How To Pay

Easier Than You Think

This substack has never been behind a paywall. Some of you do generously subscribe to it which I appreciate, but the vast majority read and listen to the podcast for free. This is not because people are stingy or unappreciative of the work, but that the subscription model offered by Substack is highly flawed.

Many of you probably pay monthly for Spotify (virtually all of the recorded music in human history), Netflix (mostly slop, but billions of dollars worth of movie and TV show production), AI (a language calculator for all the information accessible via the internet) among other things. Accordingly, it’s a laughably poor value to cough up roughly the same for one person’s “thoughts and observations.”

For those of you who frequently read, listen and find value in this work, but don’t subscribe, there is a better alternative that neither commits you to an ongoing subscription nor commits me to generating “thoughts and observations” beyond those that are naturally occurring and suitable for publication. That model is nostr, and it works in the following way: You read or listen to something you find useful, interesting or entertaining, and you tip whatever amount you decide in proportion to the value you received. This is not a recurring tip, it’s a one-time payment of 50 cents or whatever amount you decide it merits. This is good for me (I get paid) and good for you (you are able to pay if you feel like it without signing up for something expensive and of which you’ll now need to keep track in case you stop using it or simply want to cut back on expenses.)

The only drawback to nostr is getting started which is a level of difficulty on par with setting up your first email client in 1997. If you’re roughly my age, you had no idea what you were doing, had to fill out the send and receive fields with designations like SMTP and test it out until it finally worked. It’s similar with nostr which entails you go to a client (Primal.net is probably the easiest, and once you get comfortable you can experiment with other ones) and then fund it via CashApp (among other providers.) This is good for me (I get paid) and good for you (you learned the nostr ecosystem which is the future, just like email was in 1997, and you are able but not required to pay for work you’d like to support.)

I’d like to stress this final point. It is absurd that you have to subscribe to someone’s content when you’re only interested in an occasional article, or subscribe to Netflix when you’re only interested in one show. Why do you need separate accounts for AppleTV, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc.? It would be much more convenient to pick the shows you want, pay for them and let whoever funded/produced them sort out the distribution of your payment on the back end. There would still be a need for curation, which could easily be done via social media just as it is now, but subscriptions and the concomitant fees are rent-seeking relics that generate a substantial share of their profits from people forgetting and neglecting to cancel.

Moreover, if you want to read an article in the NYTimes or Wall Street Journal (why one would these days, God knows), it’s a huge ask to pony up your credit card for a subscription. But if you had $100 in your browser already, spending 50 cents on a particular piece would be an easy decision. Even better if you could read it first and decide afterwards whether it merited your support. I don’t know when it will happen — rent-seekers will do whatever they can to keep the current subscription model in place for as long as they can — but I am certain this is the future. You’ll load $100 or whatever into your browser every six months or so and pay as you see fit for the things from which you derive value.

There is value to being early to the nostr ecosystem just as there was value in being early to email and the internet. You’ll be fluent in something before it catches on, able to send funds peer to peer immediately without credit cards and third-party-permissioned bureaucracy. And you’ll be able to support what you want when you want for as much as you want without committing yourself to something expensive you probably don’t want. I encourage you to experiment with it. Worst case, you learn something new.