tl;dr
Pay for a territory, run it like a personal newsletter or blog. You get zap functionality and effective comment moderation and you would keep 91% of what you get zapped -- and you get access to an already engaged audience of thoughtful Bitcoiners.
How it could work today
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Start a territory using the name of your newsletter.
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Set your posting fees fairly high.
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Write interesting articles and publish them in your territory.
Advantages over Substacks and blogs:
- Out-of-the-box monetization of your content via zaps
- Built-in zap functionality/moderation in your comments
- Access to an active, thoughtful community of Bitcoiners
- Stackers can subscribe to your territory and get notifications when you publish
- If your articles are popular they might show up on the SN front page
Rationale
I'm sure other stackers have already thought of this use case, but it crystallized in my mind the other day in this particular way and I wanted to describe it to hear what stackers think. (Also, I'm hovering over the buy button for the ~Scoresby territory.)
I hate newsletters
I really like writing on the internet. I'd like take it to the next level and spend more time doing it. So what are my options? The most popular answer seems to be "start a Substack" but I hate newsletters.
I don't like email in general. If we lived in a world where you could self-host email, it might be worth the awful reading experience. But self-sovereign email is pretty much dead and reading long email chains is always unpleasant.
This is why I don't understand people's desire to subscribe to newsletters. Even if you're my favorite writer, I don't want to receive an email version of your latest article. I just want to know that you wrote something new and then go read it wherever you published it. There is absolutely zero reason for your article to be in my inbox next to my utility bill.
Tagging and using different inboxes doesn't fix this. I read a lot and follow a lot of people who write interesting things online. If they show up in my primary inbox, inevitably I will miss a number of them. If they show up in a special folder or something I've created to collect them all -- inevitably, I'll end up ignoring it.
RSS is good for readers, but not necessarily for writers
RSS is a nice way to learn about and read new articles from your favorite writers, but it's not a great way for writers to reach new readers. Writers are not always good marketers, and with RSS, readers mostly need to know you exist already. Also, sadly, many more people have email inboxes than have RSS readers. For whatever reason, RSS isn't that popular.
One benefit newsletter services like Substack and Beehiiv offer is increased discoverability (even though they aren't great at this, it's at least a little boost). Also they provide a base-level of professional formatting for writers who aren't designers.
Stacker News fixes this
The idea is still in the rough, but use a little imagination and work with me here. Stacker News already has the bones to provide a way better substack experience.
Out of the box monetization
Substack makes money by facilitating newsletter monetization and taking a cut. The monetization model is annoying, though. You have to subscribe and do monthly or yearly payments. Not fun. It's always a bit of a crap-shoot when looking at a new substack whether it will be paywalled or not. And then there are substacks that only paywall some posts. I'd rather just pay for what I'm interested in.
Stacker News allows monetization on a very granular level. Your readers can zap the articles they like at whatever amount they like. As long as they have a lightning wallet, it's about the slickest payment experience ever.
Built-in comment zaps and moderation
A lot of newsletters have very active comment sections. I imagine these take quite a bit of effort to moderate and deal with. Doing so in your email client probably sucks. SN fixes this with zaps. Comments that are uninteresting or spammy don't rise to the top or get downzapped. Because SN is built as a forum, reply/comment functionality is way better than most blog comment functionality.
Access to an active, thoughtful community of Bitcoiners
This could be a really big draw for the Bitcoin newsletter writers. Sure, they all have their own channels over which they attract subscribers and grow, but wouldn't it be nice to start out with some amount of guaranteed visibility in a sizable group of engaged Bitcoiners?
Changes to SN that could make it work better
These are features that could make it easier for someone to use SN as a newsletter, but would probably only be worth it for the team to work on if there was a strong, clear demand for the use-case.
Email functionality - the biggest obstacle here is finding a way to get your posts on SN into the hands of non-stackers. Adding email functionality might be a way to achieve outreach. Despite my own feelings about email, there are apparently people who like email newsletters. Perhaps new posts in territories could also be sent as emails to subscriber inboxes.
RSS - SN already exposes RSS feeds for territories (eg. stacker.news/~<territory>/rss), so no change needed here.
Permissioned posting - it'd be nice to have a tool to limit who can post in your newsletter (your territory) other than posting cost. Ideally, post contributors could be invite only.
Post scheduling - (this may already exist, if it does: go SN team!) it'd be great to be able to schedule posts ahead of time. A lot of times I work on a piece over a couple weeks and I'd love to be able to schedule it for posting rather than tie myself to my laptop at the time I want to put it up.
Custom domains - this is probably the most difficult technically. But can you imagine how powerful it would be if you could have the whole thing at your own custom domain?