Substack just killed the creator economy | Hacker News Reader

Substack just killed the creator economy

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48 pointspulisse54 comments

It's probably worth pointing out that the author is a founder of beehiiv, a Substack competitor.

Thanks for that. I knew something felt off with how much beehiiv was being plugged.

Very lame to not be transparent about that.

Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.

I think one problem people have is payment processing. There really needs to be a federal program to allow people to easily transfer money as payment. There are too many extractive middlemen with rentier economies and ethics.

There's no reason why Congress can make something like what Brazil has with Pix.

Having a public option for payment processing can do a tremendous amount of good.

I believe that this is where someone like Supertab [1] could really pop off. I don’t honestly don’t think having this as a country-specific service would be useful/beneficial. Not affiliated with ST, just have a friend who works there. I’m yet to encounter a website that offers them, though.

[1]: https://www.supertab.co/

I wonder how accessible would it be to put article source on Patreon and make a static site that fetches and displays them via Javascript?

If only there was some kind of Internet money, that would not need to rely on governments.

> Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters?

What Substack provides for its users:

- Webpage

- CMS

- WYSIWYG editor

- Email newsletters / notifications

- Payment processing / Subscription handling

I'm going to go with yes.

I think you can get the first ones with any blog engine.

It's the payment bit that's the key here.

You could do all of those on Typepad in 2008 except sending some posts only to paying subscribers https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2009/11/feedburner-typep... You had to wait until 2017 for that https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/making-money-wit...

People have made money on the Internet for decades before Substack. Ask your customers to mail you a cheque, or send them a Paypal/Venmo/Cashapp payment and manually process their subscription. People will understand that you're not Amazon and waiting a day or two to get access to your content won't be a dealbreaker for them. This way, you control the pricing and spare your customer the hassle of another monthly subscription.

If your newsletter is a side gig, sure, use Substack. But if it's your primary source of income, it's bad business to be subject to the whims of a platform you have no control over. Worse still when it's not a self-sustaining business whose primary obligations are to venture capitalist growthbros rather than paying customers.

Yes. I think it is too hard for the average person. It is one reason why some of these other became popular

I think the difficulty isn't so much in the making of the blog, but the hosting it. I think a non-technical person could probably Google their way through getting Hugo to render with one of the default templates, but it's still kind of hard to understand how to deploy stuff to a place to host the

Like, I know how to do that with Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages or S3 or spinning up an Nginx server, but none of that is intuitive, and it can be overwhelming to people who aren't familiar with Git or web hosting.

DigitalOcean has one-click WordPress.

But if you’re clicking around in the DO control panel, you’ve already conquered a significant amount of technophobia.

You still need a domain, though.

Which makes me recall that many domain registrars have complementary web hosting.

I've been wondering exacrtly this. Surely, its not hard to get setup with your own website. It's not like substack is giving you much distribution.

Email deliverability is a nightmare. You need mega reputation to not end up in spam filters.

ghost + stripe + mailgun = ez mode

Apple's advertising campaign "there's an app for that" during the 2010s has liquefied an entire generation's brains into thinking they need to download an app for something that displays words and pictures.

Like most people, I tried most of these apps. It wasn't long before I uninstalled them in favour of the mobile website versions. Most "content" apps provide no value to the user in app form. "Get the app for a better experience" - yeah, better for them. Installing the app is a way for them to access your contacts list, microphone and camera, and use your home screen and notification center as a billboard.

With the growth of the "platform services" lock-in like app stores and wallets, the value drops to practically negative, as now you have to cover not just payment processing fees, but also the passed-down cost of the digital land baron's tariff for the privilege of transacting on their turf.

No thanks.

Self hosting and using your payment processor of choice is always the best move. Own your own data or be prepared for the jig to be up at some point. This is what every platform that scales does.

I don't use Substack [1], but isn't part of the appeal of Substack discoverability?

Like that's part of the reason that a lot of these platforms get popular. Most software engineers could write something to upload, transcode, and host videos in an afternoon or two, but that only gets you 10% of YouTube's value. The thing that keeps YouTube on top is it's hyper-addictive recommendation system.

I assume that Substack offers something like that? Again I don't actually use it so I'm kind of speaking out of my ass.

[1] No one read my blog anyway so there's no pretense of charging for it.

"publish on ur own site, syndicate everywhere" has never been more salient

https://indieweb.org/POSSE#COPE

(The whole site is down now, but that's the canonical source for POSSE, or spefically COPE - Create Once Publish Everywhere)

> but isn't part of the appeal of Substack discoverability?

Discoverability should be happening on non-paid platforms like social media, message boards or channels independent of Substack itself. If customer acquisition is based on your presence on Substack, you will have to stay on it forever, paying whatever they charge, because migrating to a different platform will damage acquisition. Which of course is exactly what Substack's strategy is.

Writers move to sites like Substack (or 15 years ago blogspot) funded by other people's money like a software developer gets into an AI startup (or 5 years ago crypto). You can make bank in the short term even if you should know it will not last. Substack subsidizes individual creators and markets their blog as cooler than old blogs, Google subsidized web ads and upranked blogs in search results. Yes, it is no fun if you like stability, and its not a game I play.

> Most importantly, that means that if writers choose to leave Substack, they won’t be able to port their paid subscriptions over to another platform like they could previously.

That seems like a big change.

Having to abide by Apple’s user-friendly subscription and cancellation policies is small potatoes, compared to vendor lock-in of the subscriptions.

This is either misunderstanding it or interpreting in bad faith. The very next sentence explains why this is a bad thing. They aren't escaping vendor lock in, they're being moved to something worse.

