EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

yah tnc and lol of course goes w/o saying my blog

btw how much does this trolling gig pay, who do i contact

i know, right

i saw an interview w/yglesias where he was like all my readers really hate me i have no idea why they come to my blog

he was k funny tbh

eh i've watched a few of his bloggingheads's and he comes off like a jerk imo, interrupting, going on and on

ha yeah ive never been able to bring myself to watch a blogginghead and in general id much rather read than watch any news type thing but for some reason i saw this it was a friendly interview at a like blogg convention where they we just joking around

anyway my head says klein but my heart goes yglesias, not sure what to do, prob follow my heart

yglesias is good on urban issues - not that he says anything new, but at least he's talking to relatively wide audience. but still...super annoying on a personal level. I like klein.

Yglesias is a philosophy major in every word he writes and this is awesome about him.

ugh this is gonna be like that week i read glenn greenwald isnt it

neither of these guys is much like glenn greenwald

unless you have some sort of distaste for american journalists, then yes it'll be like that lol

these guys are on the sensible/technocratic side of the great progressive blogger divide - greenwald exists on the polemic/activist shore - which is not to say hes any more or less otm, just that hes harder to take

nah, that was what i liked abt greenwald its just that in the end i was like "wtf this is not my country i dont care"

haha

yeah but usa is in charge of the rest of the countries iirc

when krugman is updating regularly i don't have much of a reason to follow klein too closely - i don't hate him or anything though

[Yglesias is] a shitty writer imo

Actually, typos aside, he's not. He's remarkably concise and clear even if he liberally sprinkles his posts with "negative externalities" this and "regulatory capture" that jargon.

yglesias is embarrassed about having been a socialist and will occasionally mix in some right wing tinted bullshit to try and build a bit of center cred. i have grown to hate him. klein is kind of a young dinner party blogger but i keep the feed there to flick thru. i enjoy greenwald's secular fire and brimstone and i get angry about the same things as him. his biases are so transparent that is is v easy to think critically about what he writes.

maybe ill face the winner of this one off w/greenwald

can't wait

feel like klein is getting sold short here - he was hands down the best all around guy on health care reform

his coverage was comprehensive but his opinions were so milquetoast it was like reading a blog by that dude on gawker

feel like his opinions were pretty otm especially compared w/almost everyone elses which basically added up to OMG PUBLIC OPTION

they both kind of remind me of how a lot of people move to dc and get kind of absorbed into the weird political networky culture here at a pretty young age. dc is so conservative.

would love to run into these guys at a bbq and get into a drunken political argument

since the democratic primaries, even when drunk i try to sidestep political arguments. i ran into weigel at a bar one time but did not pick a fight. he is a good dude imo. that's actually one of the few blogs i regularly read - don't have time/energy to slog through a lot of content anymore.

yeah ive had v little exposure to it but dc political culture seen close up seems v strange

seems so unbearable. lotta people wearing new balances on the weekend and shit.

they r not sexy rip

never trust a libertarian

or a journalist

lol i own 2 pair of new balances

just sayin if u cannot figure how to dress how are u gonna run the country

daria i seen the shoes youre buying, you know what youre doing

new balance are great sneakers, just dont wear them on the weekend or max will shun u

you pride yourself on living in the mouth of the dragon but being fireproof, and then one day you realize it is saturday and you are in whole foods buying ingredients for a cool mac n cheese with a twist recipe you found online, wearing new balance sneakers

^^ gets it

i mean tbh i would rather live in boston than dc, at least some people there have accents

where would ilx end up siding on a boston vs dc poll?

it would turn into an argument about pizza

harDCore

whole foods, new balance sneakers, check. i don't really care about recipes

boston sucks, accents there are horrible. i hate boston

in that case the poll would require a 'neither' option xp

i am in boston with an accent. thx daria.

except <3 the patriots but the rest of new england can have them. the rest of new england hates boston more than anyone

sorry roberto! team providence.

providence: boston
baltimore: dc

daria u from pvd? i didnt know

nope not at all just spent some time there. i like it. it's like baltimore kinda. lots more weird than the other major city, more arts scene, better music, etc

yeah i mean its obv the best place in new england

best pizza too, except new haven i guess

except <3 the patriots but the rest of new england can have them. the rest of new england hates boston more than anyone

― daria-g, Monday, January 3, 2011 8:18 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

so obviously the worst possible thing to love about boston outside of racism

um http://images.starpulse.com/AMGPhotos/pic200/drp000/p017/p01795e5ahc.jpg

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