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Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#61

Post by beaconstudios »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #35
beaconstudios wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean free choice as in they decided unprompted. It's still a free choice in terms of free will either way - I'm not sure what the better term would be. Unprompted I guess.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#64

Post by alexashka »

dragonwriter wrote: post #53
alexashka wrote: post #50

Because it makes it easy to do journalism and get paid to do journalism. The get paid part is important. You like one writer on substack, you give em 5 bucks a month. You like someone else, it's exactly the same process to give 5 bucks . It's the same as Twitch (for gamers) - where people give 5$/month to people who just stream themselves playing computer games. It's because it's a single click and it's the same clic…

> Because it makes it easy to do journalism and get paid to do journalism. It makes it easy to write and get paid for writing; the incentives are very much against doing journalism , and even the former journalists on substack that I’ve seen mostly aren't doing journalism, and some are quite open that escaping journalistic standards and norms and was a big part of their motivation.

Good point - there's nothing in Substack that's specific to journalism - it is a platform for presenting text and basic media with a date attached, really.

The most prominent figures on there are journalists or ex-journalists however.

It is a bit like Twitch - it doesn't have to be for gamers, but since 99% of the streamers and 99% of the watchers are interested in games when they go there, it is what it is.

As for doing journalism - there is no incentive to do good work in just about every field. Sad face shrug.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#65

Post by mschuster91 »

blantonl wrote: post #45
misiti3780 wrote: post #7

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

The second Nazi's, militant cop-killer proponents, and child porn enthusiasts start publishing on Substack, we'll see how "pro free speech" they are.

CSAM isn't covered by "free speech" in any major developed country, and there are international treaties to combat its spread [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_child_pornography

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#66

Post by Nav_Panel »

mrfusion wrote: post #15

I love sun stack but I really think they need a way to pool subscriptions or lower the cost. I’m not going to spend $100/month to follow my ten favorite bloggers.

Most writers have free tiers? You can tell which posts you're missing by any given writer when you're on their free tier because it'll show the post as locked. In most cases, it's not stuff I'm interested in. But maybe I'd pay for The Diff someday...

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#67

Post by xhkkffbf »

honkdaddy wrote: post #51
carschno wrote: post #40

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 [...]

I figured that the NYT would go for the identity politics angle when building a takedown for one of their budding competitors. What I found most amusing about that article was the lack of mention of Bari Weiss, the extremely popular Jewish journalist who wrote for the NYT for years before joining Substack and quickly becoming one of their most popular paid newsletters. It seems like a pretty relevant detail in the Su…

The article is pretty embarrassing for the NYT and also a good example of why people are abandoning the old media. The top talks and talks about it being dominated by white men.

Then further down the article, they list the top sellers: "The most successful is the history professor Heather Cox Richardson, who has more than a million paid and unpaid subscribers. Other notable writers include the knighted novelist Salman Rushdie, the punk poet laureate Patti Smith and the Eisner-winning comic book writer James Tynion IV."

How many of this list is white and male?

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#68

Post by trynewideas »

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #37
beaconstudios wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They didn't necessarily choose it for the merits of the service. There's no all-things-equal decision on features, model, or viability that the rest of us make when one throws significant money at you and the others don't. It's a free choice, yes, but it's one biased by an external factor (money) rather than an intrinsic one (good tools, support, long-term viability).

But then people who don't know or understand this yet might subscribe to one of these paid contributors and think, gee, Substack must be a great platform because Famous McBrain writes on it, as opposed to the subtly more accurate point that Substack's _money_ must be great because Famous McBrain took it.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#69

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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.

Medium used to be popular for tech writers because it had nice, minimalist visuals, a ready made audience, and the domain gave posts a lot of credibility. But nothing is free, so they (from my perspective) pivoted to a paywalled publisher. I don't know if they pay fair rates to the authors from those that do pay for a subscription.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#70

Post by dasil003 »

naoqj wrote: post #41
mbesto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twitter wasn't like that. In the beginning you only received content you subscribed to. But they decided to change that.

Wait, what? Twitter is still primarily (other than ads) content from people you follow, the main change is screwing around with non-chronological order. Unless you are talking about the Trending sidebar or something?
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