Comment by jacobobryant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobobryant | Hacker News Reader

This looks really nice. I've been fiddling around building newsletter-adjacent products for a few years, and I've been wanting a simple Substack-alternative* that's good for casual use so that I can recommend it to users.

Can I make one request? Please provide single opt-in as an option! v2 invisible Recaptcha is effective for stopping bots, and most of the time people won't even be shown a challenge. Double opt-in confirmation emails only have about a 70% conversion rate in my experience (and that's counting only people who get past Recaptcha), so you lose a big chunk of subscribers. I almost started using Ghost a while ago for my own newsletter, but no single opt-in is just a deal breaker for me.

See also https://mailchimp.com/resources/why-single-opt-in-and-an-upd...

*Substack _is_ good for casual use, but I have various beefs with them, the main one being that they're trying to build yet another platform instead of being part of an ecosystem.

Thanks for the note!

I just ran a query, and 93% of email signups on Postcard have completed the email confirmation step. A quick look at the incomplete signups shows a lot of obvious fake emails, too.

I'm trying to minimize my reliance on big tech, so I want to avoid Google's captcha product. But, hCaptcha and Cloudflare both seem to have more privacy-focused alternatives that I'll check out.

Ah, well that's encouraging then! Perhaps you can add that query to an automated report/dashboard in case the conversion rate decreases as the service grows.

Thanks for making this in any case!

> Please provide single opt-in as an option

Where it isn't illegal, it is still scummy.

Out of the many complaints I've seen leveled at Substack, I honestly can't think of a single time where someone was complaining about their default use of single opt-in. That's not to say you're wrong--however, as best as I can tell, it doesn't seem to be much of an annoyance for most people.

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