Comment by skippyfish
8 hours ago
Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
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.
> Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read.
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.
The entire pitch of Substack is "You can export the email addresses of your current subscribers at any time"
So if they stop doing the "email my subscribers whenever I post" step, another service will fill the gap pretty quick.
Substack notes is non exportable; the newsletter now no longer have a link to read it on your site on substack and instead link to the substack app, and subscriptions started in the app pay Substack through Apple and Google and you can't export them.
Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
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If Substack stops supporting that feature you would end up losing all of your subscribers when you move to the alternative unless you happen to have an up to date export.
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Until they make it more difficult to export lol that’s the real canary in the coal mine if you ask me.
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When they will, you’ll be free to take action.
Yeah and having a site is a way to mitigate that risk...
> How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future?
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?
Its the terminating argument for FOSS hackers. When there is no good argument left, they fall onto that.
"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!"
Hackers always use this argument against everything because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.
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.
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> You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future?
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.
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Allow me to translate: “It a near certainty that they will fuck you over eventually; the question is will it be next year, next decade, or will you win the lottery?”
That’s when you leave.
There's enough demand for the feature that if they stop supporting it, they won't be able to compete against anyone offering the feature.
Gmail has categories. So they already are.
> Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
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.
* https://wordpress.com/support/import-from-substack/
> I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com.
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.
> Why? I want my writing to outlive me.
Donate to archive.org.
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What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?
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.
My blog used to be RSS only, because I thought email subscriptions were a plot of "content creators" and not something readers actually wanted... until one of my readers told me he really recommended adding email as an option. I did, and a surprising number of people subscribed since then.
For a decade or~so I subscribe to newsletters and had skip inbox rules that archived them in a folder about the subject. Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them. Not sure if that means it works or not.
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> What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?
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.
> I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.
Pick Medium, it's great ... if you want a paywall to turn away half your visitors!
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My RSS reader accepts email newsletters so I subscribe using that and funnel them all into feedbin
...I use email notifications. I follow very few people (fewer than 10), so I'm always happy when an email pops up letting me know they've written something.
I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
It's not really a counterpoint when it's addressed in the article.
"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)."
you said: "...from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website"
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.
> So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web.
Please don't post sh1t like this as some expert conclusion. Young and gullible people might believe confident but wrong talk like this.
The lift to make your own website is so low now, and the benefits of future-proofing are so great that it's just the right decision to make. You don’t even have to drive all your readers there, you’ll just have it available for everyone if the audience ever decides to gradually move on from substack (which seems to happen pretty much every social media platform).
> You need a push mechanism to reach readers.
Ghost blog includes newsletter for push.
Push as in a newsletter alone isn't doing anything. It's the "show ocassional posts of you on an already captive audience of millions and especially readers with similar interests" (the whole Substack base) that does it.
I use self-hosted Listmonk. Works great in combination with my blog. But yeah its slow growth. But that's actually what I prefer, because if you grow fast on Substack, these are gone as fast IMO as people don't really read substack emails anymore after getting 10 of them every day (as subscribing is so easy on Substack). So having a slow, but honest subscribers and then sharing it on socials or reddit in places where it genuinely helps people, there will always be some who will subscribe and read.
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.
If you write news, posts that needs discussion, information that relatively quickly becomes obsolete, then probably yes, you won't want a website because few people will search for it deliberately.
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.
No one is writing purely for themselves. It's something we like to say, and there's some value in writing down your thoughts - but deep down inside, every blogger is dreaming of having a positive impact on other people's lives. That requires reaching these people in the first place.
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.
>No one is writing purely for themselves
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!
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I feel like the transition from substack to website + newsletter wouldn't be terrible, although I'm sure your traffic would decrease after making the switch.
I miss the days when I'd regularly get forwards from friends about stuff they found on the internet.
One of my first jobs after graduate, I used to share a lot of posts with my coworkers until a certain point where one of them said "I don't know how you read so much content", worthless to say him was a Master's student, so I'm expecting him to be able to consume more content than myself, although different more towards academic stuff.
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You mention RSS, but Substack is about paid subscribers, is it not? What do you think converts a Substack user to a subscriber; is it just a numbers game?
Agreed.
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.
> no one will visit your website.
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.
I mean, can't you accomplish the same thing with "enter your email/social handle to be notified when I post something"?
For sure. I had a huge following on my wordpress blog 15 years ago and email was how everyone got notified of new content. I'm sure there's a way to at least do sms now if people want that level of notification.
Most writers just want to write and don't want to start maintaining servers and databases to handle the collection and storing of emails. This is why they outsource that functionality to a service like Substack.
It would be nice if services like Substack supported exportability, so when a writer eventually becomes successful enough to migrate away, or the platform itself is no longer a good fit, then there aren't any losses.
Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.
I actively skip stuff that’s on substack just like I do medium and blogger. Maybe there’s good stuff on there but it’s usually a by-word for slop. I figure if anyone has anything that interesting to say they’d make the effort and put it up on something more serious looking.
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They have done nothing of the sort.
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It's addressed in the article
the point is that they are not mutually exclusive. you can have both. just don't put all your eggs in the corporate basket
Yes, I think people who move away from Substack already need to have a brand and a number of followers to drive people to their personal websites, even if they use Ghost. And I do get the concerns that Substack has some super bizarre and awful content in the mix. Their feed shows me stuff every once in a while, from uber-conservative right wing Christians to conspiracy theory nonsense. But my dumb soccer blog/podcast putters along and grows slowly, in some cases, not even from social media posts. It's an interesting platform.
this tide will turn, and the day of reckoning is coming for AI slop and large domains owning the search results. small publishers are going to have their time very soon.
> no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that.
I am not convinced. My traffic counter spins quite rapidly, and I only publish on http://dmitry.gr
That's because it's a tech vlog with posts that also serve as technical reference and tutorials and such like: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm
There's a big audience for that that's actively search for such keywords.
Not the same with essays or fiction writing
Fediverse. We need to push Fediverse