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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

To me, Substack just looks like a clone of Medium. What makes it different?

The Medium model is that you provide content, and they provide an audience. They're a middleman where both the author and reader is a customer of Medium, which puts them in the position of having to balance the needs of authors and readers.

The Substack model is that you provide both content and audience, and they provide hosting and monetization tools. They're a service provider where only the author is their customer, and so they're able to focus exclusively on what the authors need.

So they don’t promote content in the way that Medium tries to do?

Correct, no promotion at all.

There is some discovery if you go look for it actually. It's just toned down and left for the user's initiative, instead of bugging you every chance it gets :)

> The Medium model is that you provide content, and they provide an audience.

This doesn't happen in practice. Like most marketplaces they have an incentive to market things that are popular or appear to be trending. That means in order for Medium to promote your article you need to do the marketing with your own audience or outlets to get eyeballs on the article and after Medium flags your article as popular it might get promoted.

This is a really big concept because it means if you're just starting off with no audience you might as well grow your own audience on your platform because most marketplaces like Medium (and others) aren't heavily promoting folks with no prior audience.

I remember putting some of my blog posts on Medium and setting the canonical URL back to my site. Out of the hundreds of thousands of visits my personal blog got I only had a few hundred total hits on Medium. That's because I didn't promote and drive my own traffic to Medium and in turn they didn't promote me.

There's no way to pay Medium to promote your content on their platform ?

> There's no way to pay Medium to promote your content on their platform ?

That's not something I saw when I used Medium in 2018ish for some of my posts.

I know there was a partner program but that wasn't paying to get traffic to your posts. That was a mechanism to get paid based on how much engagement you had on your Medium articles. It's just another incentive to get you to drive your own traffic and audience to Medium to drive up Medium engagement. Basically helping Medium grow their business.

If you wanted to pay money to promote your content you can do that without Medium. You can buy ads on Google and other outlets then run ads to your blog posts. I don't do that personally but it's an option.

I started with no audience and got >100k reads on one of my articles because I used a medium publication.

This resulted in being able to build an audience that would read my work irrespective of whether I published with a publication.

Getting your content onto a Medium publication with a large and/or relevant following is such useful method of distribution. All of my most widely read Medium posts have been via a publication that I reached out to.

No wonder it's failed if that is the model, I've never arrived on Medium .. from Medium. It's like the Vimeo of text.

> both the author and reader is a customer of Medium > only the author is [Substack’s] customer

That suggests that Medium should be more reader-friendly than Substack, but it seems the opposite is true. I suspect that even when readers are nominally customers on Medium, they are really still just the product (in the sense of “if it’s free, you’re the product” — except it’s not free here).

Most (all good?) authors will prioritize good reader experience as one of their own requirements, so a good reader experience comes naturally downstream from being author-first.

So: Medium is to Amazon/Best Western, what Substack is to Shopify/Airbnb?

https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/

The substack model seems to be more focused on building and supporting individual brands. So I don't think of visiting Substack, I think of checking out what X, Y or Z said. The Substack brand is subordinate to the individual blogs/writers.

I wrote this piece about the different subscription models a few years back and think that it held up very well: https://hua.substack.com/p/subscriptions-as-price-discrimina...

In particular re Medium:

> On the backend, the way [Medium's] partner program works is that users’ membership fees are allocated proportionally to the writer based on how many articles the user read. Fine. Also there is something about clapping. I guess if I really like a writer I could make sure to read a lot of their articles so they can get some of that membership fee. But, as a consumer, I: a. can’t subscribe directly to the writer, and b. can’t signal that I value their content at more than $5 per month. No amount of claps can make up for that!

Writers and readers both don't get the right amount of value from their framework.

When I load a Substack article, I see the article, with only the distraction of the "JavaScript required" banner at the top, and the page works without JavaScript.

When I load a Medium article, half the article isn't even on the page initially, and it may or may not load, depending on what they think my status is at the moment. The page janks around repeatedly as all of this is happening. Then, as I am reading the article, which I usually don't get around to doing, because I've already conditioned myself to never open medium.com links, there are other things competing for my attention on the page, such as the same author's other articles, other authors' articles, and promotions for Medium itself.

You can open medium links in incognito mode.

I can. I shouldn't have to.

Because you have a right to view an article on medium?

No, for UX reasons. If your content is primarily text and images ... then you should NEED javascript to view page. Maybe it is needed for comments, or some other feature, but the basic content should be viewable just fine. This is good both the readers, for accessibility for things like screen readers, for bandwidth and more. That doesn't mean medium OWES us this, but one can still make the critique.

I also skip any article that is from medium, not just because of the noise on the screen, but medium seems to just be people "building their brand" by repeating what other people have already said.

This is what I’ve found - (medium.com) indicates medium quality at best, rehashed junk at worst.

That's true for every medium, including paper.

FWIW I don't like medium because it is unpredictably paywalled.

Try Scribe, a private front end for medium and GitHub Gists.

https://scribe.rip/

That proxy is great, thanks for sharing! Most annoying thing about Medium pages is the multi-second waiting period while the page is loading. (On Chrome on a M1 Pro, mind.)

You can install an extensions called libredirect that would auto redirect, Medium, YouTube, Twitter and many others to private proxies.

