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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter.

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.

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At 66,000 messages/week, you’d actually be spending around $50-$80 monthly with SES and a VPS + database for handling bounces and unsubscribe requests.

... right, and then I'm responsible for maintaining that infrastructure, and I have to think about email deliverability as well.

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.)

Amazon is always overpriced though. How is it at other providers?

You could do the same thing through Ghost, which has an API, and not be using a service that proudly platforms the Tates and nazis.

Ghost would cost $288/month (or $241/month paid yearly).

With 66k subscribers you could cover that without even really trying by setting up a $5/month donation tier or putting a tip jar on the site. With a tiny bit of effort, you could make thousands a month.

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.

I'll put my money where my mouth is. We at Outpost will host your site on Ghost for a year for free and migrate all your substack subscribers, with the only caveats that 1) you put a tip jar link (either to Ghost's or Outpost's) at the end of every email with some text like support us being on an indie platform and 2) at the end of the year or earlier report how it went.

And substack is free because they use YOU as their growth engine. Your newsletter is plastered with their branding and links to their app, not yours. If someone subscribes to pay for your publication via their app, they own the subscription, not you.

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.

I don’t know anything about the specific situation you’re referencing. That being said, getting mad at an organization, one that is built to be a “platform” for people to share their words, for not going out of its way to police which people share which words, seems to me to be unproductive at best, if not actively close minded and tribalistic.

oh it's more than the org. IIRC, it's also the founder.

What about for going out of their way to find and pay despicable people for their words?

Sure, tolerate Nazis, give them a place to share their words, let them be part of the mainstream, let them take part in elections, play their dirty tricks and form paramilitaries and win control of government. It's a shame that that leads to certain groups, like Jews, LGBTQ, non-whites, or immigrants getting exterminated, but that's just the price you have to pay for free speech.

That’s backwards. Society does not move forward despite free speech, rather because of it. The only way to truly move past harmful ideas and ideologies is to show those who would otherwise subscribe how dumb they are. You can try to quell them, but that just lends to their appeal, and results in those that do subscribe being more extreme and doing more extreme things. For a real world example, take someone who thinks that Nick Fuentes is a reasonable, respectable guy, and then show them the recent discussion between him and Hunter Biden, and see if they don’t at least get uncomfortable, unsure.

If this were true, far right mainstream media (eg Newsmax, NY Post) would not have the viewership and readership they enjoy.

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.

The problem is not really Nazis saying despicable things, their so-called "free speech". The problem is that they are Nazis and will really do all these things if they get a chance. Why would you want to collaborate with Nazis, especially by giving them space on your platform where they can organize and publicize? Sure, collaborating with them in any other way is also bad, selling them food, giving them jobs, or whatever. It's not surprising that some people don't like collaborators any more than they like Nazis.

Let's see what the man who coined the term paradox of tolerance had to say about this:

>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.

Alright, and killed or enslaved. I also missed the communists, the same treatment for them. We can accept that there may be differences in targets between one group of fascists and the next, it's really up to their Führer to decide.

> as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion

this is a load-bearing condition, also nobody thinks that punching a nazi makes someone a nazi

Scratch liberal and a fascist bleeds.

I feel like you're probably interpreting that saying in the opposite of its intended meaning but there's not enough context to know for sure.

You could have just said the intended meaning.

You can't get that deep into politics on HN - you'll get flagged.

>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

Blame HN moderation

Substack has gone out of its way to platform the right and has been very proud to work with folks like Andrew Tate, Graham Linehan, and anti-vaxxers whose disinfo helped kill tens of thousands of Americans.

https://counterhate.com/blog/substack-generates-at-least-2-5...

Eh, I think you have a classification problem. Andrew Tate is far, far right and Linehan...this is the man who created "Father Ted"... is "right" just because he thinks men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and spaces? I'll leave out the issue of the massive numbers of people who were injured by the jab.

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.

>"just because he thinks men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and spaces"

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.

Sorry not sorry, but Substack isn't going to run off Lineham because he thinks that people with a dick shouldn't be in a female locker room.

There's a difference between thinking those thoughts, and posting about them publicly to your following while simultaneously advocating for violence against trans individuals.

Hi Simon, I'm not sure I get it completely.

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 don't like subscription popups - see recent John Gruber rants on the subject: https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

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.

Thank you! My coauthor Brad and I were subscribing to Ghost just yesterday ; we're going to adopt your model.

I really like this approach. I make similar distinctions between posts meant for email, posts that should appear in RSS, posts that belong on the homepage, and posts that should live under /archive without appearing on the homepage.

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.

It's sort of disgusting that inbox clutter from a publishing service is the dominant delivery paradigm as opposed to browsers natively checking bookmarked RSS feeds.

Email is so well designed, so resilient, and so ubiquitous that's very hard to displace it's use as a central check-in.

Right which is why I'd only suggest the browser as an alternative. Imho a browser is something I open when I proactively am seeking information/entertainment and thereby fits blog reading better than email which is more like an interrupt.

Maybe the default "new tab" view for a browser could be an RSS reader? Is that something along the lines of what you're proposing?

I want very badly to use RSS to read everything, and I still use RSS a lot. But I have to admit that email won the resiliency battle a long time ago.

Or just opening the website once a day.

(I subscribe to Cory Doctorow's list though)

This is super useful even if I just grab it as an idea to emulate. Have you used an agent to copy and paste for you ?

I've not tried that, honestly it's such a quick process already that waiting for some kind of browser automation to copy and paste would likely be slower.

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