Yep, this is the cycle. Big money comes in, the platform grows fast, everyone benefits for a while, then the squeeze starts.
Early on, platforms reward people for showing up. Later on, they need to justify the money behind them, so the terms get worse and the reach gets tighter.
Substack, LinkedIn and YouTube may be the best bets right now, but nothing stays generous once a platform owns enough of the market.
We're simply nodes on a network. Each network has its own incentives system that rewards or punishes behavior between those nodes. That platform in the main doesn't care how important a piece of your content is - it's a mathematical machine. It cares about the relationship between the nodes and the behaviors between those nodes that's particularly weighted to many pieces of content, content types and other forms of engagement. The big question is always - "when someone opens the app how does the machine decide what they see first?". We reverse engineer these behavioral incentives and play the system at its own game. I call it our "math in the flywheel" - no math, no visibility. People obsess about their content but they don't obsess enough about the machine. The math. The game.
Great piece guys! Substack is in its nice installation period when users are joining at some point some of the good stuff my get switched off to close the walled garden gates!
Networks are a great way to visualize these relationship but they're notoriously hard to model or reason about. It's a lot easier to do as you suggest - reverse engineer behavioral incentives. That way at least you get to choose if you want embed your messaging in platform-native formats, or stand out and go against the grain (both of which are strategies that can be deployed successfully).
But yeah, Substack is a great place to be right now - definitely my favorite corner of the internet! 🍿🤓
Yep, this is the cycle. Big money comes in, the platform grows fast, everyone benefits for a while, then the squeeze starts.
Early on, platforms reward people for showing up. Later on, they need to justify the money behind them, so the terms get worse and the reach gets tighter.
Substack, LinkedIn and YouTube may be the best bets right now, but nothing stays generous once a platform owns enough of the market.
I wrote about this too because enshittification has become one of the best words for what the internet now feels like: https://millennialmasters.net/p/enshittification-killing-the-internet
So glad this one hit for you, Daniel!
Really is an important and timely topic.
Appreciate the support!
🤓🙏🏼
It’s good to know what you’re engaging in.
Combine that with AI generated content reaching top quality soon.
Find your niche, or build an AI content production machine.
Above all else, get that email list. Even though that’s also going to be read by an AI very soon.
We're simply nodes on a network. Each network has its own incentives system that rewards or punishes behavior between those nodes. That platform in the main doesn't care how important a piece of your content is - it's a mathematical machine. It cares about the relationship between the nodes and the behaviors between those nodes that's particularly weighted to many pieces of content, content types and other forms of engagement. The big question is always - "when someone opens the app how does the machine decide what they see first?". We reverse engineer these behavioral incentives and play the system at its own game. I call it our "math in the flywheel" - no math, no visibility. People obsess about their content but they don't obsess enough about the machine. The math. The game.
Great piece guys! Substack is in its nice installation period when users are joining at some point some of the good stuff my get switched off to close the walled garden gates!
So lets grow like hell till then 🚀
Networks are a great way to visualize these relationship but they're notoriously hard to model or reason about. It's a lot easier to do as you suggest - reverse engineer behavioral incentives. That way at least you get to choose if you want embed your messaging in platform-native formats, or stand out and go against the grain (both of which are strategies that can be deployed successfully).
But yeah, Substack is a great place to be right now - definitely my favorite corner of the internet! 🍿🤓
Thinking of platforms as markets shifts your focus from chasing attention to creating real value and leverage.
You stop chasing vanity metrics and start building real value and leverage in an economic system that rewards strategy, not just content.