Substack writers, you need a website
elizabethtai.com
elizabethtai.com
RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read.
So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web. There's a lot of value in backing up your Substack subscribers' emails so that you can move somewhere else down the line, and the nice thing about Substack is that they let you do that. If they stop, that's a trap.
And then they spend hours every day doomscrolling and binge watching shit
How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future? That's the path basically every other platform has gone down.
So if they stop doing the "email my subscribers whenever I post" step, another service will fill the gap pretty quick.
Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
I can hear Substack marketing saying that “We don’t have any intention to put you into a vendor-lock.”
I had a lot of discussions with companies about their marketing.
Why do you upload your events’ photos to FB instead of your site?
Why do you have news on LI feed and don’t make it a post on your site as well?
Do you think they can hear it? :)
Substack is going to become a similar service as FB, LI are… no possibility to export your data easily or not at all.
1) That's on them (those not exporting their lists as backup).
2) Almost zero chance happening without warning anyway.
Backlash is almost always good publicity.
And a warning would make their content providers more able to leave.
You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?
You absolutely can know something about what someone will do in the future. You gain those insights by looking at their past and present behavior and the behavior of others in similar circumstances. Hackers tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can often see where things are heading. Enshittification is a pretty smart bet.
It's probably easy being a cynic, because you can always wait for decades (as another commenter argued) until you are right. In the meanwhile you have missed out on life - for no personal benefit at all.
Thus they argue that you should not trust your things to other people but do it yourself, because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Nope. At best you merely know what your current self intends to do in the future. Whether you'll do them then, or whether you'll even still want to do them then, or be able to do them then, or have regretted ever wanting to do them, and many other such things, we don't know.
>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Furthermore the phrase "some things" does not actually mean all things.
So again, trying to put it another way to clarify anything that may have been unclear:
You can be reasonably certain at the time that you need to make a decision that you will try to do what you believe is the best for you. I will now not go on to make an exhaustive list showing every way that you in the future may not do what is right for you because it is normally understood that there are numerous ways in which the reasonable expectations of people can be countered but nonetheless, the reasonable expectations will still tend to hold more than any of the countering scenarios. This is why they are the reasonable expectations, while the countering scenarios are the notable exceptions that often show up in sensational news reports and fiction.
And finally I should note this comes down to the principle, which I would have thought was clear from my previous post but evidently not, that if you can reasonably expect that future you will try to do what future you thinks is best for them, you can just as reasonably expect that the future corporation you are buying a service from will try to what the future corporation thinks is best for them, without giving much consideration for what is best for you.
I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
on edit: Note in my first post I referred to major illness, because major illness, including mental illness, is one of the most common ways in which people end up not attempting to do what is best for themselves.
Regardless of major illness or not, people do stupid things, self destructive things, ill-thought things, impulsive things all the time. At best they'll do "what they think is best" not "what is best" for themselves. And frequently not even that, as people still do all kinds of things they know are bad for them but can't stop themselves anyway.
But even if it was correct, "you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future" is not really strong as an argument against the grandparent's:
"You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?"
The grantparent's argument is about not knowing what you'll be doing in concrete terms, not about merely knowing some abstract guiding principle like "you'll still want to do something you feel is best for you then".
>I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
Even so, that's worth acting only if the pain of future corporation pulling some shit later on is bigger than the convenience you still get before that, or easier than what you'll lack going without its services.
Also if the cost of just dumping their ass then when they DO turn, and moving to another player, is big.
But obviously the key principle is about retaining control over your business, income stream, relationship with your readers, or whatever it is you value. Sure, I change my mind and make mistakes. But I don't think that's a good argument for handing over control to some other entity which is equally changeable and fallible, but not primarily incentivised by my well-being.
"You're only going to get 20 years of use out of this proprietary service before you'll need to spend a few hours switching off! You must switch now!"
Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.
Ghost blog includes newsletter for push.
I agree, if you don't publish anywhere and just write on your website, and you're not yet known, it's hard for people to discover initially. But in the beginning, the writint is also more for you, than for others. I haven't read from anyone that writes super good on day one. That will come with the reps, and by then, people will read you, have discovered you.
What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.
I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web.
> What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts?
On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.
Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:
example.com?re=you@yourwebsite.com&article=1234
Most people don't read most newsletters. Some people read some.
This Saturday I sent an email. It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people. 780 people clicked on a link.
I tweeted the same email as a link and got pretty good engagement! 20 likes, 2 retweets – that's decent for me these days. It was seen 1400 times. 78 people clicked on a link.
I have roughly the same number of followers as I do email subscribers.
Sadly, open rates are no longer a useful metric in the absolute, at all. Some email providers will block all tracking pixels (so those people look like they never open anything, unless they click the link) and others will proxy all images, so they fire all tracking pixels systematically (so these people look to you as if they open every single email).
The only use you can make of open rates today is relative: "was the open rate higher or lower this month than last month?"
But it's extremely unlikely that your actual open rate (and list of who actually opened) is anywhere close to what the stats show. The only thing that still makes sense is click rates.
But that's all just a rant. Your core point is completely correct. If you want readers, you have to cater to this 'push' mentality, I think.
That's unimaginable to me. Most of the writers I read publish infrequently. Email is great. I don't have to be on any social media. Articles come in and I can read them at my leisure.
Yep, let's suppose an average HN user reads 30-100 articles a month on independent websites (personal domains) posted on HN. Out of 100, he probably subscribes to 0-2 at best (via RSS/e-mail). Now, imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience. There is too much friction for a user to subscribe.
Substack is similar to a social platform. People open it to read new articles in a similar way to HN, and they can subscribe to anyone by pressing a single button. There is a recommendation feed as well.
Since Google search for tech content is dead, getting views on independent blogs is extremely hard.
