Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read.
So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web. There's a lot of value in backing up your Substack subscribers' emails so that you can move somewhere else down the line, and the nice thing about Substack is that they let you do that. If they stop, that's a trap.
Substack notes is non exportable; the newsletter now no longer have a link to read it on your site on substack and instead link to the substack app, and subscriptions started in the app pay Substack through Apple and Google and you can't export them.
Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
Every single thing substack does reeks of growth hacking. I suspect that it will only get worse. For that reason alone I chose to avoid it for my newsletter.
If Substack stops supporting that feature you would end up losing all of your subscribers when you move to the alternative unless you happen to have an up to date export.
Of course, if they were given warning they would export their subscribers. I am talking about if it was cut off without warning. I do not think the majority would have a list within the last year.
Hackers always use this argument against everything because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.
Thus they argue that you should not trust your things to other people but do it yourself, because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
>because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.
Nope. At best you merely know what your current self intends to do in the future. Whether you'll do them then, or whether you'll even still want to do them then, or be able to do them then, or have regretted ever wanting to do them, and many other such things, we don't know.
I'm not sure if you're arguing against self-determination and for serfdom. Or just making a narrow correction to one sentence in an argument that was perhaps slightly too definitive.
But obviously the key principle is about retaining control over your business, income stream, relationship with your readers, or whatever it is you value. Sure, I change my mind and make mistakes. But I don't think that's a good argument for handing over control to some other entity which is equally changeable and fallible, but not primarily incentivised by my well-being.
Nope. As per my second paragraph which you may not have gotten to:
>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Furthermore the phrase "some things" does not actually mean all things.
So again, trying to put it another way to clarify anything that may have been unclear:
You can be reasonably certain at the time that you need to make a decision that you will try to do what you believe is the best for you. I will now not go on to make an exhaustive list showing every way that you in the future may not do what is right for you because it is normally understood that there are numerous ways in which the reasonable expectations of people can be countered but nonetheless, the reasonable expectations will still tend to hold more than any of the countering scenarios. This is why they are the reasonable expectations, while the countering scenarios are the notable exceptions that often show up in sensational news reports and fiction.
And finally I should note this comes down to the principle, which I would have thought was clear from my previous post but evidently not, that if you can reasonably expect that future you will try to do what future you thinks is best for them, you can just as reasonably expect that the future corporation you are buying a service from will try to what the future corporation thinks is best for them, without giving much consideration for what is best for you.
I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
on edit: Note in my first post I referred to major illness, because major illness, including mental illness, is one of the most common ways in which people end up not attempting to do what is best for themselves.
>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Regardless of major illness or not, people do stupid things, self destructive things, ill-thought things, impulsive things all the time. At best they'll do "what they think is best" not "what is best" for themselves. And frequently not even that, as people still do all kinds of things they know are bad for them but can't stop themselves anyway.
But even if it was correct, "you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future" is not really strong as an argument against the grandparent's:
"You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?"
The grantparent's argument is about not knowing what you'll be doing in concrete terms, not about merely knowing some abstract guiding principle like "you'll still want to do something you feel is best for you then".
>I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
Even so, that's worth acting only if the pain of future corporation pulling some shit later on is bigger than the convenience you still get before that, or easier than what you'll lack going without its services.
Also if the cost of just dumping their ass then when they DO turn, and moving to another player, is big.
It is just risk assessment and mitigation. Some risks are acceptable for some people and they do not need the mitigation. But for others it is not acceptable and they would find solutions.
> You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future?
You absolutely can know something about what someone will do in the future. You gain those insights by looking at their past and present behavior and the behavior of others in similar circumstances. Hackers tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can often see where things are heading. Enshittification is a pretty smart bet.
You can do whatever research you like, but when you attempt to apply it to predicting the future, you're still speculating. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
So your ex girlfriend cheated on you and now you reject all contact with women because you know that "sooner or later" she's going to cheat on you? In my ears it sounds the same when hackers say you can never buy anything or use any service, because "sooner or later" it will go to crap.
It's probably easy being a cynic, because you can always wait for decades (as another commenter argued) until you are right. In the meanwhile you have missed out on life - for no personal benefit at all.
Allow me to translate: “It a near certainty that they will fuck you over eventually; the question is will it be next year, next decade, or will you win the lottery?”
> Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. Substack allows for exporting posts (which would be good to do regularly just for backups in case of (account) compromise):
This strategy for your legacy would not have been successful with stratoscope.geocities.com (RIP 2009), skyblog.com/stratoscobe (died in 2023 with no data export path offered), Posterous, MSN Spaces, Vine, and many others.
I am willing to bet that most of my domains will outlive "username.substack.com".
Excellent point! In fact I do have an automatic monthly donation to The Internet Archive.
Of course the URLs all change in archived pages, but at least the content is there for anyone motivated enough to find it.
A funny coincidence... I registered geary.com (my last name) in 1994, and just used it for email. A few years later I got a letter from a group of civic boosters in Geary, Oklahoma. They even enclosed a Geary Water Tower T-shirt which I still have. They saw that I didn't have a website up on this domain and asked me if they could have it.
I explained that this would be impractical since it was also my email address.
So they registered gearyok.com instead and put up a website built around Java applets. Oops.
But it got me thinking. I put up a static page (frequently edited by me) that I called Geary Central: A Guide to Gearys on the Net. This page is still up:
Naturally I gave Geary, Oklahoma top billing for inspiring this.
A few years after that I changed geary.com to a MoinMoin wiki devoted to the same topic, and moved the old static page to its current location.
Just a few days ago, someone emailed me about how they had stumbled onto my oldsite.html page and enjoyed this "blast from the past".
In 2011, my old ISP decommissioned the server I had the wiki on. I was planning to migrate it to something more modern like Drupal, but the time and effort weren't worth it to me at the time.
I did find the latest version of the "new" Geary Central on archive.org and shared it in my reply:
If you're in the US, average life expectancy is 79, so it will probably be fine for the next ~5 years.
If you're in Canada, or a G7/EU nation, it's in the 80s, so you may have 10+ years to go, so the chances of Substack being around in the same form for that time period is lower.
What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?
What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.
My blog used to be RSS only, because I thought email subscriptions were a plot of "content creators" and not something readers actually wanted... until one of my readers told me he really recommended adding email as an option. I did, and a surprising number of people subscribed since then.
Yes, I have found out the hard way that an entire generation or two of internet users has lost the ability to visit a website to see what's there. They rely on having notifications or emails come in so that they can react to things rather than proactively go seek them out. I tend to eschew push the forms of communication, for the same reason my mobile isn't covered in a colorful grid of apps: I want to actively be choosing what I do rather than having a set of options put in front of me that I get to pick from.
But that's all just a rant. Your core point is completely correct. If you want readers, you have to cater to this 'push' mentality, I think.
Ok, so if you want to read https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/, which is now publishing less than once a month, you prefer to refresh the website once a week hoping there's an article to read?
That's unimaginable to me. Most of the writers I read publish infrequently. Email is great. I don't have to be on any social media. Articles come in and I can read them at my leisure.
For a decade or~so I subscribe to newsletters and had skip inbox rules that archived them in a folder about the subject. Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them. Not sure if that means it works or not.
> Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them
Most people don't read most newsletters. Some people read some.
This Saturday I sent an email. It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people. 780 people clicked on a link.
I tweeted the same email as a link and got pretty good engagement! 20 likes, 2 retweets – that's decent for me these days. It was seen 1400 times. 78 people clicked on a link.
I have roughly the same number of followers as I do email subscribers.
Hahaha it could well be that people are merely hoarding newsletter emails. I hope readers derive _some_ value from the emails, but since I'm not doing it to drive up "engagement metrics" I don't really mind.
There was a time when google toolbar had a search gmail button. I would use it to open gmail using whatever query was inthere. It happened quite often that it found newsletters matching the query. It takes quite a bit of hoarding to accomplish.
Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:
example.com?re=you@yourwebsite.com&article=1234
Then mail you the requested article. With RE: and the same title they will even be threaded.
> What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?
Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web.
> What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts?
On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
Sure, but my comment was being given directly to a user who asked for a platform that allowed X, Y and Z. I was providing them with an answer that met their stated criteria. I don’t see how other people’s configuration is of any concern.
...I use email notifications. I follow very few people (fewer than 10), so I'm always happy when an email pops up letting me know they've written something.
I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
It's not really a counterpoint when it's addressed in the article.
"The biggest pushback I hear from writers is: “But my website doesn’t have an audience! Substack does.”
But you don’t have to completely abandon social media or platforms like Substack to protect your autonomy (personally, I prefer the word sovereignty but it does sound a tad dramatic)."
oh I can tell you that lately, hundreds of bots are very much visiting my website every day in volumes that I have never seen in the past... Unsure that's a good news though
The same thing is happening on one of my Blogger instances, the one where I publish about a very niche interest (old floor-mill buildings from the Romanian countryside). Most of the hits are coming from countries like Vietnam and Singapore, most of them associated with Android use, so I think it's a new-ish thing that Google Analytics' anti-bot/anti-spam algorithm just can't (won't?) catch.
I'm outside the loop so please forgive me, but what is different between substack and a self managed mailing list?
I've been subscribed to a few website/blogs newsletters for years and they appear to work fine, and I think the owners are not particularly technical, there's WordPress plugins.
Substack is trying to turn itself into a social network, so comments on substack posts by other substack bloggers let people find other blogs. This is why half the comments on popular substacks are from other bloggers casually mentioning the articles they wrote.
It also means that if you comment on a substack, other people can find all the comments you made on every substack, by default.
I think you're conflating two things. You can absolutely have your own website, and still use Substack. Then if you do have to move off Substack, you aren't "moving" in the sense that your URLs remain the same.
Getting a list of your existing subscribers' emails from Substack in order to migrate notifications to your new platform (hosted behind the same domain name you own) is of course an important part of moving, though.
The argument from the article is that you should be hosting your writing on blog.mywebsite.com, not mywebsite.substack.com, even if those two pages are identical and are both hosted by Substack. That's the entire point it's trying to make.
Whether or not your readers visit your website or consume your content entirely through email notifications isn't relevant to the point the author was trying to make. Because despite your absolutist "no one", some people will visit your website, and having a stable location that you control yourself is important. (Also please consider that while you may have been publishing on the internet for decades, your experience may not be universal.)
It is absolutely crazy to me that anyone with a serious web presence doesn't have their own domain name, even if that website is backed by someone else's hosted platform.
The lift to make your own website is so low now, and the benefits of future-proofing are so great that it's just the right decision to make. You don’t even have to drive all your readers there, you’ll just have it available for everyone if the audience ever decides to gradually move on from substack (which seems to happen pretty much every social media platform).
you said: "...from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website"
This is false.
It's more accurate to say that "no one will visit your website if you do not properly setup a distribution ecosystem".
It's hard work. But it works. All of my companies have been built by writing online --> distribution --> people finding my/our stuff.
Your experience of 'doing it for decades' reveals that publishing, in of itself, does nothing. And if all people do is publish (without the distribution engine), then, I agree it's a waste of time.
I write 1 hour per day. I spend about 2 hours working on distribution. Sometimes, I spend 4 hours on distribution.
I publish links to my new articles on Reddit , sometimes on Twitter. That’s enough for my posts to get to lots of people, sometimes. And when it happens, Google indexes it and it becomes one of the first links about the topics I covered. And people repost it later in other media like Mastodon, HN etc.
I don’t get how someone can have used the internet for decades and not know how this all works!
I write 1-2 hours a day but I dont spend anywhere near that much time on distribution so this is a learning opportunity... would be great if you could help me understand the activities/tasks you undertake? What do you do to spend the 2 - 4 hours on distribution? Is this daily? Or per task/article??
I use self-hosted Listmonk. Works great in combination with my blog. But yeah its slow growth. But that's actually what I prefer, because if you grow fast on Substack, these are gone as fast IMO as people don't really read substack emails anymore after getting 10 of them every day (as subscribing is so easy on Substack). So having a slow, but honest subscribers and then sharing it on socials or reddit in places where it genuinely helps people, there will always be some who will subscribe and read.
I agree, if you don't publish anywhere and just write on your website, and you're not yet known, it's hard for people to discover initially. But in the beginning, the writint is also more for you, than for others. I haven't read from anyone that writes super good on day one. That will come with the reps, and by then, people will read you, have discovered you.
Push as in a newsletter alone isn't doing anything. It's the "show ocassional posts of you on an already captive audience of millions and especially readers with similar interests" (the whole Substack base) that does it.
If you write news, posts that needs discussion, information that relatively quickly becomes obsolete, then probably yes, you won't want a website because few people will search for it deliberately.
But if you're writing for yourself, articles with multimedia, or want to use advanced features, no platform provides anything close to what you can do on your website.
No one is writing purely for themselves. It's something we like to say, and there's some value in writing down your thoughts - but deep down inside, every blogger is dreaming of having a positive impact on other people's lives. That requires reaching these people in the first place.
I promise you that Bartosz would be bummed out if he had an audience of one. And while relying on HN to accidentally discover you can work, it's not a sustainable model for anything.
Every time I see posts like this one and go into comments, everyone in the comments treat writing as a hobby which they would like to turn into work and earn money from, more or less. And I suppose the words "writing" and "blogging" associate with the community around themselves in their minds, not with the text information per se.
I'm writing technical articles (blog posts) my whole life most of the time as a result of me learning something new, to structure the information on some topic for myself and others.
If it's a research, I make a post with all the information and final result of it in public, primarily for myself and sometimes for others, because 95% of the time it's not secret and there's no point to store it privately.
If it's a helpful information (software: unofficial bugfix, hacky workaround, poorly documented feature somewhere, etc), I want it to be searchable/indexed, only that.
I don't care about attribution, about who reads my writing (be it me, my friends, people I don't know, or AI), I have no incentive to push (as in post here or on social networks) or promote these articles in any way. I don't want people to get back to my site, to subscribe to it, or to build a community around it.
If the user types "How do I solve issue X" and by a mere coincidence I solved and documented it, I don't care if the user gets the solution from my website, from the scrape & repost websites, or from AI agent which scraped the site. If this helps the user to fix the issue or to learn something new, every way is fine for me!
According to hacker news users you have to monetize every single thing you do in your spare time, otherwise it's a waste of time, be it blogging, pet projects that you need to convert to SAAS etc. And if you claim that you have "fun" and "hobbies" you are a liar (or at least you are lying to yourself that you don't want to make money out of those things).
Yeah so I guess the hundreds of billions of page views from organic search every single month is just a total myth?
As somebody who has made a lot of money publishing on the internet you absolutely can get people to read your website organically but it takes specific strategies and you can't just write about whatever you want however you want and expect traffic.
I feel like the transition from substack to website + newsletter wouldn't be terrible, although I'm sure your traffic would decrease after making the switch.
One of my first jobs after graduate, I used to share a lot of posts with my coworkers until a certain point where one of them said "I don't know how you read so much content", worthless to say him was a Master's student, so I'm expecting him to be able to consume more content than myself, although different more towards academic stuff.
I have a blog, I don't really promote it, and no one reads it.
Now, there is an argument that there's nothing on my blog worth reading, and yeah there might be truth to that, but regardless my traffic is on the order like 100 unique views per month, and I don't know what percentage of that is just scraping bots.
I'm fine with this, I had no delusions of becoming a famous writer or making any money from it or anything, my blog is basically just a dumping ground for thoughts that I think are interesting, but if I actually did care about people visiting my blog I would probably use Substack or something similar.
You mention RSS, but Substack is about paid subscribers, is it not? What do you think converts a Substack user to a subscriber; is it just a numbers game?
Why not do all automatically? My concern with substack is that it's a single point of truth. If they decide to blanket paywall everything after they sell to private equity for example. Or start to force all users to pay to be visible at all including old content. You're at the mercy of whatever they decide.
Yep, let's suppose an average HN user reads 30-100 articles a month on independent websites (personal domains) posted on HN. Out of 100, he probably subscribes to 0-2 at best (via RSS/e-mail). Now, imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience. There is too much friction for a user to subscribe.
Substack is similar to a social platform. People open it to read new articles in a similar way to HN, and they can subscribe to anyone by pressing a single button. There is a recommendation feed as well.
Since Google search for tech content is dead, getting views on independent blogs is extremely hard.
For sure. I had a huge following on my wordpress blog 15 years ago and email was how everyone got notified of new content. I'm sure there's a way to at least do sms now if people want that level of notification.
Most writers just want to write and don't want to start maintaining servers and databases to handle the collection and storing of emails. This is why they outsource that functionality to a service like Substack.
It would be nice if services like Substack supported exportability, so when a writer eventually becomes successful enough to migrate away, or the platform itself is no longer a good fit, then there aren't any losses.
Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.
I actively skip stuff that’s on substack just like I do medium and blogger. Maybe there’s good stuff on there but it’s usually a by-word for slop. I figure if anyone has anything that interesting to say they’d make the effort and put it up on something more serious looking.
Yes, I think people who move away from Substack already need to have a brand and a number of followers to drive people to their personal websites, even if they use Ghost. And I do get the concerns that Substack has some super bizarre and awful content in the mix. Their feed shows me stuff every once in a while, from uber-conservative right wing Christians to conspiracy theory nonsense. But my dumb soccer blog/podcast putters along and grows slowly, in some cases, not even from social media posts. It's an interesting platform.
Substack also comes with a brand, and having a substack is a social cue that you are a higher status person, it goes with the beefed up LinkedIn profile, playing tennis and conspicuous consumption.
Having a substack shows that you are time rich, yet at the same time, it does not come with overtones of vanity. Serious discourse allegedly goes on with substack, if you are writing there, then you are rolling it with the pros.
