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Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#31

Post by Spinnaker_ »

Substack was really good at getting writers with dedicated followings on their platform and properly monetizing their skills.

Take a look at someone like Freddie deBoer. He was a very popular blogger, had written for all the prestigious publications, and was about to accept a $15/hr manual labor job before substack offered him a contract. Now he's making 200k+ a year.

Once enough popular writers were on the platform, and with some help from twitter controversies, the network effect took over.

I love it because it's fast and minimalist. No ads, no nonsense, just the text.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#32

Post by the_only_law »

version_five wrote: post #20
the_only_law wrote: post #6

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 hav…

Yeah, despite the semi-joking nature of my post I have found good things in both Medium and Substack.

This may be really bad over analysis combined with misremembering, but both sites felt like they reflected the HN users-base (or vice versa).

I remember circa 2015-2016 Medium posts and HN comments felt in sync in regards to the tone, content etc. I feel the same thing with many Substack blogs seem feeling like an HN comment section turned into an article.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#33

Post by cpr »

Several of the absolute best journalists working today, some of whom were more or less canceled elsewhere (e.g., Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Alex Berenson), are featured there, and are making serious money -- enough to hire whole crews to help in their reporting.

I'm happy to pay $50/year to support these independent voices.

So they are a proven-successful platform, and that attracts other writers.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#34

Post by shuntress »

boplicity wrote: post #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 p…

"Astroturfing" means many fake accounts pretending to be real accounts. Hence the name. Like fake grass.

Celebrity endorsements are not astroturfing.

You could make the argument that there are enough celebrity accounts and that those accounts are run by the substack marketing team that it should be considered astroturf but that seems like a long stretch to me.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#35

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

beaconstudios wrote: post #21
gruez wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

I understand what they meant though: paying celebrities to join while giving people the impression that those celebrities joined by free choice* (ie because the platform was so great). * edit: free choice as in "not swayed by payment"

You have a very different definition of “free choice” than I think is typical.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#36

Post by misiti3780 »

mbesto wrote: post #18
misiti3780 wrote: post #7

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.

i think it is much easier for substack because of this.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#37

Post by JacobThreeThree »

beaconstudios wrote: post #21
gruez wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

I understand what they meant though: paying celebrities to join while giving people the impression that those celebrities joined by free choice* (ie because the platform was so great). * edit: free choice as in "not swayed by payment"

>giving people the impression that those celebrities joined by free choice

Paying writers for their work means they didn't choose to join Substack?

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#38

Post by joshstrange »

the_only_law wrote: post #6

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.

I will never give Medium a single dollar and big part of that is their lying paywall. It always says "Login to view the rest of the article" or something like that. After you login you have a 50-50 chance that it will say something like "you've reached the end of your free article limit" or some variation on that. Sometimes visiting the same link again will show you the content. It makes zero sense and pisses me off every time I run into it.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#39

Post by bko »

I like it because it centers around the writer not the content.

I used Medium before. Medium treats your data as its a generic post about some topic. If I wrote an article on AI, it would recommend other articles about AI from various authors. That's fine for some purposes, but as a writer trying to build an audience, I'd like to think people come to my post because they like something I have to say and would prefer a recommender system to recommend other posts by me.

Medium's monetization model is to get people to pay for Medium articles, not those of the author.

Another gross example of this is that you cannot easily see a publications from a publication. On a site, you see a tiny link called "archive" to see a writer's historical posts. There you can filter on month but can't see a dump of everything the person has written. They don't even offer "load more posts" or a calendar view. It's very hostile to the writer.

I had around 1k followers on Medium but if I posted something and didn't publish it on social media, I would get maybe a few dozen readers. Whereas Substack I consistently get around 20-25% of people that are subscribed open my publication.

Is there something between Medium and Substack? Probably, but I don't really care to look around. Substack offers you a chance to build a reader base, gives you access to emails and lets you easily monetize directly without being part of the global pool of generic low quality articles like Medium does.

I wrote more about it here.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/migrating-from-medium-to...

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#40

Post by carschno »

Here's a more skeptical article about Substack's (future) popularity in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/media/substack-g...

The article also touches upon factors of Substack's success:

> [...] the platform portrayed itself as a haven for independent writers with fewer resources while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men. The hands-off content moderation policy [...]

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