HN is NOT the right marketing tool for 99.9999% of people and businesses
But if you're writing for yourself, articles with multimedia, or want to use advanced features, no platform provides anything close to what you can do on your website.
Take a look at https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ for example.
I promise you that Bartosz would be bummed out if he had an audience of one. And while relying on HN to accidentally discover you can work, it's not a sustainable model for anything.
Every time I see posts like this one and go into comments, everyone in the comments treat writing as a hobby which they would like to turn into work and earn money from, more or less. And I suppose the words "writing" and "blogging" associate with the community around themselves in their minds, not with the text information per se.
I'm writing technical articles (blog posts) my whole life most of the time as a result of me learning something new, to structure the information on some topic for myself and others.
If it's a research, I make a post with all the information and final result of it in public, primarily for myself and sometimes for others, because 95% of the time it's not secret and there's no point to store it privately.
If it's a helpful information (software: unofficial bugfix, hacky workaround, poorly documented feature somewhere, etc), I want it to be searchable/indexed, only that.
I don't care about attribution, about who reads my writing (be it me, my friends, people I don't know, or AI), I have no incentive to push (as in post here or on social networks) or promote these articles in any way. I don't want people to get back to my site, to subscribe to it, or to build a community around it.
If the user types "How do I solve issue X" and by a mere coincidence I solved and documented it, I don't care if the user gets the solution from my website, from the scrape & repost websites, or from AI agent which scraped the site. If this helps the user to fix the issue or to learn something new, every way is fine for me!
I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. Substack allows for exporting posts (which would be good to do regularly just for backups in case of (account) compromise):
* https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037466012-...
so if you ever feel like the company is acting questionably, you can take that file and bring it in elsewhere, e.g.
I thought about this question when I recently started writing a few articles on Substack.
I chose not to use my own domain, even though I have a few.
Why? I want my writing to outlive me.
When I am no longer able to pay for domain renewals, my own domains will expire. Hopefully {my-hn-username}.substack.com will still be around.
Time will tell.
Donate to archive.org.
Of course the URLs all change in archived pages, but at least the content is there for anyone motivated enough to find it.
A funny coincidence... I registered geary.com (my last name) in 1994, and just used it for email. A few years later I got a letter from a group of civic boosters in Geary, Oklahoma. They even enclosed a Geary Water Tower T-shirt which I still have. They saw that I didn't have a website up on this domain and asked me if they could have it.
I explained that this would be impractical since it was also my email address.
So they registered gearyok.com instead and put up a website built around Java applets. Oops.
But it got me thinking. I put up a static page (frequently edited by me) that I called Geary Central: A Guide to Gearys on the Net. This page is still up:
https://www.geary.com/oldsite.html
Naturally I gave Geary, Oklahoma top billing for inspiring this.
A few years after that I changed geary.com to a MoinMoin wiki devoted to the same topic, and moved the old static page to its current location.
Just a few days ago, someone emailed me about how they had stumbled onto my oldsite.html page and enjoyed this "blast from the past".
In 2011, my old ISP decommissioned the server I had the wiki on. I was planning to migrate it to something more modern like Drupal, but the time and effort weren't worth it to me at the time.
I did find the latest version of the "new" Geary Central on archive.org and shared it in my reply:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110927053309/http://www.geary....
I wouldn't be so sure. Platforms come and go, they change domains (e.g. Twitter), they merge, they die.
If you're in Canada, or a G7/EU nation, it's in the 80s, so you may have 10+ years to go, so the chances of Substack being around in the same form for that time period is lower.
I am willing to bet that most of my domains will outlive "username.substack.com".
I have a blog, I don't really promote it, and no one reads it.
Now, there is an argument that there's nothing on my blog worth reading, and yeah there might be truth to that, but regardless my traffic is on the order like 100 unique views per month, and I don't know what percentage of that is just scraping bots.
I'm fine with this, I had no delusions of becoming a famous writer or making any money from it or anything, my blog is basically just a dumping ground for thoughts that I think are interesting, but if I actually did care about people visiting my blog I would probably use Substack or something similar.
I am not convinced. My traffic counter spins quite rapidly, and I only publish on http://dmitry.gr
There's a big audience for that that's actively search for such keywords.
Not the same with essays or fiction writing
"The biggest pushback I hear from writers is: “But my website doesn’t have an audience! Substack does.”
But you don’t have to completely abandon social media or platforms like Substack to protect your autonomy (personally, I prefer the word sovereignty but it does sound a tad dramatic)."
This is false.
It's more accurate to say that "no one will visit your website if you do not properly setup a distribution ecosystem".
It's hard work. But it works. All of my companies have been built by writing online --> distribution --> people finding my/our stuff.
Your experience of 'doing it for decades' reveals that publishing, in of itself, does nothing. And if all people do is publish (without the distribution engine), then, I agree it's a waste of time.
I write 1 hour per day. I spend about 2 hours working on distribution. Sometimes, I spend 4 hours on distribution.
* No Money *
You have to invest time. On all new projects I start here, even if I have a budget. That is because you can learn a lot more by "being on the ground" so to speak.
Here are some activities you can do:
- post on news aggregator sites like hacker news (there are lots of different ones that are niche specific)
- post on social media. This will require you to build up your social media in the first place. This takes a lot of time if you are starting.
- guest content for other peoples platform
- finding similar, non competing people in your niche and create for them, link back to you.
- Spend time writing and re-writing really helpful stuff. This helps with word of mouth.
- hardest one - actually making friends. I have made many online friends over the years by taking an interest in them. Some of them are now massive. They sometimes distribute the things they like of mine
- CRITICAL: a lot of people will read the above and think "okay, but he has a network...that is why it works", and they would be correct. But, and this is key, building a network is a skill. Learn it.
