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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

I like substack and write my newsletter on it. That being said, I agree with the author that random platform changes can be very annoying. The only true antitode of sanity is self-hosted, and Ghost self-hosted is an example of this.

That being said, I think the big problem with the internet is the very existence of these sorts of large-tech platforms. I wish such platforms didn't exist at all, and people just went to small websites. Following Ivan Illich, I wish there were a "speed/size limit" on the internet so that companies beyond a certain size like Google, Medium, Substack, etc. were precluded from existing.

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> Ghost self-hosted is an example of this

I don't know how configurable Ghost is but I suspect you will still have some problems if they introduce features that you don't like. You may be able to lag for a few versions but eventually there will be security vulnerabilities discovered, ecosystem features like plugins will grow incompatible and other general bitrot. Self-hosting will definitely give you a thick insulating layer, but upstream direction will eventually work its way through.

> eventually there will be security vulnerabilities discovered

Front and center concern, given the stack Ghost is built on

What are some of the changes to substack that are annoying? The only thing I don't like is that banner to sign up but that's always been there.

I think a lot of people are overthinking it. Substack wants to continue to be a dominant platform for publishing. Sure they want revenue but if you were to ask leadership whether they would trade 50% of traffic for some marginal increase in revenue they would prob say no. Companies aren't naive profit maximizing.

If you never heard of fast food chains and believed all the worse things about free markets you would certainly assume McDonald's charges for ketchup. Its insane of them not to! Leaving money on the table, plus allowing abuse. But they don't because customers would just think it's dick, at least in the US. And you see other trends over the years like giving free cups of water which def loses them revenue. That's all to say companies have economic incentives but not this naive short term view that critics accuse them of

> the only thing I don't like is that banner to sign but that's always been there.

How about a popup that darkens the page and obscures the text to ask you to sign up? That's been on Substack for at least a year.

All these startups work the exact same way: promise to offer something better than the enshittified incumbent (Medium), then take on many of the same enshittified attributes because they can't juice their KPIs without a bothersome UX.

Such a cap would have a whole slew of bad effects, many unforeseeable. It's not even possible to say if the world wide Internet would be possible with an arbitrary size or scope limit. Even worse if it did work; the imposition of such a control scheme would create a corporate of far more power (and likely worse tendencies) than any that currently exist.

I agree that a speed/size limit don't work, plus it will skyrocket the energy consumption of internet a lot by making some technologies infeasible or very inefficient.

Also, this is a "technological solution for a social problem", so it's infeasible to begin with.

OTOH, I have no answers for a solution to human greed, except self-control. But, this can't be applied universally either.

Transparency kills greed, but at the cost of privacy. Would you allow yourself to be monitored 24/7, if it meant all resources were justly allocated?

> Would you allow yourself to be monitored 24/7...

It depends on who's policing the police. In the west people love to point fingers to China about "The Social Credit System", but it looks quite difference when it's looked from their side [0].

Would the observers will face the same consequences for their misconducts? This is the ultimate question.

In the end, there's no system which is 100% equal for everyone (even in nature), but if you can make advantages balance out the disadvantages, you're 95% there.

[0]: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9904-the_social_credit_system

I agree, which is why I advocate for universal limits not just on the internet but on energy usage and the size of corporations, too.

The problem is that an such cap or regulation will be geared for the past, not the needs or resources of the future. The free market beats centralized planning for this reason. It allows for new and unforeseeable growth, which your limits will entirely castrate.

That is entirely what we should strive for: an elimination of growth.

Aka death. Sorry, not into death cults.

Seems like growth as we know it today is leading to death via ecosystem destruction.

So since life naturally includes death, we might as well kill everything? I couldn't tell originally if this was a joke, now it seems more like a poorly defined reaction to life's problems. Yes, nuking the entire world would technically remove all problems, but not in a good way.

I'm not entirely sure why this is being downvoted. The idea of a speed/size limit for the Internet is just absurd.

For the internet companies, and it's not that absurd. Just have tax rate progressive with company revenue and headcount.

Keeping in mind that the Internet is global, and the US tax system does not (yet) apply to the rest of the world, who would tax these companies?

The countries were the companies are established.

Ah, so it would only require a global coordinated effort to decide on limits and taxes, as well as to avoid havens where companies could avoid such regulation.

I suppose that isn't as absurd as I thought.

Not at all. Substack is not a global entity, we could start by having the US government taxing them more first.

"They will just move elsewhere", you'll say, and the response will be "Fine, then the US government can tax US-based customers and employees of the "foreign" Substack."

So now we're taxing users of a platform once it gets to a certain size. Interesting.

Precisely. Customers who want to avoid the extra tax will have to find a different service provider, leading to better distribution of the market. Mission accomplished.

This is the exact creation of a global monolith that I'm warning against. People hate the companies in power, but believe creating an even more powerful entity will magically address their concerns. That's only true when you get to the largest conceivable entity.

> I wish such platforms didn't exist at all, and people just went to small websites.

I wish it too but at this point this is basically pining for Usenet while everyone is on PhpBB-boards. The world has moved on and won’t be coming back.

UX-wise, what is the difference between Usenet and PhpBB? Both offer threaded topics, chronologically ordered. There are no "likes" or other gamification features. You can subscribe to topics via email and respond via email with both.

> I wish such platforms didn't exist at all, and people just went to small websites

We used to have a solution called RSS Feeds. At one point every site had them then Google decided we can't have nice things.

Still have. Even the linked website offers it (not sure if it used to on Substack, but I’d guess so?): https://www.mostlypython.com/rss/

I highly recommend RSS, it still works great. I saw the single file Django post here yesterday and subscribed. This (older) post was in my feed, I liked it, and I shared it out. Because you are curating your feed, it has a great signal to noise ratio.

I personally like Mataroa and smol.pub a lot. No nonsense, absolutely minimal spaces to put your thoughts on. I'm not in it for the money, and Mataroa fills what I needs pretty nicely.

It stores my small image files, plus markdown files, and represent them as readable coherent block. It provides RSS and Newsletters (which I have disabled), and basic analytics.

If you want to see, it's at https://blog.bayindirh.io

It looks cool! But, can I fully self-host it and not just point it at my domain? I would support the project but as a sysadmin, I just have an urge to run what I can on my hardware.

I don’t think so. Funny thing is, I’m the opposite. As a sysadmin, I have enough machines (at work plus personal), and I’d rather let someone manage that system for me. :)

The nice thing is, Mataroa is JS free except a couple of keyboard shortcuts. I failed to find a template equally nice for Jekyll, so I started to use the service.

> I wish there were a "speed/size limit" on the internet so that companies beyond a certain size

I assume you are aware that this is a natural tendency towards economies of scale? It’s not tenable to impose arbitrary limits with no grounded reason.

There is a grounded reason: to limit technology usage. The amish do it and in many ways their society is much healthier than normal society.

Do you have a small website for your newsletter? Or is it just archived on Substack?

No, I keep a blog that is self-hosted. I find that self-hosted is the best for ultimate control but unfortunately it's much easier to reach larger audiences with platforms like Substack, Medium, YouTube, etc.

Would you mind share the link? I’m always hunting for new blogs because I also happen to have a newsletter (sent via Buttondown, archived there and on my site) that’s focused on blogs.

Here it is: https://blog.jpolak.org/ . Not sure if you'll like it. I'm a purist when it comes to my position on technology and my ultimate aim is to help foster a harmonious relationship with the biosphere by opposing modern consumerist society.

Bookmarked! Thank you. I quickly scrolled through it and there’s more than a few interesting posts in here.

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