Substack wants to do more than just newsletters

  The notion that it’s a platform for supporting creators in general, rather than merely for news, could help justify its valuation — the company was reportedly valued at $650 million in a 2021 funding round — and open the door to a possible acquisition

Well that’s depressing - hopefully that’s more of an outsiders guess than an internal priority. Thanks for posting though, interesting update! I’ll save my lengthy thoughts on why this paradigm is deadly for innovation and free speech for my Substack ;)

In general, substack has been crushing the scientific discussion space, which I see as a little more populous and diverse than traditional “science journalism”. There’s legions of people on there collaborating on all sorts of tricky problems from AI to Covid, both credentialed academics and passionate hackers. Ever since getting a lifetime ban from Reddit—the only other place with a sizeable community of scientists other than Twitter and its competitors-I’ve grown to rely on substack as my main source of reading material. It’s nice!

Fingers crossed they stick to high quality science content, or at least continue supporting that community effectively. I’m sure there’s lots more short term money in divisive political content…

It's definitely cornered a niche. Would be interesting to see if it can become profitable. Not sure if expanding it's portfolio is the way to do that but I guess we'll see.