When I said I spend 2-4 hours per day sometimes, these are the things I'm doing above.
* With Money *
- SEO - seo is very expensive. backlinks, promoted content, optimization
- paid traffic to content - can start the budget low but need to be skilled in paid ads to make this work.
- Paid media buys - for example paying for your content to be featured in someone else's newsletter. If they have a list of 50,000, as an example, you might pay $1,000 for that placement. If that same list was in the finance space, you might pay $30,000. It's contextual.
Even though these paid strategies are paid, they still take time.
I don’t get how someone can have used the internet for decades and not know how this all works!
As somebody who has made a lot of money publishing on the internet you absolutely can get people to read your website organically but it takes specific strategies and you can't just write about whatever you want however you want and expect traffic.
Getting a list of your existing subscribers' emails from Substack in order to migrate notifications to your new platform (hosted behind the same domain name you own) is of course an important part of moving, though.
The argument from the article is that you should be hosting your writing on blog.mywebsite.com, not mywebsite.substack.com, even if those two pages are identical and are both hosted by Substack. That's the entire point it's trying to make.
Whether or not your readers visit your website or consume your content entirely through email notifications isn't relevant to the point the author was trying to make. Because despite your absolutist "no one", some people will visit your website, and having a stable location that you control yourself is important. (Also please consider that while you may have been publishing on the internet for decades, your experience may not be universal.)
It is absolutely crazy to me that anyone with a serious web presence doesn't have their own domain name, even if that website is backed by someone else's hosted platform.
And potentiality lose all your precious posts and reader discussions in the process? That's part of the special value of having a website.
I've been subscribed to a few website/blogs newsletters for years and they appear to work fine, and I think the owners are not particularly technical, there's WordPress plugins.
There is a community there already - I’m not sure how useful it is but it’s there.
You can charge for newsletters - this is particularly popular for finance type things.
It also means that if you comment on a substack, other people can find all the comments you made on every substack, by default.
Having a substack shows that you are time rich, yet at the same time, it does not come with overtones of vanity. Serious discourse allegedly goes on with substack, if you are writing there, then you are rolling it with the pros.
Yet every platform goes through phases, ending with the inevitable 'enshittification'. Soon the reader will see substack as a byword for best avoided, much like having to download a PDF or open an inevitably paywalled mainstream media news article, not worth the click.
With one's own website you are outside of the loop, and the theory still holds that, if you have anything worth seeing, they will come. However, most people will stay on platforms until there is something to actually buy.
Recently I was doom scrolling until I came across this vacuum cleaner for cats, that enables you to harvest the fur. I want this as a joke present for a cat I know, so I was prepared to escape the platform to buy the product. If it was a lengthy essay on how to make felt clothing from cat fur on substack, then I probably would not have clicked. Yes I am that shallow!
Hence, if you have something to sell, then an independent website is what you want, and a sales funnel to get people there. This does mean social media, the newsletter, SEO, the substack and even paid advertising.
Not everyone has something to sell though.
The same thing is happening on one of my Blogger instances, the one where I publish about a very niche interest (old floor-mill buildings from the Romanian countryside). Most of the hits are coming from countries like Vietnam and Singapore, most of them associated with Android use, so I think it's a new-ish thing that Google Analytics' anti-bot/anti-spam algorithm just can't (won't?) catch.
We've seen it so often.
I thought it too, then I broke the RSS feed on my blog and someone complained immediately.
But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than its fees, because the counterfactual is that I don't have any of those things. I think it's a huge mistake to lump those together as "convenience", its a lot more than convenient!
The only important thing to me about having a non-substack website is that its good to have a place for more permanent information, lists, contact, etc. But even for many writers, that kind of stuff becomes stale so quickly that the personal sites don't tend to matter much, or even make them look worse! The floating social network spaces are much more valuable. Even losing my x.com would be much worse to my day-to-day life than losing my domain, though I may wish it were otherwise. And I cannot replicate that elsewhere. The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
If you could write a small guide, that'd be phenomenal.
The experience was so good that we haven't moved off. Even if we did build a more formal conference site, we'd still keep the substack blog. The mailing list has grown from nothing to right at 1000 subs which isn't bad for something I do in my spare time. By far the most effective communication. Social media (all channels) are a fraction of the engagement that I get compared to substack.
Services like pirate[dot]kred use that information to link your books to your payment pages (substack is supported).
I think this is mostly wrong, and that the social networks are big primarily because they spent money at the right time to create entrenched network effects that allow them to rent-seek ever after. The quality and innovation of the services themselves (especially simple sites like twitter/X) is not the moat. At a technical level, most are easily clone-able and dominate not because they offer the best service or have the best features but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.
I said "mostly" above because it seems like substack, e.g., as you said, has bundled payment, email, etc in a way that people really like. Even there, though, the network effect is probably the dominating factor.
But after 2010 it just gradually got shitter.
WhatsApp replaced it (in most ways; in some ways there is no replacement) and has so far been amazing but it feels like we're about at the "2010" of WhatsApp. Meta is starting to turn the screws. An AI button. Notifications about new features. Integration with Meta accounts. Eventually it will probably merge with Facebook Messaging or some bollocks and then we'll all have to move elsewhere.
Anyway my point is, these things genuinely became big because they were great. They stayed big despite becoming shitter due to network effects.
If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.
And we would have kept a more inconvenient web, since without that incentive, Facebook etc. would never have had reason to pay for an army of software developers to implement and improve the site and servers to host it.
Why do you think it became successful?
I expect you will respond by trying to claim that Facebook is no longer convenient, and that this -- not whether it was ever convenient in the past -- is what is really important. Two things:
1. Even if this were true, the finite historical period during which it was convenient to people still has value, which is all that my original claim requires.
