Ask HN: What is special about Substack?

4 points·mychele··2 comments

I see more and more substack links popping up on HN. What is special about this platform? What is it's edge over similar, alternative platforms?

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The Economist had a good article on this earlier this month. In short, for the past decade content creators have, for the most part, provided free content for Twitter, Facebook, etc. These companies in turn have made billions of dollars displaying ads alongside this free content. Sites like Substack are changing that and making it easier for content creators themselves to manage / monetize their content.

[1] https://econ.st/3fzbPKe (This is a "gift this article" link which I've not used before. Hopefully it lets you see it if you don't have an account.)

[2] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/05/08/the-new-rules-... (The article itself)

Guessing…

Being a YC company¹, presumably the overlap with people who are aware of both is quite high. They also pay some "big names" an advance to write², and again the overlap of chosen people/interests seems likely to align to some extent.

FWIW, there was a time when the front page basically felt like a Medium indexer, and I imagine this cycle will eventually be the same as the platform changes/dilutes/grows(delete as appropriate).

¹ https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/substack

² https://blog.substack.com/p/why-we-pay-writers

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