Comment by doublepg23

8 hours ago

I've always understood platforms like Substack or Patreon to really be a solution to the payment processing problem first and foremost.

6 comments

doublepg23

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pibaker  4 hours ago

This is true for patreon but not substack. I personally know people who blog on substack not because they care about monetization — I mean, they hardly get any readers who are not a friend already — but because it is "the place" to put long form writing. I can't see the exact subscription number of substack, but if Pareto principle holds, I'd suspect most substack blogs don't have a monetization problem to solve because no one pay for them.

t-writescode  8 hours ago

That’s exactly right. Finding ways to get paid for your work, and all the very complicated way taxes interact with it all, unless you’re going all-in on ads, is a messy problem that people will happily centralize for.

And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.

  • doublepg23  8 hours ago

    I follow a very prolific open-source/FOSS podcasting network.

    All of their infrastructure from the very bottom to the very top is FOSS - except their membership program. It links to a third-party which processes payments compliantly.

    They've attempted a pivot to funding the network via BTC/Lightning but clearly that's polarizing to a lot of people even though it better aligns with their philosophy.

    • t-writescode  6 hours ago

      I'm not a lawyer; but I believe that even if they take payment through BTC, etc, they're going to need to take sales tax, etc, based on the location that their subscriber is ... which means they need to handle the tax hell that comes with it, so they'll find themselves better off with a Merchant of Record that can handle that for them ... which is almost certainly proprietary because ... it's a big mess.