Made or Paid, Man?

Paywall Follies

The founders of Substack were trying to solve a very specific problem. How to free newsletter writers from the web publishing chores and how to have them paid, avoid the free work. See founder Hamish McKenzie. Substack is not technically a blog. It is rather a newsletter. Preferred are infrequent but substantive posts that readers feel compelled to pay for. If you publish frequently, it goes against the grain of this platform. People get annoyed with too many emails.

The old mentalblog had a very high Google ranking in several categories. There were often visits of thousands of people who wondered in mistakenly or wanted a picture. Here, all visits are all real interested readers.

In the past, I published significant photos, many I took myself. I do not print “pirsum rishon” or ugly logo on someone’s forehead. Yet, I did see my photos in other publications, even in print magazines, without any attribution.

Boruch Gorin is a pretty mild ideologue, but there is no way he was not finding all these Schneersons and others when he rummaged in the archives. Obviously, he was interested in a certain selection of his subjects. Have you ever seen him publish a full file of the interrogations? But why not?

People want to avoid pointing, subscribing, or linking to mentalblog, it is “controversial”. Yet, they don’t have an issue with stealing from mentalblog. If I were a paid Chabad propagandist or an entertainer like Jacobsons or Taub, I would have the confirmation bias wind behind my sails, but heck it’s more fun to change the opinion than to confirm it.

I have some significant posts coming up that took time to generate. There is also the tremendous contribution of the renowned Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, a national treasure in flesh and blood. I would rather not put things behind the paywall or butcher pictures.

One more thing. I wish the readers would populate the comments. Instead, people send me text, emails, etc. There are often multiple corrections right after publishing and after the emails go out. Many of the corrections are substantive. I continue to update posts even weeks after publication, but more so in the hours right after the publishing, so please come back and check it out again. Pun intended.