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Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#151

Post by infogulch »

farmerstan wrote: post #118
lhnz wrote: post #8

Many writers like them because they seem to have made both costly and cheap signals to show that they are on the side of writers: (1) they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform" (2) they let the writer own their audience / mailing list (so they can leave with their audience, if they want to) (3) they advanced money to popular writers These things with the addition of a si…

Everyone who is responding doesn’t understand the core benefit of Substack: the writer owns the relationship between them and their subscribers. Substack has no such ownership. Substack doesn’t take payments from the subscribers and then pay the writer. The subscribers directly pay the writer and the writer is charged a fee by Substack. It is VERY easy for writers to drop off Substack. They own their subscription lis…

THE business plan for every new company created in the last two decades is exploitative by design, and people are fed up with it. The problem is that the relationships between the person consuming, the person producing, and the business is organized wrong. The plan is for the business to insert itself between people and extract a tax on their interaction instead of collecting a fee for providing a service. Technology has accelerated this trend by reducing the cost of this automated relationship management.

This is a gross inversion of normal relationships between people. I hope that Substack's model becomes more popular and people choose to eject exploitative mediators and force them to be third party service providers where they belong.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30420113

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#152

Post by beagle3 »

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"

The only writer I follow on substack, Scott Alexander S. (Previously of SlateStarCodex fame, now AstralCodexTen) went into all the details - what he was offered, and why it was a good offer - it wasn’t a bribe like most celebrity deals are - it was more like a book advance.

He most definitely didn’t pretend to “just go there”, and his post on the subject mentioned a few others with similar deals by name.

Do you have a problem when a publisher pays an advance to (say) Stephen King in order to get him to publish through them?

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#153

Post by temp8964 »

slg wrote: post #149
temp8964 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why those reporting need to be intentionally biased? The bill is clearly about what the training programs can teach, not “discuss”. These two are clearly different. When a training program teaches white employees they are inherently racist, it’s totally different from a random person raises this idea from discussion.

This is a continuation of the same problem I highlighted before because it pretends that self-censorship only happens on the right. I have been through over a dozen diversity training courses in my career. Not a single one has ever said "white employees are inherently racists". This law is written against strawmen examples. Their goal isn't to stop those extreme examples. It is supposed to make companies fearful enou…

If you never saw one then it does not exist. Good point.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#154

Post by [deleted] »

nokcha wrote: post #110
Spinnaker_ wrote: post #31

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,…

>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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#155

Post by ss48 »

I'll give the positive side of it. I'm sure there's enough negatives too. I find it to be more transparent in many ways.

It's clearer which writer is getting paid for what. On many news sites, you don't know if the money is going to the company and which writer is getting compensated. The focus is to pay writers you like to write more, and is not centered on the writing that gets enough payment from advertisers. You also don't get much in terms of ads from the writers too.

You know what your paying for, what you're getting, and from whom. You know that what you are reading will stay available to you because it is in your email, which cannot be paywalled or taken off the internet because something happened to the business model or to the website. You own the right to read the content you paid to get, and it will always be available as long as you have your emails saved and accessible.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#156

Post by slg »

temp8964 wrote: post #153
slg wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a continuation of the same problem I highlighted before because it pretends that self-censorship only happens on the right. I have been through over a dozen diversity training courses in my career. Not a single one has ever said "white employees are inherently racists". This law is written against strawmen examples. Their goal isn't to stop those extreme examples. It is supposed to make companies fearful enou…

If you never saw one then it does not exist. Good point.

Speaking of strawmen... You could have at least tried to address the point I was making.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#157

Post by boplicity »

baggy_trough wrote: post #134
cjbest wrote: post #124

I'm one of the Substack founders. My (obviously biased) view is that we are trying to do something that is genuinely important, and that we're willing to sweat the details in service of the people who use Substack. I'll try to give that quick barbell of lofty vision and practical details. Big picture: we believe that what you read matters, and that therefore great writing (and great intellectual culture in general) i…

Desperately need a bundle type offering. I wouldn't pay $5 x 5 different subscriptions, but I'd do a $10 bundle for 4 newsletters, or the like.

I strongly disagree. Their focus should continue to be 100% on making it possible for their authors to make a living. Anything else is a distraction. Bundling, while a possible option to help this, is probably a distraction at this point, and could also muddy the waters, in terms of the Substack/Author relationship.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#158

Post by bart_spoon »

ohwellhere wrote: post #131
cjbest wrote: post #124

I'm one of the Substack founders. My (obviously biased) view is that we are trying to do something that is genuinely important, and that we're willing to sweat the details in service of the people who use Substack. I'll try to give that quick barbell of lofty vision and practical details. Big picture: we believe that what you read matters, and that therefore great writing (and great intellectual culture in general) i…

A common criticism in this thread -- and elsewhere -- is the accumulation of subscription fees to authors. I can justify $10/month for my favorite writer's weekly work, but not another $90/month for my next 9 favorite writers' biweekly or monthly work. What are your thoughts on handling this aspect of the economic piece of the content puzzle?

The solution may simply be that consumers should get used to consuming less. We all bemoan what has become of the modern internet (tracking/privacy violations, clickbait, the 'attention' economy, a never ending stream of low-effort, low-value content), but one of the single biggest contributors to this state is that it has built up around users getting addicted to consuming content for no monetary cost.

This probably extends outside the digital realm and applies to modern consumerism in general. If paying for the actual cost of consumption goods is unbearable, perhaps it's a sign we should be cutting back on how much of it we are consuming?

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#159

Post by reducesuffering »

_bfhp wrote: post #80
Spinnaker_ wrote: post #31

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,…

I'm about halfway into his book. I'm not someone familiar with the education field so I just nod along during his discussions of the studies, but that introduction chapter was so good . I want to send it to everyone I know.

Make sure to spend a little extra time after reading this review of that book: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...

Also coincidentally on substack...

Re: Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

#160

Post by temp8964 »

slg wrote: post #156
temp8964 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you never saw one then it does not exist. Good point.

Speaking of strawmen... You could have at least tried to address the point I was making.

You don't have a point. You live in an alternative reality which claims things exist in reality do not exist.
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