I have two questions that I would like to investigate into Substack, for two related, but slightly different, reasons.
1. Does anyone know whether or to what extent the actual amounts of guaranteed payment details to specific authors were ever disclosed in any of the financials for recent fundraising efforts? I know they did a direct-to-public raise just like a week ago, but I don't think it included many details, and I don't think their recent 8-K included much in the way of specifics either.
2. Does anyone know what percentage of those guaranteed payments in the aggregate (assuming that specifics are not known) are *not* earned out? That is, how poorly are the highest-paid earners on the platform underperforming?
(cont.)
Also, perhaps more related to #1, is there any research on what % of these ppl with guaranteed earnings are of what political persuasion? There is a *lot* of talk about how they are mainly TERFs, etc., and for this reason everyone without trash beliefs should abandon the platform, but then I see ppl like Freddie deBoer thrown in that talk, and then I realize those ppl have no idea what they are talking about, because they have obviously never read any Freddie deBoer.
I want to be a socially-responsible person. I want to listen to the people who are saying that I shouldn't be writing on Substack because it supports people who support the eradication of transgender people, but I also do believe that abhorrent views shouldn't deserve no platform. That's not a good way to run a society, because plenty of people think that liberal views are fucking abhorrent, and when they are in power, we'll be the ones silenced.
But Substack also doesn't need to be going bankrupt on bad contracts to lazy fucking bigots who aren't pulling their weight, so I'm very interested in what data there is about these terrible contracts they got themselves in, but I presume there is very little actual data, and lots of speculation and lots of controversy around very few facts. If I'm wrong about that, I'd love to be educated. Unfortunately, I don't have limitless time to do all the research myself.
I literally have zero idea what hashtags to put on these kind of posts to be useful. I feel like I'm so bad at hashtags, and I know they are important for search, but I feel like people don't know how to use them for search, and I don't know how to use them to be found, and it's just a bit of a mess right now for user and creator here in the Fediverse. Suggestions welcome.
@chancerydaily Think of them as keywords to bold.
@LouisIngenthron I guess I'm assuming that searchers realize that search doesn't work normally, and that they are trying to reverse engineer my reverse engineering of the hash tagging process, and it's all getting a little ouroborousy in my mind, but I could just let it be simpler and hope the searchers aren't so fucking neurotic.