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Taste is the new moat, as is ownership; Dirt started on Substack but eventually moved to a custom website, beehiiv as a newsletter CMS, and Discord to host their thriving paid member community. Daisy points to a context collapse across distribution platforms and believes the solution is for publishers to “become the platforms again.” Besides the low overhead, audience and platform ownership are what form that “agility” in the primordial soup; Twitter or whatever platform tweaking the algorithm against your favor means less when you’re more self-reliant. It’s a higher up-front investment (Dirt contracted a firm to build out their website) but quickly pays off. “My particular experience of audience development,” Daisy says, “was comprised of strategies to be successful in that environment of traffic and scale, or to at least be responsive to. Towards the end, it became how do you build a moat that's not reliant on traffic and scale?” In Dirt, she has dug such a moat. “For the past 10 years, taste couldn’t be monetized. Soon it will be one of the only things that can.“