2. But it is not true. It is still very convenient to the millions of people who continue to use it, as can be plainly seen from the fact that millions of people continue to use it.
Did you miss Myspace and Friendster? Orkut had a market, I think. The reason that Facebook succeeded later is because it had a good API and invited people to write apps for it (mostly surveys and games, remember Zynga?), tracked its users across the internet, and sold them in targeted slices to advertisers. It was Friendster as a commercial platform (like Salesforce was CRM as a commercial platform.) It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.
I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput, being created by very talented people using Erlang. The reason people use it is because they always have and their friends do, and for a lot of countries with expensive SMS it provided messaging (and became so integrated into business that people weren't allowed to live without it.)
This is my argument about why these things were successful; I think that "they were great" isn't a credible one. They simply grabbed a large chunk of already proven markets quickly, but oriented themselves toward corporate needs to leverage that into total control.
I might be misremembering a bunch but myspace never had a feed that showed you your friend’s updates.
It also wasn’t able to magically show you the people who were at that random house party you went to the night before that you hit it off with but were too drunk to get their number.
People love attention when it's people they know and like hanging out with.
The thing that degraded Facebook and Instagram is that they're not like that anymore, they're about maximizing content so that you spend as much time on their apps as possible.
If you just want to view content they are great for that, but I'd almost argue that they're not even social networks anymore. They are much closer to a smartphone version of cable television with mildly interactive elements.
Also, it didn’t allow custom styles or html, which was unusual at the time but ultimately helped it take off to the point that, like Google, it didn’t have allow HTML or JS in ads either.
MySpace was a) awful, b) only used by a tiny tiny fraction of people (1% maybe), and c) rarely had people's real names & photos on it. Not remotely comparable to Facebook. Even fewer people used Friendster and Orkut, at least in the UK.
> I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput
Free. No ads. Reliable. E2E encryption. Group chats. Cross platform. There's so much that's great about it. It was successful because the alternative was SMS which was shit. I'm guessing you're American.
This is a feature, not a bug. There is nothing worse for a society's collective privacy than a surveillance machine where people willingly post every detail of their lives. Stalin would have dreamed of today's anti-social media as a surveillance tool.
> There's so much that's great about it.
There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry. And that's assuming messages are truly encrypted and not analyzed behind your back by Meta. E2EE is kind of meaningless when the endpoints cannot be trusted. SMS is insecure in transit but it isn't controlled by a single for-profit company with close ties to government agencies.
If you take on a new Facebook experience by using their camera glasses, that will also have a privacy cost that this time will include my (and everyone else in-frame's) privacy.
Uhm no. I wanted to know who real people were. At the time it was the much more secure and private than anything else because you needed to be at the same university to see anyone's accounts, and the idea of selling user data for profit didn't even exist.
> There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry
Sure. That doesn't invalidate any of the good stuff, and is minor in comparison (contact lists are not as valuable as you seem to think). If Signal had existed at the time I'm sure it would have been extremely popular too. Also photos are E2E encrypted.
A child born when facebook started going to shit is now able to drive.
Sure. So what? You nonetheless cannot deny the utility. The friends that I have made from social networks are no less real. I am very grateful they (the means to discover these people now in my life) exist.
We don’t really rely too much on the navigability of the Hudson River anymore. But being next to it is still the most expensive land in the nation.
As an overly dramatic example, a slave might fall in love with the wife he met on a plantation, and the family he has, and even be grateful for them. Nevertheless, you probably don't want to use those facts to be a booster for slave plantations.
My argument is that all the good things you like about social networks, from a technical pov, could be had quite easily without the ads, political propoganda, and other ill-effects of the current popular social networks. Indeed, there are many open source projects that already provide the features you'd want. It's just that none has achieved the network you want.
This situation is unlike that of a large, complex physical infrastructure project, where you really do need to "put up" with a governement (or something like it) in order to get the thing built and maintained.
Or maybe happy punch card programming developed your 1337 skills but glad IDEs are there for the current generation.
As a more moderate metaphor it's like someone saying they like living in one city, for all its flaws, and someone else comes along and extolls the virtues of several imaginary cities. It's fun to imagine those places, but its silly to mention them when someone is speaking of utility. This rush to examples not beholden to reality seems more common among technical types than any other, and likely prevents you from benefitting from what exists today.
The problem, of course, is that the utility of a social network is right in the name: the network of users it connects. If the people you want to interact with aren't on Mastodon, then you have to use Twitter.
But ethically-good (for lack of a better term) Twitter alternatives isn't a list of imaginary cities.
I'm not the others participating in this subthread, so I can't speak to their motivations, but for me, it's possible to recognize that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have utility for many people, but also lament that otherwise-better platforms exist that haven't gained traction.
(And it's funny in this specific case, because often the reason they haven't gained traction is because of actual problems with the product: the UI is unpolished, the UX is bad, important feature XYZ is missing, etc. But in the case of Mastodon it actually is as good [or better] product-wise as Twitter. It just doesn't have the same mass appeal because of existing network effects, marketing, and first/early-mover advantages.)
Why should you go thru the trouble? Because these social networks own your content and your audience and won't hesitate a second to drop you if they deem fit.
(There were a dozen other, unrelated things ranking higher on Google.)
In any social network where "network effects" are a thing in the first place, there is more content produced than can be consumed by a particular user. The algorithm (tm) is forced to curate certain pieces of content out of circulation and can only heavily promote a negligible minority of content. This creates content reach distribution that is essentially a parabola. While there can be tons of signals to adjust the reach, the primary signals are inevitably going to be virality of the account and early engagement. You can't reasonably look at long term engagement due to content to eyeball ratio.
Ergo, posts must be designed to quickly grab early attention in an infinite feedback loop and this incentivizes cartels and bot farms to create echo chambers. Both extremely harmful phenomena.
