Sublime

The real villain here is Google. Google found one of the very best business models of all time, skimming all the surplus profit off of the entire free open internet. This is the natural end state of that process.

The past few years have seen platforms arise that make some aspect of creation, distribution, monetization, and administration easier. Yet, there is still much that can be streamlined.

If Medium were built on open data, Substack wouldn't have to build an editor, interface, and CMS from scratch. They'd build a subscription module that operates on top of the Medium editor and content.