Comment by Sachaniman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sachaniman | Hacker News Reader

The biggest thing for me is canonical URLs.

If I'm trying to BUILD an audience, I'm going to write content for free. If I already have a website I post content on, you bet I'm going to keep posting my free content there. Why am I competing with Substack on SEO for my own free content? That's just stupid.

Eventually, if I actually get an audience that's willing to pay, I would use Substack to offer that walled garden. Just like Youtube creators offer their free content on Youtube, and paid content through other means like Patreon.

Even Medium supports canonical URLs. I'm not sure why Substack isn't satisfied with being the distributor of my content, but also wants to be the home for it.

That was one of the reasons I decided to go with my own platform. But Substack is not like Medium because it provides less discovery and more of a platform for writers. Medium, on the other hand, is more like an aggregator.

I was glad to see the canonical URL issue mentioned in your post, since that was the main thing bugging me about Substack. Thanks for writing this!

When I sent Substack Support an email about the issues of content ownership and canonical URLs in late May this year, I got this response:

>On Substack writers own all of their content, but we don't support synchronizing with external website or have external websites as the canonical url. Substack is meant to be the home for individual writers. Sorry about that

I love many things about Substack. Chiefly, the user experience of setting up the newsletters, and the iframe embed (though it can be improved) are great.

But I hope Substack reconsiders what their idea of being a "home for individual writers" means. Substack shouldn't have to be the source of my content, but rather be the plumbing for it. It seems not supporting custom canonical URLs was a conscious decision to force me to make Substack the source of my content, which is disappointing.

I'll have to look into ConvertKit in the meantime.

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