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“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

Hunter Walk
6 min readDec 12, 2022

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.

cAIsey 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 benefit of a big mailing list that I took with me, and so when I turned on payments Platformer was ramen-profitable basically from day one. It took me about six months to climb back to my old Verge salary, and right after that I launched my Discord with some other writers and that led to a big spike in revenue. Most of the discourse around independent journalism centers on how hard it is, and leaving my old perch was certainly scary, but in the end it worked out great.

I mean, there were many small annoyances along the way — finding a bookkeeper, and an accountant, and interacting with the California Franchise Tax Board, to which I always seem to owe some amount of money no matter how many times I’ve paid my bills. And I did find myself missing the feeling of being in a newsroom from time to time, though I continued to have access to The Verge’s slack as a contributor and that helped me feel less lonely.

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Hunter Walk
Hunter Walk

Written by Hunter Walk

You’ll find me @homebrew , Seed Stage Venture Fund w @satyap . Previously made products at YouTube, Google & SecondLife. Married to @cbarlerin .

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