It's probably worth pointing out that the author is a founder of beehiiv, a Substack competitor.
CamelCaseName · 1h ago
Thanks for that. I knew something felt off with how much beehiiv was being plugged.
Very lame to not be transparent about that.
No comments yet
famahar · 2h ago
Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.
azemetre · 1h ago
I think one problem people have is payment processing. There really needs to be a federal program to allow people to easily transfer money as payment. There are too many extractive middlemen with rentier economies and ethics.
There's no reason why Congress can make something like what Brazil has with Pix.
Having a public option for payment processing can do a tremendous amount of good.
slau · 21m ago
I believe that this is where someone like Supertab [1] could really pop off. I don’t honestly don’t think having this as a country-specific service would be useful/beneficial. Not affiliated with ST, just have a friend who works there. I’m yet to encounter a website that offers them, though.
I wonder how accessible would it be to put article source on Patreon and make a static site that fetches and displays them via Javascript?
xboxnolifes · 54m ago
> Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters?
What Substack provides for its users:
- Webpage
- CMS
- WYSIWYG editor
- Email newsletters / notifications
- Payment processing / Subscription handling
I'm going to go with yes.
tombert · 1h ago
I think the difficulty isn't so much in the making of the blog, but the hosting it. I think a non-technical person could probably Google their way through getting Hugo to render with one of the default templates, but it's still kind of hard to understand how to deploy stuff to a place to host the
Like, I know how to do that with Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages or S3 or spinning up an Nginx server, but none of that is intuitive, and it can be overwhelming to people who aren't familiar with Git or web hosting.
chrismcb · 1h ago
Yes. I think it is too hard for the average person. It is one reason why some of these other became popular
sumanthvepa · 1h ago
I've been wondering exacrtly this. Surely, its not hard to get setup with your own website. It's not like substack is giving you much distribution.
locusofself · 1h ago
Email deliverability is a nightmare. You need mega reputation to not end up in spam filters.
maxace · 4m ago
ghost + stripe + mailgun = ez mode
maxace · 5m ago
clicked the minus sign on the ad "window"
worked as a hyperlink instead, same as clicking on the ad itself
not very "denk" imo
rectang · 2h ago
> Most importantly, that means that if writers choose to leave Substack, they won’t be able to port their paid subscriptions over to another platform like they could previously.
That seems like a big change.
Having to abide by Apple’s user-friendly subscription and cancellation policies is small potatoes, compared to vendor lock-in of the subscriptions.
VirgilShelton · 2h ago
Self hosting and using your payment processor of choice is always the best move. Own your own data or be prepared for the jig to be up at some point. This is what every platform that scales does.
pixodaros · 1h ago
Writers move to sites like Substack (or 15 years ago blogspot) funded by other people's money like a software developer gets into an AI startup (or 5 years ago crypto). You can make bank in the short term even if you should know it will not last. Substack subsidizes individual creators and markets their blog as cooler than old blogs, Google subsidized web ads and upranked blogs in search results. Yes, it is no fun if you like stability, and its not a game I play.
tombert · 1h ago
I don't use Substack [1], but isn't part of the appeal of Substack discoverability?
Like that's part of the reason that a lot of these platforms get popular. Most software engineers could write something to upload, transcode, and host videos in an afternoon or two, but that only gets you 10% of YouTube's value. The thing that keeps YouTube on top is it's hyper-addictive recommendation system.
I assume that Substack offers something like that? Again I don't actually use it so I'm kind of speaking out of my ass.
[1] No one read my blog anyway so there's no pretense of charging for it.
maxace · 2m ago
"publish on ur own site, syndicate everywhere" has never been more salient
jpereira · 1h ago
disclosure: building a substack competitor on atproto
I'm really excited for ATProto as a way to build applications that let you have the benefits of substack (a unified network, recommendations, social features like comments, etc) without the eventual path to lock in.
It's particularly exciting because the incentive is actually there to build an application this way. Whether Bluesky is growing or not, there are currently 30M accounts that you can reach (with one of the best auth systems I've interacted with), AND atproto gives you the building blocks for others to build on your work. Both these things make the bootstrapping problem for any social application way down.
There's still a lot of stuff missing, payments being a big (and gnarly one), notification management being another, but both the bluesky team and the overall ecosystem has been moving at a solid pace, and things are getting more viable by the day.
chrisweekly · 1h ago
Great post, thanks for the astute analysis. It's such a shame, I was starting to collect a good set of writers I'm following there - and was planning to join them. Maybe beehiiv is worth a closer look.
adithyassekhar · 2h ago
Don't usually like Apple, but (the inevitable but),
Creators should be happy they're passing the cost to customers. We know they didn't choose to write on substack out of altruism.
