Everyone is on about Substack’s new Notes future. It seems basically like microblogging, but I guess I have to be logged into Substack to read anything on it?

Why do people keep going into these closed platforms again and again? It seems to be mostly about discovery. Platforms like Substack and Medium offer the promise that because they have a bunch of writers in one place, you will be able to find writing you like and others will be able to find your writing. As web search continues to deteriorate, it becomes increasingly difficult to do that on the open web..

The problem is that doing that—building and running a centralized platform at scale—costs money. You need developers and engineers and infrastructure. You have to pay for all of that, and so you have to figure out how to generate revenue.

And that ends up being the slow death of all of these platforms.