Comment by simonsarris
6 hours ago
I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting.
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.
> The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
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.
The network effects ARE the genuine utility.
And you can take advantage of their network effects by implementing a POSSE system. Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. That way, your website is the source of truth and the other places are like museums you curate to.
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.
I'm not sure I'd describe cartel behavior as utility.
It is wrong, but so are you. The truth is that social networks are big because they HAD genuine utility. The Facebook was amazing... at least until about 2010. I was at uni when it started and I vividly remember thinking "I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is" (we didn't have physical face books in the UK) and then a year later thefacebook turned up. Amazing for everyone's social lives.
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.
Also because they closed all the gates of interoperability once they got big enough.
If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.
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> I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is
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.
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> but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.
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 are probably coming at this from different angles. I don't deny those things but they're also not a counter-argument to the point I'm intending to make.
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.
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Yes the thing is valuable because of the network and the network is there because of the network.
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.
the point is that they are not mutually exclusive. you can have both. just don't put all your eggs in the corporate basket
How easy/difficult was it getting off the ground on substack? Did you get interactions right from your first post? Is there visibility for new writers?
I started using it to run a conference 4 years ago with the intent that it was supposed to be a temporary solution until we built a "real" site.
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.
https://blog.carolina.codes/
Cheers from Concord, NC. Nice to see a fellow techie in the South ‘round these parts.
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Please x2.
If you could write a small guide, that'd be phenomenal.
What is genuinely interesting is how Hacker News moderators will edit user posts, such that it looks as if the user replied to another post originally, without ever making that clear. What other lies and manipulation do they come with? Directly editing the content of posts silently, no sign of being edited?
Please also make sure to keep your wikidata and ISNI information up to date with your substack links.
Services like pirate[dot]kred use that information to link your books to your payment pages (substack is supported).
> (I definitely don't!)
I mean I wouldn't either if I'd managed to score website.com