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Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

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11–20 of 178 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#11
1. They've astroturfed a lot. (By paying famous people to use their service.) This has given them a lot of credibility.

2. They basically solve the business model issue for writers, so you really can focus on the writing. At least, more so than the alternatives.

3. Their design is actually pretty nice, and focused on just two things: list building and content.

4. The defaults make sense, and solve real problems for people who want to make money with their writing.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#12
someone posted a twit where they explained how they get a lot more subscribers/followers in their newsletter with substack than wordpress. I guess substack is a lot more aggressive at this kind of marketing. So a lot of writers will prefer to post in it, especially since it looks clean until now.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#13
Simply because censorship on other platforms of the FAANG is so extreme and anti-American that balanced and rational conversations are NOT POSSIBLE. So substitutes are found and substack is one of the major substitutes. Alt-media in general is the solution to censorship.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#14

1. They've astroturfed a lot. (By paying famous people to use their service.) This has given them a lot of credibility. 2. They basically solve the business model issue for writers, so you really can focus on the writing. At least, more so than the alternatives. 3. Their design is actually pretty nice, and focused on just two things: list building and content. 4. The defaults make sense, and solve real problems for p…

> 1. They've astroturfed a lot. (By paying famous people to use their service.) This has given them a lot of credibility.

Paying for what is essentially celebrity endorsements seems like the exact opposite of "astorturfed".

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#17
There are two questions here, really. The first is why does Substack appeal to readers? To me, it doesn't. What appeals to me are the writers. If I care to read what they write, I'd read it on any platform. They happen to be on Substack, so I read them on Substack. The other question is why does it appeal to writers, in particular the more popular high-quality, high-prestige writers that are attracting readers?

I don't think that's a question to be asked of Hacker News readers in general, as presumably most of us aren't Substack writers, just readers.

To be honest, I don't like Substack as an application. Their commenting defaults are terrible. I'm not a fan of the push model of newsletters in general and prefer the pull model of going to the site whenever you feel like being updated on your own schedule. But I like the writers, so I go there anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#18

It's pro free speech, which is the opposite of almost every other platform in 2022.

So this is an interesting distinction. Isn't "free speech" much easier to support if your platform is zero/minimal discovery to it? I.e. if you actively are searching for and subscribe to it, you're actively signaling your choice. Whereas, YT, Twitter, etc. content gets throw at you whether you like it or not.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#20

Substack feels like Medium except instead of blogspam from overexcited junior React developers, you get blogspam from wannabe pseudo-philosophers. As other have mentioned the lack of Paywall is nice tho. Medium had one of the most frustrating iirc.

This is funny and somewhat accurate, certainly for 95% of what's on the sites. For me anyway, medium articles only usually come up when I'm trying to learn about, say, some aspect of data science (and usually read like something someone wrote it so they could put it on their resume). Substack seems to be much more about the authors, and there are a few popular ones that have gone "independent" and write there and have good followings. That, I think, is where substack can be good, if you like editorials from particular people, it's easy to follow them, and they have enough of such people. I wish there was some way to aggregate subscriptions to get a discount though, I feel like I would end up paying them more if I could get an "unlimited" version, though maybe the quality would go down because top folks would get paid less.
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