Is Substack the Media Future We Want? | Hacker News Reader

Is Substack the Media Future We Want?

newyorker.com

54 pointsmisiti378069 comments

With a title like that, you'd think the article would make a more obvious enumeration of the reasons Substack might not be the future we want. Instead it spends most of its time in a declarative, historian's voice.

But while the author drops a few implications along the way, it's not really until the fifth or so paragraph from the end do they finally reveal a more concrete suspicion:

> A robust press is essential to a functioning democracy, and a cultural turn toward journalistic individualism might not be in the collective interest. It is expensive and laborious to hold powerful people and institutions to account, and, at many media organizations, any given article is the result of collaboration between writers, editors, copy editors, fact checkers, and producers.

Dunno, it kinda seems like wondering if there can be room for a multi-million dollar HBO special like Game of Thrones in a world where niche Patreon creators are making thousands of dollars. I guess we don't even need analogy: how do paid niche blogs (which is a far more accurate description of Substack than "premium newsletters") threaten large publications?

But to answer their question: yes, I think Substack is definitely part of the future we want. For years we've wondered if we could back out of our ad-driven internet economy where small players had no shot at making a living if they couldn't attract ad dollars. We've brainstormed so much about what that could even look like.

Then platforms like Patreon and Substack popped up and demonstrated what a lot of us assumed was impossible: people opening their wallet to support an individual.

Looks like there actually is a way through this ad-driven mess.

More glaringly, a piece with a title like that in a major media outlet lays bare an obvious conflict of interest. "No, not the future you want."

I was ready for some interesting points about the downsides of Substack.

But reading the article, especially with the 15(!!) inset ads and the Creative Cloud sidebar ad that followed me the whole length of the article, I realized how hard it is to damn Substack with anything that doesn't pale in comparison to ad-captured traditional media.

> But to answer their question: yes, I think Substack is definitely part of the future we want.

You wrote what I wanted to.

Substack is an enabling technology, and functionally replaces the printer that magazines like the New Yorker use to physically print their magazine before sending them out to readers via USPS (instead of email) or to bookstores.

They also picked a very good payment processor in Stripe, another enabling technology that functionally replaces the physical terminals you would get from Square or First Data.

In the long term I might be concerned about Substack if they take on too much VC money and try to go the full Medium route. In the short term, concerning yourself with Substack is like concerning yourself with what kind of printers that a book publisher uses. A printer can be technically interesting, but ultimately it does the job you ask of it.

What excites me about Patreon and Substack is the underlying cultural shift that makes them possible.

10 years ago, users of a free service I run urged me to put up a Paypal donation button like they were dying to throw money at me. After months of urging, I finally did. ...I received so little in donations that I refunded the money.

Last year, my users urged me to put up a Patreon and, expecting the worst, I finally did it. The service isn't nearly as popular as it was 10 years ago, yet they've committed $300+/month which is enough to at least pay for some of my time to improve the service, a service I considered taking down.

It's hard to overstate what's going on here. There are avenues opening up just when I thought, yesterday, that they closed off for good.

Just like Adsense created a content renaissance that let small creators (on a couple mediums) make a living, it might not be overstating it to say that we're seeing the next one, this time with direct, recurring (important!) funding.

Aside, I wonder what the historian's analysis of the cultural shift would look like mapped out. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitch was the lynchpin in normalizing direct contribution.

The main trouble I have with Substack right now is that it looks so much like Medium it's hard not believe it is going to turn out the same in the end.

Unlike Medium, however, it's attracted some quality writing. (e.g. Medium seems to attract writers who are (a) blown away by much easier it is to get usage numbers compared to a real blog, and (b) are blown away by getting 70 "views" on an article.)

> Unlike Medium, however, it's attracted some quality writing.

IIRC Medium was like this too in the beginning. There was a time where I wanted to read articles on Medium because they were higher quality than average. I agree that it's hard to see Substack turning out differently. Although if the company isn't acquired / doesn't IPO then it's also true that these things can vary based on who is running the company.

>IIRC Medium was like this too in the beginning.

I think that's right. And one of the things that made Medium attractive to me to cross-post from my own blog to every now and then was that people who mostly didn't know any better saw the overall quality and assumed that there was some filtering going on. Which in turn made it seems more authoritative than a "blog." I stopped bothering once the quality went down and the paywalls went up.

