I have a small email list that I would send out emails a few times per year. It used to be on Mailchip but they switched focus to e-commerce so much that it was painful (multi-step) process to actually send an email. I moved my list to Substack and it's fairly easy (2 clicks) to send a message.
Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?
101–110 of 178 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?
#102I'm as surprised as you: https://ja3k.com/blog/surp.html
Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?
#103Because just like clubhouse, they have fancy investors who gave them a ton of money to bribe celebrity writers to be on the platform. Same thing is also happening with "callin" podcasting app.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?
#104It'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.
Yeah going through their "Content Guidelines" there's a lot of stuff that's clearly up to the moderators to decide according to their ideology. For an easy example:
>We don’t allow content that promotes harmful or illegal activities, including material that advocates, threatens, or shows you causing harm to yourself, other people, or animals.
I have seen plenty of substacks talking about the war in Ukraine (for example [0]). This is _clearly_ advocating harm to other people -- you're talking about soldiers and weapons in war after all. Is this breaking the guidelines? Taken literally yes, but of course not in practice.
Eventually, somebody's idea of what is acceptable will clash with the moderation, and we will see the same cries of censorship and deplatforming we see everywhere else.
[0] https://patrickfox.substack.com/p/lets-fck-with-vlad-part3
Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?
#105Because the content marketers have not discovered it yet. Kinda like Medium around 2016ish. Let’s see how long this one lasts.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform" "Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days. It's close to being a dog whistle for the alt-right. I'm surprised this is a stance that would attract more "excellent writers".
> "Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days. I'd disagree. It's unpopular with left-leaning mainstream audiences , but among intellectuals who write for a living, I imagine that extra assurances of not getting kicked off the platform are rather attractive.
>It's unpopular with left-leaning mainstream audiences
It is truly wild how HN often frames censorship as something coming purely from the left while ignoring the laws coming out of conservative state legislatures across the country. There is a wide spectrum of people both pushing for censorship and pushing against it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?
#107As someone who switched my newsletter to substack from mailchimp (plug: lastweekin.ai) last year, here is my take:
* It's free. Mailchimp gets surprisingly expensive pretty quick as your audience grows, with no path for revenue.
* It's easy to start. Very easy to move over to it from mailchimp and set it all up. Even after two years of additional features, it's quite streamlined.
* It's simple. The feature set is pretty minimalist in a good way, puts composing and putting out content first in a way that makes it pretty frictionless to use.
* It's monetizable. Kinda obvious, but I was surprised by how many people are willing to be paying subscribers tbh.
I do have some gripes: like Medium it provides very few options for customization, and it is very much designed with the assumption the newsletter is stand-alone (meaning no associated website for which the newsletter serves to provides updates). Still, on the whole it's quite nice.
From a reader perspective, I would assume it's popular because a lot of good writers/newsletters have been started with it lately due to the above reasons.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?
#108There 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…
RSS does work, fwiw (you may know this but for others too ...): just add "/feed" to the end of the root URL, for example: https://bariweiss.substack.com/feed
Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?
#109Good content.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?
#110Substack 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,…
>I love it because it's fast and minimalist.
Minor quibble about this: On large pages, it can be quite slow. E.g., on https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t... , it takes a few seconds after initial loading for it be responsive to pressing the PgDown key, at least on my machine.