Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 451 posts

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

#251

Post by kodah »

Mavvie wrote: post #202
nelsondev wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon AWS also deplatformed right leaning services.

Yes, but not because they were right leaning. According to them, it was due to the lack of moderation and dangerous content being hosted.

I don't mind Parler being deplatformed as long as similar standards are held for others. Given that Facebook was also a major contributor to the organizing of January 6th I think it makes sense people were asking for their deplatforming as well. That never happened though, and goes unanswered w.r.t. the logic that you've shared.

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

#252

Post by boplicity »

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: post #248
boplicity wrote: post #246

I run an email newsletter with 150,000 email subscribers, and monetize it by selling educational courses, as well as some ad revenue. Any considerations, in terms of deciding whether or not to use Substack for my business?

any advice for someone looking to do the same? greatly appreciated.

A consistent source of website visitors is the best learning tool you can have.

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

#253

Post by sachinmonga »

alisonatwork wrote: post #198

Are there any plans to allow readers/subscribers to decouple identities between different newsletters? Or, asked a different way, will the app allow you to "subscribe" to newsletters anonymously? I find myself very reluctant to sign up for new newsletters on Substack now because my identity is shared across all newsletters, so I feel I can no longer keep my interests separated. To be clear: after commenting on one ne…

> after commenting on one newsletter, it becomes impossible to comment on any other newsletter without compromising my privacy.

We tried to build reader profiles in a way that can handle this nicely - you can choose on a per-subscription basis which publications to display on your profile and which you'd like to keep hidden. This is almost like an anonymous subscription although it doesn't quite support a fully anonymous commenting use case, since theoretically someone could recognize you from different comment sections.

One thing I could see us trying in the future is giving writers more control over who can comment and how, on their particular publications. Already, writers can choose whether to allow comments from all subscribers, only paid subscribers, or to turn off comments entirely. Allowing writers to choose to support anonymous commenting doesn't seem out of the question.

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

#254

Post by krapp »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #247
krapp wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump was always going to be the leading candidate. He could have won a second term if not for his fumbling over COVID and his meltdown over secret commies stealing his votes. No one was ever going to vote for Biden twice, the left only hates him less than they hate Trump and half the country never stopped drinking the Trump Kool-Aid. You can't beat a man who has a cult and started a revolution with... whatever the h…

Are you saying Trump could have won in 2020? I think the pandemic killed his presidency... it's like 1932 when Herbert Hoover got voted out because of the Great Depression, regardless of whose fault it was. It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts. It seems to me the Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of…

Yes, I said that if not for those events I think Trump could have won. Better leadership with COVID along with his (somewhat fictitious but still compelling) narrative of turning around the economy would probably have put him over Biden. Even though Biden won by a sizeable margin of popular votes - and as a candidate, he received more votes than any other candidate in history - he won with fewer electoral votes (the only votes that actually matter) than the 78,000 votes in three swing states which got Trump over in 2016.

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

#256

Post by sachinmonga »

tsycho wrote: post #233

First of all, I have been reading a lot of publications on Substack, thank you. I have been using your app for a few days, and have a few feature requests: 1. Can you please support signing in to multiple accounts? Ideally, you would merge the subscriptions together into one view, but even if not, easy account switching is good enough. 2. Can you gray out the read posts? The "inbox" doesn't distinguish between read a…

1. Account switching and/or being able to merge accounts is a totally reasonable idea. Right now you can theoretically sign out / sign in with a different email address but I know that's a pain

2. Good feedback re: the orange dot! I'll pass that along to our Designer.

3. This is also a good idea, but unfortunately a little less straightforward to get right 100% of the time as email clients increasingly start to get in the way of tracking pixels visibility.

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

#257

Post by sachinmonga »

gnicholas wrote: post #215

It looks like the app supports Apple's Dynamic Type, which adjusts the text size based on the users' iOS-level setting. That's good for accessibility and usability more generally. Do you consider letting users customize other readability-related features, such as column width, line spacing, etc.? Like text size, this is good for both usability and accessibility. Glad to see Dynamic Type supported in your v1.0!

Yes! Very excited to build more readability features and customization.

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

#258

Post by HWR_14 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #224
KerrAvon wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Feels weird to have to say this, but Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.

> Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.

He may be the leading candidate to be the republican nominee, but that's not the same as the leading candidate likely to win.

Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.

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

#259

Post by shroompasta »

demosthenes714 wrote: post #67
pedalpete wrote: post #6

Maybe harkening back to the old-school days of HN, but I'd be keen to hear about the tech stack you decided to use in building the app, what your considerations are for multi-platform, and advice for start-ups getting ready to launch their own apps.

John here, one of the app engineers at Substack. Our team has lots of experience with Swift and values the level of polish you can achieve natively, so went with that. We try to avoid third-party dependencies so native implementation and customization of UIKit, URLSession, and CoreData are important to us. Cross platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, etc are super interesting but in our experience c…

I'm curious as I think I'll be making this decision in the near future.

> it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs.

Besides the custom UI stuff, as I think React Native has some decent animation support nowadays, what specific native APIs were needed in Substack's case that made React Native an ineligible choice?

As text being the main content for Substack, Its hard for me to imagine why React Native wouldn't be sufficient for a relatively simple app.

Discord, undoubtedly, has more complex UI needs compared to Substack, however it's humming along just fine with React Native.

What makes React Native capable for Discord, but incapable for your needs?

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

#260

Post by HWR_14 »

krapp wrote: post #254
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying Trump could have won in 2020? I think the pandemic killed his presidency... it's like 1932 when Herbert Hoover got voted out because of the Great Depression, regardless of whose fault it was. It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts. It seems to me the Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of…

Yes, I said that if not for those events I think Trump could have won. Better leadership with COVID along with his (somewhat fictitious but still compelling) narrative of turning around the economy would probably have put him over Biden. Even though Biden won by a sizeable margin of popular votes - and as a candidate, he received more votes than any other candidate in history - he won with fewer electoral votes (the…

> [Biden] won with fewer electoral votes [than] Trump over in 2016.

That's both not true and trivially checkable.

Post reply on HN