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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Not a good post. Substack isn’t perfect, but Medium is awful. Comparing the two is not a good take, especially as Substack seems to have figured out the individual writer business model while Medium still wants you to pay for their whole platform.

But... Substack emails your newsletters directly to the readers and provides the option to export your email list right??. I'm sure these will the axed as soon as profitability becomes an issue since they provide a nice lock in.

This is extremely unlikely and would invoke a torrent of anger from millions of users.

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Substack hasn’t really figured out a business model. They took $86 million of VC money at the height of the boom and used it for exorbitant payouts to writers, creating the illusion of success.

Last year Substack failed to raise another VC round and ended up trying crowdfunding instead. Notably they refused to answer any questions about how much money they’re losing and if they ever expect to be profitable — a weird look when you’re soliciting investors:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23660473/substack-retail-...

Personally I’d give Substack less than 20% chances of survival. This kind of information-free crowdfunded investment round is a mark of high desperation.

Exactly. And although Substack has done a good job of building their brand, on the technical side they have pretty much zero "moat". The service they provide is incredibly simple. It never made sense as a VC-funded massive growth business. It would have been better off as a self-sustained private company, almost along the lines of Craiglist. Patreon finds itself in a similar boat.

That can all be true, while the post is still bad. Substack isn’t perfect (as I said) but I think their issues are VC-hypergrowth inflicted and not due to a problem with the fundamental business model.

> This is extremely unlikely and would invoke a torrent of anger from millions of users.

Millions of non-paying users. :)

See Reddit, Twitter, etc. - the folks running these outfits don't give a fig about their users. Their goal is to make money.

Substack’s entire purpose is to cater to writers. Them preventing the export of emails is about as likely as Burger King removing hamburgers from their menu.

Perhaps there's a compromise: Substack won't do it, but they'll get aquired and then whoever bought them will do it. :)

Substack’s TOS clearly states that the writer owns their list, so I don’t think Substack could even legally axe the ability to export the list.

Even if they did change the terms it couldn’t apply retroactively, and as you say, it would upset everybody. So while I can think of reasons to not use Substack, list ownership is not a particularly good one.

Source: I have a small Substack

The history of the Internet shows you really shouldn't trust that. If I had a Substack list I cared about, I'd regularly export the emails.

I think the more important point would be that many of their most prominent writers would not put up with it. I imagine that has way more influence than a large number of writers with tens to hundreds of subscribers.

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