If someone thinks you are worth enough to pay 30% more they'll pay. That's always been the case.
tombert · 1h ago
It's still insane that Apple thinks it deserves 30% of your entire subscription cost for simply processing the transaction.
I'm not saying that managing subscription billing has no value, but it's not like what Apple is doing has no comparison; PayPal offers similar subscription services and their cut is less than 10%.
adithyassekhar · 1h ago
That's the only insane part about this. But they can't go back because numbers must go up.
VanTheBrand · 1h ago
So if they will always still pay at 30% higher then why not set the price another 30% higher after that and keep going again and again?
adithyassekhar · 1h ago
They can and it's not wrong. The authors gave it to substack, substack can choose their pricing. That was the deal though, not sure what's the issue here. This is just an ad for a competitor.
jackvalentine · 1h ago
We’ve seen a bunch of blog platforms come and go at this point - what makes investors think Substack is worth of a 100mil series C?
xeonmc · 1h ago
Do not bulid your castle in the middle of a swamp, or something like that.
No comments yet
ChrisArchitect · 1h ago
Related/unrelated:
anyone notice the seemingly big uptick in Substack submissions around here? Like ones reaching the front page, often submitted by newer-ish accounts. What's that about? Did (1) alot of bloggers switch to Substack recently? and (2) is there a concerted effort to take advantage of HN traffic bumps here?
</subtleconspiracykeepinganeyeon>
tombert · 1h ago
I think it's just that it's the cool place to write blog posts now. It was similar five or six years ago with Medium, or Github Pages. I don't think conspiratorial thinking is really necessary.
TimorousBestie · 1h ago
Surprised not to find any discussion of Stripe refusing to process payments for otherwise legal content on other platforms (Steam, itch.io, Patreon). It’s very likely their hyper-vigilance will extend to Substack as well.
maxace · 1m ago
they are very annoying at first re: kyc
throwaway290 · 1h ago
probably not coincidentally, Andresseen Horowitz newsletter just announced they are migrating to Substack (https://a16z.substack.com/)
(Not that I read their newsletter just was too lazy to cancel)
tootie · 2h ago
I think you should also lay some blame on Apple who have this shitty policy for app store subs. Apple makes it very easy for users but users should really be aware to never use that feature since it's hostile to creators. It's not limited to Substack.
Very lame to not be transparent about that.
No comments yet
There's no reason why Congress can make something like what Brazil has with Pix.
Having a public option for payment processing can do a tremendous amount of good.
[1]: https://www.supertab.co/
What Substack provides for its users:
- Webpage
- CMS
- WYSIWYG editor
- Email newsletters / notifications
- Payment processing / Subscription handling
I'm going to go with yes.
Like, I know how to do that with Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages or S3 or spinning up an Nginx server, but none of that is intuitive, and it can be overwhelming to people who aren't familiar with Git or web hosting.
worked as a hyperlink instead, same as clicking on the ad itself
not very "denk" imo
That seems like a big change.
Having to abide by Apple’s user-friendly subscription and cancellation policies is small potatoes, compared to vendor lock-in of the subscriptions.
Like that's part of the reason that a lot of these platforms get popular. Most software engineers could write something to upload, transcode, and host videos in an afternoon or two, but that only gets you 10% of YouTube's value. The thing that keeps YouTube on top is it's hyper-addictive recommendation system.
I assume that Substack offers something like that? Again I don't actually use it so I'm kind of speaking out of my ass.
[1] No one read my blog anyway so there's no pretense of charging for it.
I'm really excited for ATProto as a way to build applications that let you have the benefits of substack (a unified network, recommendations, social features like comments, etc) without the eventual path to lock in.
It's particularly exciting because the incentive is actually there to build an application this way. Whether Bluesky is growing or not, there are currently 30M accounts that you can reach (with one of the best auth systems I've interacted with), AND atproto gives you the building blocks for others to build on your work. Both these things make the bootstrapping problem for any social application way down.
There's still a lot of stuff missing, payments being a big (and gnarly one), notification management being another, but both the bluesky team and the overall ecosystem has been moving at a solid pace, and things are getting more viable by the day.
Creators should be happy they're passing the cost to customers. We know they didn't choose to write on substack out of altruism.
If someone thinks you are worth enough to pay 30% more they'll pay. That's always been the case.
I'm not saying that managing subscription billing has no value, but it's not like what Apple is doing has no comparison; PayPal offers similar subscription services and their cut is less than 10%.
No comments yet
anyone notice the seemingly big uptick in Substack submissions around here? Like ones reaching the front page, often submitted by newer-ish accounts. What's that about? Did (1) alot of bloggers switch to Substack recently? and (2) is there a concerted effort to take advantage of HN traffic bumps here?
</subtleconspiracykeepinganeyeon>
(Not that I read their newsletter just was too lazy to cancel)