Yet every platform goes through phases, ending with the inevitable 'enshittification'. Soon the reader will see substack as a byword for best avoided, much like having to download a PDF or open an inevitably paywalled mainstream media news article, not worth the click.
With one's own website you are outside of the loop, and the theory still holds that, if you have anything worth seeing, they will come. However, most people will stay on platforms until there is something to actually buy.
Recently I was doom scrolling until I came across this vacuum cleaner for cats, that enables you to harvest the fur. I want this as a joke present for a cat I know, so I was prepared to escape the platform to buy the product. If it was a lengthy essay on how to make felt clothing from cat fur on substack, then I probably would not have clicked. Yes I am that shallow!
Hence, if you have something to sell, then an independent website is what you want, and a sales funnel to get people there. This does mean social media, the newsletter, SEO, the substack and even paid advertising.
this tide will turn, and the day of reckoning is coming for AI slop and large domains owning the search results. small publishers are going to have their time very soon.
I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting.
But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than its fees, because the counterfactual is that I don't have any of those things. I think it's a huge mistake to lump those together as "convenience", its a lot more than convenient!
The only important thing to me about having a non-substack website is that its good to have a place for more permanent information, lists, contact, etc. But even for many writers, that kind of stuff becomes stale so quickly that the personal sites don't tend to matter much, or even make them look worse! The floating social network spaces are much more valuable. Even losing my x.com would be much worse to my day-to-day life than losing my domain, though I may wish it were otherwise. And I cannot replicate that elsewhere. The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
> The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
I think this is mostly wrong, and that the social networks are big primarily because they spent money at the right time to create entrenched network effects that allow them to rent-seek ever after. The quality and innovation of the services themselves (especially simple sites like twitter/X) is not the moat. At a technical level, most are easily clone-able and dominate not because they offer the best service or have the best features but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.
I said "mostly" above because it seems like substack, e.g., as you said, has bundled payment, email, etc in a way that people really like. Even there, though, the network effect is probably the dominating factor.
And you can take advantage of their network effects by implementing a POSSE system. Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. That way, your website is the source of truth and the other places are like museums you curate to.
Why should you go thru the trouble? Because these social networks own your content and your audience and won't hesitate a second to drop you if they deem fit.
Using something like Typefully or even Postiz lets you post without linking to any site. If you publish a blogpost, you can have one of these tools create an C article with the same content.
For the majority of people it's the opposite of utility. Not even inutility or uselessness, it's negatively useful.
In any social network where "network effects" are a thing in the first place, there is more content produced than can be consumed by a particular user. The algorithm (tm) is forced to curate certain pieces of content out of circulation and can only heavily promote a negligible minority of content. This creates content reach distribution that is essentially a parabola. While there can be tons of signals to adjust the reach, the primary signals are inevitably going to be virality of the account and early engagement. You can't reasonably look at long term engagement due to content to eyeball ratio.
Ergo, posts must be designed to quickly grab early attention in an infinite feedback loop and this incentivizes cartels and bot farms to create echo chambers. Both extremely harmful phenomena.
It is wrong, but so are you. The truth is that social networks are big because they HAD genuine utility. The Facebook was amazing... at least until about 2010. I was at uni when it started and I vividly remember thinking "I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is" (we didn't have physical face books in the UK) and then a year later thefacebook turned up. Amazing for everyone's social lives.
But after 2010 it just gradually got shitter.
WhatsApp replaced it (in most ways; in some ways there is no replacement) and has so far been amazing but it feels like we're about at the "2010" of WhatsApp. Meta is starting to turn the screws. An AI button. Notifications about new features. Integration with Meta accounts. Eventually it will probably merge with Facebook Messaging or some bollocks and then we'll all have to move elsewhere.
Anyway my point is, these things genuinely became big because they were great. They stayed big despite becoming shitter due to network effects.
> If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.
And we would have kept a more inconvenient web, since without that incentive, Facebook etc. would never have had reason to pay for an army of software developers to implement and improve the site and servers to host it.
Yes, absolutely. Facebook became successful because at the time it was much more convenient than existing ways of accomplishing the same thing it did (interacting socially with other people, meeting new people), including even existing websites like myspace which were themselves more convenient than trying to create one's own website and grow a community, or traveling to meet people face-to-face.
> I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is
Did you miss Myspace and Friendster? Orkut had a market, I think. The reason that Facebook succeeded later is because it had a good API and invited people to write apps for it (mostly surveys and games, remember Zynga?), tracked its users across the internet, and sold them in targeted slices to advertisers. It was Friendster as a commercial platform (like Salesforce was CRM as a commercial platform.) It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.
I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput, being created by very talented people using Erlang. The reason people use it is because they always have and their friends do, and for a lot of countries with expensive SMS it provided messaging (and became so integrated into business that people weren't allowed to live without it.)
This is my argument about why these things were successful; I think that "they were great" isn't a credible one. They simply grabbed a large chunk of already proven markets quickly, but oriented themselves toward corporate needs to leverage that into total control.
> It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.
I might be misremembering a bunch but myspace never had a feed that showed you your friend’s updates.
It also wasn’t able to magically show you the people who were at that random house party you went to the night before that you hit it off with but were too drunk to get their number.
Facebook didn't have the feed initially either (and it was really disliked when it was introduced - people thought it was like stalking). But yes to your second point. Real people who you actually wanted to know and had actually met were on Facebook. That wasn't really true of any of the other sites.
Little did we know back then how many people were yearning to have stalkers. "This person wants to be notified every time I put something online" sounded incredibly creepy in the mid-aughts!
Group chats and private Discord servers with IRL friends are the modern version of the Facebook feed.
People love attention when it's people they know and like hanging out with.
The thing that degraded Facebook and Instagram is that they're not like that anymore, they're about maximizing content so that you spend as much time on their apps as possible.
If you just want to view content they are great for that, but I'd almost argue that they're not even social networks anymore. They are much closer to a smartphone version of cable television with mildly interactive elements.
Yeah, Facebook was primarily a directory when it started, a cross between a college facebook (like a yearbook given at the start of the year instead of the end) and a phone book.
Also, it didn’t allow custom styles or html, which was unusual at the time but ultimately helped it take off to the point that, like Google, it didn’t have allow HTML or JS in ads either.
MySpace was a) awful, b) only used by a tiny tiny fraction of people (1% maybe), and c) rarely had people's real names & photos on it. Not remotely comparable to Facebook. Even fewer people used Friendster and Orkut, at least in the UK.
> I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput
Free. No ads. Reliable. E2E encryption. Group chats. Cross platform. There's so much that's great about it. It was successful because the alternative was SMS which was shit. I'm guessing you're American.
This is a feature, not a bug. There is nothing worse for a society's collective privacy than a surveillance machine where people willingly post every detail of their lives. Stalin would have dreamed of today's anti-social media as a surveillance tool.
> There's so much that's great about it.
There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry. And that's assuming messages are truly encrypted and not analyzed behind your back by Meta. E2EE is kind of meaningless when the endpoints cannot be trusted. SMS is insecure in transit but it isn't controlled by a single for-profit company with close ties to government agencies.
Clearly people wanted real names and photos. There's space for both private and public spaces. I won't tell you my real name on this account, but I'll tell it to my WhatsApp friends.
okay? good for you? you being worked up about privacy doesn’t magically invalidate the experience of others. you not liking something doesn’t mean that it’s objectively bad. you not seeing utility in something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have utility. you not seeing value in something doesn’t mean that a great many people saw value in it, which is exactly what you’re arguing against. It does not surprise me that someone with a worldview so simple and self-centred cannot comprehend of how a great many people saw the juice being worth the squeeze.
Facebook had immense utility in the 2000s and even some of the 2010s. Not everyone wants to hang out with you on 4chan dude.
The cost of that experience/juice was their privacy. Value isn't free.
If you take on a new Facebook experience by using their camera glasses, that will also have a privacy cost that this time will include my (and everyone else in-frame's) privacy.
Uhm no. I wanted to know who real people were. At the time it was the much more secure and private than anything else because you needed to be at the same university to see anyone's accounts, and the idea of selling user data for profit didn't even exist.
> There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry
Sure. That doesn't invalidate any of the good stuff, and is minor in comparison (contact lists are not as valuable as you seem to think). If Signal had existed at the time I'm sure it would have been extremely popular too. Also photos are E2E encrypted.
> but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.
Sure. So what? You nonetheless cannot deny the utility. The friends that I have made from social networks are no less real. I am very grateful they (the means to discover these people now in my life) exist.
Is this a real thing that happens anymore? I don't recall when the last time someone made a new genuine connection through one of the major social media platforms (speaking of IG, FB, Twitter, primarily). LinkedIn, I guess comes to mind, but that's just been mostly career connections/job searching, and maybe Discord. Pretty much everyone I know (in my age range around 25-30) has only met new people from either participating in social settings in real life (climbing gym, playing volleyball, in person events), or through friends of friends. Otherwise it seems like most people just use IG or other DM's to try to hit on people or sell them something (usually unsuccessfully).
We are probably coming at this from different angles. I don't deny those things but they're also not a counter-argument to the point I'm intending to make.
As an overly dramatic example, a slave might fall in love with the wife he met on a plantation, and the family he has, and even be grateful for them. Nevertheless, you probably don't want to use those facts to be a booster for slave plantations.
My argument is that all the good things you like about social networks, from a technical pov, could be had quite easily without the ads, political propoganda, and other ill-effects of the current popular social networks. Indeed, there are many open source projects that already provide the features you'd want. It's just that none has achieved the network you want.
This situation is unlike that of a large, complex physical infrastructure project, where you really do need to "put up" with a governement (or something like it) in order to get the thing built and maintained.
I think you are missing the point of talking about utility in the first place. I have no interest in lamentations. If you told someone to stay away from social networks because of their flaws, you would be doing them a cultural and professional disservice.
As a more moderate metaphor it's like someone saying they like living in one city, for all its flaws, and someone else comes along and extolls the virtues of several imaginary cities. It's fun to imagine those places, but its silly to mention them when someone is speaking of utility. This rush to examples not beholden to reality seems more common among technical types than any other, and likely prevents you from benefitting from what exists today.
The hole in that analogy is that in some cases these other platforms aren't imaginary. The open, ad-free, privacy-protecting, you-own-your-data alternative to Twitter actually exists: Mastodon.
The problem, of course, is that the utility of a social network is right in the name: the network of users it connects. If the people you want to interact with aren't on Mastodon, then you have to use Twitter.
But ethically-good (for lack of a better term) Twitter alternatives isn't a list of imaginary cities.
I'm not the others participating in this subthread, so I can't speak to their motivations, but for me, it's possible to recognize that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have utility for many people, but also lament that otherwise-better platforms exist that haven't gained traction.
(And it's funny in this specific case, because often the reason they haven't gained traction is because of actual problems with the product: the UI is unpolished, the UX is bad, important feature XYZ is missing, etc. But in the case of Mastodon it actually is as good [or better] product-wise as Twitter. It just doesn't have the same mass appeal because of existing network effects, marketing, and first/early-mover advantages.)
Do people even want to interact with specific others on these platforms, or just the amorphous mass of others? Both X and Mastodon have two different amorphous masses you can interact with.
How easy/difficult was it getting off the ground on substack? Did you get interactions right from your first post? Is there visibility for new writers?
I started using it to run a conference 4 years ago with the intent that it was supposed to be a temporary solution until we built a "real" site.
The experience was so good that we haven't moved off. Even if we did build a more formal conference site, we'd still keep the substack blog. The mailing list has grown from nothing to right at 1000 subs which isn't bad for something I do in my spare time. By far the most effective communication. Social media (all channels) are a fraction of the engagement that I get compared to substack.
If you want a free ticket to come down this year, shoot me a note! We typically bring a bunch of folks from Concord. I came to speak at a meetup over at Flywheel Concord a couple of years ago to promote the conference.
What is genuinely interesting is how Hacker News moderators will edit user posts, such that it looks as if the user replied to another post originally, without ever making that clear. What other lies and manipulation do they come with? Directly editing the content of posts silently, no sign of being edited?
I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter.
I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth.
Substack doesn't have an API for composing a newsletter, but their rich text editor DOES accept copy-pasted data - and copy-paste is the universal API.
I really like this approach. I make similar distinctions between posts meant for email, posts that should appear in RSS, posts that belong on the homepage, and posts that should live under /archive without appearing on the homepage.
I use Substack for email distribution too. For the website side, I built an open-source blogging platform called Jant (https://jant.me) around these needs: posts appear on the homepage by default, posts marked as Featured are included in RSS, and posts can also be unlisted. It also syncs everything to GitHub as Markdown, in a repo that works as a complete Hugo site.
If I get it, you're basically using Substack as an email platform. So the blog (the "original") can use Wordpress, Ghost, whatever ; and this is the canonical place that all articles go to. But then you duplicate the content onto Substack so it gets pushed out as emails.
My understanding of what it means:
- the blog doesn't have its own subscription system ; you link out to Substack for that. So you must be massively losing out on blog-driven subscriptions because of the much higher friction (vs having the pop-ups directly on the blog)?
- all of your content is duplicated between the real blog and the Substack copy. How do you avoid Substack cannibalizing all of your blog's traffic, given that they are a bigger domain possibly better optimized for SEO?
I'm willing to take the hit to subscriber numbers for not having that kind of thing on my own site.
From an SEO perspective, I think I might be beating Substack comfortably.
My blog has a different page for each item, plus it ties them together with tags.
The Substack email is a full week of content in one go. I don't think that's particularly SEO-optimal.
Again though, I'm willing to take the risk. So far I've not seen any obvious downsides to this model, and I've been dual publishing in this way for a few years now.
At 66,000 messages/week, you’d actually be spending around $50-$80 monthly with SES and a VPS + database for handling bounces and unsubscribe requests.
... right, and then I'm responsible for maintaining that infrastructure, and I have to think about email deliverability as well.
Plus Substack discovery does carry some value - about 65% of my new subscribers come via the various Substack mechanisms, the rest are from my own site or "direct" (which I think means people landed on my substack directly and then chose to subscribe.)
I don’t know anything about the specific situation you’re referencing. That being said, getting mad at an organization, one that is built to be a “platform” for people to share their words, for not going out of its way to police which people share which words, seems to me to be unproductive at best, if not actively close minded and tribalistic.
Substack has gone out of its way to platform the right and has been very proud to work with folks like Andrew Tate, Graham Linehan, and anti-vaxxers whose disinfo helped kill tens of thousands of Americans.
Eh, I think you have a classification problem. Andrew Tate is far, far right and Linehan...this is the man who created "Father Ted"... is "right" just because he thinks men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and spaces? I'll leave out the issue of the massive numbers of people who were injured by the jab.
All I'll maintain here is that Substack is not in the business of censoring or deciding who gets to publish on their platform according to one group's political preferences.
>"just because he thinks men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and spaces"
You're telling on yourself with this one, transphobe.
Lineham is an anti-trans activist. There's quite literally a whole section on his Wikipedia page dedicated to it, in fact it's the longest section on there. He's practically dedicated his life to the cause.
There's a difference between thinking those thoughts, and posting about them publicly to your following while simultaneously advocating for violence against trans individuals.
Sure, tolerate Nazis, give them a place to share their words, let them be part of the mainstream, let them take part in elections, play their dirty tricks and form paramilitaries and win control of government. It's a shame that that leads to certain groups, like Jews, LGBTQ, non-whites, or immigrants getting exterminated, but that's just the price you have to pay for free speech.
Let's see what the man who coined the term paradox of tolerance had to say about this:
>In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
Oh no, Karl Popper is a Nazi. Quick punch him.
>non-whites
This meme needs to die. Nazis wanted to kill half of all whites, viz. everyone who lived East of the Oder and wasn't a German.
Alright, and killed or enslaved. I also missed the communists, the same treatment for them. We can accept that there may be differences in targets between one group of fascists and the next, it's really up to their Führer to decide.
That’s backwards. Society does not move forward despite free speech, rather because of it. The only way to truly move past harmful ideas and ideologies is to show those who would otherwise subscribe how dumb they are. You can try to quell them, but that just lends to their appeal, and results in those that do subscribe being more extreme and doing more extreme things. For a real world example, take someone who thinks that Nick Fuentes is a reasonable, respectable guy, and then show them the recent discussion between him and Hunter Biden, and see if they don’t at least get uncomfortable, unsure.
If this were true, far right mainstream media (eg Newsmax, NY Post) would not have the viewership and readership they enjoy.
In any case, few people here (and in general, IME) are suggesting that Nazis should have no platform whatsoever, only that we shouldn't choose to associate ourselves with those platforms -- especially when there are so many perfectly viable alternatives that don't occasionally promote Nazis to your readers.
The problem is not really Nazis saying despicable things, their so-called "free speech". The problem is that they are Nazis and will really do all these things if they get a chance. Why would you want to collaborate with Nazis, especially by giving them space on your platform where they can organize and publicize? Sure, collaborating with them in any other way is also bad, selling them food, giving them jobs, or whatever. It's not surprising that some people don't like collaborators any more than they like Nazis.
I'll put my money where my mouth is. We at Outpost will host your site on Ghost for a year for free and migrate all your substack subscribers, with the only caveats that 1) you put a tip jar link (either to Ghost's or Outpost's) at the end of every email with some text like support us being on an indie platform and 2) at the end of the year or earlier report how it went.
With 66k subscribers you could cover that without even really trying by setting up a $5/month donation tier or putting a tip jar on the site. With a tiny bit of effort, you could make thousands a month.
Substack lets you get away with sending that many emails without attempting to monetize because you pay them in clout and with your reader data.
I think they are getting the better deal given how good your writing is and your reputation.
