Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

There are two questions here, really. The first is why does Substack appeal to readers? To me, it doesn't. What appeals to me are the writers. If I care to read what they write, I'd read it on any platform. They happen to be on Substack, so I read them on Substack. The other question is why does it appeal to writers, in particular the more popular high-quality, high-prestige writers that are attracting readers?

I don't think that's a question to be asked of Hacker News readers in general, as presumably most of us aren't Substack writers, just readers.

To be honest, I don't like Substack as an application. Their commenting defaults are terrible. I'm not a fan of the push model of newsletters in general and prefer the pull model of going to the site whenever you feel like being updated on your own schedule. But I like the writers, so I go there anyway.

I work at Substack. We are building https://reader.substack.com/ for people who prefer pull. Supports both Substack and RSS. Still early days for that product but we are investing in it.

Thank you. I fully understand prioritizing the features that get you off the ground fastest and appreciate it when a platform eventually goes back to accommodate the outliers. To me, the issue with newsletters is just that push notifications of any kind are so absolutely drowned in spam that I don't want to deal with them for anything other than absolutely essential things I need to remember on a time-restricted basis, like "hey, remember you have a flight later today."

> The other question is why does it appeal to writers, in particular the more popular high-quality, high-prestige writers that are attracting readers?

Getting paid directly for writing, without dealing with the administrative overhead of things not specifically built for writing, like Patreon.

We can talk about censorship all day until we're prohibited from doing so by a private entity and move to another platform, but it won't change the fact that the writers yelling the most about it could've easily set up a Patreon with a monthly plan and published long-form text there. Plenty of people still do it. Substack just does that one thing better.

RSS does work, fwiw (you may know this but for others too ...): just add "/feed" to the end of the root URL, for example: https://bariweiss.substack.com/feed

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