I mean I wouldn't either if I'd managed to score website.com
I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth.
Here's the tool I use for the copy-pasting: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blog-to-newsletter
Substack doesn't have an API for composing a newsletter, but their rich text editor DOES accept copy-pasted data - and copy-paste is the universal API.
Substack lets you get away with sending that many emails without attempting to monetize because you pay them in clout and with your reader data.
I think they are getting the better deal given how good your writing is and your reputation.
Ultimately, even if you own the email list, you’re sharecropping on their land.
They will email your list with their own promotional offers and marketing whenever they feel like it.
If we’ve proved anything in tech, it’s that consumers will fall for the trap of “free” every single time.
In any case, few people here (and in general, IME) are suggesting that Nazis should have no platform whatsoever, only that we shouldn't choose to associate ourselves with those platforms -- especially when there are so many perfectly viable alternatives that don't occasionally promote Nazis to your readers.
>In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
Oh no, Karl Popper is a Nazi. Quick punch him.
>non-whites
This meme needs to die. Nazis wanted to kill half of all whites, viz. everyone who lived East of the Oder and wasn't a German.
this is a load-bearing condition, also nobody thinks that punching a nazi makes someone a nazi
https://counterhate.com/blog/substack-generates-at-least-2-5...
All I'll maintain here is that Substack is not in the business of censoring or deciding who gets to publish on their platform according to one group's political preferences.
You're telling on yourself with this one, transphobe.
Lineham is an anti-trans activist. There's quite literally a whole section on his Wikipedia page dedicated to it, in fact it's the longest section on there. He's practically dedicated his life to the cause.
(I subscribe to Cory Doctorow's list though)
Plus Substack discovery does carry some value - about 65% of my new subscribers come via the various Substack mechanisms, the rest are from my own site or "direct" (which I think means people landed on my substack directly and then chose to subscribe.)
If I get it, you're basically using Substack as an email platform. So the blog (the "original") can use Wordpress, Ghost, whatever ; and this is the canonical place that all articles go to. But then you duplicate the content onto Substack so it gets pushed out as emails.
My understanding of what it means:
- the blog doesn't have its own subscription system ; you link out to Substack for that. So you must be massively losing out on blog-driven subscriptions because of the much higher friction (vs having the pop-ups directly on the blog)?
- all of your content is duplicated between the real blog and the Substack copy. How do you avoid Substack cannibalizing all of your blog's traffic, given that they are a bigger domain possibly better optimized for SEO?
I'm willing to take the hit to subscriber numbers for not having that kind of thing on my own site.
From an SEO perspective, I think I might be beating Substack comfortably.
My blog has a different page for each item, plus it ties them together with tags.
The Substack email is a full week of content in one go. I don't think that's particularly SEO-optimal.
Again though, I'm willing to take the risk. So far I've not seen any obvious downsides to this model, and I've been dual publishing in this way for a few years now.
I use Substack for email distribution too. For the website side, I built an open-source blogging platform called Jant (https://jant.me) around these needs: posts appear on the homepage by default, posts marked as Featured are included in RSS, and posts can also be unlisted. It also syncs everything to GitHub as Markdown, in a repo that works as a complete Hugo site.
We collaborated with other publishing apps (pckt & Offprint) to make Standard.site - https://standard.site - a simple set of standards for publishing interop that enables something like RSS but on top of a whole social network. More context: https://lab.leaflet.pub/3moomxyjssk2p
Others can leverage this to make e.g. a whole reader app where you can find everything people in your network are publishing: https://standard-reader.app
A key thing is it's very flexible, you can publish on Leaflet, or on a self-hosted blog, and make your content discoverable and subscribeable in the same way. And in either case, you own your content — even if you use Leaflet as your hosted CMS, published data lives in your PDS where you control it, and all the social graph stuff persists even if you stop using Leaflet or we ever shut down.
Self-hosting a website is great but also considerable overhead for many folks, and we want to make it easy to publish and still have control and avoid lock-in. We even see folks doing hybrid approaches, e.g. using Leaflet to publish (for easy to use CMS + nice social features) but also pulling published data to render directly on their own website.
It's very different from what you get with a concentrated single platform like Substack (or Instagram, YouTube, etc) as far as audience reach, and early days with the ecosystem, but I think it's valuable in a different way. It's more aligned with the open web, and importantly, it's more antifragile — there are many ways to reach people and interact with your readers, from Bluesky to Leaflet to other reader apps, search tools, etc. Network effects aren't there yet to the degree of Substack, but a lot of cool things are emerging and it feels like an exciting time to build here together.
EDIT - OH, I missed you're on the AT protocol, so there's the main difference already.
I do like the Indie web, and to me, it is more just the way the internet was/has been/needs to be. What is missing are neutral kinds of payment layers/vendors that won't pull your funding if you say something someone somewhere doesn't like.
And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.
The real choke point is one step up the chain with payment processors, and since 9/11 and stricter KYC with banks, there's not a reliable, widely accepted path around those regulations. Cryptocurrency remains fringe. Running a self-hosted ghost or WordPress powered blog or newsletter will encounter the same bottleneck wherever money changes hands among average-Joes online.
If their standard residential Internet packages don't offer truly static IP addresses, then it at least makes nominal sense to say: if you want to host your own website from your home, you pay some annual fee for a static IP that is not part of normal residential provision of service. But that can also quickly twist into charging exorbitant rates or pushing people hosting personal websites on their own hardware to pay for business plans they don't truly need.
But in my experience, Substack is much higher quality. I actually read several Substack blogs regularly because they’re better and more consistent than most blogs I come across. YMMV, I guess, but I have at least half a dozen blogs I actively follow on Substack, compared to maybe 1 elsewhere.
