A Note to Readers
A Useful Idiots update with some upcoming changes for subscribers
Hey Useful Idiots,
This week marks two and a half years of Useful Idiots on Substack and we’re very proud of and thankful for the community we have grown in that time. After an analysis of our subscriber model with the helpful team at Substack, we decided to make some changes.
***These changes WILL NOT affect current paid subscribers***
First is that the price to subscribe will rise by a small amount on October 1st. Anyone who has a paid subscription BEFORE OCTOBER 1st will be LOCKED IN to the low price forever. So subscribe now before prices rise.
Our reasoning: apparently the Substack model has changed since we joined in early 2021, and this price, which is the baseline price for the site, is more in line with the cost of keeping the podcast up on Substack and running smoothly.
However, we’re hoping none of you pay that price because you’ll all subscribe before October 1st.
Second, we’ll be rolling out some new ways to get your subscription discounted. This includes bundling with other Substacks, getting up to 6 months comped by referring friends, and some special discount codes that will be sent out to our most active listeners. Stay tuned in the coming months for updates.
Finally, we have a new URL! Twitter has been suppressing Substack links, so you can now tell your friends to find us at www.usefulidiotspodcast.com.
Thank you all so much for your continued support. Helping independent media stay alive is so important right now and we value every listener in the Useful Idiots community. If paying for a subscription isn’t an option for you right now, sharing the show and subscribing to us on Youtube is just as important to grow our audience.
In the next two and a half years of Useful Idiots, we’ll either defeat the suppressing security state censors or be silenced into obscurity. Stick with us either way.
We’ll be back with more updates and a whole lot more show. Stay tuned.
I come to Substack only to read your stuff and a couple other writers. Substack did not get me here, and you all seem to use Youtube to host your video.
So my question is why are you on Substack? What is the purpose versus simply hosying your own secure wordpress site with a subscription service. It is dead simple and you would have never have had conflicts wirh Elon when Substack decides to imolement a feature to be like Twitter. Also, what percentage of your revenue does substack suck up for the service of hosting a few megabytes of text, images and audio.
Already substack is forcing me to view, other creators, well I don't want to. I want it to be clean and see what I am paying to see. Why should substack get any of your money, lets say you wanted a hosted solution and a company to oversee it. Well my company pays another comoany 300 dollars a month to host our 100GB of data, do maintenance and updates. Or if you really want to protect yourself from cancellation pay about 10k for a server, get a static IP Address and host your own server. Then someone would have to come after your DNS hosting which there are many options, or your end point internet service provider. A wordpress site can be linked to several different payment processors making it harder for them to shut you down.
After all Substack brings you NO traffic instead you bring Substack traffic, how do they quantify the money you bring them?
What will happen to you or your channel when they inevitably take the payoff from a corporate bank that wants to take them public, at which point Blackrock and Vanguard who are the second and third largest share holders in WBD who owns CNN, could throw their budget on cppier paper for one month at the Substack stock and get a controlling interest or at least enough interest to destroy the stock any time they want buy simply shotgun selling their shares. Remember a 7 percent selloff in the U.S. Stock Matket during Covid precipitated a 40 percent drop. Our markets are built on sticks and sand.
So Substack, unless you yourself own a controlling interest it will be new boss same as the old boss and I dont see any value they bring. I don't need this dumb substack app, but if you thought it served some value you could have an app for your site for about 120K in programming fees. You could have the Substack platform backend built for 570k through several good consulting houses who use Eastern European programmers and manage them with U.S. team leaders.
The thing that broke the internet was platforms. Yes platforms made it possible for the technologically illiterate to post videos on Youtube making the content that give Google a place to host its 320 billion dollars worth of ads.
You see if everyone had their own websites instead of relying on youtube, facebook, blah blah blah you couldn't so easily be cancelled. And there would be less control, true Google would still control searches but we can go someplace else for searches.Building a search engine is easier than ever because unlike in 2000 all websites made since 2010 tend to be intentionally crawler friendly and even host files at the front end of the website that announce to search engines a roadmap of the entire underlying site.
As soon as people use a Platform you remove what made the internet amazing in the past.
Everyone uses youtube so now there is a youtube app on your tv when you buy it. In 2006 we didn't have applications that exist just for one website and its files. We had things like winamp, vlc player, and numerous other media players. You could put a bunch of mp3s on your website and give someone a link and their winamp,vlcplayer,media player, would queue up the playlist you set and start playing on the persons computer.
You could even live broadcast your own radio station or video if you wanted right from your site. Streaming and compression systems were invented long before youtube, they stood on the shoulders of giants and then worked to dumb it down knowing making it easier would draw users and eventually the easy way would be so much the standard that people would forget how to do it without them.
They would destroy what used to make computers a learning experience. You used to build, event and create. Now all of that is done for you so you no longer build anything to set yourself apart instead you just have to find a way to get attention with whats on your camera. Think of that, this place that used to make prospectors, engineers and artists now makes actors, :(
OK, I've subscribed (I think—it's a bit confusing). The reason that I have not subscribed earlier is that, while both of you Useful Idiots are at the top of the list of my favorite and most admired journalists, I am not especially satisfied with your duet performances on "Useful Idiots". Too much are you engaged in speaking with one another (often with a-bit-too-obvious self-satisfaction), and too little are your conversations designed so as to open up something important to your audience. Please think about that. Glenn Greenwald has much the same problem except that he's rather a one-person duet, i.e. talking more to himself than to anyone else. (Good when he interviewed Norman Finkelstein because Finkelstein makes himself heard.) All of you are doing very valuable stuff; I just wish that your performances came across as less like a one-or-two-personal kaffeeklatsches and more like Adam's reporting on the Grayzone, to name one example.