(2021-04-20) Substack Vs Daostack Mirror

Substack vs. DAOstack. An alternative history of platforms, publishing, politics, and power. By Jonathan Glick, Tal Shachar & Jarrod Dicker. There’s an alternative story of Substack.

revenues remained pretty small despite momentum and the costs of development and operations were not insignificant. The platform needed capital to grow. But here’s where the stream of time split from our reality. (Cue spooky sci-fi sound effects.) Because in this other dimension, the platform entrepreneurs didn’t raise venture capital money.

Instead, they decided to raise capital by selling crypto tokens directly to the Substack subscriber community. To make them worth buying, all subscriptions and payments were moved on-chain so that the tokens could provide their owners a number of utility benefits

the tokens would be used for governance purposes, for votes on the future strategy of the platform project itself. In essence, the platform, Substack, had become a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization.

Our other-dimension Substack team granted themselves some amount of the tokens, and perhaps under pressure, they granted some to their writers

A lot of the platform’s most desirable writers, writers who could almost certainly attract a ton of paying subscribers, were currently paid employees of media companies

What if the project used the funds they just had raised to not only pay for tech and ops, but to offer some very popular writers a guarantee for the first year? It would be a bit of a gamble

It was the community’s first big vote -- and it passed by a large majority

There was only one issue; as was the case in our reality, when the Substack community looked at exactly which of the guarantee writers were performing best, it turned out there was a pattern. A meaningful percentage of their top performers, whether from the left-wing or right, were those self-described as ‘anti-woke.’ As the business model is to subscribe to an individual, the relationship became less just about the content the person created and more about the position the person took.

What if the association made it harder to attract readers and writers of other perspectives?

Soon enough, Substack’s owner-community began raising the issue. They organized into three factions

So how did these two timelines differ? In many ways, they didn’t.

But there were some subtle differences

In the alternative Substack world, they were the opinions of owners seeking to influence other owners. Everyone involved recognized that the value of their tokens was directly connected to the decisions the community would make

But what if our two timelines collided?

Who would win and why?

One way to think about this is to compare how successful the two institutions would be as lenders.

There’s no reason Substack Inc. couldn’t become an excellent scale lender for all sorts of paid media projects. But DAOStack might have some unique competitive advantages.

Here in our dimension, we are in the midst of a wave of venture investing in the creator economy. Companies building new platforms for writers, artists, and other makers are closing huge rounds from A-list investors. These investments are driving much-needed product innovation. Even more importantly, they are increasingly providing the financial subsidies necessary to transition people from employment to independence. But these platforms depend on brilliant creators, and they depend on the users who are loyal to them.

Decentralization doesn’t eliminate the hard problems. It doesn’t wish away wars over values; hierarchies of professional vs amateur; the challenges of developing and nurturing talent.

Our colliding Substacks both bring value to their communities. Both can serve as an evolution to transition into a world when you can have both financial support, creator capital, and a collective-based media platform.