And substack is free because they use YOU as their growth engine. Your newsletter is plastered with their branding and links to their app, not yours. If someone subscribes to pay for your publication via their app, they own the subscription, not you.
Ultimately, even if you own the email list, you’re sharecropping on their land.
They will email your list with their own promotional offers and marketing whenever they feel like it.
If we’ve proved anything in tech, it’s that consumers will fall for the trap of “free” every single time.
It's sort of disgusting that inbox clutter from a publishing service is the dominant delivery paradigm as opposed to browsers natively checking bookmarked RSS feeds.
Right which is why I'd only suggest the browser as an alternative. Imho a browser is something I open when I proactively am seeking information/entertainment and thereby fits blog reading better than email which is more like an interrupt.
I've not tried that, honestly it's such a quick process already that waiting for some kind of browser automation to copy and paste would likely be slower.
I'm one of the creators of Leaflet - https://leaflet.pub - also mentioned in another comment. We're making a publishing app kind of like Substack or Ghost, but connected to the open social ecosystem building on AT Protocol. There a lot of potential here, and a lot of tools that already exist.
We collaborated with other publishing apps (pckt & Offprint) to make Standard.site - https://standard.site - a simple set of standards for publishing interop that enables something like RSS but on top of a whole social network. More context: https://lab.leaflet.pub/3moomxyjssk2p
Others can leverage this to make e.g. a whole reader app where you can find everything people in your network are publishing: https://standard-reader.app
A key thing is it's very flexible, you can publish on Leaflet, or on a self-hosted blog, and make your content discoverable and subscribeable in the same way. And in either case, you own your content — even if you use Leaflet as your hosted CMS, published data lives in your PDS where you control it, and all the social graph stuff persists even if you stop using Leaflet or we ever shut down.
Self-hosting a website is great but also considerable overhead for many folks, and we want to make it easy to publish and still have control and avoid lock-in. We even see folks doing hybrid approaches, e.g. using Leaflet to publish (for easy to use CMS + nice social features) but also pulling published data to render directly on their own website.
It's very different from what you get with a concentrated single platform like Substack (or Instagram, YouTube, etc) as far as audience reach, and early days with the ecosystem, but I think it's valuable in a different way. It's more aligned with the open web, and importantly, it's more antifragile — there are many ways to reach people and interact with your readers, from Bluesky to Leaflet to other reader apps, search tools, etc. Network effects aren't there yet to the degree of Substack, but a lot of cool things are emerging and it feels like an exciting time to build here together.
haha yes! i built feedgrab.net but once it did what i wanted, i stopped building it. it just works. doesn't really make RSS cool again, but it does the job for me
RSS is great for informing readers of new content. Sadly only a few actually use it, except (unknowingly, for a large part of the population) for... Podcasts.
So, thinking out loud: you could offer people to subscribe to your website by publishing a RSS feed with dummy audio, using a link in the the episode description to get people to hop through to your website. And then you offer the appropriate "subscribe in iTunes / Spotify / generic podcasting app" buttons on your website page.
And then suddenly the masses can sign up to your updates! And they can easily unsubscribe! And you don't have to deal with email, and can use static file hosting! There'd even be a discovery inroad as presumably the Apples and Spotifies of this world will push it through the personalized recommendations pipe just as they would for any other podcast.
It's a bit subversive but it would work wouldn't it?
Good idea, and unfortunately one of those that would work only while it’s not popular. If it turns out to be good enough to become popular, here comes the enforcement.
It'd be hard to detect from structure. Episode descriptions can and do legitimately have links. And if/when it comes to deep inspection, instead of a dummy audio file one could use a TTS-ed audio version of the post, there's some legitimacy there. You can even flip it around and claim that the blogpost is the "audio transcription" "for those who want it".
But yeah let's not underestimate the power we're giving these platforms. If down the road it doesn't match the monetization strategy? Platform giveth, platform taketh.
As a writer who has been on the web for a long time, I no longer write much for the sake of the web. My personal website I took down this year because I didn't like the idea of AI snarfing up everything I wrote. I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. While I don't write only for money, I certainly write with the idea of needing a certain amount of money to keep on writing. The internet just doesn't offer that kind of environment anymore in my opinion.
I do like the Indie web, and to me, it is more just the way the internet was/has been/needs to be. What is missing are neutral kinds of payment layers/vendors that won't pull your funding if you say something someone somewhere doesn't like.
Same - I wrote on the web for 25 years (2000 to 2025). I can attribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of income to it. I no longer have any websites, as nothing came out of it for a couple years. ~90% of all my traffic ended up bots.
And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.
> I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage.
The real choke point is one step up the chain with payment processors, and since 9/11 and stricter KYC with banks, there's not a reliable, widely accepted path around those regulations. Cryptocurrency remains fringe. Running a self-hosted ghost or WordPress powered blog or newsletter will encounter the same bottleneck wherever money changes hands among average-Joes online.
Most internet providers I've seen around lately have clauses against hosting your own website on residential providers. That provides two choke points. I used to be a Monero fan before its Blockchain became the size of Cyberpunk 2077.
> clauses against hosting your own website on residential providers
If their standard residential Internet packages don't offer truly static IP addresses, then it at least makes nominal sense to say: if you want to host your own website from your home, you pay some annual fee for a static IP that is not part of normal residential provision of service. But that can also quickly twist into charging exorbitant rates or pushing people hosting personal websites on their own hardware to pay for business plans they don't truly need.
Whenever I see Substack or Medium URLs, I avoid clicking them. They are so spammy with their call to subscribe, that it's not even worth me visiting them. People recognize quality, and they don't need to be pressured to subscribe. The websites I visit every day never asked me to come back.
Interesting. I feel the same way about Medium - it’s mostly a bunch of undergrads and tech bootcamp students regurgitating basic tutorials.
But in my experience, Substack is much higher quality. I actually read several Substack blogs regularly because they’re better and more consistent than most blogs I come across. YMMV, I guess, but I have at least half a dozen blogs I actively follow on Substack, compared to maybe 1 elsewhere.
There is a list of a few websites that I subconsciously think only have garbage articles and never really pay serious attention to them: quora, medium and substack.
Surely dev.to also filled with low level articles, but at least people there spent effort to write articles then gave it for free. But those users of the previous websites mostly write it for money.
Don't get me wrong, quality articles deserve to have money in return, you can't get far without sustainable business. But writing for the sake of writing (and earning money for the quantity not quality) is what is causing those websites to be filled with shallow contents.
Everyone's experience will be different, but I will say that I have not received significant network effects traffic on Substack nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content.
In short, I think that for the vast majority of casual posters, the aspirational upsides of joining a network are going to fall flat. Like with most aggregators, the popular things tend to be promoted more.
So, for me at least, if I'm going to get very low traffic, I'd prefer to get that very low traffic on my own website. It might be a pyrrhic victory but I sleep just a little better knowing that as one of the 1% that actually creates stuff, I did what little I could.
Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source. Maybe there is a network effect on substack that makes it easier to get these external links, but I doubt most actual readers are coming from inside the substack ecosystem.
> Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source.
I think the parent was talking about having a substack, not reading things on Substack.
But I also think the direct network effects don't come from casuals (other than that they repost to social networks.) People who are paying for a substack will look at others because it doesn't involve another signup or separate bill, they can just add the subscription for a buck or two. Now they can tour the subscriber content, and they can drop it after a little while if it doesn't ultimately appeal to them with just a click or three.
For non-subscribers, a substack isn't any different from any other blog.
Maybe I'm an outlier, but I find that my main reason for discontinuing Ground News/Nebula/whatever is that I subscribe aspirationally and never actually make time to consume the content. One year I got my partner and I subscriptions to Masterclass and at the end of the year neither one of us had watched a single video.
Basically, I don't know anyone who is ever bored. Who the hell has time to click on and read random posts? The entire value of HN is that other smart people surface the top 1% of 1% of stuff I'd probably find interesting.
The notion of reading Substack posts just because I'm a subscriber seems like fantasy.
My two cents here is that if you're trying to growth hack yourself, you need to be on a platform that's also growth hacking. Building an audience anywhere is genuinely hard. Algorithmic feeds like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. force you to play a game they control and that may not align with your content. Medium, substack, etc. will build your audience only to the extent that it aligns with their goals. Hosting your own blog means somehow getting traffic to it -- which might mean playing the google search game, which then depends on aligning with user queries and getting your site ranked. Or it may mean somehow driving traffic to your blog, such as from a newsletter or social site. But that brings us back to either algorithmic feeds or newsletter products. Don't think there's an easy answer here and I bet YMMV depending on the type of content you have, how much of audience you already have, etc.
I tried the reverse -- syndicating content on medium that we publish on our blog. 0 impressions, literally, for 5 posts that got some readership on our blog.
That’s exactly right. Finding ways to get paid for your work, and all the very complicated way taxes interact with it all, unless you’re going all-in on ads, is a messy problem that people will happily centralize for.
And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.
I follow a very prolific open-source/FOSS podcasting network.
All of their infrastructure from the very bottom to the very top is FOSS - except their membership program. It links to a third-party which processes payments compliantly.
They've attempted a pivot to funding the network via BTC/Lightning but clearly that's polarizing to a lot of people even though it better aligns with their philosophy.
I'm not a lawyer; but I believe that even if they take payment through BTC, etc, they're going to need to take sales tax, etc, based on the location that their subscriber is ... which means they need to handle the tax hell that comes with it, so they'll find themselves better off with a Merchant of Record that can handle that for them ... which is almost certainly proprietary because ... it's a big mess.
I've been listening to the network for decades now and directly credit my IT career to the people who've been platformed on the various shows over the years. Lots of great content.
This is true for patreon but not substack. I personally know people who blog on substack not because they care about monetization — I mean, they hardly get any readers who are not a friend already — but because it is "the place" to put long form writing. I can't see the exact subscription number of substack, but if Pareto principle holds, I'd suspect most substack blogs don't have a monetization problem to solve because no one pay for them.
I’m the founder of Tertulia so take this with appropriate grain of salt.
I (unsurprisingly) agree authors should own their own website and email list (btw based on hundreds of data points we know converts about 100 to 1 versus social followers for book sales) but the issue is how to make it effortless to set up and maintain a website.
We built a system where you enter one ISBN and we instantly import your entire book catalog, including books, reviews, metadata, author bio, etc. Btw one book to all the authors’ books is not trivial problem (see how often Amazon gets it wrong) due to lack of universal author ID. We’ve since built author-specific email marketing, ecommerce, etc all on a domain each author owns (we make it seamless). Now that we have 9k+ happy (65 NPS) authors we’re adding author cross promotion for distribution but the author’s owned domain and capturing their own emails remains at center.
Anyways if anyone wants to check it out for free (no CC needed) would welcome feedback from HN community. https://authors.tertulia.com/
I debated this for longer than I would like, and in the end regretted not joining Substack soon enough. I keep a personal blog since 2012 [1] which, in its last iteration, is hosted in Ghost. There is something really reassuring in knowing that you own a space in the internet, that nobody can shut you down, and that ceteris paribus it will survive till eternity.
However, discoverability is indeed a problem. If in the past we had to play the SEO game in order to get some traffic (I would crosspost in Reddit but the amount of uncalled hate I would get from an unqualified audience hardly pays off – I manage to make to the top of HN once though), now it's even worse with AI.
I agree with those who say that as much as we like to say we write for ourselves (and I do think this is true), it's as important to have contact with the public. In Le vie intellectuele Fr. Sertillanges would argue that critics help you shape the argument and make it clearer and more correct. Therefore, having a distribution channel is important. After all, if all you want is to brain dump or write as an exercise, write it in Obsidian or similar software, connect it to Git and be done with it.
Now, after I started my Substack [2] I was able to attract over ~2.3k subs to date. It's true that a lot of that came from other channels (like my YouTube channel), but in the past it was always slow and Ghost newsletter never really worked well for me. In Substack I often get recommendations from other writers, and you can also refer to people you respect as well.
If Substack ever ceases to allow you to export your posts or subscribers, then I agree the network effect won't be as decisive. Currently, I write my drafts in Obsidian so I always have a local copy, then copy, paste and refine in the Substack editor (so it looks optimized there), and press publish.
Exporting your subscriber list isn't perfect. I did it after moving to https://tuhat.net, and then after posting from tuhat, got emails from subscribers asking who I was and why I was writing to them. The majority of said subscribers, came from an article I wrote about leaving substack, so you'd think they'd have figured it out.
Some of them were far less polite, never mind that it would have taken them less time to click unsubscribe then writing some insulting email to someone they chose to follow.
I recently started to write newsletters about Hamburg (https://alsterrunde.com). Before doing that I also considered Substack but seeing that I have to pay 50$ for just using my domain was a no-go. In the end, I ended up with my friend's hosted Ghost solution (https://www.synapsmedia.com).
If you already have a Substack, you can also easily migrate to Ghost. Since it is open source, you can also host it on Hetzner, if you want to manage it yourself.
I wrote this for my own self-hosted blog a few years ago:
> My goal is to write good blog posts, and µstack exists for the purpose of making it as easy as possible for me to write good blog posts. As far as I can tell, there’s no meaningful correlation between the quality of work published on a website, and the amount of engagement that website receives. I could track clicks or traffic or RSS feed queries, but that data would only tell me how many people are reading what I write - it wouldn’t tell me if my writing is any good.
I feel like it's relevant here. The OP tacitly assumes that engagement is the goal, that your purpose in writing is to get eyes on what you wrote. I argue that, for most writers, the goal is self-expression. If that drives engagement, cool. If it doesn't, the purpose has still been fulfilled.
If I were to provide an addendum to the OP, it would be this: consider the goals of your blog, artistic and otherwise. The answer to "what platform is right for me?" might be no platform at all.
If you make good art (or blog posts), people will find you, "platform" or not. The internet is cool that way. Eyes do not good art make.
I feel like the internet used to be "cool that way", but it's not anymore. You don't do stuff for "engagement", but you probably want some audience and feedback, otherwise why bother publishing your work at all. Nowadays almost all audience got sucked up by the black hole of social media and LLMs, and most authors just scream into the void.
The linked article "What I learned from one year of Substack" [1] perfectly sums up my experience. I can't read the article because I only see a coercive demand to subscribe first. Perhaps that's the joke.
I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but like ‘oh great now I gotta deal with this’. So that’s why Medium in the past and now Substack etc end up as fallbacks
A custom domain and GitHub hosting has been fine for me. You pay the time cost of setting up a static site, but I’d take that over Wordpress. Writing articles is a markdown file and a push. If you need to draft in private, keep it offline. It gives me a place where I can keep a resume and a portfolio, I control the design and I don’t pay for traffic. You don’t even need a custom domain name.
A different kingdom to be sure, but you can always pack your bags and push the repository elsewhere. There’s something quite pleasing about having everything handled in git too.
given that wordpress.com is just managed hosting i wonder if other providers can bring that cost down. installing it yourself is trivial though because of Softaculous, and web hosting is much cheaper.
Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess.
But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it.
Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0.
If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.
Your point being? These thousands of hosting providers all charge around $5 or more to host your Wordpress instance, because that’s what it actually costs to run Wordpress.
A more modern CMS can bring costs down by serving pages from a CDN cache and, most importantly, selectively re-rendering only pages that changed. This is hard to do with Wordpress because plugins can essentially render anything and depend on any data.
Substack gives a really nice exposure though, unlike medium and other platforms.
It's very hard to gain readers now on independent websites. Google search is dead (very few people now search for tech content), social media platforms penalize you for posting links and so on.
You can get a few thousand subscribers on Substack just by being consistent and interacting with other people. Now try gaining 1000 subscribers to an e-mail newsletter or RSS from your personal blog. People who tried it know that 5,000 views on your blog can convert to a few subscribers, and you need to get those 5000 somehow first.
A lot of people just repost their articles to substack for a reason. It's not forbidden. You can repost them from your personal blog.
This is why it'd be great if bloggers more frequently provided topical, off-site recommendations in post footers. It's functionally like Substack's internal links but connects the open web.
I think from a technical perspective, newsletters are a solved problems with lots of options as you've mentioned.
Substack thrives because it's built a reputation for having well-reasoned or engaging voices in a newsletter format. They pushed a big campaign to onboard writers like Bill Bishop (Sinocism) onto the platform early on. Because of that, newer writers are likely seeking to tap into the network effects/discovery systems that comes with having big names on the platform.
People log onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, etc. because the people they're interested are already on the platform, and the platform provides a recommendation system that allows newer "creators" to tap into an existing audience for others in their niche.
I get that we all want people to be on open platforms but I feel like the really staunch part of the open platforms only crowd is not taking the time to understand why people like platforms like substack.
I agree, very aware it's way more than just the publishing / email tools! Also posted a top-level comment about building alternatives with https://leaflet.pub and https://standard.site - and yes I think really important to consider the full list of things you get with Substack: blog + email, easy to customize, monetization, social features + network, all in one platform, long tail of features…
Did a short talk on this at a local meetup recently, basically on how we might collectively re-create the entire stack of what Substack offers, in an open ecosystem, with a strong focus on network / distribution, more so than just features.
It's a tall order but I do think there's a big opportunity here beyond what any single app can or should tackle, in building an open alternative to the whole longform publishing stack, combining the tools and the social network side. AT Protocol and the Atmosphere (ecosystem of folks building on it) are pretty well positioned here. Lots of nice ways to get autonomy and ownership with web publishing + distribution and social affordances at the same time.
Of course a big challenge in bootstrapping the network and building the cultural footprint and giving folks flexible ways to make money and reach new readers, but I'm encouraged by how much progress we've made collectively just this past year.
I resonate with the author's point that I can modify my own website to my will.
