Substack has entered the arena of the social network wars, taking it to Twitter head-on with a new product called Notes. It’s a short form feed style of posts that runs in a parallel track to your long form newsletter subscriptions (the Inbox), and looks remarkably similar to Twitter. But Substack’s big innovation here for a social network is capitalizing on their subscription-centric model — every other general-use social network on the internet to-date has been based on advertising. From the announcement, how Substack will differentiate:

By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money...

📨 Disintermediating the media with… Substack?

Jerry Brito writes about the growth of independent writing on Substack, prompted by a Mike Solana tweet:

From a technical perspective, Substack does not belong on Solana’s list next to Bitcoin and Signal. Signal is a company, but they have almost no information about their users—no names, no messages. Bitcoin is not a company, but instead a permissionless decentralized network, and “it” can’t decide who can use it or for what. Substack, on the other hand, is a centralized service that permissions who’s allowed on and...