Its not available on the chrome store because of manifest V2, there is privacy redirect but its abandoned and doesn't support scribe.

https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect

At some point, Substack will require Javascript, just as Medium eventually did.

That is an interesting prediction, what makes you think that?

Medium is a bad value proposition for those who make good content, therefore they tend to leave and as a result the only thing left is trash.

“Medium.com” nowadays is a sign of low quality and I personally started skipping articles because of that alone.

The big difference is that Substack puts its writers front and center, while Medium focuses on itself. People read Substack content every day without even realizing that the company exists. Authors can build their own brands and gather a dedicated following without too much interference.

For now at least, Substack has much, much better UI.

Beyond that, Substack is currently positioning themselves as a platform/tool for content creators to create their own brand and market to their own audience. If you aren't paying attention, you might not even notice that your favourite author was on Substack; they're functionally a spiritual descendent of the independent blogs of old (who might be running on MT or Wordpress or whatever, but weren't a "Wordpress blog by Joe Smith", but "Joe Smith's blog" (which happens to be on Wordpress).

Medium has been positioning themselves as a content brand in their own right for some time; they have been undergoing relentless business model churn, but at various times they've had editorial teams, they've commissioned work, they've had writers on payroll, and they've had verticals or "editorial teams" or whatever such as OneZero, Forge, Marker, and Elemental. Those last I think were launched in 2019 and killed off in 2021; but functioned like magazines published by Medium with editors and staff writers. I'm not quite sure what todays strategy is, but it seems to still be focused on the publisher/magazine model where the brand is "Medium" and the author just gets a byline.

You can see this approach in terms of features like theming, URL structures, support for custom domains, etc. (Eg, Substack supports custom domains; Medium recently ended their support.)

Substack fills an explicitly free-speech need (for now) in an age where the backbone/service providers of the internet's conveniently forgotten why that's important.

You get a lot more interesting writers on board than Medium in that case. People who stick to the safe areas of thought don't make history (for good or ill).

"Free speech" isn't a business model, unless the business plan is to sell a story to VCs and get paid a percentage of the term sheet.

Substack has to pay the "I'm being cancelled" blowhards huge sums to get them on the platform to begin with. They earn nothing from eyeball traffic; people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage. And even if they did, Substack would earn a tiny pittance from their fraction of subscription fees from that demographic.

That's not how it worked. Some authors got paid a big advance in return for giving up all subscription revenue for one year. In at least some cases, authors said they would have made more money taking the regular subscription deal, where Substack gets a cut.

So in those cases, Substack provided financing and made money on it in the end. I don't know if that's true on average, though.

It is a classic platform bootstrapping model. It worked with new book publishers in the 1800s too. It worked for new video game consoles, etc ...

The content creator doesn't fully trust the new publisher/platform, so they need upfront monetary assurance beyond a normal advance/royalty type deal, in case the platform fails. Likewise the platform values exclusives from big names that will drive demand for the platform. So the platform gives up potential upside to secure the exclusivity rights and the content creators get a premium.

I've seen a fair bit of discussion about this, and so far, every author who I've seen talk about this has said they took the deal and came out behind, or they refused the deal but would have come out behind if they'd taken it, ie, subscription revenue ended up exceeding the offered advance.

I imagine there must be some authors out there who didn't mmet Substack's expectations, but they're apparently few and far between.

That's the opposite of what happened. You may want to double check this. :)

> people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage

Some prominent Substacks have tens of thousands of paying subscribers. Glenn Greenwald is apparently clearing (after Substack's fees), something like $100k USD/month. Matt Taibbi has even more paying subscribers, so will make even more; Andrew Sullivan is close behind. Last year Substack announced they had over 1 million paying subscribers (generally around $5-10/month), and the top 10 newsletters were at that point generating over $20m in revenue/year (ie, averaging over 2m each).

As it turns out, a non-trivial amount of people are willing to pay for writing, whatever the reason is.

Whereas Medium works better for network effects/SEO (and why it became super popular before Facebook/Twitter became the most reliable methods of distribution for personal articles), Substack has a better writer/reader relationship, which matters when trying to make a living off of it. Although as a result, it incentivises "thought leadership" more than Medium, which is funny in retrospect since Medium was the blogging platform that started the trend.

Conversely, technical content doesn't do as well on Substack.

The paywall on Medium prompts me to subscribe to Medium (and presumably, some of the money goes to the authors). It feels like a magazine. My relationship is with Medium, not individual authors.

With Substack, I'm prompted to subscribe directly to newsletters from individual authors.

None of the authors I follow on Twitter tell me to subscribe to Mediums. A bunch of them point me towards their Substacks.

Individual writers control their own email lists

The UI is better.

Better how? I remember when Medium first came out, everyone fawned over the quality of the UI.

A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions. And a personal subscription model.

> A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions

These are also features of Medium, maybe most blogs. Being discerning is also a required feature of the internet, regardless what one might dream of, imo.

This seems like a pretty uncharitable take, and one thats unlikely to be true.

Do you think substack has some metric on "unsubstantiated opinions" that they're trying to maximize? Or have you just noticed more content that you disagree with there?

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