????

Didn’t I affirm the author’s point that the increased vendor lock-in for creators was a big deal, implicitly agreeing that it was bad?

By “Apple’s user-friendly subscription and cancellation policies”, I mean e.g. the ability to unsubscribe without having to fight through the usual dark patterns. Having to offer that shouldn’t be onerous, although sadly some publishers see it that way.

I can accept that I may not have communicated my point as well as I might have, but “bad faith”, wtf?

Although the creator should disclose the link to beehive, I don't think this should be flagged as it's raising valid points and showcasing a worrying trend.

Related/unrelated:

anyone notice the seemingly big uptick in Substack submissions around here? Like ones reaching the front page, often submitted by newer-ish accounts. What's that about? Did (1) alot of bloggers switch to Substack recently? and (2) is there a concerted effort to take advantage of HN traffic bumps here?

</subtleconspiracykeepinganeyeon>

You can monetise on Substack. Same with Youtube.

Anyone can create a blog host or a video hosting site.

Being able to pay creators who post on said platform is the key issue.

I think it's just that it's the cool place to write blog posts now. It was similar five or six years ago with Medium, or Github Pages. I don't think conspiratorial thinking is really necessary.

Funny how quickly the worm turned on Medium due to the constant nagging and paywalling. It's looked down on in the same way as linking to a Quora article at this point.

Yeah, I don't remember the last time a Medium article trended on HN. I suspect Substack will have a similar fate eventually, for the same reasons.

I was self-hosting my blog on my own server until very recently, but I moved to Cloudflare Pages and thus far I find it to be the least-awful platform I've used for it. Cloudflare might eventually turn out to be evil, but at least since I have my own domain name and it's just a static site, it's trivial to move to a different provider or even just host again myself if necessary.

I really would like to figure out a good way to syndicate though; there's really no discoverability with the current iteration.

disclosure: building a substack competitor on atproto

I'm really excited for ATProto as a way to build applications that let you have the benefits of substack (a unified network, recommendations, social features like comments, etc) without the eventual path to lock in.

It's particularly exciting because the incentive is actually there to build an application this way. Whether Bluesky is growing or not, there are currently 30M accounts that you can reach (with one of the best auth systems I've interacted with), AND atproto gives you the building blocks for others to build on your work. Both these things make the bootstrapping problem for any social application way down.

There's still a lot of stuff missing, payments being a big (and gnarly one), notification management being another, but both the bluesky team and the overall ecosystem has been moving at a solid pace, and things are getting more viable by the day.

Surprised not to find any discussion of Stripe refusing to process payments for otherwise legal content on other platforms (Steam, itch.io, Patreon). It’s very likely their hyper-vigilance will extend to Substack as well.

they are very annoying at first re: kyc

This website format is really really really bad to read.

agreed. starting off with a giant ad for some AI-something-or-other was bad enough, but the design makes it hard to visually scan for where the article starts.

If you're still actively using Substack as a creator, you're obviously very okay with them sending out Swastika missives, and you don't feel it's detrimental to your own brand – you'll not get any sympathy from me.

We’ve seen a bunch of blog platforms come and go at this point - what makes investors think Substack is worth of a 100mil series C?

I think you should also lay some blame on Apple who have this shitty policy for app store subs. Apple makes it very easy for users but users should really be aware to never use that feature since it's hostile to creators. It's not limited to Substack.

probably not coincidentally, Andresseen Horowitz newsletter just announced they are migrating to Substack (https://a16z.substack.com/)

(Not that I read their newsletter just was too lazy to cancel)

a16z are investors in substack.

Do not bulid your castle in the middle of a swamp, or something like that.

Don't usually like Apple, but (the inevitable but),

Creators should be happy they're passing the cost to customers. We know they didn't choose to write on substack out of altruism.

If someone thinks you are worth enough to pay 30% more they'll pay. That's always been the case.

It's still insane that Apple thinks it deserves 30% of your entire subscription cost for simply processing the transaction.

I'm not saying that managing subscription billing has no value, but it's not like what Apple is doing has no comparison; PayPal offers similar subscription services and their cut is less than 10%.

That's the only insane part about this. But they can't go back because numbers must go up.

So if they will always still pay at 30% higher then why not set the price another 30% higher after that and keep going again and again?

They can and it's not wrong. The authors gave it to substack, substack can choose their pricing. That was the deal though, not sure what's the issue here. This is just an ad for a competitor.

Not everything in life is binary the way you portray. They did not choose to use substack out of altruism, nor did they choose to fully exploit everyone as much as possible (they might have gone with apple pay themselves if that were the case). There can be in between zones were people are writing to reach readers and make some money from it, not as much as possible.

The last paragraph is patently untrue, it's used as a clever gotcha for transactive capitalist interactions (assuming it can only be this way and no other), completely ignoring the human elements.

I should make it clear I'm not saying substack was morally in the right here. Nor do I side with apple in any way. I'm pointing the obvious.

Honestly, I just can't see this as the little guy vs the corpo image this post is trying to make. Just two capitalistic ideas fighting one another. The people writing on here must have better paying jobs for their livelihood. The authors are treating their blogs as business which turns off the part of my brain with human emotional concerns.

Life isn't binary, but our choices often are.

Great post, thanks for the astute analysis. It's such a shame, I was starting to collect a good set of writers I'm following there - and was planning to join them. Maybe beehiiv is worth a closer look.

clicked the minus sign on the ad "window"

worked as a hyperlink instead, same as clicking on the ad itself

not very "denk" imo

"their creator economy", not "the creator economy".

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