Comments will now mostly be for paying subscribers

Plus, announcing a date for a price change — and a new episode of Risky Business.

Happy Thursday, folks. I try to be judicious about when I fill your inboxes, mostly sticking to substantive posts instead of site announcements and procedural matters. This post is procedural, but I’ll aim to kill three birds with one stone by covering a few different issues.

Bird #1: There’s a new episode of Risky Business out! (Usually, these will drop on Thursdays.) This episode is a little spicier, as Maria and I cover the three p’s: poker, presidential debates — including an uncomfortable reality that Democrats have to confront if the first debate goes badly for Biden — and p(doom).

Bird #2: When I made plans to run the presidential model for paying Silver Bulletin subscribers — ETA remains sometime next month — I announced that there will be a price increase going into effect for new subscribers. I just want to be transparent about the date this will go into effect: June 1. If you are already a paid subscriber, this will not affect you one bit. My policy, like must Substackers, is to lock in pricing indefinitely at the time people sign up for a subscription. So if you’re already signed up you’ll keep the current pricing of $8/month or $80/year. The same goes if you subscribe before June 1 (hint, hint). After that, prices will increase to $10/month or $95/year, and the plan will be to stick with that for a while unless there’s some crazy Argentinian inflation.

Bird #3: The third announcement is about the comments section.

A lot of subscriber newsletters have great comments sections. But with Silver Bulletin it’s really been hit-and-miss.

I have various theories about this. This newsletter covers a lot of ground from politics to sports to economics. And somewhat unusually for a newsletter, I get a lot of drive-by views from people who aren’t subscribed. (About 60 percent of views on the average post are not from the email list.) And my own politics are a bit eclectic, I guess — though really they’re not too hard to pin down. But for better or worse, this newsletter seems to attract both liberals and conservatives with strong political views.

Whatever the reason, I’m just going by my own revealed preference here — I’m often reluctant myself to check the comments on politics-related posts, except maybe the first couple in case readers point out (all-too-frequent) typos.

So comments will now be restricted to paid subscribers for most posts, including the overwhelming majority of politics-related posts. Sorry, but that’s the only expedient solution I can identify. I don’t have time to police the comments section in an election year. I’ll probably eventually hire an editor or site manager to help out, but I’m focused on hiring someone to help with the election model first.

And even then, I’m not sure I’ll revert to the old policy. I have a rough theory that comments sections tend to break when you’re over a certain threshold (low five figures) of readership, and the overall number of views on the typical post is well above that, while the number of paid readers is not. Plus, the paid comments filter seems to work reasonably well when I’ve tried it before. This post had a relatively civil and constructive comments section despite touching on a lot of third-rail topics, for instance. The subscriber questions threads — there’s still time to submit a question for this month, by the way — nearly always do, too.

My hope is that a higher signal-to-noise ratio in the comments will add value even if you’re not a paying subscriber. I’d rather see a post with 40 civil comments instead of a 400-comment flame war. Currently, the number of comments just isn’t much of a quality signal. Since mid-March — excluding NCAA tournament posts and the election model announcement, which were big outliers — the correlation between the number of comments on a post and the number of new paid subscriptions it generates is actually negative (−.10). That’s cheating slightly, since paywalled posts limit comments to paid subscribers by default, and paywalled posts also generate more paid subscriptions. Still, the correlation between the number of comments and the total number of (free + paid) signups is still relatively modest at +.42.

And sure, we’ll probably get a few people who subscribe to post a comment and then immediately cancel. That’s not a behavior I want to incentivize — chronically toxic commenters who make the experience worse for anyone else are not worth the marginal revenue. Still, hopefully this can get things to a point where the comments section is a net positive most of the time.