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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

How did you guys settle on "Substack"? I only ask because Substack is a really well known handle for one of the most prolific Node ecosystem contributors, and I feel like you guys are going to run into a lot of SEO pain dealing with that.

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We subscribe to the pg take on naming. We went through a couple of options we like, and Substack was the one we could get the .com for. It's a Stack for Subscription publishing. We didn't realize about the node developer with the Twitter handle; hopefully it's different enough that it's not a pain for either of us.

See http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

So you couldn't be bothered to google for the name? It's not just their Twitter handle; they've published some of the most popular npm packages of all time under it; there's who knows how many millions of users.

Or is it that you googled and decided you can just take over someone's identity because they haven't registered a .com. It's not like "substack" would be a thing outside of it.

They haven't taken over an identity. A simple disclaimer on the landing page is sufficient to explain the situation, which is that no company is responsible for every current or past or future naming conflict. There's something something about naming being hard.

substack isn't a startup, it's a human being. Regardless of something being pg's "take", that doesn't make what you've done here ethical, or good for the ecosystem, or good for your company. (Separately, if you don't have the .com OR the twitter handle, change your name)

Change your name, how about?

You knew what you were doing, there's no way you haven't done your research before taking that name. You also knew that YC always had a culture of developers and you still went through with it... alienating the developer community. That said, there's still time to make it right... You could probably give the domain name to the "real" substack and find a new and probably better, name.

I got excited I was about to read an AMA with substack.

It also sounds too techie-sounding for the average writer, versus something like "TinyLetter". Though I guess they're used to it with things like "blog", "Tumblr", and "pod/vodcast"

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