{"id":8010,"date":"2026-08-14T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/?p=8010"},"modified":"2026-08-02T13:50:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T11:50:24","slug":"three-types-are-in-fact-eight-axes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/2026\/08\/14\/three-types-are-in-fact-eight-axes\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Types Are In Fact Eight Axes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tracy Friedlander\u2019s post<\/a> on the three Substack creator type appeared on my Substack timeline one Sunday morning. I found it interesting and it got me thinking about what these types were. But thinking about them made me realise that they were simplistic and I wondered how I could reduce them<\/a> to something more flexible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Creator map<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The post is called \u201cThe 3 Substack Creator Types On Substack\u2026\u201d, and it proposes three types: Authority, Pathfinder, Magnetizer. Authority builds from what you know, Pathfinder from what you\u2019ve been through, Magnetizer from how you see the world. Her post opens by admitting that nobody likes to talk about where they started, because it\u2019s not sexy. It\u2019s very true: in our age of social media where you have to appear successful at all times to appeal to the masses (unless you can turn it into clickbait) confessing that you started somewhere and at some point you didn\u2019t know what you were doing isn\u2019t a selling point for your side hustle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a quiz at the bottom of her post, and taking it gets you your type by email along with a mini-guide. Below the quiz is the Creator Type Blueprint, an email-delivered course, and below that workshops on paid tier design. It\u2019s a well-designed funnel: quiz first, then the course, then the workshops, each one pointing at the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I waited a few weeks before publishing this post because I didn\u2019t want to risk hurting her business model (ok, I don\u2019t really think I have that power or reach, but I didn\u2019t want to be accused of trying to damage her income). Not that I think I\u2019m being unfairly critical of her post, I\u2019m being very honest in my analysis and my opinion of the subject, and my point isn\u2019t to say she\u2019s doing something wrong, it\u2019s to show my exploration of the idea and the different conclusions I arrived at. To be clear: my opinion isn\u2019t her failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a bias in my approach here: I did my PhD working on overlapping biology taxonomies and how they can be captured and manipulated in computer systems, so I tend to think about these problems in connected and overlapping classifications. When you think about little other than one problem for 4 years, it changes the way you think for life. I even wrote a (unpublished) paper<\/a> one night about how the world is a graph database that I really liked but I couldn\u2019t find a good place to submit it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That led me to build a street photography taxonomy<\/a> (that should be published at the same time as this one). The old street photography labels just didn\u2019t work for me: someone would post a photo and I couldn\u2019t decide whether it was street or urban or documentary or social commentary. And not knowing what the photos were meant to be made it hard to understand them (you don\u2019t look for the same thing in urban landscape and street portraits, for example). Eventually I decided that the argument was pointless, because these photographs could be several of these labels simultaneously. So I built a different kind of system based on fourteen axes: human presence, human role, architecture, relationship, documentary intent, abstraction, environmental weight, temporal mode, colour, humour, distance, motion, setting, framing. Every photo takes a position on every axis at once (a 14-value vector). The famous kinds of street photography, e.g. the Decisive Moment, the Empty Street, the crowd scene, are not separate things. They\u2019re heat clusters: combinations of axis values that recur so often it makes it easier to name them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, I decided to create a taxonomy of creators starting from Friedlander\u2019s types. To me, Friedlander\u2019s three types are in fact dense regions where several values happen to correlate. They\u2019re in fact really three answers to the same question: what you lead with. The axis is: what you know, what you\u2019ve been through, how you see. A person can lead with what they know in one post and with how they see in the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Underneath that shared axis the information space is much wider:<\/p>\n\n\n\n