick, thats all actually

damn it’s getting sexual in the ezra and matty thread

its been 0 posts since a good post

i think i got that backward anyway in the american vernacular suck my dick is actually sentiment of aggression not sexuality which i know is kinda weird if youre not familiar with it

lol sorry if my post struck a nerve.. but the idea that financial incentives of writing for the nyt audience are constraining *ezra klein* to be more of a centrist and less critical of power just seems to be based on an outdated model of how this stuff works. it’s not like big legacy media is just shifting around pundits like pawns. klein is an independent and highly successful vector of technocratic centrism. he’s one of the main conduits by which libertarian policy ideas are re-packaged and sold to liberals—that’s why people like tyler cowen love him. from blogging to founding vox, that’s been his ideology for decades, he doesn’t need dean baquet to tell him to write that stuff. and if yglesias is a good counterfactual for what klein would be writing if he were unconstrained by establishment media, klein would be writing much more centrist and aggressive left-punching stuff. you can even see it in the way this thread’s got bumped over the last few years; whenever it’s bumped about yglesias it’s someone mad that he’s written a substack called like “Why Joe Biden Should Moderate On Abortion” or “Now Is A Wonderful Time For Fiscal Austerity”, whereas when it’s bumped about klein it’s k3v or jaymc being like “this podcast where klein interviews michael pollan about the psychic benefits of microdosing lsd and mushrooms is highly elucidating.” nyt refashioning klein into a new ira glass means he’s doing much *less* of the centrist policy writing he used to do. if he weren’t at the nyt most likely he’d be doing more of that stuff