I don't remember the beginnings of Medium, but I vividly remember Quora back in the day. It was full of successful CEOs, entrepreneurs, subject matter experts, scientists, etc. It was THE place to ask a question if you wanted high quality responses. Now, it is just a Google spam and growth hacking platform.

I guess the difference here is that low-quality content (however you care to define) mostly won't be paid for and likely won't even be seen. The concept is interesting although I for one am very selective about the things I subscribe to. (And I'm also pretty newslettered out in general.)

Let me tell you a story about Yahoo answers...

The "problem" with Medium is that the quality of many of the articles is poor. But so what? That only matters if you're using presence on the site as your mechanism of quality filtering. If the site has mixed quality posts, read the ones from high quality authors.

There could be a market for a service that just does quality filtering as a news aggregation service. So basically the opposite of what YouTube is doing -- don't show anything from OAN or CNN or similar partisan outlets, don't show garbage blogs, show the good ones. Maybe easier said than done, but I bet there's a market there.

That's basically what sites like Reddit or HN set out to do: aggregate the good articles, using the wisdom of the crowd. Of course that's not that easy, and not necessary what people even want

The wisdom of the crowd quickly gets overwhelmed by the idiocy of the mob.

I agree. Another potential solution is a kind of service that will enable users to look for articles that meet some criteria, and the service could prioritize articles of higher quality. Then you wouldn't need to browse Medium, you'd just look for what you want and the service would recommend quality articles.

Of course the question is always how to properly rank an article's quality. I'd say the best approach is to crowdsource it - develop an algorithm that takes into account how many other highly ranked articles reference a given article, and give a higher rank to articles that have more references.

If you do this, make sure to give the algorithm a clever name. Ideally name it after yourself, unless your name is Smith. You'll never do well with a business built around something called SmithRank.

Now if your last name happened to be something related the things you're ranking, like, say..."Article"...wow, call it ArticleRank!

Just remember you heard it first here on HackerNews.

Yes, good show, PageRank. Slight problem, though -- that measures popularity, which correlates with outrage rather than quality. Then you end up with results full of OAN and CNN.

I’m sure I’ve read hundreds of pieces on Medium, but I don’t associate those pieces with anybody or anything and I definitely never gave them any money. On the other hand, I subscribe to multiple substacks and I’ve been really happy with the experience, one that I associate very directly with the specific writers I’m paying to read.

That feels like a big difference.

In other words, a dinosaur is worried about an incoming meteor.

Most meteors miss. A dinosaur looking up at the sky, worried about a meteor and saying, nah, this one's probably harmless was right a hundred thousand times out of a hundred thousand and one. And even the dinosaurs knew they'd become extinct one day, they didn't know how it would happen and when.

I'm not sure, but I'm not liking the media present we have.

Need to reinforce your bubble.

I think it's not possible to have an opinion on "the media". It's an industry not an entity. The MSM has mostly done an outstanding job, newspapers in particular. There's a lot of terrible media too.

> The MSM has mostly done an outstanding job, newspapers in particular.

I really genuinely cannot tell whether you are being sarcastic.

Sincere. The NY Times, WaPo, NPR and even CNN have not let much get past them. It's a meme that they're terrible because they made a few mistakes in thousands of pages of reporting. For the most part, they have dug deep and gotten tons of information to light. Information that amateur opinion writers on platforms like Substack can't match. Even the slightly outsider orgs like ProPublica or The Intercept are doing their work via professional newsrooms with editors. I don't recall ever seeing a major story be broken by a blogger or newsletter writer.

I mostly feel bad for the node.js developer, James Halliday, who goes by substack. Seeing this article (ad?) and their recruiting ads on HN reminds me of his tweets:

https://twitter.com/substack/status/1323049757615353856?s=21

Unsure of the validity to those claims. But it did seem like they capitalized on the familiarity of his username to gain traction early on.

That’s ridiculous, maybe familiar to a few node devs who are knee deep in code all day but let’s not pretend that he’s a household name on the level of Steve Wozniak

Probably not, substack will be great until it begins censoring content. The end goal is to rediscover self-hosted blogs, but this time with a paid option to view the premium content.