2. Right now I have procmail set up to store but do not show me and later throw away every email I get from substack because I don't want _any_ of my subscriptions to show up as email, and I couldn't find a way to get substack to honour that. So if you end up with 'cat pictures and similar which are only sent as extra email', can you announce it in the blog in some noisy fashion? Because I will have to figure out some way to save these particular mails from substack, but still not show me any of the rest. Procmail lets you do anything, so this shouldn't be very hard, once I have an example of the new thing to be saved. Still, easier for _me_ if you didn't do that and made the new content accessible from the substack inbox.
I thought you had a plan to make some things available by email only and not by the Substack Inbox. I have no idea how to do that; I just thought that you did.
When you wrote: "My only concern is that I don't want our paid texts to lie entirely openly on the internet" I parsed that as 'I don't want the paid texts to be part of the blog. Just emailed to people.' So, that may be nothing like what you meant, but that is where I got my wrong idea from. I still do not know what you mean by 'entirely openly' --- one of those 'xxx is only available for paid subscribers to keep reading become a paid subscriber' banners example: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/did-tech-bros-ruin-san-francisco was what you were thinking of?
That's more of a 'I save my best stuff for the paying people in the hope that it will make you start paying' pitch but it sounded to me like you wanted to keep the sillier stuff away from people who might abuse you for it. I don't think this substack division is going to help you there.
The rule is 'never post anything to your substack you wouldn't mind seeing everybody arguing about in Aftonbladet and Flamman -- not only tomorrow, but sometime in the indefinite future' and where mentioning that your family got mildly sick eating too many wild strawberries means that you get articles saying you are both a terrible mother and not a proper Swede, who should be able to eat an infinite amount without problems.
>>The rule is 'never post anything to your substack you wouldn't mind seeing everybody arguing about in Aftonbladet and Flamman -- not only tomorrow, but sometime in the indefinite future' and where mentioning that your family got mildly sick eating too many wild strawberries means that you get articles saying you are both a terrible mother and not a proper Swede, who should be able to eat an infinite amount without problems.
Ha ha ha, that is Sweden! I take your warning seriously. In my case, the problem is that Aftonbladet couldn't care less about what I'm doing, even when I happen to grab a scoop that they would really have wanted themselves. I'm more worried about people who know me in everyday life, like my children's teachers and people who live nearby. That's the reason why we don't publish our last names here: That we don't want to assault people who know us as "x's father" or "x's mother" with everything we think. We are not anonymous, but try to be unsearchable from our real-life identities.
My intention was to publish paid posts that are a bit on the sillier side. For example, I wrote a post about my efforts to start eating meat for ethical reasons. I think it is an interesting subject worth discussing. But I also wouldn't like such a post to go viral, because if it did, I would become famous for being squeamish. That is the wrong reason to become known to a wider audience, but it is still not exactly something that I'm ashamed of.
My intention is to publish such posts to paid subscribers and people who say they are interested but not in the financial position to support blogs. I will do my best to hide them from everyone else. My basic assumption is that people who are in the position to support us financially and want to support us financially will do so and others won't. So we won't publish any Noahpinion-style teasers. Scott Alexander-style is much better for us.
I think it must be very hard to be a child of a blogger -- especially one who 'lets it all hang out'. All children find their parents' behaviour cringe-worthy at times. The people who are celebrating their cringe-worthiness must be exasperating to have as parents. Now that everybody can be a celebrity, we have even more children stuck with 'my parents are famous' type problems.
>I don't want to spam those people with weekly updates about lighthearted stuff they didn't ask for
You could make a cryptocurrency address (preferably Monero), account with a payment processor such as PayPal (although I've heard bad things about them), or simply publish your bank details for people to donate.
Cryptocurrency is not a bad option, as long as Substack allows it, although I don't know how many people use crypto. As I understand it, people can't support a blog on Substack without subscribing. That's a limitation I guess, because many people prefer to read things when it suits them, not when a writer happens to send an email.
