News Roundup #9: Parlor Rises To The Top of App Store

Welcome to Issue #9 of the Means of Creation weekly news roundup where we break down the latest news on the passion economy, including the happenings related to platforms, creators, startups, and trends.

This Week’s Interview: Li & Nathan!

This week on Means of Creation we did something a bit different: a casual Q&A and hangout with us, Li Jin and Nathan Baschez! We walked through the week's passion economy news, and took live questions from the MoC community.

Find it as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Breaker or wherever you listen to podcasts, or as a video on YouTube here. Or subscribe to the Means of Creation YouTube Channel. Now, onto the news.

Parlor Surges

What happened?

• Parlor hit #1 in the App Store after Facebook and Twitter started attaching warning labels to election misinformation.
• The platform is largely being used by political conservatives who feel ideologically censored on Facebook.
• Gab, founded in 2016, is also growing but their growth is limited because they were kicked out of the App Stores.

Li’s Take:

• Any moderation on a social platform always breeds an alternative that’s “free”.
• For example, it was just after Patreon tightened their moderation policy that OnlyFans became popular for sex workers (many of whom migrated from Patreon).
• While the incumbent platform usually remains large, it opens up a small opportunity for an unmoderated site to emerge. While Parlor is hot, it still only has 10 million users,a lot fewer than Facebook’s 2.7 billion users.

Nathan’s Take:

• There are two options for platforms: have moderation, or don’t have moderation. If you don’t, your site will become a scum pile (like 4chan).
• At the same time, the Sam Lesson piece on the societal problem of only needing 1,000 true fans to succeed highlights the potential problems with niche communities: they promote ideological siloes instead of collectively working through a common narrative.

SubstackInbox Launches In Beta

What happened?

• Substack is building a new product that will let you read all of your newsletters in one place.

Li’s Take:

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