For the last point, I understand the value of the substack but I was asking what the "value added" was for the person creating the substack. For example, why not just have anyone be able to create a substacker community without the reward structure for the creator? Maybe offer some "bounty" whereby some group of people can give the 10k sat threshold required to create the community (like a "Kickstarter" like thing or sort of how the area51.stackexchange voting works) if you want to only create communities that have actual buy-in.
Giving 50% of sats earned to the creator in the substack is kind of weird, especially if the creator doesn't do anything but create the substack and leave. In some sense, this is encouraging rent-seeking behavior. I can imagine that practically, the creator would be invested to drive content, especially if there's some 10k sat to recoup (say), but if a savy substack creator finds a good topic, all they have to do is sit back and let other people do the work to earn 50% on all proceeds.
More importantly, from my point of view, the creator's only real contribution to the substack was to create it. All other power, assuming you don't want any type of "admin/mod" behavior, isn't present.
If you don't give any real power to control the content in the substack to the creator, then why give them 50% of profits, why not just let the community create substacks and have at them? If you do imagine giving some power to the substack creator, what is it? That is, what "value add" does a substack creator give to the substack they create?
Great points. Rent-seeking is the framing I needed to hear.
What I wanted was for someone to have incentives to make the sub thrive (as you point out). I definitely don't want rent-seeking though. But I want to introduce novelty given we have digitally native currency easily flowing through this platform. I need more ideas around this.
One alternative is to have a group of users put up the 10k sats to start the sub, then 10k sats/month to keep it up, and that group of users paying that month gets the 50% split. That's just kind of complicated.
I guess any incentive structure needs:
  • a hurdle to starting it
  • a hurdle to keeping it going (to prevent rent-seeking)
  • rewards for keeping it going
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Good god man.
"I've just received 1000 sats from @k00b, ask me anything"
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The rent-seeking thing was insightful. Well deserved.
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