Oh. You meant that people might want to pay for extra posts but read at their pleasure instead of having them in their inbox? I thought you meant they might want to donate to the blog without subscribing.
I mean both at once. There are people for everything, as we say in Sweden. Some people might not like to subscribe to things: Before I started to write a blog myself, I only subscribed to blogs that were very infrequently updated. The others I could just check once in a while, I thought. If there are such people who would like to donate to this blog, it would be unwise to thank them through sending them an additional email every week.
I have no idea to what degree other people share my email allergy. Maybe I'm just obsessing over a problem that doesn't really exists.
I think it's probably a bad idea to put private info on the public internet, even for a fee. Depends how private, I guess. Just remember that anyone who really wants access to it will be willing to pay, possibly with a pseudonymous card.
Yes, I mean, I don't plan to publish anything private-private. Not anything that would be disastrous if it came out. I just have a rather high threshold for what I write entirely publicly, so there are many things that are not hyper-private but which I still don't want to write to the whole internet. I plan to write about those things to paid subscribers because otherwise I won't write about them at all.
I subscribed or something recently, don't remember the exact signup. (My credit card company thought the $80 payment to ANDERS L was fraud, lol.) On this post, it still tells me I'm unpaid and can upgrade to paid. Do you know what's going on with that?
Happy to be able to support the Internet having awesome blogs again!
Unfortunately I don't know what is going on with anything. Recently I happened to block all comments on every post on this blog because my finger slipped... I'm on that level. But at least I know how to add people manually on the paid list, so in worst case that's what needs to be done.
1. People can support a blog without subscribing. See for instance: https://helendale.substack.com/p/greetings-from-chiantishire and click on the tip link.
2. Right now I have procmail set up to store but do not show me and later throw away every email I get from substack because I don't want _any_ of my subscriptions to show up as email, and I couldn't find a way to get substack to honour that. So if you end up with 'cat pictures and similar which are only sent as extra email', can you announce it in the blog in some noisy fashion? Because I will have to figure out some way to save these particular mails from substack, but still not show me any of the rest. Procmail lets you do anything, so this shouldn't be very hard, once I have an example of the new thing to be saved. Still, easier for _me_ if you didn't do that and made the new content accessible from the substack inbox.
>>1. People can support a blog without subscribing. See for instance: https://helendale.substack.com/p/greetings-from-chiantishire and click on the tip link.
That's a great idea. I will add such a function if I ever understand how to do it.
>>Still, easier for _me_ if you didn't do that and made the new content accessible from the substack inbox
Stupid question I guess, but still: If I send a post by email, will it then automatically be accessible through Substack Inbox too?
I thought you had a plan to make some things available by email only and not by the Substack Inbox. I have no idea how to do that; I just thought that you did.
Ah, no, I thought the opposite, because there is an option to send things by Substack Inbox but not by email. I will check what I actually wrote.
When you wrote: "My only concern is that I don't want our paid texts to lie entirely openly on the internet" I parsed that as 'I don't want the paid texts to be part of the blog. Just emailed to people.' So, that may be nothing like what you meant, but that is where I got my wrong idea from. I still do not know what you mean by 'entirely openly' --- one of those 'xxx is only available for paid subscribers to keep reading become a paid subscriber' banners example: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/did-tech-bros-ruin-san-francisco was what you were thinking of?
That's more of a 'I save my best stuff for the paying people in the hope that it will make you start paying' pitch but it sounded to me like you wanted to keep the sillier stuff away from people who might abuse you for it. I don't think this substack division is going to help you there.
The rule is 'never post anything to your substack you wouldn't mind seeing everybody arguing about in Aftonbladet and Flamman -- not only tomorrow, but sometime in the indefinite future' and where mentioning that your family got mildly sick eating too many wild strawberries means that you get articles saying you are both a terrible mother and not a proper Swede, who should be able to eat an infinite amount without problems.