I use hugo to build my website and I wrote my own theme. It's clunky, but control over the design/build lets me:
- Put PyIodide into posts to make ML code explainers interactive (https://iahmed.me/post/poor_mans_autograd/)
- Inject custom widgets to illustrate theoretical ideas (https://iahmed.me/post/surprise-derivation-entropy/)
- Have multiple layouts to suit my needs (https://iahmed.me/resume/ rendered from json at build time for SEO)
On the flip side, I'm not good at SEO :) It works because SEO is not my primary goal, but I'd love to have a bigger audience. The flexibility I'm afforded is an ok compromise.
Natsoc newsletters are apparently fine, but showing porn is too much and you'll be moderated. Go on, tell me how one is more harmful to kids than the other.
There's an exact parallel with business owners - in my geographic region (BR) at least - in general. It still surprises me how many small and even medium-sized businesses don't bother registering their own domain name anymore, preferring instead to rely entirely on an Instagram page.
In my mind this always went without saying, but realistically I know most people never think long term about this sort of thing. I've been hosting my own web content for nearly a decade now, including a 6 year old blog, and I've always kept it there only, using social media to advertise it.
Frankly I think self hosting is super easy in 2026 (and virtually free unless you want personalized domains or subdomains), especially for simple web content, but I also understand the aversion to it and at least hope that more and more people will spend their money on VPS (or other hosting services like Wordpress), rather than these random websites that appear overnight like Substack.
I agree! That's why I built Pagecord. Like Substack it's a blog with a mailing list, but it's also your personal website (pages, for example) with a custom domain. Also, source available.
Most people will defer to Substack because (A) the brand, and (B) it can be monetised which is probably the biggest draw.
Maybe I need to bring monetisation to Pagecord? :)
I used to pay Mailchimp $100+/month and would write 3-4 articles per month. It seemed illogical to me how much mailchimp would charge.
I now have a substack + a wordpress website. An article goes to both places, and substack acts as a subscriber growth + email distribution tool for me.
Substack is free because you act as a growth/distribution engine for them.
They plaster your emails with ads to download their app and will even email your list whenever they feel like it and when you leave they will still email your list substack-related content and offers.
When someone subscribed via the app btw, they own that person, not you.
If you’re okay with that trade off, fine, but I thought we learned this lesson about the trap of “free” with the social media companies before…
Recently, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s surprisingly easy these days. I already have a domain on Cloudflare, and I had Codex build a simple blogging system for me. I write everything in Markdown, the site is hosted on Cloudflare, comments are stored in Cloudflare D1, and all articles live in the repository as Markdown files. GitHub Actions takes care of publishing automatically and also performs regular backups. To reduce comment spam, I use Cloudflare Turnstile, which has been working really well. For comment moderation, I protect the admin interface with Cloudflare Zero Trust, using email-based authentication, so I don’t need to build or maintain my own authentication system. Overall, the setup has been incredibly simple, reliable, and has required very little ongoing maintenance.
This is not a simple setup. Most people would be just fine with a static site that can be hosted for free on Netlify, Cloudfare Pages, GitHub Pages and so on.
Thank you! I don't like substack at all. I hate the typography overall. It's not hard to power up a static website, especially these days using Jekyll, Hugo, or hundreds of other such framework in so many different languages.
The only thing good about Substack is to find new people to read from, but I'm less inclined to follow them for long because who knows how Substack changes things.
For anyone who’s interested in this stuff: I made a FOSS commenting system for websites that accepts comments via email. https://r3ply.com
You combine your website/blog with that and you have a pretty nice setup that you own. You can even use RSS to allow people to subscribe to replies to comments, threads, a page, etc…
I'd consider Substack if it had options to make my blog the canonical. But AFAIK that isn't possible; the only way of doing it would be for Substack to be the canonical and my blog the "copy", and that seems dumb from a future thinking perspective?
Does SEO even matter these days? Google Search seems to be on the way out as the dominant discovery mechanism. Really a better discovery mechanism is what writers need that's more aligned with with readers and writers and less with platform owners and advertisers.
I agree and am working on it. It’s been a stream of progress after launching my comedy writings under https://yelluw.com
I’ve focused mostly on writing by postponing the actual editorial/cms side of things. I’d rather prove that I can write and write well than spend all my energy getting the perfect cms setup.
The one issue I have today is copyright and all the extreme scraping being done by ai companies. I wonder how others are dealing with that.
In system after system, people enthusiastically swarm to something which is easy to use. Then, after enshittification, they hang around too long because it's so hard to extract and send the meaningful data and metadata elsewhere.
If you write all your stuff in a location you control, and syndicate that out to the popular platform of the day, you can minimize your loss.
An astoundingly large percentage of my personal technical policies are guided by the idea that I want to minimize my losses after the next sudden yet inevitable betrayal.
I've been blogging for 22 years now. At the beginning I could tell I had a relatively steady audience based on frequent comments (when comments on blogs were a thing). These died off over the years. Then, in 2020, I implemented my own unobtrusive subscription mechanism and email distribution to try to regain such an audience. And... it's pretty disappointing. I've gotten less than 200 subscribers that way; conversions just don't happy.
Then I "switched" to Substack 3 years ago and the audience growth is real. I'm approaching 2000 subscribers (some of which are paid, which always surprises me and I appreciate), and these keep growing organically although I'm sure a large portion of which are fake. It's hard to say it doesn't work or isn't worth it.
Now... spoiler: I never "switched" to Substack. I continue to write all of my content on my website _first_, with all of the features it had before, but now I copy/paste the content into Substack and distribute it that way. It's painful, but I have scars from when I moved off of Medium and want to ensure I "own" the originals.
For what it's worth, I have a markdown-based website with a domain I own, and I stubbornly link to that website only, treating substack as just a temporary distribution channel.[^1] And I am constantly, endlessly asking myself if all the extra friction I've added to my life is worth it.
[^1]: I can't stand how slow and tracking-heavy substack is, but the problem of "send email and not get filtered as spam" is non-trivial.
If you can generate traffic to your website while having a deep email list as well of people who are alerted when you write, you essentially make yourself unable to be censored or deplatformed. Large companies want you there so they make money from your content, make your own platform and get your own users and you have the keys to the kingdom.
I am quite sad that Kagi Smallweb excludes Substack. I understand that less technical writers have started moving to Substack both to build an audience and have access to effective publishing tools, but it feels like I'm missing out on some really interesting new perspectives, similar to early Medium.
We have made peace with the dichotomy of a computer delivering AAA titles at 4k 144Hz while simultaneously struggling to render a few hundred comments on Substack.
Yeah, even if the website itself gets less traffic than the places you syndicate the content to, it's at least a stable home base that's there if those platforms fall apart. Are you posting something that corporations or celebrities don't like/want to see shared? Then posting it on your own site means that the buck stops with you, and they'll have to force you to take it down in court rather than relying on advertiser pressure/'encouraging' the platform to ignore fair use. Did you do something controversial that means platforms don't want to deal with you or individuals want to ruin your life? Having your own site means you can generally tell them to pound sand. And there's no worries regarding things like forced logins, forced ads, obnoxious cookie banners (especially if you don't need to collect personal info anyway), age verification restrictions, etc.
Plus there's just a level of control over the design and features that you can't get elsewhere. Want to make the site look completely unlike any other? It's 100% doable, as plenty of blogs posted here show very well. Want to add a new feature like polls or surveys or quizzes or interactive infographics or what not? You don't need a third party service or some premium account, you just add it yourself.
Running a website is like owning a home rather than renting one. You decide what furniture, what colours, what utilities and service providers, whether you want pets, etc.
I kind of agree with the author, but having such places is very convenient for most people considering most people do not know how to make websites. Yes, it is easy nowadays, but it is still a hurdle for many.
Specifically on Substack though: I immediately close if a link I clicked is Substack. Many reasons for that. I find it very unpleasant to read stuff there, because of that banners and general design of the website. It all look generic and I hate generic. Second reason and even more important for me is that Substack platforms Nazis and white supremacists and they have apparently no problem about it.
Honestly, I shut down my webiste and Medium, then moved to Substack because they solved the "get paid for my writing" problem.
In 2022, Medium was defacto blogging platform and getting into their paid program was close to impossible.
In the first 2 days of setting up Subtack I got a 5 dollar deposit from my first paying reader. I couldn't have done that on either Medium or my personal blog.
Another reason for having a designed website instead of just a Substack is marketing. When I visit a site and see that it’s a Substack I don’t want to stay and explore. It feels generic and that hurts the writing. Making a custom site isn’t much trouble, especially these days so defaulting to Substack feels a little unconsidered
Frankly, if writing is becoming a serious business for you, it's probably better to work across ALL of Substack/personal site/X/etc. They're all worthwhile distribution and monetization channels and can serve different purposes.
My biggest grievance with Substack is that the font treatment (kerning is way off), coloring, spacing, etc of all of the posts is difficult to read. I can't read anything on Substack without a 3rd party reader tool. This is ironic because the core competency of a publishing tool is ensuring that your audience can read the content.
Every time I see a substack article I simply do not open it, because if I do, especially on mobile, 90% of the screen will be covered for popups banners and what not
I run an independent technical homepage. The monthly cost is about $65 USD. Of course, it's money I can spend on a hobby, but it's still quite a lot. The only reason I can manage it is because I'm a programmer—I can handle things like caching strategies and various other tedious tasks. I get about 600 visitors a day.(The site could be hosted much more cheaply. I deliberately run a more involved architecture because part of its purpose is to serve as an operational portfolio. I needed public evidence that I could design, deploy, monitor, and operate a real system over time. Generally, for a site of about my size, around $40 a month should be enough.)
Writing itself takes a lot of effort.
First:
1.You have to define your target audience.
2.You have to choose topics they'll find interesting.
3.You need to collect materials.
4.You read through the materials, build the structure, and go through multiple drafts and revisions.
Even a short post usually takes about a week. And even after all that, will people actually read it? Not really. So I have to promote it on external sites like HN and Reddit, and keep updating the sitemap until my site starts showing up in Google search results.
The problem is that most people want to make money through writing. That's completely understandable. With the economy getting tougher, even hobbies cost money.
The issue is that once you step away from platforms like Substack and Medium, it becomes much harder for people to find your content, and you lose the community itself. In fact, that's the real strength of Substack and Medium—people are already there to spend money because they're earning from the same ecosystem. But if you move to an independent site, even putting up ads can cause strong backlash (especially since Google often shows low-quality ads—like porn ads—to people who don't share their personal data).
In my case, I created my site because I needed a portfolio that made me look professional. Since I don't have experience at prestigious companies or universities, and I've mostly moved between small contractors, I needed something to show that I know certain things, have relevant experience, and have built actual products. (In the Korean market, the only work available to programmers without capital is small NDA-bound jobs.)
On the other hand, people with good careers don't need to take this risk—their reputation comes from successful products they've worked on in the market.
So I needed a metric like 'I run my own site, it uses MSA, and I have experience running it stably over the long term.' Of course, I could list the projects I've worked on, but most of them don't have a strong track record of market success. So I think that unless you're in a special situation, it's better to stay within existing writing communities.
There are guides but it amounts to "use popular services to link to your website". Post snippets on the bird apps, social media hellscapes, and aggregators like this one. Duplicate your content on the blogging services. Have an RSS feed and submit it to discovery engines and web directories/rings. And send me a link so I can index you.
Depending on how often you write copy and paste to “elsewhere” is the easy answer.
Substack really wants you to use them as a primary publisher so they don’t make it easy to programmatically put content up. Other platforms have varying levels of ease around this.
Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read.
So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web. There's a lot of value in backing up your Substack subscribers' emails so that you can move somewhere else down the line, and the nice thing about Substack is that they let you do that. If they stop, that's a trap.
> Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read.
How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future? That's the path basically every other platform has gone down.
The entire pitch of Substack is "You can export the email addresses of your current subscribers at any time"
So if they stop doing the "email my subscribers whenever I post" step, another service will fill the gap pretty quick.
Substack notes is non exportable; the newsletter now no longer have a link to read it on your site on substack and instead link to the substack app, and subscriptions started in the app pay Substack through Apple and Google and you can't export them.
Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
Thanks for this.
I can hear Substack marketing saying that “We don’t have any intention to put you into a vendor-lock.”
I had a lot of discussions with companies about their marketing.
Why do you upload your events’ photos to FB instead of your site?
Why do you have news on LI feed and don’t make it a post on your site as well?
Do you think they can hear it? :)
Substack is going to become a similar service as FB, LI are… no possibility to export your data easily or not at all.
They've already started requiring you to be signed in to view content, so I'd argue that have already become, not going to become.
Not sure about LinkedIn, but Facebook does let you export all your data as a bit monolithic zip file.
because they have to due to EU Laws every business operating in the EU has to allow this.
Every single thing substack does reeks of growth hacking. I suspect that it will only get worse. For that reason alone I chose to avoid it for my newsletter.
Can't you link to whatever you want in your own blog post?
If Substack stops supporting that feature you would end up losing all of your subscribers when you move to the alternative unless you happen to have an up to date export.
Which is trivial. Even once a month is enough.
How many writers are even thinking about that though? If they shut it off tomorrow, how many would have a list within the last year?
I'm pretty sure all of them. Because they'll never shut it without advance warning, due to the backlash.
Of course they wouldn't give warning.
Backlash is almost always good publicity.
And a warning would make their content providers more able to leave.
Of course, if they were given warning they would export their subscribers. I am talking about if it was cut off without warning. I do not think the majority would have a list within the last year.
Two answers to that:
1) That's on them (those not exporting their lists as backup).
2) Almost zero chance happening without warning anyway.
Until they make it more difficult to export lol that’s the real canary in the coal mine if you ask me.
The coal mine is already inhospitable
Do they do it right now? How far into the future can you plan for? In the long run we all die.
Your host can kick you and DNS can block you.
When they will, you’ll be free to take action.
Yeah and having a site is a way to mitigate that risk...
There's enough demand for the feature that if they stop supporting it, they won't be able to compete against anyone offering the feature.
Gmail has categories. So they already are.
That’s when you leave.
> How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future?
You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?
Hackers always use this argument against everything because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.
Thus they argue that you should not trust your things to other people but do it yourself, because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
>because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.
Nope. At best you merely know what your current self intends to do in the future. Whether you'll do them then, or whether you'll even still want to do them then, or be able to do them then, or have regretted ever wanting to do them, and many other such things, we don't know.
I'm not sure if you're arguing against self-determination and for serfdom. Or just making a narrow correction to one sentence in an argument that was perhaps slightly too definitive.
But obviously the key principle is about retaining control over your business, income stream, relationship with your readers, or whatever it is you value. Sure, I change my mind and make mistakes. But I don't think that's a good argument for handing over control to some other entity which is equally changeable and fallible, but not primarily incentivised by my well-being.
Nope. As per my second paragraph which you may not have gotten to:
>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Furthermore the phrase "some things" does not actually mean all things.
So again, trying to put it another way to clarify anything that may have been unclear:
You can be reasonably certain at the time that you need to make a decision that you will try to do what you believe is the best for you. I will now not go on to make an exhaustive list showing every way that you in the future may not do what is right for you because it is normally understood that there are numerous ways in which the reasonable expectations of people can be countered but nonetheless, the reasonable expectations will still tend to hold more than any of the countering scenarios. This is why they are the reasonable expectations, while the countering scenarios are the notable exceptions that often show up in sensational news reports and fiction.
And finally I should note this comes down to the principle, which I would have thought was clear from my previous post but evidently not, that if you can reasonably expect that future you will try to do what future you thinks is best for them, you can just as reasonably expect that the future corporation you are buying a service from will try to what the future corporation thinks is best for them, without giving much consideration for what is best for you.
I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
on edit: Note in my first post I referred to major illness, because major illness, including mental illness, is one of the most common ways in which people end up not attempting to do what is best for themselves.
>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Regardless of major illness or not, people do stupid things, self destructive things, ill-thought things, impulsive things all the time. At best they'll do "what they think is best" not "what is best" for themselves. And frequently not even that, as people still do all kinds of things they know are bad for them but can't stop themselves anyway.
But even if it was correct, "you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future" is not really strong as an argument against the grandparent's:
"You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?"
The grantparent's argument is about not knowing what you'll be doing in concrete terms, not about merely knowing some abstract guiding principle like "you'll still want to do something you feel is best for you then".
>I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
Even so, that's worth acting only if the pain of future corporation pulling some shit later on is bigger than the convenience you still get before that, or easier than what you'll lack going without its services.
Also if the cost of just dumping their ass then when they DO turn, and moving to another player, is big.
Its the terminating argument for FOSS hackers. When there is no good argument left, they fall onto that.
"You're only going to get 20 years of use out of this proprietary service before you'll need to spend a few hours switching off! You must switch now!"
You get 3 years and then you cannot switch off, your thing is simply destroyed.
Substack has been around for a decade. The core value is also easily swappable.
It is just risk assessment and mitigation. Some risks are acceptable for some people and they do not need the mitigation. But for others it is not acceptable and they would find solutions.
> You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future?
You absolutely can know something about what someone will do in the future. You gain those insights by looking at their past and present behavior and the behavior of others in similar circumstances. Hackers tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can often see where things are heading. Enshittification is a pretty smart bet.
You can do whatever research you like, but when you attempt to apply it to predicting the future, you're still speculating. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
So your ex girlfriend cheated on you and now you reject all contact with women because you know that "sooner or later" she's going to cheat on you? In my ears it sounds the same when hackers say you can never buy anything or use any service, because "sooner or later" it will go to crap.
It's probably easy being a cynic, because you can always wait for decades (as another commenter argued) until you are right. In the meanwhile you have missed out on life - for no personal benefit at all.
Allow me to translate: “It a near certainty that they will fuck you over eventually; the question is will it be next year, next decade, or will you win the lottery?”
> Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. Substack allows for exporting posts (which would be good to do regularly just for backups in case of (account) compromise):
* https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037466012-...
so if you ever feel like the company is acting questionably, you can take that file and bring it in elsewhere, e.g.
* https://wordpress.com/support/import-from-substack/
> I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com.
I thought about this question when I recently started writing a few articles on Substack.
I chose not to use my own domain, even though I have a few.
Why? I want my writing to outlive me.
When I am no longer able to pay for domain renewals, my own domains will expire. Hopefully {my-hn-username}.substack.com will still be around.
Time will tell.
This strategy for your legacy would not have been successful with stratoscope.geocities.com (RIP 2009), skyblog.com/stratoscobe (died in 2023 with no data export path offered), Posterous, MSN Spaces, Vine, and many others.
I am willing to bet that most of my domains will outlive "username.substack.com".
>{my-hn-username}.substack.com will still be around
I wouldn't be so sure. Platforms come and go, they change domains (e.g. Twitter), they merge, they die.
> Why? I want my writing to outlive me.
Donate to archive.org.
Excellent point! In fact I do have an automatic monthly donation to The Internet Archive.
Of course the URLs all change in archived pages, but at least the content is there for anyone motivated enough to find it.
A funny coincidence... I registered geary.com (my last name) in 1994, and just used it for email. A few years later I got a letter from a group of civic boosters in Geary, Oklahoma. They even enclosed a Geary Water Tower T-shirt which I still have. They saw that I didn't have a website up on this domain and asked me if they could have it.
I explained that this would be impractical since it was also my email address.
So they registered gearyok.com instead and put up a website built around Java applets. Oops.
But it got me thinking. I put up a static page (frequently edited by me) that I called Geary Central: A Guide to Gearys on the Net. This page is still up:
https://www.geary.com/oldsite.html
Naturally I gave Geary, Oklahoma top billing for inspiring this.
A few years after that I changed geary.com to a MoinMoin wiki devoted to the same topic, and moved the old static page to its current location.
Just a few days ago, someone emailed me about how they had stumbled onto my oldsite.html page and enjoyed this "blast from the past".
In 2011, my old ISP decommissioned the server I had the wiki on. I was planning to migrate it to something more modern like Drupal, but the time and effort weren't worth it to me at the time.
I did find the latest version of the "new" Geary Central on archive.org and shared it in my reply:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110927053309/http://www.geary....
It's very unlikely Substack will still be around when you die, if you're younger than 60.
What if I'm 74? ;-)
If you're in the US, average life expectancy is 79, so it will probably be fine for the next ~5 years.
If you're in Canada, or a G7/EU nation, it's in the 80s, so you may have 10+ years to go, so the chances of Substack being around in the same form for that time period is lower.
What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?
What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.
My blog used to be RSS only, because I thought email subscriptions were a plot of "content creators" and not something readers actually wanted... until one of my readers told me he really recommended adding email as an option. I did, and a surprising number of people subscribed since then.
Yes, I have found out the hard way that an entire generation or two of internet users has lost the ability to visit a website to see what's there. They rely on having notifications or emails come in so that they can react to things rather than proactively go seek them out. I tend to eschew push the forms of communication, for the same reason my mobile isn't covered in a colorful grid of apps: I want to actively be choosing what I do rather than having a set of options put in front of me that I get to pick from.
But that's all just a rant. Your core point is completely correct. If you want readers, you have to cater to this 'push' mentality, I think.
Ok, so if you want to read https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/, which is now publishing less than once a month, you prefer to refresh the website once a week hoping there's an article to read?
That's unimaginable to me. Most of the writers I read publish infrequently. Email is great. I don't have to be on any social media. Articles come in and I can read them at my leisure.
For a decade or~so I subscribe to newsletters and had skip inbox rules that archived them in a folder about the subject. Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them. Not sure if that means it works or not.
> Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them
Most people don't read most newsletters. Some people read some.
This Saturday I sent an email. It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people. 780 people clicked on a link.
I tweeted the same email as a link and got pretty good engagement! 20 likes, 2 retweets – that's decent for me these days. It was seen 1400 times. 78 people clicked on a link.
I have roughly the same number of followers as I do email subscribers.
Hahaha it could well be that people are merely hoarding newsletter emails. I hope readers derive _some_ value from the emails, but since I'm not doing it to drive up "engagement metrics" I don't really mind.
There was a time when google toolbar had a search gmail button. I would use it to open gmail using whatever query was inthere. It happened quite often that it found newsletters matching the query. It takes quite a bit of hoarding to accomplish.
Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:
Then mail you the requested article. With RE: and the same title they will even be threaded.My RSS reader accepts email newsletters so I subscribe using that and funnel them all into feedbin
> What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?
Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web.
> What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts?
On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
> I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.
Pick Medium, it's great ... if you want a paywall to turn away half your visitors!
The author has the option to enable that or not.
And (judging by the number of Medium articles I've been turned away from) 95% of all authors leave it on.
Sure, but my comment was being given directly to a user who asked for a platform that allowed X, Y and Z. I was providing them with an answer that met their stated criteria. I don’t see how other people’s configuration is of any concern.
...I use email notifications. I follow very few people (fewer than 10), so I'm always happy when an email pops up letting me know they've written something.
I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
It's not really a counterpoint when it's addressed in the article.
"The biggest pushback I hear from writers is: “But my website doesn’t have an audience! Substack does.”
But you don’t have to completely abandon social media or platforms like Substack to protect your autonomy (personally, I prefer the word sovereignty but it does sound a tad dramatic)."
oh I can tell you that lately, hundreds of bots are very much visiting my website every day in volumes that I have never seen in the past... Unsure that's a good news though
Hundreds a day is nothing. Unless they cause a problem, you don't need to do anything.
The LLMs love your site!
> much visiting my website every day
The same thing is happening on one of my Blogger instances, the one where I publish about a very niche interest (old floor-mill buildings from the Romanian countryside). Most of the hits are coming from countries like Vietnam and Singapore, most of them associated with Android use, so I think it's a new-ish thing that Google Analytics' anti-bot/anti-spam algorithm just can't (won't?) catch.
I'm outside the loop so please forgive me, but what is different between substack and a self managed mailing list?
I've been subscribed to a few website/blogs newsletters for years and they appear to work fine, and I think the owners are not particularly technical, there's WordPress plugins.
Substack is trying to turn itself into a social network, so comments on substack posts by other substack bloggers let people find other blogs. This is why half the comments on popular substacks are from other bloggers casually mentioning the articles they wrote.
It also means that if you comment on a substack, other people can find all the comments you made on every substack, by default.
Substack is free - so there are no hosting costs. Everything is managed for you.
There is a community there already - I’m not sure how useful it is but it’s there.
You can charge for newsletters - this is particularly popular for finance type things.
I think you're conflating two things. You can absolutely have your own website, and still use Substack. Then if you do have to move off Substack, you aren't "moving" in the sense that your URLs remain the same.
Getting a list of your existing subscribers' emails from Substack in order to migrate notifications to your new platform (hosted behind the same domain name you own) is of course an important part of moving, though.
The argument from the article is that you should be hosting your writing on blog.mywebsite.com, not mywebsite.substack.com, even if those two pages are identical and are both hosted by Substack. That's the entire point it's trying to make.
Whether or not your readers visit your website or consume your content entirely through email notifications isn't relevant to the point the author was trying to make. Because despite your absolutist "no one", some people will visit your website, and having a stable location that you control yourself is important. (Also please consider that while you may have been publishing on the internet for decades, your experience may not be universal.)
It is absolutely crazy to me that anyone with a serious web presence doesn't have their own domain name, even if that website is backed by someone else's hosted platform.
The lift to make your own website is so low now, and the benefits of future-proofing are so great that it's just the right decision to make. You don’t even have to drive all your readers there, you’ll just have it available for everyone if the audience ever decides to gradually move on from substack (which seems to happen pretty much every social media platform).
you said: "...from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website"
This is false.
It's more accurate to say that "no one will visit your website if you do not properly setup a distribution ecosystem".
It's hard work. But it works. All of my companies have been built by writing online --> distribution --> people finding my/our stuff.
Your experience of 'doing it for decades' reveals that publishing, in of itself, does nothing. And if all people do is publish (without the distribution engine), then, I agree it's a waste of time.
I write 1 hour per day. I spend about 2 hours working on distribution. Sometimes, I spend 4 hours on distribution.
I publish links to my new articles on Reddit , sometimes on Twitter. That’s enough for my posts to get to lots of people, sometimes. And when it happens, Google indexes it and it becomes one of the first links about the topics I covered. And people repost it later in other media like Mastodon, HN etc.
I don’t get how someone can have used the internet for decades and not know how this all works!
I write 1-2 hours a day but I dont spend anywhere near that much time on distribution so this is a learning opportunity... would be great if you could help me understand the activities/tasks you undertake? What do you do to spend the 2 - 4 hours on distribution? Is this daily? Or per task/article??
> You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
Ghost blog includes newsletter for push.
I use self-hosted Listmonk. Works great in combination with my blog. But yeah its slow growth. But that's actually what I prefer, because if you grow fast on Substack, these are gone as fast IMO as people don't really read substack emails anymore after getting 10 of them every day (as subscribing is so easy on Substack). So having a slow, but honest subscribers and then sharing it on socials or reddit in places where it genuinely helps people, there will always be some who will subscribe and read.
I agree, if you don't publish anywhere and just write on your website, and you're not yet known, it's hard for people to discover initially. But in the beginning, the writint is also more for you, than for others. I haven't read from anyone that writes super good on day one. That will come with the reps, and by then, people will read you, have discovered you.
Push as in a newsletter alone isn't doing anything. It's the "show ocassional posts of you on an already captive audience of millions and especially readers with similar interests" (the whole Substack base) that does it.
If you write news, posts that needs discussion, information that relatively quickly becomes obsolete, then probably yes, you won't want a website because few people will search for it deliberately.
But if you're writing for yourself, articles with multimedia, or want to use advanced features, no platform provides anything close to what you can do on your website.
Take a look at https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ for example.
No one is writing purely for themselves. It's something we like to say, and there's some value in writing down your thoughts - but deep down inside, every blogger is dreaming of having a positive impact on other people's lives. That requires reaching these people in the first place.
I promise you that Bartosz would be bummed out if he had an audience of one. And while relying on HN to accidentally discover you can work, it's not a sustainable model for anything.
>No one is writing purely for themselves
Every time I see posts like this one and go into comments, everyone in the comments treat writing as a hobby which they would like to turn into work and earn money from, more or less. And I suppose the words "writing" and "blogging" associate with the community around themselves in their minds, not with the text information per se.
I'm writing technical articles (blog posts) my whole life most of the time as a result of me learning something new, to structure the information on some topic for myself and others.
If it's a research, I make a post with all the information and final result of it in public, primarily for myself and sometimes for others, because 95% of the time it's not secret and there's no point to store it privately.
If it's a helpful information (software: unofficial bugfix, hacky workaround, poorly documented feature somewhere, etc), I want it to be searchable/indexed, only that.
I don't care about attribution, about who reads my writing (be it me, my friends, people I don't know, or AI), I have no incentive to push (as in post here or on social networks) or promote these articles in any way. I don't want people to get back to my site, to subscribe to it, or to build a community around it.
If the user types "How do I solve issue X" and by a mere coincidence I solved and documented it, I don't care if the user gets the solution from my website, from the scrape & repost websites, or from AI agent which scraped the site. If this helps the user to fix the issue or to learn something new, every way is fine for me!
According to hacker news users you have to monetize every single thing you do in your spare time, otherwise it's a waste of time, be it blogging, pet projects that you need to convert to SAAS etc. And if you claim that you have "fun" and "hobbies" you are a liar (or at least you are lying to yourself that you don't want to make money out of those things).
Yeah so I guess the hundreds of billions of page views from organic search every single month is just a total myth?
As somebody who has made a lot of money publishing on the internet you absolutely can get people to read your website organically but it takes specific strategies and you can't just write about whatever you want however you want and expect traffic.
How do people get to your Substack? Does it have a recommendations system like social media?
It does
> so that you can move somewhere else down the line
And potentiality lose all your precious posts and reader discussions in the process? That's part of the special value of having a website.
I feel like the transition from substack to website + newsletter wouldn't be terrible, although I'm sure your traffic would decrease after making the switch.
I miss the days when I'd regularly get forwards from friends about stuff they found on the internet.
One of my first jobs after graduate, I used to share a lot of posts with my coworkers until a certain point where one of them said "I don't know how you read so much content", worthless to say him was a Master's student, so I'm expecting him to be able to consume more content than myself, although different more towards academic stuff.
>"I don't know how you read so much content"
And then they spend hours every day doomscrolling and binge watching shit
Agreed.
I have a blog, I don't really promote it, and no one reads it.
Now, there is an argument that there's nothing on my blog worth reading, and yeah there might be truth to that, but regardless my traffic is on the order like 100 unique views per month, and I don't know what percentage of that is just scraping bots.
I'm fine with this, I had no delusions of becoming a famous writer or making any money from it or anything, my blog is basically just a dumping ground for thoughts that I think are interesting, but if I actually did care about people visiting my blog I would probably use Substack or something similar.
Blogs on indie platforms like Bear and Pagecord get promoted in the Discover (and Spotlight, on Pagecord) feeds which definitely drives traffic
You mention RSS, but Substack is about paid subscribers, is it not? What do you think converts a Substack user to a subscriber; is it just a numbers game?
Why not do all automatically? My concern with substack is that it's a single point of truth. If they decide to blanket paywall everything after they sell to private equity for example. Or start to force all users to pay to be visible at all including old content. You're at the mercy of whatever they decide.
We've seen it so often.
> no one will visit your website.
Yep, let's suppose an average HN user reads 30-100 articles a month on independent websites (personal domains) posted on HN. Out of 100, he probably subscribes to 0-2 at best (via RSS/e-mail). Now, imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience. There is too much friction for a user to subscribe.
Substack is similar to a social platform. People open it to read new articles in a similar way to HN, and they can subscribe to anyone by pressing a single button. There is a recommendation feed as well.
Since Google search for tech content is dead, getting views on independent blogs is extremely hard.
I mean, can't you accomplish the same thing with "enter your email/social handle to be notified when I post something"?
For sure. I had a huge following on my wordpress blog 15 years ago and email was how everyone got notified of new content. I'm sure there's a way to at least do sms now if people want that level of notification.
Most writers just want to write and don't want to start maintaining servers and databases to handle the collection and storing of emails. This is why they outsource that functionality to a service like Substack.
It would be nice if services like Substack supported exportability, so when a writer eventually becomes successful enough to migrate away, or the platform itself is no longer a good fit, then there aren't any losses.
Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.
I actively skip stuff that’s on substack just like I do medium and blogger. Maybe there’s good stuff on there but it’s usually a by-word for slop. I figure if anyone has anything that interesting to say they’d make the effort and put it up on something more serious looking.
It's addressed in the article
the point is that they are not mutually exclusive. you can have both. just don't put all your eggs in the corporate basket
Yes, I think people who move away from Substack already need to have a brand and a number of followers to drive people to their personal websites, even if they use Ghost. And I do get the concerns that Substack has some super bizarre and awful content in the mix. Their feed shows me stuff every once in a while, from uber-conservative right wing Christians to conspiracy theory nonsense. But my dumb soccer blog/podcast putters along and grows slowly, in some cases, not even from social media posts. It's an interesting platform.
Substack also comes with a brand, and having a substack is a social cue that you are a higher status person, it goes with the beefed up LinkedIn profile, playing tennis and conspicuous consumption.
Having a substack shows that you are time rich, yet at the same time, it does not come with overtones of vanity. Serious discourse allegedly goes on with substack, if you are writing there, then you are rolling it with the pros.
Yet every platform goes through phases, ending with the inevitable 'enshittification'. Soon the reader will see substack as a byword for best avoided, much like having to download a PDF or open an inevitably paywalled mainstream media news article, not worth the click.
With one's own website you are outside of the loop, and the theory still holds that, if you have anything worth seeing, they will come. However, most people will stay on platforms until there is something to actually buy.
Recently I was doom scrolling until I came across this vacuum cleaner for cats, that enables you to harvest the fur. I want this as a joke present for a cat I know, so I was prepared to escape the platform to buy the product. If it was a lengthy essay on how to make felt clothing from cat fur on substack, then I probably would not have clicked. Yes I am that shallow!
Hence, if you have something to sell, then an independent website is what you want, and a sales funnel to get people there. This does mean social media, the newsletter, SEO, the substack and even paid advertising.
Not everyone has something to sell though.
this tide will turn, and the day of reckoning is coming for AI slop and large domains owning the search results. small publishers are going to have their time very soon.
> no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that.
I am not convinced. My traffic counter spins quite rapidly, and I only publish on http://dmitry.gr
That's because it's a tech vlog with posts that also serve as technical reference and tutorials and such like: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm
There's a big audience for that that's actively search for such keywords.
Not the same with essays or fiction writing
Fediverse. We need to push Fediverse
I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting.
But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than its fees, because the counterfactual is that I don't have any of those things. I think it's a huge mistake to lump those together as "convenience", its a lot more than convenient!
The only important thing to me about having a non-substack website is that its good to have a place for more permanent information, lists, contact, etc. But even for many writers, that kind of stuff becomes stale so quickly that the personal sites don't tend to matter much, or even make them look worse! The floating social network spaces are much more valuable. Even losing my x.com would be much worse to my day-to-day life than losing my domain, though I may wish it were otherwise. And I cannot replicate that elsewhere. The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
> The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
I think this is mostly wrong, and that the social networks are big primarily because they spent money at the right time to create entrenched network effects that allow them to rent-seek ever after. The quality and innovation of the services themselves (especially simple sites like twitter/X) is not the moat. At a technical level, most are easily clone-able and dominate not because they offer the best service or have the best features but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.
