Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax | Hacker News Reader

Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax

theverge.com

30 pointsarticsputnik26 comments

Writers are not "fleeing Substack" that's just legacy media trying to insinuate ways to hurt Substack's revenue by creating a false perception of "hm maybe I should consider switching" in classic divide and conquer.

A quick google search "substack site:theverge.com" will reveal that theverge hasn't written a single positive article about substack. Most posts are implying you should avoid substack.

The whole article is based on "this one guy switched to ghost" type of evidence ... no data, no stats.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean your wrong

There are plenty fleeing Substack, and at considerable cost when a Substack subscriber decides to chargeback because they're no longer writing on Substack.

I am regretting letting my schlubstack.com domain expire now.

This is correct. Substack was one of the first "mainstreamish" platforms to go "against the grain" and try to be neutral with respect to the topics and ideas it platformed. Notably, it allowed deviations from the "party line" on the issues of the pandemic. As became evident with the SPLC story, there are powerful organizations whose goal is not to forget such things and organize persistent media punishment campaigns against the dissenters. This can well be a manifestation of that.

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> They are not neutral by any means

Are you familiar with what "neutral" means? If you have objections to them it's worth your time to have them be correct.

> Are you familiar with what "neutral" means?

Yes.

You can look back through the past 100 theverge.com posts on HN and you won't find anything insightful or even actual reporting (i.e. adding new facts that aren't reported by other sources): https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theverge.com

None paywal link: https://archive.ph/bmX1d

I loved the open web quote: "The more important thing is that we have a home on the open web that we control, and whatever anti-creator changes Substack is forced to make in the future to live up to its valuation we won't be affected by."

To me, I always said to have your own website and domain. Because platforms come and go. I have experienced it myself with Medium, WordPress, etc. I wrote a little more about "Why I think to Have Your Website" at https://www.ssp.sh/brain/why-have-your-website/ (in case of interest)

The problem with that is discoverability. I'd love to do a blog without making money off it but if nobody ever reads it there's no point.

I used to be able to find personal and small blogs on google. Blogosphere died when google changed algorithms and it ceased to be possible. They stopped coming out in searches even when I was able to quote the title and parts of the content.

Blame google enshittification for this one.

Yes I like kagi's "small web" search source a lot for this reason.

However 99% of people don't use it (probably higher than that) so it doesn't really help with discoverability.

IMO, not too many people are being discovered by substack. Twitter and other social media is where you have to have conversations to slowly build up your subscriber base.

I agree. A lot of discovery there is just people writing notes and posts “how to discover and boost discoverability” - just an endless loop of growing and talking about growing without substantial non-growth content.

Webrings were so valuable they were used to train the PageRank AI decades ago. No time like the present to bring back what works!

They might have been good for pagerank but not for users. I never used them. I really hated them.

This is what they want you to believe, sure, it will help in the short-term. But when switching, losing most of them, and losing your content (if not moved with you), but all the domain ranking, is much bigger. And the real discovery happens on social media or through writing high-quality content that will always be shared or discovered. But all of this applies to blogging, newsletters only, like sending your thoughts via email, is OK, but a real blog, I'd want on my own domain/website.

Yeah it's also, for the first time in my life I'm really pivoting my personal interests away from IT and tech. This was more of a plan when I was still fully into it.

I'm more interested in streaming now for my new hobbies but that is even harder to self host.

Honest question: does the blog have to be for other people or can I just be for you? And if people find it - great.

If you are instead trying to acquire eyeballs for some reason, that’s great as well. But I don’t think you should look at it as “no one will find so there is no value whatsoever”

Personally, I write to think out loud. And I am not looking to monetize my writing anytime soon. So, I am quite happy with Substack at this moment. I don't have to pay for any hosting or sending the newsletter, and my awesome 90ish subscribers get them!

But if you are a serious professional writer, then there are other better options. For sure. And as someone suggested, owning and hosting your content is absolutely the best way to go!

All these companies want to make money eventually to justify their "technology company" valuations, show growth to keep expensive employees excited about stock options, etc. But the truth is that there just isn't any real reason for any of these companies to own text-based article hosting in the long term. There isn't enough of a network effect with blog posts like there is with traditional social media.

Medium started squeezing everyone, so everyone left for Substack. Now Substack is doing it, so everyone is leaving for the next thing.

Whoever owns the next thing may be the most benevolent people in the world, but given enough time and money, distant future owners will probably do the same thing.

The only long-term solution is to own your own site or pay sustainable (chunky) fees to a service that makes money from hosting you, not from being a 'social platform'.

Maybe it makes sense to start on one of these social platforms to grow an initial audience, but any platform will eventually need to juice you for it's own growth when the VC money runs out. It's just the economics of it.

Substack positioned itself as medium without the enshittification but it's enshittified just as much. I'll pass on it and on 'newsletters' hosted there too. It's beyond the level of annoyance I tolerate.

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