>>The rule is 'never post anything to your substack you wouldn't mind seeing everybody arguing about in Aftonbladet and Flamman -- not only tomorrow, but sometime in the indefinite future' and where mentioning that your family got mildly sick eating too many wild strawberries means that you get articles saying you are both a terrible mother and not a proper Swede, who should be able to eat an infinite amount without problems.
Ha ha ha, that is Sweden! I take your warning seriously. In my case, the problem is that Aftonbladet couldn't care less about what I'm doing, even when I happen to grab a scoop that they would really have wanted themselves. I'm more worried about people who know me in everyday life, like my children's teachers and people who live nearby. That's the reason why we don't publish our last names here: That we don't want to assault people who know us as "x's father" or "x's mother" with everything we think. We are not anonymous, but try to be unsearchable from our real-life identities.
My intention was to publish paid posts that are a bit on the sillier side. For example, I wrote a post about my efforts to start eating meat for ethical reasons. I think it is an interesting subject worth discussing. But I also wouldn't like such a post to go viral, because if it did, I would become famous for being squeamish. That is the wrong reason to become known to a wider audience, but it is still not exactly something that I'm ashamed of.
My intention is to publish such posts to paid subscribers and people who say they are interested but not in the financial position to support blogs. I will do my best to hide them from everyone else. My basic assumption is that people who are in the position to support us financially and want to support us financially will do so and others won't. So we won't publish any Noahpinion-style teasers. Scott Alexander-style is much better for us.
I think it must be very hard to be a child of a blogger -- especially one who 'lets it all hang out'. All children find their parents' behaviour cringe-worthy at times. The people who are celebrating their cringe-worthiness must be exasperating to have as parents. Now that everybody can be a celebrity, we have even more children stuck with 'my parents are famous' type problems.
>I don't want to spam those people with weekly updates about lighthearted stuff they didn't ask for
You could make a cryptocurrency address (preferably Monero), account with a payment processor such as PayPal (although I've heard bad things about them), or simply publish your bank details for people to donate.
Cryptocurrency is not a bad option, as long as Substack allows it, although I don't know how many people use crypto. As I understand it, people can't support a blog on Substack without subscribing. That's a limitation I guess, because many people prefer to read things when it suits them, not when a writer happens to send an email.
Oh. You meant that people might want to pay for extra posts but read at their pleasure instead of having them in their inbox? I thought you meant they might want to donate to the blog without subscribing.
I mean both at once. There are people for everything, as we say in Sweden. Some people might not like to subscribe to things: Before I started to write a blog myself, I only subscribed to blogs that were very infrequently updated. The others I could just check once in a while, I thought. If there are such people who would like to donate to this blog, it would be unwise to thank them through sending them an additional email every week.
I have no idea to what degree other people share my email allergy. Maybe I'm just obsessing over a problem that doesn't really exists.
I think it's probably a bad idea to put private info on the public internet, even for a fee. Depends how private, I guess. Just remember that anyone who really wants access to it will be willing to pay, possibly with a pseudonymous card.
Yes, I mean, I don't plan to publish anything private-private. Not anything that would be disastrous if it came out. I just have a rather high threshold for what I write entirely publicly, so there are many things that are not hyper-private but which I still don't want to write to the whole internet. I plan to write about those things to paid subscribers because otherwise I won't write about them at all.
I subscribed or something recently, don't remember the exact signup. (My credit card company thought the $80 payment to ANDERS L was fraud, lol.) On this post, it still tells me I'm unpaid and can upgrade to paid. Do you know what's going on with that?
Happy to be able to support the Internet having awesome blogs again!
Unfortunately I don't know what is going on with anything. Recently I happened to block all comments on every post on this blog because my finger slipped... I'm on that level. But at least I know how to add people manually on the paid list, so in worst case that's what needs to be done.