I said "mostly" above because it seems like substack, e.g., as you said, has bundled payment, email, etc in a way that people really like. Even there, though, the network effect is probably the dominating factor.
The network effects ARE the genuine utility.
And you can take advantage of their network effects by implementing a POSSE system. Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. That way, your website is the source of truth and the other places are like museums you curate to.
Why should you go thru the trouble? Because these social networks own your content and your audience and won't hesitate a second to drop you if they deem fit.
"Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere"
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
(There were a dozen other, unrelated things ranking higher on Google.)
x.com heavily penalizes off-site links.
Fair enough, but that move should make you think twice before tying your fate to theirs.
Using something like Typefully or even Postiz lets you post without linking to any site. If you publish a blogpost, you can have one of these tools create an C article with the same content.
Great way to not get subscribers to your substack etc.
For the majority of people it's the opposite of utility. Not even inutility or uselessness, it's negatively useful.
In any social network where "network effects" are a thing in the first place, there is more content produced than can be consumed by a particular user. The algorithm (tm) is forced to curate certain pieces of content out of circulation and can only heavily promote a negligible minority of content. This creates content reach distribution that is essentially a parabola. While there can be tons of signals to adjust the reach, the primary signals are inevitably going to be virality of the account and early engagement. You can't reasonably look at long term engagement due to content to eyeball ratio.
Ergo, posts must be designed to quickly grab early attention in an infinite feedback loop and this incentivizes cartels and bot farms to create echo chambers. Both extremely harmful phenomena.
I'm not sure I'd describe cartel behavior as utility.
It is wrong, but so are you. The truth is that social networks are big because they HAD genuine utility. The Facebook was amazing... at least until about 2010. I was at uni when it started and I vividly remember thinking "I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is" (we didn't have physical face books in the UK) and then a year later thefacebook turned up. Amazing for everyone's social lives.
But after 2010 it just gradually got shitter.
WhatsApp replaced it (in most ways; in some ways there is no replacement) and has so far been amazing but it feels like we're about at the "2010" of WhatsApp. Meta is starting to turn the screws. An AI button. Notifications about new features. Integration with Meta accounts. Eventually it will probably merge with Facebook Messaging or some bollocks and then we'll all have to move elsewhere.
Anyway my point is, these things genuinely became big because they were great. They stayed big despite becoming shitter due to network effects.
Also because they closed all the gates of interoperability once they got big enough.
If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.
> If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.
And we would have kept a more inconvenient web, since without that incentive, Facebook etc. would never have had reason to pay for an army of software developers to implement and improve the site and servers to host it.
what improvements? The algorithm that radicalises people and keeps them seperated in bubbles? The Mass Data Harvesting?
Are you implying something about Facebook is convenient?
Yes, absolutely. Facebook became successful because at the time it was much more convenient than existing ways of accomplishing the same thing it did (interacting socially with other people, meeting new people), including even existing websites like myspace which were themselves more convenient than trying to create one's own website and grow a community, or traveling to meet people face-to-face.
Why do you think it became successful?
So... what about Facebook is convenient?
>at least until about 2010
A child born when facebook started going to shit is now able to drive.
> I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is
Did you miss Myspace and Friendster? Orkut had a market, I think. The reason that Facebook succeeded later is because it had a good API and invited people to write apps for it (mostly surveys and games, remember Zynga?), tracked its users across the internet, and sold them in targeted slices to advertisers. It was Friendster as a commercial platform (like Salesforce was CRM as a commercial platform.) It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.
I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput, being created by very talented people using Erlang. The reason people use it is because they always have and their friends do, and for a lot of countries with expensive SMS it provided messaging (and became so integrated into business that people weren't allowed to live without it.)
This is my argument about why these things were successful; I think that "they were great" isn't a credible one. They simply grabbed a large chunk of already proven markets quickly, but oriented themselves toward corporate needs to leverage that into total control.
> It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.
I might be misremembering a bunch but myspace never had a feed that showed you your friend’s updates.
It also wasn’t able to magically show you the people who were at that random house party you went to the night before that you hit it off with but were too drunk to get their number.
Facebook didn't have the feed initially either (and it was really disliked when it was introduced - people thought it was like stalking). But yes to your second point. Real people who you actually wanted to know and had actually met were on Facebook. That wasn't really true of any of the other sites.
Little did we know back then how many people were yearning to have stalkers. "This person wants to be notified every time I put something online" sounded incredibly creepy in the mid-aughts!
Group chats and private Discord servers with IRL friends are the modern version of the Facebook feed.
People love attention when it's people they know and like hanging out with.
The thing that degraded Facebook and Instagram is that they're not like that anymore, they're about maximizing content so that you spend as much time on their apps as possible.
If you just want to view content they are great for that, but I'd almost argue that they're not even social networks anymore. They are much closer to a smartphone version of cable television with mildly interactive elements.
Yeah, Facebook was primarily a directory when it started, a cross between a college facebook (like a yearbook given at the start of the year instead of the end) and a phone book.
Also, it didn’t allow custom styles or html, which was unusual at the time but ultimately helped it take off to the point that, like Google, it didn’t have allow HTML or JS in ads either.
> Did you miss Myspace and Friendster?
MySpace was a) awful, b) only used by a tiny tiny fraction of people (1% maybe), and c) rarely had people's real names & photos on it. Not remotely comparable to Facebook. Even fewer people used Friendster and Orkut, at least in the UK.
> I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput
Free. No ads. Reliable. E2E encryption. Group chats. Cross platform. There's so much that's great about it. It was successful because the alternative was SMS which was shit. I'm guessing you're American.
> rarely had people's real names & photos on it
This is a feature, not a bug. There is nothing worse for a society's collective privacy than a surveillance machine where people willingly post every detail of their lives. Stalin would have dreamed of today's anti-social media as a surveillance tool.
> There's so much that's great about it.
There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry. And that's assuming messages are truly encrypted and not analyzed behind your back by Meta. E2EE is kind of meaningless when the endpoints cannot be trusted. SMS is insecure in transit but it isn't controlled by a single for-profit company with close ties to government agencies.
Clearly people wanted real names and photos. There's space for both private and public spaces. I won't tell you my real name on this account, but I'll tell it to my WhatsApp friends.
okay? good for you? you being worked up about privacy doesn’t magically invalidate the experience of others. you not liking something doesn’t mean that it’s objectively bad. you not seeing utility in something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have utility. you not seeing value in something doesn’t mean that a great many people saw value in it, which is exactly what you’re arguing against. It does not surprise me that someone with a worldview so simple and self-centred cannot comprehend of how a great many people saw the juice being worth the squeeze. Facebook had immense utility in the 2000s and even some of the 2010s. Not everyone wants to hang out with you on 4chan dude.
The cost of that experience/juice was their privacy. Value isn't free.
If you take on a new Facebook experience by using their camera glasses, that will also have a privacy cost that this time will include my (and everyone else in-frame's) privacy.
And a lot of people also didn’t see the utility and the invasion of the privacy. It is not only OP or needs or 4chan, if that’s your only argument.
> This is a feature, not a bug.
Uhm no. I wanted to know who real people were. At the time it was the much more secure and private than anything else because you needed to be at the same university to see anyone's accounts, and the idea of selling user data for profit didn't even exist.
> There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry
Sure. That doesn't invalidate any of the good stuff, and is minor in comparison (contact lists are not as valuable as you seem to think). If Signal had existed at the time I'm sure it would have been extremely popular too. Also photos are E2E encrypted.
> but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.
Sure. So what? You nonetheless cannot deny the utility. The friends that I have made from social networks are no less real. I am very grateful they (the means to discover these people now in my life) exist.
Is this a real thing that happens anymore? I don't recall when the last time someone made a new genuine connection through one of the major social media platforms (speaking of IG, FB, Twitter, primarily). LinkedIn, I guess comes to mind, but that's just been mostly career connections/job searching, and maybe Discord. Pretty much everyone I know (in my age range around 25-30) has only met new people from either participating in social settings in real life (climbing gym, playing volleyball, in person events), or through friends of friends. Otherwise it seems like most people just use IG or other DM's to try to hit on people or sell them something (usually unsuccessfully).
We are probably coming at this from different angles. I don't deny those things but they're also not a counter-argument to the point I'm intending to make.
As an overly dramatic example, a slave might fall in love with the wife he met on a plantation, and the family he has, and even be grateful for them. Nevertheless, you probably don't want to use those facts to be a booster for slave plantations.
My argument is that all the good things you like about social networks, from a technical pov, could be had quite easily without the ads, political propoganda, and other ill-effects of the current popular social networks. Indeed, there are many open source projects that already provide the features you'd want. It's just that none has achieved the network you want.
This situation is unlike that of a large, complex physical infrastructure project, where you really do need to "put up" with a governement (or something like it) in order to get the thing built and maintained.
Less dramatic off top of head: proud poverty built your work ethic but no motivation to pull any social safety net ladders.
Or maybe happy punch card programming developed your 1337 skills but glad IDEs are there for the current generation.
I think you are missing the point of talking about utility in the first place. I have no interest in lamentations. If you told someone to stay away from social networks because of their flaws, you would be doing them a cultural and professional disservice.
As a more moderate metaphor it's like someone saying they like living in one city, for all its flaws, and someone else comes along and extolls the virtues of several imaginary cities. It's fun to imagine those places, but its silly to mention them when someone is speaking of utility. This rush to examples not beholden to reality seems more common among technical types than any other, and likely prevents you from benefitting from what exists today.
The hole in that analogy is that in some cases these other platforms aren't imaginary. The open, ad-free, privacy-protecting, you-own-your-data alternative to Twitter actually exists: Mastodon.
The problem, of course, is that the utility of a social network is right in the name: the network of users it connects. If the people you want to interact with aren't on Mastodon, then you have to use Twitter.
But ethically-good (for lack of a better term) Twitter alternatives isn't a list of imaginary cities.
I'm not the others participating in this subthread, so I can't speak to their motivations, but for me, it's possible to recognize that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have utility for many people, but also lament that otherwise-better platforms exist that haven't gained traction.
(And it's funny in this specific case, because often the reason they haven't gained traction is because of actual problems with the product: the UI is unpolished, the UX is bad, important feature XYZ is missing, etc. But in the case of Mastodon it actually is as good [or better] product-wise as Twitter. It just doesn't have the same mass appeal because of existing network effects, marketing, and first/early-mover advantages.)
Do people even want to interact with specific others on these platforms, or just the amorphous mass of others? Both X and Mastodon have two different amorphous masses you can interact with.
choosing utility over ethics is a value judgement, thats all.
Yes the thing is valuable because of the network and the network is there because of the network.
We don’t really rely too much on the navigability of the Hudson River anymore. But being next to it is still the most expensive land in the nation.
the point is that they are not mutually exclusive. you can have both. just don't put all your eggs in the corporate basket
How easy/difficult was it getting off the ground on substack? Did you get interactions right from your first post? Is there visibility for new writers?
I started using it to run a conference 4 years ago with the intent that it was supposed to be a temporary solution until we built a "real" site.
The experience was so good that we haven't moved off. Even if we did build a more formal conference site, we'd still keep the substack blog. The mailing list has grown from nothing to right at 1000 subs which isn't bad for something I do in my spare time. By far the most effective communication. Social media (all channels) are a fraction of the engagement that I get compared to substack.
https://blog.carolina.codes/
Cheers from Concord, NC. Nice to see a fellow techie in the South ‘round these parts.
If you want a free ticket to come down this year, shoot me a note! We typically bring a bunch of folks from Concord. I came to speak at a meetup over at Flywheel Concord a couple of years ago to promote the conference.
Please x2.
If you could write a small guide, that'd be phenomenal.
What is genuinely interesting is how Hacker News moderators will edit user posts, such that it looks as if the user replied to another post originally, without ever making that clear. What other lies and manipulation do they come with? Directly editing the content of posts silently, no sign of being edited?
What is "un-distribution"?
I don't know, but I imagine "unsubscribe" type of features.
> (I definitely don't!)
I mean I wouldn't either if I'd managed to score website.com
Please also make sure to keep your wikidata and ISNI information up to date with your substack links.
Services like pirate[dot]kred use that information to link your books to your payment pages (substack is supported).
I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter.
I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth.
Here's the tool I use for the copy-pasting: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blog-to-newsletter
Substack doesn't have an API for composing a newsletter, but their rich text editor DOES accept copy-pasted data - and copy-paste is the universal API.
I really like this approach. I make similar distinctions between posts meant for email, posts that should appear in RSS, posts that belong on the homepage, and posts that should live under /archive without appearing on the homepage.
I use Substack for email distribution too. For the website side, I built an open-source blogging platform called Jant (https://jant.me) around these needs: posts appear on the homepage by default, posts marked as Featured are included in RSS, and posts can also be unlisted. It also syncs everything to GitHub as Markdown, in a repo that works as a complete Hugo site.
Hi Simon, I'm not sure I get it completely.
If I get it, you're basically using Substack as an email platform. So the blog (the "original") can use Wordpress, Ghost, whatever ; and this is the canonical place that all articles go to. But then you duplicate the content onto Substack so it gets pushed out as emails.
My understanding of what it means:
- the blog doesn't have its own subscription system ; you link out to Substack for that. So you must be massively losing out on blog-driven subscriptions because of the much higher friction (vs having the pop-ups directly on the blog)?
- all of your content is duplicated between the real blog and the Substack copy. How do you avoid Substack cannibalizing all of your blog's traffic, given that they are a bigger domain possibly better optimized for SEO?
I don't like subscription popups - see recent John Gruber rants on the subject: https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover
I'm willing to take the hit to subscriber numbers for not having that kind of thing on my own site.
From an SEO perspective, I think I might be beating Substack comfortably.
My blog has a different page for each item, plus it ties them together with tags.
The Substack email is a full week of content in one go. I don't think that's particularly SEO-optimal.
Again though, I'm willing to take the risk. So far I've not seen any obvious downsides to this model, and I've been dual publishing in this way for a few years now.
Thank you! My coauthor Brad and I were subscribing to Ghost just yesterday ; we're going to adopt your model.
At 66,000 messages/week, you’d actually be spending around $50-$80 monthly with SES and a VPS + database for handling bounces and unsubscribe requests.
... right, and then I'm responsible for maintaining that infrastructure, and I have to think about email deliverability as well.
Plus Substack discovery does carry some value - about 65% of my new subscribers come via the various Substack mechanisms, the rest are from my own site or "direct" (which I think means people landed on my substack directly and then chose to subscribe.)
Amazon is always overpriced though. How is it at other providers?
You could do the same thing through Ghost, which has an API, and not be using a service that proudly platforms the Tates and nazis.
I don’t know anything about the specific situation you’re referencing. That being said, getting mad at an organization, one that is built to be a “platform” for people to share their words, for not going out of its way to police which people share which words, seems to me to be unproductive at best, if not actively close minded and tribalistic.
Substack has gone out of its way to platform the right and has been very proud to work with folks like Andrew Tate, Graham Linehan, and anti-vaxxers whose disinfo helped kill tens of thousands of Americans.
https://counterhate.com/blog/substack-generates-at-least-2-5...
Eh, I think you have a classification problem. Andrew Tate is far, far right and Linehan...this is the man who created "Father Ted"... is "right" just because he thinks men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and spaces? I'll leave out the issue of the massive numbers of people who were injured by the jab.
All I'll maintain here is that Substack is not in the business of censoring or deciding who gets to publish on their platform according to one group's political preferences.
>"just because he thinks men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and spaces"
You're telling on yourself with this one, transphobe.
Lineham is an anti-trans activist. There's quite literally a whole section on his Wikipedia page dedicated to it, in fact it's the longest section on there. He's practically dedicated his life to the cause.
Sorry not sorry, but Substack isn't going to run off Lineham because he thinks that people with a dick shouldn't be in a female locker room.
There's a difference between thinking those thoughts, and posting about them publicly to your following while simultaneously advocating for violence against trans individuals.
What about for going out of their way to find and pay despicable people for their words?
oh it's more than the org. IIRC, it's also the founder.
Sure, tolerate Nazis, give them a place to share their words, let them be part of the mainstream, let them take part in elections, play their dirty tricks and form paramilitaries and win control of government. It's a shame that that leads to certain groups, like Jews, LGBTQ, non-whites, or immigrants getting exterminated, but that's just the price you have to pay for free speech.
Let's see what the man who coined the term paradox of tolerance had to say about this:
>In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
Oh no, Karl Popper is a Nazi. Quick punch him.
>non-whites
This meme needs to die. Nazis wanted to kill half of all whites, viz. everyone who lived East of the Oder and wasn't a German.
Alright, and killed or enslaved. I also missed the communists, the same treatment for them. We can accept that there may be differences in targets between one group of fascists and the next, it's really up to their Führer to decide.
> as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion
this is a load-bearing condition, also nobody thinks that punching a nazi makes someone a nazi
Scratch liberal and a fascist bleeds.
I feel like you're probably interpreting that saying in the opposite of its intended meaning but there's not enough context to know for sure.
That’s backwards. Society does not move forward despite free speech, rather because of it. The only way to truly move past harmful ideas and ideologies is to show those who would otherwise subscribe how dumb they are. You can try to quell them, but that just lends to their appeal, and results in those that do subscribe being more extreme and doing more extreme things. For a real world example, take someone who thinks that Nick Fuentes is a reasonable, respectable guy, and then show them the recent discussion between him and Hunter Biden, and see if they don’t at least get uncomfortable, unsure.
