Unfortunately people love to complain about ads, but rarely actually get their wallets out when an alternative payment method is presented. Case in point: the frequent archive.org links to get around paywalls.
Piracy is a service problem. A paywall literally says “you might like this but pay me first to see what it is.” Substack has a “let me read it first” button and I’ve never seen an archive link to that even though there are plenty of private articles.
The concept of gift links exists, but these websites footaxe themselves by limiting their most viral content —- ostensibly the best and cheapest marketing they could get, down the drain.
Substack's "let me read it first" is just a way to close the subscription popup, it has nothing to do with reading otherwise paywalled content.
The thing is, having had some of my own content "go viral" before - it's not worth much. Most people will read it for a minute and move on. A tiny percentage will subscribe and an even tinier percentage will give you any money. So from the point of view of a creator, it makes a ton of sense to put up paywalls on things – but only once you've already gotten a bit of an audience and distribution method figured out.
> Substack's "let me read it first" is just a way to close the subscription popup, it has nothing to do with reading otherwise paywalled content.
It has everything to do with telegraphed intention of not having content be gratis. The fact that you cannot even mentally keep the idea of subscription gates in the same bucket as paywalls says a lot.
