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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

#311

Post by bishplsok »

throwaway_4ever wrote: post #286
awb wrote: post #79

My personal experience with consuming content on Substack is that it’s been mostly fringe opinion content with a biased agenda. For someone like me that feels wary every time I see a Substack URL, are there some quality independent journalists covering current events that don’t participate in conspiracy theories and partisan echo chambers that I can discover?

astralcodexten.substack.com isn’t a journalist (he’s a psychiatrist) but covers current events quite well, probably has as little bias as you can as a person, and is popular on HN.

[dead]

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

#312

Post by zapataband1 »

briandear wrote: post #268
wpietri wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Yeah a worker led economic theory vs a racist ideology. Your argument boils down to this: if any country based on a particular ideology did many horrible things, then that ideology should be rejected.

please go ahead and defend your capitalistic gov that exterminated people in vietnam, hired nazis, bombed black neighborhoods, destabilized and created brutal dictatorships in latin america, bombs kids in yemen, enables apartheid..and once you're done digesting that think about the. slave. trade.

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

#313

Post by benoliver999 »

wpietri wrote: post #123
kradeelav wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm obviously not who you're replying to, but I exclusively read substack articles through RSS readers like inoreader - typically every article (both paid and unpaid) will show up in the feed; the paid articles are just paywalled after the title/image/short paragraph preview. Hope that helps.

Good to know, thanks! In that case, my question for the Substack folks is: For Substack authors that I subscribe to, will you be making a full-content feed available? I'm quite happy with my current feed reader, and would just like to get my substack subscriptions in there like my other full-content subscriptions.

It would be ideal to have a "private" RSS feed for paid sub, I agree.

For now I use feedbin, which lets you subscribe to newsletters with a custom feedbin email. Other readers also do this.

The downside is that your substack login address has to be a feedbin address.

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

#315

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway_4ever wrote: post #286
awb wrote: post #79

My personal experience with consuming content on Substack is that it’s been mostly fringe opinion content with a biased agenda. For someone like me that feels wary every time I see a Substack URL, are there some quality independent journalists covering current events that don’t participate in conspiracy theories and partisan echo chambers that I can discover?

astralcodexten.substack.com isn’t a journalist (he’s a psychiatrist) but covers current events quite well, probably has as little bias as you can as a person, and is popular on HN.

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by bambax »

native_samples wrote: post #19

Firstly - love love love Substack. It's so simple but it's so rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few questions (mostly not about the app though, I'll have to wait for Android support to try that). 1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. T…

Well, the problem with your second point ("free speech") is that it tends to attract and retain a specific kind of writers: those who aren't accepted anywhere else.

Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term.

And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that typically bundles many different voices) also attracts readers that are ideological/obsessive.

That's a feedback loop that could end not well.

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

#317

Post by klabb3 »

moviewise wrote: post #262
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…

> But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot? As a subscriber to many Substack newsletters with different publishing schedules, I've found it to be a bit tedious and distracting to have my email inbox be inundated with new posts. I'd rather go to a reader app that has all the newsletters I've subscribed to in one place for when I have the time and the interest to spend a couple of hours reading. I'd l…

So you want an aggregate newsletter with the top posts of the last X days in your email and then a link to substack? What part of that experience isn't possible on the web?

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

#318

Post by native_samples »

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.

But they define dangerous content as anything right leaning, and lack of moderation as lack of deletion of said content.

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

#319

Post by native_samples »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #243
cjbest wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By "read in their email client" (presumably on mobile) I will assume that people view but do not read. Attention spans on mobile are atrocious (notably, the fulcrum is screen size having a neurological impact on ability to pay attention - this is a biological fact) – very little real reading takes place. I can imagine Substack is more of an "aspires to read X" platform than a place for actually reading X. This argume…

If it was aspirational reading people wouldn't pay so much for it.

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

#320

Post by hihihihi1234 »

briandear wrote: post #280
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…

[flagged]

This isn't the right thread to have this argument and I imagine dang will remove your post, but I just want to note: Trump and his supporters aren't merely alleging that there were some irregularities in the election (which may be true), or that the media was overwhelmingly biased towards Biden (which is definitely true.) They allege that there was enormous, widespread fraud that stole millions of votes and handed the election to Biden despite Trump being the rightful winner - and also that the evidence for this fraud is mounting and damning and there's a huge conspiracy by the media, big tech, etc to cover it up. That's a much stronger claim than anything you say and I'm yet to see good evidence for it.

I'm not sure why you're talking about COVID, Russia, oil prices etc because none of that was mentioned; I actually agree with most of what you wrote in your latter paragraphs. But this isn't the place to have this kind of flamewar.

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