Don’t Judge a Substack by Its Cover | Hacker News Reader

Don’t Judge a Substack by Its Cover

secondbreakfast.co

> Lowering the bar for online publishing is fantastic. I am cheering for them.

> But I hope I don’t find myself groaning when I click on Substack links.

> Medium became a victim of its own success. Too much noise, not enough signal. I wonder how Substack can avoid the same fate.

Isn't this a problem of "network effects"? As the network grows, the quality lowers? To remain high quality you need strong filters which ultimately shrinks the network.

Substack is gonna be exposed to a similar problem as medium, and they may be able to solve it, but I don't expect so, because they aren't building a "magazine" but a "publishing platform".

Yeah, that's what I'm wondering. I hope they're able to avoid the same outcome of Medium. I think the paid feature and the email-first feature change the dynamics a little bit. The similar brand matters less when all your subscribers are just getting your posts via email, and the subscribe/pay features can serve as signals to show which Substacks are worth paying more attention to.

We'll see!

> “Oh this person just throws stuff on Medium? Probably not worth my time.”

This is just the worst attitude. Someone's not worth your time because they don't have the knowledge or time to stand up a website on their own domain? People who aren't web developers might still have something interesting to say.

Agreed. It's a subconscious bias I've noticed creep in over the years.

For me, it's not that they can't stand up a website, but that there's very little barrier to entry. An article on the New Yorker, say, tends to be better than one on Medium not because the writer can make a website but because they have a strong editorial team that only publish content of a certain quality and edit it to improve it. An article on Medium may not even have been proofread.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. The New Yorker is a magazine that curates and publishes articles by people who write for a living and stakes its reputation on only publishing pieces of a high quality.

The distinction here really is if someone publishes on joesblog.com or on medium.com/joesblog. Both are self-published rather than selected for publication, but the OP was of the opinion that joesblog.com is an indicator of higher quality of content, which I don't think is true. All it indicates is that someone has been able to set up a website.

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