Surely dev.to also filled with low level articles, but at least people there spent effort to write articles then gave it for free. But those users of the previous websites mostly write it for money.
Don't get me wrong, quality articles deserve to have money in return, you can't get far without sustainable business. But writing for the sake of writing (and earning money for the quantity not quality) is what is causing those websites to be filled with shallow contents.
In short, I think that for the vast majority of casual posters, the aspirational upsides of joining a network are going to fall flat. Like with most aggregators, the popular things tend to be promoted more.
So, for me at least, if I'm going to get very low traffic, I'd prefer to get that very low traffic on my own website. It might be a pyrrhic victory but I sleep just a little better knowing that as one of the 1% that actually creates stuff, I did what little I could.
I think the parent was talking about having a substack, not reading things on Substack.
But I also think the direct network effects don't come from casuals (other than that they repost to social networks.) People who are paying for a substack will look at others because it doesn't involve another signup or separate bill, they can just add the subscription for a buck or two. Now they can tour the subscriber content, and they can drop it after a little while if it doesn't ultimately appeal to them with just a click or three.
For non-subscribers, a substack isn't any different from any other blog.
Basically, I don't know anyone who is ever bored. Who the hell has time to click on and read random posts? The entire value of HN is that other smart people surface the top 1% of 1% of stuff I'd probably find interesting.
The notion of reading Substack posts just because I'm a subscriber seems like fantasy.
I think it's both, see "nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content."
And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.
All of their infrastructure from the very bottom to the very top is FOSS - except their membership program. It links to a third-party which processes payments compliantly.
They've attempted a pivot to funding the network via BTC/Lightning but clearly that's polarizing to a lot of people even though it better aligns with their philosophy.
I've been listening to the network for decades now and directly credit my IT career to the people who've been platformed on the various shows over the years. Lots of great content.
However, discoverability is indeed a problem. If in the past we had to play the SEO game in order to get some traffic (I would crosspost in Reddit but the amount of uncalled hate I would get from an unqualified audience hardly pays off – I manage to make to the top of HN once though), now it's even worse with AI.
I agree with those who say that as much as we like to say we write for ourselves (and I do think this is true), it's as important to have contact with the public. In Le vie intellectuele Fr. Sertillanges would argue that critics help you shape the argument and make it clearer and more correct. Therefore, having a distribution channel is important. After all, if all you want is to brain dump or write as an exercise, write it in Obsidian or similar software, connect it to Git and be done with it.
Now, after I started my Substack [2] I was able to attract over ~2.3k subs to date. It's true that a lot of that came from other channels (like my YouTube channel), but in the past it was always slow and Ghost newsletter never really worked well for me. In Substack I often get recommendations from other writers, and you can also refer to people you respect as well.
If Substack ever ceases to allow you to export your posts or subscribers, then I agree the network effect won't be as decisive. Currently, I write my drafts in Obsidian so I always have a local copy, then copy, paste and refine in the Substack editor (so it looks optimized there), and press publish.
[1] https://rafaelquintanilha.com [2] https://codecapital.substack.com
If you already have a Substack, you can also easily migrate to Ghost. Since it is open source, you can also host it on Hetzner, if you want to manage it yourself.
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
[1] https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-...
> My goal is to write good blog posts, and µstack exists for the purpose of making it as easy as possible for me to write good blog posts. As far as I can tell, there’s no meaningful correlation between the quality of work published on a website, and the amount of engagement that website receives. I could track clicks or traffic or RSS feed queries, but that data would only tell me how many people are reading what I write - it wouldn’t tell me if my writing is any good.
I feel like it's relevant here. The OP tacitly assumes that engagement is the goal, that your purpose in writing is to get eyes on what you wrote. I argue that, for most writers, the goal is self-expression. If that drives engagement, cool. If it doesn't, the purpose has still been fulfilled.
If I were to provide an addendum to the OP, it would be this: consider the goals of your blog, artistic and otherwise. The answer to "what platform is right for me?" might be no platform at all.
If you make good art (or blog posts), people will find you, "platform" or not. The internet is cool that way. Eyes do not good art make.
So, thinking out loud: you could offer people to subscribe to your website by publishing a RSS feed with dummy audio, using a link in the the episode description to get people to hop through to your website. And then you offer the appropriate "subscribe in iTunes / Spotify / generic podcasting app" buttons on your website page.
And then suddenly the masses can sign up to your updates! And they can easily unsubscribe! And you don't have to deal with email, and can use static file hosting! There'd even be a discovery inroad as presumably the Apples and Spotifies of this world will push it through the personalized recommendations pipe just as they would for any other podcast.
It's a bit subversive but it would work wouldn't it?
But yeah let's not underestimate the power we're giving these platforms. If down the road it doesn't match the monetization strategy? Platform giveth, platform taketh.
But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it.
Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0.
If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.
There are literally thousands of PHP hosting providers.
There are also dozens, possibly hundreds of deviated wordpress hosting services, aside from WordPress.com.
A more modern CMS can bring costs down by serving pages from a CDN cache and, most importantly, selectively re-rendering only pages that changed. This is hard to do with Wordpress because plugins can essentially render anything and depend on any data.
A different kingdom to be sure, but you can always pack your bags and push the repository elsewhere. There’s something quite pleasing about having everything handled in git too.
It's very hard to gain readers now on independent websites. Google search is dead (very few people now search for tech content), social media platforms penalize you for posting links and so on.
You can get a few thousand subscribers on Substack just by being consistent and interacting with other people. Now try gaining 1000 subscribers to an e-mail newsletter or RSS from your personal blog. People who tried it know that 5,000 views on your blog can convert to a few subscribers, and you need to get those 5000 somehow first.
A lot of people just repost their articles to substack for a reason. It's not forbidden. You can repost them from your personal blog.
