An idea--not a new one--that I've been thinking about for a bit: it seems unfortunate that growth often depends on writing things that drive discussion, e.g. on Twitter and Hacker News, or even Substack. Part of the vision I've had for the various things I've been building over the past few years is that it'd be nice if the most effective growth strategy was to just write. That's one of the things that appeals to me about algorithmic discovery: it can pick up on positive signals--like clicks and reading time--that people give, even if they don't head over to Twitter or wherever and share your post. I think that's indeed how it works on Youtube?? My understanding, possibly incorrect or outdated, is that even if you're starting from scratch, you can pretty much just focus on making videos consistently and eventually, if your videos are good, you'll start to pick up traffic gradually. It may still take a lot of work before you start growing, but at least that work is going into your core competency of making videos instead of trying to get people to like your tweets. (I'd like to fact check that last paragraph) I guess SEO-based growth has a similar dynamic, and I should probably learn more about that. Though my understanding is that it only works for certain types of writing, i.e. things that people are explicitly searching for. I'm unaware of how well it would work as a primary growth strategy for your average newsletter. 🤷

I’m just unsure how you’d do something to that effect without centralizing around a platform. Substack can certainly track eyeballs on Substack, but not really anywhere else such that they could recommend more Substack (without resorting to Facebook-level trackery). Yakread certainly would have (has?) the ability to use eyeball metrics for individual article engagement, but that really only helps the reader, afaict, unless your goal as a newsletter is “get more yakread-based readers”, which is probably a fine growth strategy, but I don’t know if it’d be enough to, say, drive an income. (For whatever it’s worth, my newsletter consumption is split pretty evenly between HEY and Yakread atm)

I guess it depends on how big yakread gets 😉 The ideal end scenario imo is that there are a bunch/at least a handful of different reader apps, all with their own algorithmic discovery stuff built in. I highly doubt this would happen, but as a thought experiment, theoretically Gmail could start throwing in newsletter recommendations. Realistically, what might be more likely to happen is that Yakread gets at least big enough that it can help to kickstart your growth. Even if you can't get enough subs from yakread for a full time income, maybe you can get your first several hundred subs from there--enough that you can focus on figuring out what you want to actually write about and let Yakread help you find an initial core audience.

True, I apologize for downplaying Yakread’s growth potential—I do really love the product and I have been recommending it around my circle 🙃

no worries, and thanks!

re: sharing stuff, i did just download the PWA and noticed a ton of features I haven’t been using—including one where I can link to newsletters I recommend, which actually solves a problem I’ve had of continually needing to collate lists of blogs I read for friends/family

in the long term, if yakread is very successful, I think competition is practically guaranteed. There's not much of a moat since it just recommends content from other websites--anyone can build a reader app that has just as much access to content as yakread does. Which is good, that's what I'm trying to make happen! even if it disqualifies yakread from ever taking VC. So I am crossing my fingers that there could be a more robust, open ecosystem thing down the road

Yeah, and the diaspora of reading apps (as I think mentioned in one of your “models of new social media”) is what’s making me think about this problem. I imagine it’s a feature that different readers would use different recommendation algos, but it might be hard for an individual newsletter to play to all of those at the same time.

ah yes, the beta features 🙂 there's a bunch of good stuff in the "customize your feed" section too; that used to be more prominent but I decided to just emphasize newsletters for the sake of simplicity

As a part of the generation raised by YouTube, I think this is a story we’ve all heard many times

Yeah! this reminds me of the content moderation situation too--the original idea of section 230 was to foster more of a marketplace, where different platforms would have different moderation policies and people would naturally gravitate towards the ones they like most... except then networks came in and gave us fb et. al.

I fell down the rabbit hole of https://neocities.org just to try and glimpse that specific dream 🥲

that's great 😄