Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

>There is one important difference: Substack has better, more flexible tools for payment than blogging ever had.

There are two more key differences: Substack has serious marketing effort behind it. Big scale, well thought ought, multi-channel and multi-platform. It's the proverbial tide that rises all boats - the ones that docked at the Substack harbor, that is.

The other substantive advantage is uniform and clear user (reader) interface. The value of which cannot be over-stated for ease and please of focusing on the content, for comfortable familiarity, and for fast, smooth performance. It stands in stark contrast with ad-laden, noisy and ad-hoc interface of most online publications, be it newspapers or blogs. Its structure is very clear "flat trees", giving an almost linear navigating experience - as opposed to the multiply linked graphs of typical publications. The constrained options of Substack allow it to be, and remain, great. It even passes the "works just as well without adblock" test.

At the risk of doing it disservice by the way of risky comparison, Substack is everything that Google Amp ever wanted to be - and without the warts.

> It even passes the "works just as well without adblock" test.

From a visual perspective yes. However i must note without a JS blocker snowden's article from yesterday will weigh 2.41MB, including 1.22MB JS file, which is insane! Disabling JS brings it down to 1.16MB where images are the heaviest files, with about 40-210KB per image, which is reasonable.

So, despite all the bad things i think about that kind of industry, i must recognize that their website works well without JavaScript, does not block Tor users, and is not excessively heavy to load once you have disabled JS. I'm ashamed to say it because it should be the minimum quality requirement for EVERY website, but congratulations on making an actually usable website in 2021. That's apparently become such a technological challenge that most VC-funded startups are incapable to do it.

It almost makes me want to pay a subscription! But of course i won't do it, since Substack is not a non-profit. There's no reason i should subsidize evil capitalist shareholders with the little money i have to live, i'd much rather use it to support artists and developers directly via liberapay, opencollective and other more ethical venues that do not encourage centralized hosting of content.

Good points about JS and Tor, thank you!

>That's apparently become such a technological challenge

I suppose it's more of an organizational challenge. Various factors like the difficulty of quantifying product- or service-manager productivity, or mistaking casual mass audience for core, engaged audience, etc.

Our culture still perceives interactive services and electronic content way too heavily through the lens of factory-like production of more countable widgtes, rather than of culture-and-religion like managing by making opinionated decisions, integrating things into cohesive, fractal form, and building lasting epic stories.

>There's no reason i should subsidize evil capitalist shareholders with the little money i have to live

Since I disagree with your stance :-) I'll propose a middle ground: try to compare various available payment/contribution channels with regards to: how large % they forward to the creator vs the cut taken, and how small is the channel's undue influence on the host socio-political system and the creators. Notably the (traditional) banking system, including some "bridge" companies like PayPal, fail the later part very much; they extend undue influence both broad socio-political, and also over the creators. Conversely, a specialized "patronize your favorite creator" services like SubscribeStar seems to be quite neutral. Of course nothing beats a direct payment :-)

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