Comment by daturkel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daturkel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is actually a very interesting point that I've come across on a few different platforms recently (Patreon, for example, [also targets their homepage to creators, not consumers](https://www.patreon.com/)). I wonder if Substack just doesn't want to deal with opening the door to some newsletters getting "free promotion" by being features on their homepage? Nonetheless, I'd love to see "trending" or "editors picks" or something.

Nonetheless, here are some I subscribe to:

Big, by Matt Stoller (about monopolies): https://mattstoller.substack.com/

Margins (about business and tech): https://themargins.substack.com/

Flow State (music): https://flowstate.substack.com/

Normcore tech (tech, data science): https://vicki.substack.com/

The Passion Economy (business): https://passion.substack.com/

Probably like Patreon, they expect that creators are bringing an existing fan community with them. I've never discovered creators through Patreon, but I've found countless creators elsewhere and then looked at their Patreon page to see what they were working on/funding. As an email newsletter service, this is particularly typical.

That said, these are some pretty neat newsletters so now I do find myself wanting to discover more of them. I see an opportunity for something like one of those "Awesome list" Github repos that lists neat Substack newsletters people have found. And honestly that kind of feels more "wholesome" to me than official curation since it's communicating one person's taste (or a curated group's taste) rather than introducing potential incentives for newsletter writers to try to game some system for publicity. This seems like a good start. ;)

Homepage should be indicative and easy to navigate. For example in online advertising industry you are presented with "Publishers" and "Advertisers" in content creation industry homepage should show for example "Content Creators" and "Consumers" or "Publishers" and "Readers".

I also think Substack's UI and UX should be much better and also their search feature is rather primitive, search always should be robust in this kind of businesses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com