https://meangreennation.substack.com
Over on the first post on MGN Substack we listed the main reasons why we are moving over.
- We are fans of the substack/newsletter model. I happily pay for a good number of newsletters and read a ton of them daily.
- While blogging is still close to my heart, pushing notifications (via email!) is the wave of the future (and the past) and we know everyone is busy and can’t be bothered to go to some-url-dot-com every morning to check for the latest and greatest.
- Twitter was our mechanism of pushing out notifications and updates for a while, but now that it is the Site Formerly Known As Twitter, and the utility of it is debatable, we had to make some kind of decision. You may have previously received emails from MGN via a newsletter/update. Those were mostly digest-style posts with links to where we wanted you to read. We figured pushing you updates means you get the posts when we write them and you don’t have to find them on the internet — a place where it is increasingly difficult to find what you are looking for.
The great challenge of writing consistently is to make it easy to do so. One reason why twitter was dominated by writers/journalists/etc was because of how easy it made it to fire off written thoughts. Even on here — where it is very easy — there are decisions to make: What header picture? What tags? Do I make it a social media-friendly title? Clickbait? SEO optimization? Every writer cares that people read or don’t read their work. Writing good stuff and letting discovery happen organically is like a good restaurant with no storefront presence. You are wasting time.
Substack and the newsletter business is a push-model. You decide if you care about it and I push out new things to you. It’s like the newspaper. It would come every day and you picked it up and read what was in there. If you didn’t like it you moved on. Done. The internet made it much easier to discover things, but you would still have to remember to go check for it. Its harder and harder to do that kind of thing anymore, especially with so many distractions and other shiny things in your face all the time.
So I figure I would go all-in on substack. I like having control over what MGN looks and feels like, but honestly people read stuff on their phone so much that there is very much in the way of differentiation in that space anymore. For me, the writer, it makes it easy to jump in and write. I have officially outsourced all of the maintenance work to substack. My day job is in technology so it wasn’t hard work running all the stuff, but it did take up some time. I would log in to do a post, and instead spend and hour doing server updates. Now, it can simply be writing hot takes about the QB.
All of the MGN membership stuff has been migrated over. If you paid for a membership you are grandfathered in at that price. New members are at the new Substack $8/$80 look. I have no illusions of getting rich but I won’t lie. I am slightly intrigued by how some niche writers have made a living off of this thing. Meanwhile, I won’t hold my breath. For now, it helps pay for all of the TV subscriptions I have.
GMG