If this were true, far right mainstream media (eg Newsmax, NY Post) would not have the viewership and readership they enjoy.
In any case, few people here (and in general, IME) are suggesting that Nazis should have no platform whatsoever, only that we shouldn't choose to associate ourselves with those platforms -- especially when there are so many perfectly viable alternatives that don't occasionally promote Nazis to your readers.
The problem is not really Nazis saying despicable things, their so-called "free speech". The problem is that they are Nazis and will really do all these things if they get a chance. Why would you want to collaborate with Nazis, especially by giving them space on your platform where they can organize and publicize? Sure, collaborating with them in any other way is also bad, selling them food, giving them jobs, or whatever. It's not surprising that some people don't like collaborators any more than they like Nazis.
Ghost would cost $288/month (or $241/month paid yearly).
I'll put my money where my mouth is. We at Outpost will host your site on Ghost for a year for free and migrate all your substack subscribers, with the only caveats that 1) you put a tip jar link (either to Ghost's or Outpost's) at the end of every email with some text like support us being on an indie platform and 2) at the end of the year or earlier report how it went.
With 66k subscribers you could cover that without even really trying by setting up a $5/month donation tier or putting a tip jar on the site. With a tiny bit of effort, you could make thousands a month.
Substack lets you get away with sending that many emails without attempting to monetize because you pay them in clout and with your reader data.
I think they are getting the better deal given how good your writing is and your reputation.
And substack is free because they use YOU as their growth engine. Your newsletter is plastered with their branding and links to their app, not yours. If someone subscribes to pay for your publication via their app, they own the subscription, not you.
Ultimately, even if you own the email list, you’re sharecropping on their land.
They will email your list with their own promotional offers and marketing whenever they feel like it.
If we’ve proved anything in tech, it’s that consumers will fall for the trap of “free” every single time.
It's sort of disgusting that inbox clutter from a publishing service is the dominant delivery paradigm as opposed to browsers natively checking bookmarked RSS feeds.
Or just opening the website once a day.
(I subscribe to Cory Doctorow's list though)
Email is so well designed, so resilient, and so ubiquitous that's very hard to displace it's use as a central check-in.
I want very badly to use RSS to read everything, and I still use RSS a lot. But I have to admit that email won the resiliency battle a long time ago.
Right which is why I'd only suggest the browser as an alternative. Imho a browser is something I open when I proactively am seeking information/entertainment and thereby fits blog reading better than email which is more like an interrupt.
This is super useful even if I just grab it as an idea to emulate. Have you used an agent to copy and paste for you ?
I've not tried that, honestly it's such a quick process already that waiting for some kind of browser automation to copy and paste would likely be slower.
I'm one of the creators of Leaflet - https://leaflet.pub - also mentioned in another comment. We're making a publishing app kind of like Substack or Ghost, but connected to the open social ecosystem building on AT Protocol. There a lot of potential here, and a lot of tools that already exist.
We collaborated with other publishing apps (pckt & Offprint) to make Standard.site - https://standard.site - a simple set of standards for publishing interop that enables something like RSS but on top of a whole social network. More context: https://lab.leaflet.pub/3moomxyjssk2p
Others can leverage this to make e.g. a whole reader app where you can find everything people in your network are publishing: https://standard-reader.app
A key thing is it's very flexible, you can publish on Leaflet, or on a self-hosted blog, and make your content discoverable and subscribeable in the same way. And in either case, you own your content — even if you use Leaflet as your hosted CMS, published data lives in your PDS where you control it, and all the social graph stuff persists even if you stop using Leaflet or we ever shut down.
Self-hosting a website is great but also considerable overhead for many folks, and we want to make it easy to publish and still have control and avoid lock-in. We even see folks doing hybrid approaches, e.g. using Leaflet to publish (for easy to use CMS + nice social features) but also pulling published data to render directly on their own website.
It's very different from what you get with a concentrated single platform like Substack (or Instagram, YouTube, etc) as far as audience reach, and early days with the ecosystem, but I think it's valuable in a different way. It's more aligned with the open web, and importantly, it's more antifragile — there are many ways to reach people and interact with your readers, from Bluesky to Leaflet to other reader apps, search tools, etc. Network effects aren't there yet to the degree of Substack, but a lot of cool things are emerging and it feels like an exciting time to build here together.
I get a cloudflare 502 error for standard.site
can't we just make RSS cool again?!
haha yes! i built feedgrab.net but once it did what i wanted, i stopped building it. it just works. doesn't really make RSS cool again, but it does the job for me
This looks cool! How does it compare to something like WriteFreely (https://writefreely.org/)?
EDIT - OH, I missed you're on the AT protocol, so there's the main difference already.
RSS is great for informing readers of new content. Sadly only a few actually use it, except (unknowingly, for a large part of the population) for... Podcasts.
So, thinking out loud: you could offer people to subscribe to your website by publishing a RSS feed with dummy audio, using a link in the the episode description to get people to hop through to your website. And then you offer the appropriate "subscribe in iTunes / Spotify / generic podcasting app" buttons on your website page.
And then suddenly the masses can sign up to your updates! And they can easily unsubscribe! And you don't have to deal with email, and can use static file hosting! There'd even be a discovery inroad as presumably the Apples and Spotifies of this world will push it through the personalized recommendations pipe just as they would for any other podcast.
It's a bit subversive but it would work wouldn't it?
Good idea, and unfortunately one of those that would work only while it’s not popular. If it turns out to be good enough to become popular, here comes the enforcement.
It'd be hard to detect from structure. Episode descriptions can and do legitimately have links. And if/when it comes to deep inspection, instead of a dummy audio file one could use a TTS-ed audio version of the post, there's some legitimacy there. You can even flip it around and claim that the blogpost is the "audio transcription" "for those who want it".
But yeah let's not underestimate the power we're giving these platforms. If down the road it doesn't match the monetization strategy? Platform giveth, platform taketh.
As a writer who has been on the web for a long time, I no longer write much for the sake of the web. My personal website I took down this year because I didn't like the idea of AI snarfing up everything I wrote. I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. While I don't write only for money, I certainly write with the idea of needing a certain amount of money to keep on writing. The internet just doesn't offer that kind of environment anymore in my opinion.
I do like the Indie web, and to me, it is more just the way the internet was/has been/needs to be. What is missing are neutral kinds of payment layers/vendors that won't pull your funding if you say something someone somewhere doesn't like.
Same - I wrote on the web for 25 years (2000 to 2025). I can attribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of income to it. I no longer have any websites, as nothing came out of it for a couple years. ~90% of all my traffic ended up bots.
And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.
> I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage.
The real choke point is one step up the chain with payment processors, and since 9/11 and stricter KYC with banks, there's not a reliable, widely accepted path around those regulations. Cryptocurrency remains fringe. Running a self-hosted ghost or WordPress powered blog or newsletter will encounter the same bottleneck wherever money changes hands among average-Joes online.
Most internet providers I've seen around lately have clauses against hosting your own website on residential providers. That provides two choke points. I used to be a Monero fan before its Blockchain became the size of Cyberpunk 2077.
> clauses against hosting your own website on residential providers
If their standard residential Internet packages don't offer truly static IP addresses, then it at least makes nominal sense to say: if you want to host your own website from your home, you pay some annual fee for a static IP that is not part of normal residential provision of service. But that can also quickly twist into charging exorbitant rates or pushing people hosting personal websites on their own hardware to pay for business plans they don't truly need.
Whenever I see Substack or Medium URLs, I avoid clicking them. They are so spammy with their call to subscribe, that it's not even worth me visiting them. People recognize quality, and they don't need to be pressured to subscribe. The websites I visit every day never asked me to come back.
Interesting. I feel the same way about Medium - it’s mostly a bunch of undergrads and tech bootcamp students regurgitating basic tutorials.
But in my experience, Substack is much higher quality. I actually read several Substack blogs regularly because they’re better and more consistent than most blogs I come across. YMMV, I guess, but I have at least half a dozen blogs I actively follow on Substack, compared to maybe 1 elsewhere.
Same. I'm sure there are good things there but most of what I have come across has been trash so it makes a great filter.
same for me on medium, but susbstack not necesarily, they seem to be more focused on the author not like medium
There is a list of a few websites that I subconsciously think only have garbage articles and never really pay serious attention to them: quora, medium and substack.
Surely dev.to also filled with low level articles, but at least people there spent effort to write articles then gave it for free. But those users of the previous websites mostly write it for money.
Don't get me wrong, quality articles deserve to have money in return, you can't get far without sustainable business. But writing for the sake of writing (and earning money for the quantity not quality) is what is causing those websites to be filled with shallow contents.
Everyone's experience will be different, but I will say that I have not received significant network effects traffic on Substack nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content.
In short, I think that for the vast majority of casual posters, the aspirational upsides of joining a network are going to fall flat. Like with most aggregators, the popular things tend to be promoted more.
So, for me at least, if I'm going to get very low traffic, I'd prefer to get that very low traffic on my own website. It might be a pyrrhic victory but I sleep just a little better knowing that as one of the 1% that actually creates stuff, I did what little I could.
Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source. Maybe there is a network effect on substack that makes it easier to get these external links, but I doubt most actual readers are coming from inside the substack ecosystem.
> Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source.
I think the parent was talking about having a substack, not reading things on Substack.
But I also think the direct network effects don't come from casuals (other than that they repost to social networks.) People who are paying for a substack will look at others because it doesn't involve another signup or separate bill, they can just add the subscription for a buck or two. Now they can tour the subscriber content, and they can drop it after a little while if it doesn't ultimately appeal to them with just a click or three.
For non-subscribers, a substack isn't any different from any other blog.
Maybe I'm an outlier, but I find that my main reason for discontinuing Ground News/Nebula/whatever is that I subscribe aspirationally and never actually make time to consume the content. One year I got my partner and I subscriptions to Masterclass and at the end of the year neither one of us had watched a single video.
Basically, I don't know anyone who is ever bored. Who the hell has time to click on and read random posts? The entire value of HN is that other smart people surface the top 1% of 1% of stuff I'd probably find interesting.
The notion of reading Substack posts just because I'm a subscriber seems like fantasy.
I think curation is worth paying for, but only if the quality is extremely high (e.g. for a good newspaper).
> I think the parent was talking about having a substack, not reading things on Substack.
I think it's both, see "nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content."
My two cents here is that if you're trying to growth hack yourself, you need to be on a platform that's also growth hacking. Building an audience anywhere is genuinely hard. Algorithmic feeds like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. force you to play a game they control and that may not align with your content. Medium, substack, etc. will build your audience only to the extent that it aligns with their goals. Hosting your own blog means somehow getting traffic to it -- which might mean playing the google search game, which then depends on aligning with user queries and getting your site ranked. Or it may mean somehow driving traffic to your blog, such as from a newsletter or social site. But that brings us back to either algorithmic feeds or newsletter products. Don't think there's an easy answer here and I bet YMMV depending on the type of content you have, how much of audience you already have, etc.
I tried the reverse -- syndicating content on medium that we publish on our blog. 0 impressions, literally, for 5 posts that got some readership on our blog.
It sounds like you’ve given up on an open web. Possibly the rational thing for you to do in your circumstances, but nonetheless a sad place we are in.
I've always understood platforms like Substack or Patreon to really be a solution to the payment processing problem first and foremost.
That’s exactly right. Finding ways to get paid for your work, and all the very complicated way taxes interact with it all, unless you’re going all-in on ads, is a messy problem that people will happily centralize for.
And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.
I follow a very prolific open-source/FOSS podcasting network.
All of their infrastructure from the very bottom to the very top is FOSS - except their membership program. It links to a third-party which processes payments compliantly.
They've attempted a pivot to funding the network via BTC/Lightning but clearly that's polarizing to a lot of people even though it better aligns with their philosophy.
I'm not a lawyer; but I believe that even if they take payment through BTC, etc, they're going to need to take sales tax, etc, based on the location that their subscriber is ... which means they need to handle the tax hell that comes with it, so they'll find themselves better off with a Merchant of Record that can handle that for them ... which is almost certainly proprietary because ... it's a big mess.
Which podcast is this? It's not on my radar, def interested.
https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com
I've been listening to the network for decades now and directly credit my IT career to the people who've been platformed on the various shows over the years. Lots of great content.
This is true for patreon but not substack. I personally know people who blog on substack not because they care about monetization — I mean, they hardly get any readers who are not a friend already — but because it is "the place" to put long form writing. I can't see the exact subscription number of substack, but if Pareto principle holds, I'd suspect most substack blogs don't have a monetization problem to solve because no one pay for them.
I’m the founder of Tertulia so take this with appropriate grain of salt.
I (unsurprisingly) agree authors should own their own website and email list (btw based on hundreds of data points we know converts about 100 to 1 versus social followers for book sales) but the issue is how to make it effortless to set up and maintain a website.
We built a system where you enter one ISBN and we instantly import your entire book catalog, including books, reviews, metadata, author bio, etc. Btw one book to all the authors’ books is not trivial problem (see how often Amazon gets it wrong) due to lack of universal author ID. We’ve since built author-specific email marketing, ecommerce, etc all on a domain each author owns (we make it seamless). Now that we have 9k+ happy (65 NPS) authors we’re adding author cross promotion for distribution but the author’s owned domain and capturing their own emails remains at center.
Anyways if anyone wants to check it out for free (no CC needed) would welcome feedback from HN community. https://authors.tertulia.com/
I debated this for longer than I would like, and in the end regretted not joining Substack soon enough. I keep a personal blog since 2012 [1] which, in its last iteration, is hosted in Ghost. There is something really reassuring in knowing that you own a space in the internet, that nobody can shut you down, and that ceteris paribus it will survive till eternity.
However, discoverability is indeed a problem. If in the past we had to play the SEO game in order to get some traffic (I would crosspost in Reddit but the amount of uncalled hate I would get from an unqualified audience hardly pays off – I manage to make to the top of HN once though), now it's even worse with AI.
I agree with those who say that as much as we like to say we write for ourselves (and I do think this is true), it's as important to have contact with the public. In Le vie intellectuele Fr. Sertillanges would argue that critics help you shape the argument and make it clearer and more correct. Therefore, having a distribution channel is important. After all, if all you want is to brain dump or write as an exercise, write it in Obsidian or similar software, connect it to Git and be done with it.
Now, after I started my Substack [2] I was able to attract over ~2.3k subs to date. It's true that a lot of that came from other channels (like my YouTube channel), but in the past it was always slow and Ghost newsletter never really worked well for me. In Substack I often get recommendations from other writers, and you can also refer to people you respect as well.
If Substack ever ceases to allow you to export your posts or subscribers, then I agree the network effect won't be as decisive. Currently, I write my drafts in Obsidian so I always have a local copy, then copy, paste and refine in the Substack editor (so it looks optimized there), and press publish.
[1] https://rafaelquintanilha.com [2] https://codecapital.substack.com
A great article written on this theme is “DON’T BUILD YOUR CASTLE IN OTHER PEOPLE’S KINGDOMS” (2021)
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
Exporting your subscriber list isn't perfect. I did it after moving to https://tuhat.net, and then after posting from tuhat, got emails from subscribers asking who I was and why I was writing to them. The majority of said subscribers, came from an article I wrote about leaving substack, so you'd think they'd have figured it out.
Some of them were far less polite, never mind that it would have taken them less time to click unsubscribe then writing some insulting email to someone they chose to follow.
I recently started to write newsletters about Hamburg (https://alsterrunde.com). Before doing that I also considered Substack but seeing that I have to pay 50$ for just using my domain was a no-go. In the end, I ended up with my friend's hosted Ghost solution (https://www.synapsmedia.com).
If you already have a Substack, you can also easily migrate to Ghost. Since it is open source, you can also host it on Hetzner, if you want to manage it yourself.
This saved me when X killed Substack tweets. My Substack uses a custom domain and thus was fine. People tweeted it out with no blocking.
I wrote this for my own self-hosted blog a few years ago:
> My goal is to write good blog posts, and µstack exists for the purpose of making it as easy as possible for me to write good blog posts. As far as I can tell, there’s no meaningful correlation between the quality of work published on a website, and the amount of engagement that website receives. I could track clicks or traffic or RSS feed queries, but that data would only tell me how many people are reading what I write - it wouldn’t tell me if my writing is any good.
I feel like it's relevant here. The OP tacitly assumes that engagement is the goal, that your purpose in writing is to get eyes on what you wrote. I argue that, for most writers, the goal is self-expression. If that drives engagement, cool. If it doesn't, the purpose has still been fulfilled.
If I were to provide an addendum to the OP, it would be this: consider the goals of your blog, artistic and otherwise. The answer to "what platform is right for me?" might be no platform at all.
If you make good art (or blog posts), people will find you, "platform" or not. The internet is cool that way. Eyes do not good art make.
I feel like the internet used to be "cool that way", but it's not anymore. You don't do stuff for "engagement", but you probably want some audience and feedback, otherwise why bother publishing your work at all. Nowadays almost all audience got sucked up by the black hole of social media and LLMs, and most authors just scream into the void.
The linked article "What I learned from one year of Substack" [1] perfectly sums up my experience. I can't read the article because I only see a coercive demand to subscribe first. Perhaps that's the joke.
[1] https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-...
It's not a Substack site and virtually no Substack sites do this.
I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but like ‘oh great now I gotta deal with this’. So that’s why Medium in the past and now Substack etc end up as fallbacks
A custom domain and GitHub hosting has been fine for me. You pay the time cost of setting up a static site, but I’d take that over Wordpress. Writing articles is a markdown file and a push. If you need to draft in private, keep it offline. It gives me a place where I can keep a resume and a portfolio, I control the design and I don’t pay for traffic. You don’t even need a custom domain name.
