Comment by Bratmon
7 hours ago
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
Thanks for this.
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.
Not sure about LinkedIn, but Facebook does let you export all your data as a bit monolithic zip file.
Every single thing substack does reeks of growth hacking. I suspect that it will only get worse. For that reason alone I chose to avoid it for my newsletter.
Can't you link to whatever you want in your own blog post?
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.
Which is trivial. Even once a month is enough.
How many writers are even thinking about that though? If they shut it off tomorrow, how many would have a list within the last year?
2 replies →
Until they make it more difficult to export lol that’s the real canary in the coal mine if you ask me.
The coal mine is already inhospitable