Substack was down | Hacker News Reader

Substack was down

substack.com

25 pointsbenjyhirsch34 comments

it's a shame substack continues to get more and more visually bloated. I remember when it first launched, thinking the site looked really clean and simple. i figured it was only a matter of time before the simplicity went away, and it became more like Medium.com (in a bad way). it seems like there is a very predictable model for how a site like this devolves:

- it starts ultra clean, posts have a title and body, maybe (reluctantly) a share link appears somewhere on the page .

- then "modern" looking custom web fonts are added, making elements on the page flicker/move around when the page opens.

- then the entire site adds a sticky header that animates as you scroll up and down.

- then the site is rewritten using some client-side rendering framework that requires javascript to run 'correctly'.

- then a popup modal is added to every single page asking you to subscribe or sign in.

(substack is currently here)

- then "reading time indicators" (e.g. "5 min read") are added to the top of every story

- then "related" stories are inter-spliced throughout the text of the story.

- then it becomes hard or impossible to even find the actual content of the story, as the entire site is engulfed in "related" content

hey those product managers gotta earn their equally bloated compensation packages.

PM here, and though I've only worked on delivering one web app, I was forced to follow this model because "we have a UX designer for a reason".

At some point the future vision of the UI was getting so unnecessarily bloated, our UX genius independently came up with Clippy, but if he were a fox...

Luckily we were sold and I got a new job because I knew I was gonna lose that fight

The PMs, and the senior engineers. "Leave well enough alone" is never a winning pitch.

We see this phenomenon literally everywhere. The Patent and Trademark Office just replaced their perfectly usable Search page with something vastly more complicated, and incomprehensible at first glance.

When I was researching my article about Twitter and firing all those engineers, I looked at the R&D spending for Proctor & Gamble and other consumer products companies. It's usually 1-2% of revenue. They spend their money on marketing, where it belongs when your product is mature.

You may be right, but percent of revenue is a terrible measure.

What do you think is better?

Not sure what the economists call it, but if a business spends $8M producing goods they sell for $10M, the money they can potentially spend on research is $2M, not $10M (the revenue).

I was going to answer this, but too many accounting questions:

Is the $8M "cost of goods sold", i.e. variable costs, or does it include the fixed costs (buildings, salaries, utilities, etc.)

Yeah, there is a lot of detail, and I don't have a perfect formula.

My point was that OP equated revenue with profit, which is clearly and substantially wrong.

OP was me, wasn't it?

I said "It's usually 1-2% of revenue."

Oh, I didn't realize you're OP :)

Yeah, I read that as "of all the money they could spend these greedy bastards only spend 1-2% on R&D", but in reality their "disposable income" is much less the revenue.

Did I miss your point in some way?

I think you read "revenue" as "disposable income."

R&D as a percent of revenue is a pretty common metric in the investment world. It's not perfect, like most accounting metrics. Maybe there are people who measure R&D as a percent of (revenue - COGS) but I haven't seen that.

That's more than I know, but you're probably right.

Perhaps one day I'll revolutionize accounting with my ideas, but for now I'll accept this :)

Hopefully an alternative frontend project pops up for it soon.

You missed out the bullet point where someone posts a variation of this comment on Hacker News.

> then "reading time indicators" (e.g. "5 min read") are added to the top of every story

Many CMSes and static site generators include this and it's genuinely useful (it matters if an article is a short read or something that needs to be saved for later because it requires 30 minutes reading). Is it really "bloat"?

Browsers already include this feature in a coarse grained (but utterly sufficient) manner in the form of a scroll bar.

The scroll bar that some OSes hide and that cannot know if there's a massive picture or a map or 50 of them? Not nearly the same thing.

https://twitter.com/SubstackStatus/status/160562134725390745...

Founder here. Sorry about this everyone. We're monitoring a fix now

It’s odd that their status page mentions scheduled maintenance and everything is still green.

After Twitter I hope we're all starting to realize that these billionaire VC backed media platforms are not the place to pour our heart and souls into. You are giving them power over you and your content. No matter what they promise, eventually they will abuse their power against you.

At their whim

Lol, I could host all of substack as static html pages on a $20/mo linode instance. Embarrassing.

Doubt you could do that in a way where you'd attract users at the level of Substack.

You could if you gave people $400-500k to move over.

If my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bike.

They only pay $3500 and it comes with a big NDA.

They were fronting people 250k+ for their first year. IIRC

Umm maybe it’s the fact substack is outright paying for traffic and lying about it? It’s just their own paid influencers who use it.

Where are they lying about it? They openly admit to paying writers. And no, it's not "just" their influencers using it.

Perhaps I'm a bit old-fashioned, but paying writers to write doesn't seem like a particularly nefarious activity to me. I mean, I believe the NYT does it too, and a few other organizations.

Everyone knows it is trivial to host a read-only static website with the traffic of Substack.

It’s the read/write part that gets you.

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