* Leaflet<https://leaflet.pub>
* Offprint<https://offprint.app>
* Pckt<https://pckt.blog>Substack thrives because it's built a reputation for having well-reasoned or engaging voices in a newsletter format. They pushed a big campaign to onboard writers like Bill Bishop (Sinocism) onto the platform early on. Because of that, newer writers are likely seeking to tap into the network effects/discovery systems that comes with having big names on the platform.
People log onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, etc. because the people they're interested are already on the platform, and the platform provides a recommendation system that allows newer "creators" to tap into an existing audience for others in their niche.
Did a short talk on this at a local meetup recently, basically on how we might collectively re-create the entire stack of what Substack offers, in an open ecosystem, with a strong focus on network / distribution, more so than just features.
It's a tall order but I do think there's a big opportunity here beyond what any single app can or should tackle, in building an open alternative to the whole longform publishing stack, combining the tools and the social network side. AT Protocol and the Atmosphere (ecosystem of folks building on it) are pretty well positioned here. Lots of nice ways to get autonomy and ownership with web publishing + distribution and social affordances at the same time.
Of course a big challenge in bootstrapping the network and building the cultural footprint and giving folks flexible ways to make money and reach new readers, but I'm encouraged by how much progress we've made collectively just this past year.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
Natsoc newsletters are apparently fine, but showing porn is too much and you'll be moderated. Go on, tell me how one is more harmful to kids than the other.
I (unsurprisingly) agree authors should own their own website and email list (btw based on hundreds of data points we know converts about 100 to 1 versus social followers for book sales) but the issue is how to make it effortless to set up and maintain a website.
We built a system where you enter one ISBN and we instantly import your entire book catalog, including books, reviews, metadata, author bio, etc. Btw one book to all the authors’ books is not trivial problem (see how often Amazon gets it wrong) due to lack of universal author ID. We’ve since built author-specific email marketing, ecommerce, etc all on a domain each author owns (we make it seamless). Now that we have 9k+ happy (65 NPS) authors we’re adding author cross promotion for distribution but the author’s owned domain and capturing their own emails remains at center.
Anyways if anyone wants to check it out for free (no CC needed) would welcome feedback from HN community. https://authors.tertulia.com/
I tried the reverse -- syndicating content on medium that we publish on our blog. 0 impressions, literally, for 5 posts that got some readership on our blog.
I use hugo to build my website and I wrote my own theme. It's clunky, but control over the design/build lets me:
- Put PyIodide into posts to make ML code explainers interactive (https://iahmed.me/post/poor_mans_autograd/)
- Inject custom widgets to illustrate theoretical ideas (https://iahmed.me/post/surprise-derivation-entropy/)
- Have multiple layouts to suit my needs (https://iahmed.me/resume/ rendered from json at build time for SEO)
The only thing good about Substack is to find new people to read from, but I'm less inclined to follow them for long because who knows how Substack changes things.
You combine your website/blog with that and you have a pretty nice setup that you own. You can even use RSS to allow people to subscribe to replies to comments, threads, a page, etc…
Some of them were far less polite, never mind that it would have taken them less time to click unsubscribe then writing some insulting email to someone they chose to follow.
If you write all your stuff in a location you control, and syndicate that out to the popular platform of the day, you can minimize your loss.
An astoundingly large percentage of my personal technical policies are guided by the idea that I want to minimize my losses after the next sudden yet inevitable betrayal.
Most people will defer to Substack because (A) the brand, and (B) it can be monetised which is probably the biggest draw.
Maybe I need to bring monetisation to Pagecord? :)
The one issue I have today is copyright and all the extreme scraping being done by ai companies. I wonder how others are dealing with that.
[^1]: I can't stand how slow and tracking-heavy substack is, but the problem of "send email and not get filtered as spam" is non-trivial.
Then I "switched" to Substack 3 years ago and the audience growth is real. I'm approaching 2000 subscribers (some of which are paid, which always surprises me and I appreciate), and these keep growing organically although I'm sure a large portion of which are fake. It's hard to say it doesn't work or isn't worth it.
Now... spoiler: I never "switched" to Substack. I continue to write all of my content on my website _first_, with all of the features it had before, but now I copy/paste the content into Substack and distribute it that way. It's painful, but I have scars from when I moved off of Medium and want to ensure I "own" the originals.
If you are curious, I had written more about this 2 years ago in https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging
So yeah, get a website.
Set a GitHub repo, use pnpm + Astro, and your favourite AI to migrate data there, brew some coffee, and before you finish it, you have your page up.
It does not prevent you from posting elsewhere. But that way, you have full control both on the fruits of your own work, and how you display it.
I now have a substack + a wordpress website. An article goes to both places, and substack acts as a subscriber growth + email distribution tool for me.
They plaster your emails with ads to download their app and will even email your list whenever they feel like it and when you leave they will still email your list substack-related content and offers.
When someone subscribed via the app btw, they own that person, not you.
If you’re okay with that trade off, fine, but I thought we learned this lesson about the trap of “free” with the social media companies before…
Plus there's just a level of control over the design and features that you can't get elsewhere. Want to make the site look completely unlike any other? It's 100% doable, as plenty of blogs posted here show very well. Want to add a new feature like polls or surveys or quizzes or interactive infographics or what not? You don't need a third party service or some premium account, you just add it yourself.
Running a website is like owning a home rather than renting one. You decide what furniture, what colours, what utilities and service providers, whether you want pets, etc.
if you've a chance read a bit on sharecropping, the feudal system.
then you will see a good population of people are willingly getting into serfdom.