A different kingdom to be sure, but you can always pack your bags and push the repository elsewhere. There’s something quite pleasing about having everything handled in git too.
given that wordpress.com is just managed hosting i wonder if other providers can bring that cost down. installing it yourself is trivial though because of Softaculous, and web hosting is much cheaper.
Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess.
But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it.
Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0.
If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.
> Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess.
There are literally thousands of PHP hosting providers.
There are also dozens, possibly hundreds of deviated wordpress hosting services, aside from WordPress.com.
Your point being? These thousands of hosting providers all charge around $5 or more to host your Wordpress instance, because that’s what it actually costs to run Wordpress.
A more modern CMS can bring costs down by serving pages from a CDN cache and, most importantly, selectively re-rendering only pages that changed. This is hard to do with Wordpress because plugins can essentially render anything and depend on any data.
Yes, that's what it is. Even worse if you want to get paid through subscriptions. Although Ghost blog might be a good middle option.
Substack gives a really nice exposure though, unlike medium and other platforms.
It's very hard to gain readers now on independent websites. Google search is dead (very few people now search for tech content), social media platforms penalize you for posting links and so on.
You can get a few thousand subscribers on Substack just by being consistent and interacting with other people. Now try gaining 1000 subscribers to an e-mail newsletter or RSS from your personal blog. People who tried it know that 5,000 views on your blog can convert to a few subscribers, and you need to get those 5000 somehow first.
A lot of people just repost their articles to substack for a reason. It's not forbidden. You can repost them from your personal blog.
Not true. Ghost sites grow quite well and much of Substack's network effects don't turn into real subscribers
This is why it'd be great if bloggers more frequently provided topical, off-site recommendations in post footers. It's functionally like Substack's internal links but connects the open web.
Seeing some of the conversations in the comments reminded me of this thread and post from a few years back "Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39016734 https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghos...
Alternatively, use an open platform that doesn't lock you in:
I think from a technical perspective, newsletters are a solved problems with lots of options as you've mentioned.
Substack thrives because it's built a reputation for having well-reasoned or engaging voices in a newsletter format. They pushed a big campaign to onboard writers like Bill Bishop (Sinocism) onto the platform early on. Because of that, newer writers are likely seeking to tap into the network effects/discovery systems that comes with having big names on the platform.
People log onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, etc. because the people they're interested are already on the platform, and the platform provides a recommendation system that allows newer "creators" to tap into an existing audience for others in their niche.
I get that we all want people to be on open platforms but I feel like the really staunch part of the open platforms only crowd is not taking the time to understand why people like platforms like substack.
I agree, very aware it's way more than just the publishing / email tools! Also posted a top-level comment about building alternatives with https://leaflet.pub and https://standard.site - and yes I think really important to consider the full list of things you get with Substack: blog + email, easy to customize, monetization, social features + network, all in one platform, long tail of features…
Did a short talk on this at a local meetup recently, basically on how we might collectively re-create the entire stack of what Substack offers, in an open ecosystem, with a strong focus on network / distribution, more so than just features.
It's a tall order but I do think there's a big opportunity here beyond what any single app can or should tackle, in building an open alternative to the whole longform publishing stack, combining the tools and the social network side. AT Protocol and the Atmosphere (ecosystem of folks building on it) are pretty well positioned here. Lots of nice ways to get autonomy and ownership with web publishing + distribution and social affordances at the same time.
Of course a big challenge in bootstrapping the network and building the cultural footprint and giving folks flexible ways to make money and reach new readers, but I'm encouraged by how much progress we've made collectively just this past year.
I resonate with the author's point that I can modify my own website to my will.
I use hugo to build my website and I wrote my own theme. It's clunky, but control over the design/build lets me:
On the flip side, I'm not good at SEO :) It works because SEO is not my primary goal, but I'd love to have a bigger audience. The flexibility I'm afforded is an ok compromise.Also take into account Substack moderation policy.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
Natsoc newsletters are apparently fine, but showing porn is too much and you'll be moderated. Go on, tell me how one is more harmful to kids than the other.
There's an exact parallel with business owners - in my geographic region (BR) at least - in general. It still surprises me how many small and even medium-sized businesses don't bother registering their own domain name anymore, preferring instead to rely entirely on an Instagram page.
In my mind this always went without saying, but realistically I know most people never think long term about this sort of thing. I've been hosting my own web content for nearly a decade now, including a 6 year old blog, and I've always kept it there only, using social media to advertise it.
Frankly I think self hosting is super easy in 2026 (and virtually free unless you want personalized domains or subdomains), especially for simple web content, but I also understand the aversion to it and at least hope that more and more people will spend their money on VPS (or other hosting services like Wordpress), rather than these random websites that appear overnight like Substack.
I agree! That's why I built Pagecord. Like Substack it's a blog with a mailing list, but it's also your personal website (pages, for example) with a custom domain. Also, source available.
Most people will defer to Substack because (A) the brand, and (B) it can be monetised which is probably the biggest draw.
Maybe I need to bring monetisation to Pagecord? :)
https://pagecord.com
https://github.com/lylo/pagecord
Why do they need a website, their newsletter is their channel and social profiles on X would be sufficient?
Now the friction is close to none, at least for techies.
Set a GitHub repo, use pnpm + Astro, and your favourite AI to migrate data there, brew some coffee, and before you finish it, you have your page up.
It does not prevent you from posting elsewhere. But that way, you have full control both on the fruits of your own work, and how you display it.
I used to pay Mailchimp $100+/month and would write 3-4 articles per month. It seemed illogical to me how much mailchimp would charge.
I now have a substack + a wordpress website. An article goes to both places, and substack acts as a subscriber growth + email distribution tool for me.
Substack is free because you act as a growth/distribution engine for them.
They plaster your emails with ads to download their app and will even email your list whenever they feel like it and when you leave they will still email your list substack-related content and offers.
When someone subscribed via the app btw, they own that person, not you.
If you’re okay with that trade off, fine, but I thought we learned this lesson about the trap of “free” with the social media companies before…
Great idea.
Recently, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s surprisingly easy these days. I already have a domain on Cloudflare, and I had Codex build a simple blogging system for me. I write everything in Markdown, the site is hosted on Cloudflare, comments are stored in Cloudflare D1, and all articles live in the repository as Markdown files. GitHub Actions takes care of publishing automatically and also performs regular backups. To reduce comment spam, I use Cloudflare Turnstile, which has been working really well. For comment moderation, I protect the admin interface with Cloudflare Zero Trust, using email-based authentication, so I don’t need to build or maintain my own authentication system. Overall, the setup has been incredibly simple, reliable, and has required very little ongoing maintenance.
This is not a simple setup. Most people would be just fine with a static site that can be hosted for free on Netlify, Cloudfare Pages, GitHub Pages and so on.
Thank you! I don't like substack at all. I hate the typography overall. It's not hard to power up a static website, especially these days using Jekyll, Hugo, or hundreds of other such framework in so many different languages.
The only thing good about Substack is to find new people to read from, but I'm less inclined to follow them for long because who knows how Substack changes things.
The real pro move is to have zero traffic so it doesn't matter either way
For anyone who’s interested in this stuff: I made a FOSS commenting system for websites that accepts comments via email. https://r3ply.com
You combine your website/blog with that and you have a pretty nice setup that you own. You can even use RSS to allow people to subscribe to replies to comments, threads, a page, etc…
I'd consider Substack if it had options to make my blog the canonical. But AFAIK that isn't possible; the only way of doing it would be for Substack to be the canonical and my blog the "copy", and that seems dumb from a future thinking perspective?
Does SEO even matter these days? Google Search seems to be on the way out as the dominant discovery mechanism. Really a better discovery mechanism is what writers need that's more aligned with with readers and writers and less with platform owners and advertisers.
I agree and am working on it. It’s been a stream of progress after launching my comedy writings under https://yelluw.com I’ve focused mostly on writing by postponing the actual editorial/cms side of things. I’d rather prove that I can write and write well than spend all my energy getting the perfect cms setup.
The one issue I have today is copyright and all the extreme scraping being done by ai companies. I wonder how others are dealing with that.
In system after system, people enthusiastically swarm to something which is easy to use. Then, after enshittification, they hang around too long because it's so hard to extract and send the meaningful data and metadata elsewhere.
If you write all your stuff in a location you control, and syndicate that out to the popular platform of the day, you can minimize your loss.
An astoundingly large percentage of my personal technical policies are guided by the idea that I want to minimize my losses after the next sudden yet inevitable betrayal.
I've been blogging for 22 years now. At the beginning I could tell I had a relatively steady audience based on frequent comments (when comments on blogs were a thing). These died off over the years. Then, in 2020, I implemented my own unobtrusive subscription mechanism and email distribution to try to regain such an audience. And... it's pretty disappointing. I've gotten less than 200 subscribers that way; conversions just don't happy.
Then I "switched" to Substack 3 years ago and the audience growth is real. I'm approaching 2000 subscribers (some of which are paid, which always surprises me and I appreciate), and these keep growing organically although I'm sure a large portion of which are fake. It's hard to say it doesn't work or isn't worth it.
Now... spoiler: I never "switched" to Substack. I continue to write all of my content on my website _first_, with all of the features it had before, but now I copy/paste the content into Substack and distribute it that way. It's painful, but I have scars from when I moved off of Medium and want to ensure I "own" the originals.
If you are curious, I had written more about this 2 years ago in https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging
For what it's worth, I have a markdown-based website with a domain I own, and I stubbornly link to that website only, treating substack as just a temporary distribution channel.[^1] And I am constantly, endlessly asking myself if all the extra friction I've added to my life is worth it.
[^1]: I can't stand how slow and tracking-heavy substack is, but the problem of "send email and not get filtered as spam" is non-trivial.
If you can generate traffic to your website while having a deep email list as well of people who are alerted when you write, you essentially make yourself unable to be censored or deplatformed. Large companies want you there so they make money from your content, make your own platform and get your own users and you have the keys to the kingdom.
This is a solid argument. However, I feel creators should focus first on writing consistently and then invest in a personal website as they grow.
The moment I get those popups on Substack or similar, to login to continue reading, those writers have lost a reader.
So yeah, get a website.
I am quite sad that Kagi Smallweb excludes Substack. I understand that less technical writers have started moving to Substack both to build an audience and have access to effective publishing tools, but it feels like I'm missing out on some really interesting new perspectives, similar to early Medium.
unfortunately a lot of people never read history to understand how certain things in the modern world came to be.
if you've a chance read a bit on sharecropping, the feudal system.
then you will see a good population of people are willingly getting into serfdom.
The website itself isn't the most important thing, what matters is the people who use it.
I am surprised that people pay $12/ month for a single Substack newsletter.
Technically you do not own domain. You just rent it from registrar for yearly fee.
Substack fails to deliver the single thing it supposed to do - great reading experience.
The website itself is slow, it cannot render the whole comments section, it constantly nags readers with subscribe forms.
It can not handle single account across my subscriptions.
Its just crap.
We have made peace with the dichotomy of a computer delivering AAA titles at 4k 144Hz while simultaneously struggling to render a few hundred comments on Substack.
Yeah, even if the website itself gets less traffic than the places you syndicate the content to, it's at least a stable home base that's there if those platforms fall apart. Are you posting something that corporations or celebrities don't like/want to see shared? Then posting it on your own site means that the buck stops with you, and they'll have to force you to take it down in court rather than relying on advertiser pressure/'encouraging' the platform to ignore fair use. Did you do something controversial that means platforms don't want to deal with you or individuals want to ruin your life? Having your own site means you can generally tell them to pound sand. And there's no worries regarding things like forced logins, forced ads, obnoxious cookie banners (especially if you don't need to collect personal info anyway), age verification restrictions, etc.
Plus there's just a level of control over the design and features that you can't get elsewhere. Want to make the site look completely unlike any other? It's 100% doable, as plenty of blogs posted here show very well. Want to add a new feature like polls or surveys or quizzes or interactive infographics or what not? You don't need a third party service or some premium account, you just add it yourself.
Running a website is like owning a home rather than renting one. You decide what furniture, what colours, what utilities and service providers, whether you want pets, etc.
And HN is kind of like the HOA of websites, giving you notices about color choice, pets, and under construction gifs.
Earlier I got an email from Substack telling me to check out my stats for my bewest blog post.
It has 2 views, lol.
I just post it all to blog.ciefas.cafe now, I have no audience so I feel like Substack is useless to me.
I kind of agree with the author, but having such places is very convenient for most people considering most people do not know how to make websites. Yes, it is easy nowadays, but it is still a hurdle for many.
Specifically on Substack though: I immediately close if a link I clicked is Substack. Many reasons for that. I find it very unpleasant to read stuff there, because of that banners and general design of the website. It all look generic and I hate generic. Second reason and even more important for me is that Substack platforms Nazis and white supremacists and they have apparently no problem about it.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
I was reading and reading and thinking that's the ages old advise POSSE, and then they even mention the Indieweb, nice.
Honestly, I shut down my webiste and Medium, then moved to Substack because they solved the "get paid for my writing" problem.
In 2022, Medium was defacto blogging platform and getting into their paid program was close to impossible.
In the first 2 days of setting up Subtack I got a 5 dollar deposit from my first paying reader. I couldn't have done that on either Medium or my personal blog.
People pay to read blogs?
If you ever need a home. I built it mainly for me and all the stuff that I work on.
https://upubli.sh/
Substack writers, you need to move to Ghost.
Wake up. The ad revenue model of websites is dying.
Substack is unreadable for anyone in Australia, as it forces you unnecessarily through age verification.
Another reason for having a designed website instead of just a Substack is marketing. When I visit a site and see that it’s a Substack I don’t want to stay and explore. It feels generic and that hurts the writing. Making a custom site isn’t much trouble, especially these days so defaulting to Substack feels a little unconsidered
I think https://indieweb.org/POSSE is generally a good compromise.
Frankly, if writing is becoming a serious business for you, it's probably better to work across ALL of Substack/personal site/X/etc. They're all worthwhile distribution and monetization channels and can serve different purposes.
Amen to that
so true ! since 1995 !
My biggest grievance with Substack is that the font treatment (kerning is way off), coloring, spacing, etc of all of the posts is difficult to read. I can't read anything on Substack without a 3rd party reader tool. This is ironic because the core competency of a publishing tool is ensuring that your audience can read the content.
Isn't Substack's whole premise that you get raw cash for you priceless writing, not worrying about SEO and other crap?
Those without an actual domain are sure very exposed.
The age of the individual is over...
If you have a substack you probably do not need a website. You probably need a personal diary.
Thank you for saying this.
Every time I see a substack article I simply do not open it, because if I do, especially on mobile, 90% of the screen will be covered for popups banners and what not
Did we really learn nothing from Medium's situation?
What did you learn from the Medium situation?
Staking your own kingdom has infinitely more potential than settling into someone's fief.
Did Wordpress write this?
The page is AI slop, don't waste your time
I run an independent technical homepage. The monthly cost is about $65 USD. Of course, it's money I can spend on a hobby, but it's still quite a lot. The only reason I can manage it is because I'm a programmer—I can handle things like caching strategies and various other tedious tasks. I get about 600 visitors a day.(The site could be hosted much more cheaply. I deliberately run a more involved architecture because part of its purpose is to serve as an operational portfolio. I needed public evidence that I could design, deploy, monitor, and operate a real system over time. Generally, for a site of about my size, around $40 a month should be enough.)
Writing itself takes a lot of effort.
First:
1.You have to define your target audience.
2.You have to choose topics they'll find interesting.
3.You need to collect materials.
4.You read through the materials, build the structure, and go through multiple drafts and revisions.
Even a short post usually takes about a week. And even after all that, will people actually read it? Not really. So I have to promote it on external sites like HN and Reddit, and keep updating the sitemap until my site starts showing up in Google search results.
The problem is that most people want to make money through writing. That's completely understandable. With the economy getting tougher, even hobbies cost money.
The issue is that once you step away from platforms like Substack and Medium, it becomes much harder for people to find your content, and you lose the community itself. In fact, that's the real strength of Substack and Medium—people are already there to spend money because they're earning from the same ecosystem. But if you move to an independent site, even putting up ads can cause strong backlash (especially since Google often shows low-quality ads—like porn ads—to people who don't share their personal data).
In my case, I created my site because I needed a portfolio that made me look professional. Since I don't have experience at prestigious companies or universities, and I've mostly moved between small contractors, I needed something to show that I know certain things, have relevant experience, and have built actual products. (In the Korean market, the only work available to programmers without capital is small NDA-bound jobs.)
On the other hand, people with good careers don't need to take this risk—their reputation comes from successful products they've worked on in the market.
So I needed a metric like 'I run my own site, it uses MSA, and I have experience running it stably over the long term.' Of course, I could list the projects I've worked on, but most of them don't have a strong track record of market success. So I think that unless you're in a special situation, it's better to stay within existing writing communities.
Obligatory:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...
Archive link: https://archive.ph/rfnc5
Yet another walled garden leveraging network effects
TLDR: POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
Is there a guide for how to do the “syndicate elsewhere” part?
For the HN audience, the first part is trivially easy (getting a domain, publishing on it) but the second probably isn’t obvious.
There are guides but it amounts to "use popular services to link to your website". Post snippets on the bird apps, social media hellscapes, and aggregators like this one. Duplicate your content on the blogging services. Have an RSS feed and submit it to discovery engines and web directories/rings. And send me a link so I can index you.
Stickers are neat too.
Depending on how often you write copy and paste to “elsewhere” is the easy answer.
Substack really wants you to use them as a primary publisher so they don’t make it easy to programmatically put content up. Other platforms have varying levels of ease around this.
who reads websites these days?
You? For example, on this site?