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We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

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Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#151

Post by bathtub365 »

sachinmonga wrote: post #129
klabb3 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developing for email is still a pretty big pain. I hear you, it's a shit show! I'm gonna have to do that myself soon and I don't look forward to it. > But there are limits to what you can do [in email] But email will still be a very common entry point for readers (unless you expect to change the behavior of your users), so you still need to link to the app or website from the email. As a user I don't mind an app fr…

> As a user I don't mind an app from a technical perspective. It gives me more options! But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot? A simple but important one: being able to get a notification on your phone when a new post lands in your inbox. There are lots of subtle little things around readability, scroll performance, etc. too. There are also a decent number of Podcasts on Substack now, and listeni…

Can you elaborate on what “scroll performance” means? The only time I’ve had trouble with scrolling when I’m reading something on my phone is when an app or website thinks they know how to scroll better than the OS does.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#152

Post by sachinmonga »

kbos87 wrote: post #147

Just downloaded the app last night. It was the first time I realized how many great Substacks I’m subscribed to, and this is definitely going to be my preferred method of consumption. Looking forward to seeing the future of Substack.

Thanks! I definitely had that realization too when I first downloaded the app, and it's been a not uncommon experience.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#153

Post by shortformblog »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #127
shortformblog wrote: post #102

I’m sure that you probably know my opinion on all this already (given my general loudness about newsletter things in general, as the editor of Tedium), but I’d love to see you offer options to create ecosystem options that don’t rely on having to publish on Substack proper. It seems like creators could use the support of something like Substack without being tied to the publishing platform itself. That seems like a r…

Ghost[0] Seems like it more or less fits what you're describing. I first heard about it on an episode of Indie Hackers.[1] It was an especially interesting and unusual episode. I remember him talking about positioning with open source and also him going on these crazy international sailing trips while running the company. Also I can't comment on a post about substack without mentioning my favorite substack post of al…

I addressed this in the answer to Chris, but I think the secret is really that they’ve invested a lot in resources in a way other platforms have not, and those resources are probably useful to non-Substackers as well.

Ghost is a good platform. I don’t use it these days, but I’m a bit of a maverick—case in point, I used Ghost to build my newsletter before it had any newsletter functionality! (I currently use Craft CMS, which has a dedicated view that can spit out a completed newsletter template, with custom ads, in a matter of seconds.)

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#154

Post by dang »

Mindwipe wrote: post #28
cjbest wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely care a lot about about freedom of the press, and have written a bunch about it at e.g. https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more I think the Substack model gives us a bunch of advantages here: readers are choosing to subscribe to writers they trust, and who they then have a direct relationship with. I don't think that Apple is likely to try to police that too heavily, and if they do the…

Quoted post unavailable.

Please don't do this on HN. Thoughtful critique is welcome, but we're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture, and also the cross-examination/flaming style of forum comments. They just tend to have a dumbing-down effect on threads. We want curious conversation here and I'm sure you can make your substantive points in that way if you want to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#155

Post by sachinmonga »

kndjckt wrote: post #138

love love love substack. I'm fully hooked and spend over 1 hour a day reading on it. The app looks good, I've been waiting for something like this! A few comments; - The font looks quite small (on iPad). Have you considered adding the ability to change font and size? - Now that all my subs are in here, I don't really need to bombard my inbox. Is there a way so that I can mute sending to my email inbox? - I love to re…

Thanks!

- The iPad experience is admittedly not as amazing as it could be, and something I'm excited to improve big time down the road. For now, the app should respect your dynamic type settings (in case you have your font set larger at the iOS level)

- Yep, there's a toggle you can access from your Profile Tab > Notifications

- Right now the offline experience is so-so but not perfectly optimized. If you refresh your Inbox right before a flight your recent posts should be cached nicely and readable while offline.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#156

Post by Avshalom »

cjbest wrote: post #54
klabb3 wrote: post #32

A popular sentiment on HN is "don't make an app when you can just have a web page". Reading articles is an an almost perfect fit for the web. What are your reasons for having an app?

Reading articles may be an almost perfect fit for web, but we see a really clear pattern among the 70% of our users that read in mobile: they discover stuff to read on the web through links that get shared, but once they sign up they overwhelmingly read in their email client. Email is actually pretty great for this, and email is especially powerful for giving writers direct connection to their readers. But there are…

No post body was provided.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#157

Post by tootie »

klabb3 wrote: post #32

A popular sentiment on HN is "don't make an app when you can just have a web page". Reading articles is an an almost perfect fit for the web. What are your reasons for having an app?

"Popular on HN" and "Conducive to a profitable business" are nearly disjoint sets.

One of the main products at my job is a new site that we've spent a lot of time making performant and readable but we're still building an app experience because we want to meet our users (particularly affluent users) where they are.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#158

Post by pedalpete »

onefuncman wrote: post #121
cjbest wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll get you a real answer about how the tech stack is today. But for now I can tell a war story that might be fun. I'm one of the founders, and am in a very much non-technical role now as CEO, I did write a bunch of the very early code (some of which people curse my name for to this day.) When we were starting, I was limited by how many new languages/frameworks I could learn at once. I started writing the backend i…

A few (but not too many) years ago I inherited a custom compilation of python2.x to make unicode strings work properly. You made the right call, lol.

I have memories of the Python compatibility issues causing huge headaches. We're back to using Python due to ML requirements now, but it kept me away for years.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#159

Post by zozbot234 »

wpietri wrote: post #135
cjbest wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2: We do have a strong philosophical stance on this. We think taking a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press is both the right thing to do, and critical to the success of our broader mission. We've written about this a few times, e.g. https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati... and https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more That is incidentally a big part of the answer for…

That philosophical stance is very common at the beginnings of a platform. E.g., Twitter being the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party". Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. But over time, tensions develop between the theory and the practice. So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support? From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that catego…

Why would these actors want to publish on Substack in the first place? They have their own platforms already. Alt-right content is highly "meme" based (e.g. the whole thing with frogs and 'Kekistan', or the Qanon LARPing), it doesn't do well on a platform focused on long-form texts with serious intellectual interest.

Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

#160

Post by meowface »

KerrAvon wrote: post #134
hihihihi1234 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a follow-up question to #3. Like the parent post I commend your stance on free speech, but recognise you host some controversial figures that other platforms have been happy to ban. The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower, and as Substack gets bigger it's naturally going to attract more attention, both from those who call for increased censorship, and from…

> The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower I'm not affiliated with Substack, but I'm having difficulty with your premise here. There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. What opinions is "Big Tech" "censoring" and why should one think there's any validity to your slippery slope a…

They're probably using Big Tech as a stand-in for Big Social Media Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).
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