Responding to Substack's new "Pledges" Feature
As we said in a previous piece, WeWrite aims to out-compete Substack. Here are my thoughts on Substack’s new “Pledges” feature, which seems to be veering a little bit closer to what WeWrite seeks to accomplish.
Instead of forcing writers to hide certain content behind paywalls, pledges allow readers to altruistically support writers without anything in return. This is the primary basis of WeWrite, where each page is a donation target.
Here are some key differences, though.
Substack: No budgets
Substack Pledges still runs the risk of budget over-runs. If you wish to support many creators, you’ll end up spending tons of money. Money is tight these days, we need to allow readers to support all their creators while being smart about their money.
Substack: No pools
In WeWrite, splitting payments and forwarding payments is done through “Donation Pools” … this allows users to donate to one page (could be a user, or a project) while forwarding some or all of those proceeds to a distribution list of other recipients.
These Pools can be nested ad infinitum, pools inside of pools, which will allow a complex branching network of donations to seed various corners of the online noosphere. Read more about this WeWrite feature here.
A full comparison between WeWrite and Substack is yet to be written. I just wanted to quickly respond to a feature that was announced this morning. (Jan 31, 2023)
Final thoughts
It’s interesting that Substack began with a free and paywalled model, and is now adding a voluntary donation method. WeWrite intends to do the opposite; we believe that the primary social proof should be donations and percentages of budgets, rather than likes. (which are vanity metrics)
That being said, it’s a question of priority. WeWrite might eventually add the ability for creators to paywall certain things, and since budgets will be defined by percentage, perhaps it will be a question of whether or not your allocated percentage meets a certain threshold.
More prototyping and user research is needed on this question. Stay tuned for more updates!