Recently, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s surprisingly easy these days. I already have a domain on Cloudflare, and I had Codex build a simple blogging system for me. I write everything in Markdown, the site is hosted on Cloudflare, comments are stored in Cloudflare D1, and all articles live in the repository as Markdown files. GitHub Actions takes care of publishing automatically and also performs regular backups. To reduce comment spam, I use Cloudflare Turnstile, which has been working really well. For comment moderation, I protect the admin interface with Cloudflare Zero Trust, using email-based authentication, so I don’t need to build or maintain my own authentication system. Overall, the setup has been incredibly simple, reliable, and has required very little ongoing maintenance.
It has 2 views, lol.
I just post it all to blog.ciefas.cafe now, I have no audience so I feel like Substack is useless to me.
Those without an actual domain are sure very exposed.
Frankly I think self hosting is super easy in 2026 (and virtually free unless you want personalized domains or subdomains), especially for simple web content, but I also understand the aversion to it and at least hope that more and more people will spend their money on VPS (or other hosting services like Wordpress), rather than these random websites that appear overnight like Substack.
Specifically on Substack though: I immediately close if a link I clicked is Substack. Many reasons for that. I find it very unpleasant to read stuff there, because of that banners and general design of the website. It all look generic and I hate generic. Second reason and even more important for me is that Substack platforms Nazis and white supremacists and they have apparently no problem about it.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
In 2022, Medium was defacto blogging platform and getting into their paid program was close to impossible.
In the first 2 days of setting up Subtack I got a 5 dollar deposit from my first paying reader. I couldn't have done that on either Medium or my personal blog.
Frankly, if writing is becoming a serious business for you, it's probably better to work across ALL of Substack/personal site/X/etc. They're all worthwhile distribution and monetization channels and can serve different purposes.
The website itself is slow, it cannot render the whole comments section, it constantly nags readers with subscribe forms.
It can not handle single account across my subscriptions.
Its just crap.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...
Archive link: https://archive.ph/rfnc5
Every time I see a substack article I simply do not open it, because if I do, especially on mobile, 90% of the screen will be covered for popups banners and what not
Writing itself takes a lot of effort.
First:
1.You have to define your target audience.
2.You have to choose topics they'll find interesting.
3.You need to collect materials.
4.You read through the materials, build the structure, and go through multiple drafts and revisions.
Even a short post usually takes about a week. And even after all that, will people actually read it? Not really. So I have to promote it on external sites like HN and Reddit, and keep updating the sitemap until my site starts showing up in Google search results.
The problem is that most people want to make money through writing. That's completely understandable. With the economy getting tougher, even hobbies cost money.
The issue is that once you step away from platforms like Substack and Medium, it becomes much harder for people to find your content, and you lose the community itself. In fact, that's the real strength of Substack and Medium—people are already there to spend money because they're earning from the same ecosystem. But if you move to an independent site, even putting up ads can cause strong backlash (especially since Google often shows low-quality ads—like porn ads—to people who don't share their personal data).
In my case, I created my site because I needed a portfolio that made me look professional. Since I don't have experience at prestigious companies or universities, and I've mostly moved between small contractors, I needed something to show that I know certain things, have relevant experience, and have built actual products. (In the Korean market, the only work available to programmers without capital is small NDA-bound jobs.)
On the other hand, people with good careers don't need to take this risk—their reputation comes from successful products they've worked on in the market.
So I needed a metric like 'I run my own site, it uses MSA, and I have experience running it stably over the long term.' Of course, I could list the projects I've worked on, but most of them don't have a strong track record of market success. So I think that unless you're in a special situation, it's better to stay within existing writing communities.
The problems mentioned several times in this thread can all be addressed by their ways, although it requires work, and not treating this "getting paid to write" thing as merely a hobby.
- how not to rely on a central authority for your work - how to solve the problem of getting paid - how not to get banned by the publishing site and also the payment processor for saying things they might deem controversial - and even how to keep your subscribers and also prevent your paid content from leaking to the LLMs
This is how people like Ben Settle (considered as one of the greatest email marketers), Dan Kennedy (Ben looks up to him) and Matt Furey (Ben and Dan both revere him) earned their way into wealth.
* they paywall their premium newsletters. but you can't access them via a website by logging in with a username/password, or a forgotten password flow. No. It's delivered to your home as printed booklets via courier [1].
* Ben has a rule: if you subscribe to his paid newsletter ($97/mo) and then unsub, you won't even be able to join back [2].
* Dan Kennedy has no email. You'll have to fax him to get his attention.
* Ben often talks about the perils of having your entire business at the mercy of platforms and payment processors. His solution is to have multiple merchant accounts [3].
* By keeping their premium content away from the internet, they're able to keep off piracy, and that same playbook is now protecting their content from LLM bots. And by charging big numbers ($97/mo vs $5/mo) they're able to deinsentivise the subscribers from uploading them to the internet. They have proud long-time subscribers who are loyal to them and don't want to harm their business.
One of the main discussion points in this thread is the importance of owning your list. And nobody takes that job seriously than these direct marketers. To them, it's all about controlling as many different parts of the machinery as they could.
And finally, if they're doing offline business, what do they keep their websites for? To build the list of course. And then sell their paid stuff to that list via email.
Yes, it seems like a chicken and egg problem, but then I believe you only need a few fans to keep the ball rolling (kelly 1000 true fans etc).
[1] - https://emailplayers.com/ [2] - https://bensettle.com/blog/why-i-banned-you/ [3] - https://bensettle.com/blog/merchant-account-kicks-my-app/ - matt furey's $97/mo digital newsletter https://knockoutmarketing.com/zen-mastery-newsletter/
For the HN audience, the first part is trivially easy (getting a domain, publishing on it) but the second probably isn’t obvious.
Stickers are neat too.
Substack really wants you to use them as a primary publisher so they don’t make it easy to programmatically put content up. Other platforms have varying levels of ease around this.