“Dead on arrival. I’m still waiting to see the first good Mastodon post. God help us.”
Casey Newton’s Deep Skepticism Of Twitter Replacements & Getting More Comfortable With Substack’s 10% Take Rate
My daughter knows Casey Newton as the ‘watch pro wrestling and eat chicken wings’ friend. She is not wrong. But beyond the bond of those shared pleasures, we also have a long — and mostly agreeable — relationship rooted in his coverage of the technology community and my participation in said industry. When I last interviewed Casey, back in 2017, he recognized there’s a “natural, & healthy, tension between myself & the people I write about.” So with that context, here’s another FIVE QUESTIONS with Casey Newton.
Hunter Walk: Hi Casey and welcome back. I think you’re the first person I’ve interviewed twice on this blog. The biggest personal change since our 2017 discussion is your founding of the tech newsletter Platformer (which everyone should subscribe to). Ahead of its launch we’d spoken quite a bit privately about going indie and I’m so glad you took that path. In hindsight what did you underestimate and what did you overestimate in terms of initial challenges?
Casey Newton: This is kind of a dodge, but the truth is that the launch went mostly to plan. I had the…
