louisswiss

> It's not much of a fair market if one of the items have been removed from the shelves and you have to specifically ask for it and the price.

To be fair, this isn't a very apt analogy.

A better one would be to liken Apple to a smart fridge...

- Is it ok for Apple to say "only products bought through our smart fridge's grocery app can be stored in this fridge" ? --> probably not

- Is it ok for Apple to take a cut when the consumer purchases through the smart fridge's app directly? --> IMO clearly yes

- Should Apple be required to warn you that it'd be cheaper to buy the same brand of milk from a grocery store 10min walk away? --> IMO clearly no

> This no longer exists. You need Twitter in perpetuity. If for some reason you’re banned from Twitter (often there’s no reason at all) there goes an entire career and audience you’ve built for years.

For a newsletter at least, this definitely isn't true.

For context, I'm the cofounder of SparkLoop — a referral platform specifically for newsletters.

We see thousands of newsletters growing 5-50% monthly with referrals (and more if they do other marketing stuff).

Except this doesn't work for Substack users, because Substack doesn't support tools like ours.

The problem isn't that "you can't grow a newsletter without Twitter" — it's that "you can't grow a Substack without Twitter".

Just choose a better email platform and the problem disappears.

easy...

character = trust / competence

> It literally means 'regular person test'...

The whole point is that it doesn't mean "regular person test'...

It means "person who isn't the target customer and who probably cares about you too much to give unbiased feedback" test.

> In the end what changed is that e-mail based marketing was on the decline, with other mediums taking over.

FWIW this is completely incorrect. Over the past 2 years other marketing channels have skyrocketed in cost (eg FB ads) and most brands/companies are now investing heavily into email marketing. It's a significant growth industry right now, more so than at any time since I've been involved with email marketing (since ~2010).

If you're buying a large software license today — and I bet this holds true for at least some houses, cars, other "high-pressure sales situations" too — the vendor definitely won't think of the negotiation as adversarial.

In an unending game of the prisoner's dilemma, either you all win or you all lose.

> “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

By Ronald Wright.