1. Recursive seems interesting and potentially cool, but I'd want to know more details about how it works. For example, is ownership or "modship" transitive? Do sub-substacks pay royalties to their parent, like some kind of pyramid scheme? Maybe you have more thoughts on this, but I would personally put it on the backburner.
  2. The name would rapidly drop the 'er' and just become substack. I'm already doing that in this comment.
  3. Disagree about the top level path. People may start spawning user accounts to squat on popular names. /s/<substack> and /u/<user> fits pattern most users would expect. Rather than being intuitive, I think it would be extremely confusing to overlap users and communities in the same namespace.
  4. Like it, but also full of unknowns.
    1. Potentially crazy idea, make it like a company stock. The creator starts with 100% share that entitles them to that 50% profit share, but there is some mechanism that forces them to distribute share to other users in order to grow the community. Your share is also used as a voting mechanism for community governance, mod elections, etc. Maybe you need to burn share every time you post or comment on the substack. Maybe there's a market for substack shares and it auto inflates at a predictable rate. The inflation and market will make it increasingly costly for a small collection of people to maintain authoritarian control as the community grows, but maybe slow enough that the creator can extract value before their share is inflated away.
    2. This whole idea sounds like it would technically count as a security, so it might bring legal trouble.
As for the terminology of substack(er), this might get tricky with respect to the existing platform https://substack.com/ (where authors also get paid to write... be it in fiat in their case).
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  1. It would be tree like in shape. People can always create top-level subs if they want. Pyramid scheme is easily over-applied.
  2. Point taken. Name squatting would suck.
  3. Yeah, definitely tricky. Just in the ideation phase though and easy to overcomplicated.
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I see the tree structure, and I like it. I just don't know how the economic incentives might corrupt things.
Some substacker names would be inherently more valuable because they lend themselves better to generating subs-subs, like 'politics' and 'technology', and that could create some perverse incentives or just riddle the community with confusion, kind of like what's happened with reddit with legit forks from subs like 'worldnews' name themselves 'anime_titties'.
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