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I'm surprised that substack shows up so often on HN. It doesn't support syntax highlighting, tables, Latex, and has no widgets for data or interactive visualizations. Perfect for lots of audiences who want long-form writing, but HN?
I'm surprised that substack shows up so often on HN. It doesn't support syntax highlighting, tables, Latex, and has no widgets for data or interactive visualizations. Perfect for lots of audiences who want long-form writing, but HN?
It’s a YC company. I don’t see much special for it, let’s see how long it lasts. At least Medium did some very unique things with their text editor (I challenge anyone to find a more enjoyable _writing_ experience than Medium in the world of online editors, barring Google Docs)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a YC company. I don’t see much special for it, let’s see how long it lasts. At least Medium did some very unique things with their text editor (I challenge anyone to find a more enjoyable _writing_ experience than Medium in the world of online editors, barring Google Docs)
have you tried Quip ( https://quip.com )
I'm surprised that substack shows up so often on HN. It doesn't support syntax highlighting, tables, Latex, and has no widgets for data or interactive visualizations. Perfect for lots of audiences who want long-form writing, but HN?
It’s a YC company. I don’t see much special for it, let’s see how long it lasts. At least Medium did some very unique things with their text editor (I challenge anyone to find a more enjoyable _writing_ experience than Medium in the world of online editors, barring Google Docs)
And even then, I’d chose wordpress over medium any day because of how restrictive and gated medium is. Their rss feeds are also so hidden it’s annoying.
(Disclaimer: I both self-published books and also write a paid newsletter on Substack) The author of this article makes the point that Substack pays ~90% in revenue, versus traditional publishers which do ~10%. While this is true, I do think the author seems to deliberately avoid mentioning the self-publishing platforms like Gumroad, Podia etc which allow authors to keep 95-96.5% of revenue when publishing books, and…
There is no one on Gumroad that wants to read books. Substack is more than a e-commerce stripe checkout flow. Author can keep 100% of their earnings (except CC processing fees) if they use a static webpage and a Paypal button; this is missing the point entirely.
It's like back in the day, when a bunch of Victorian (?) novels were published by chapter in newspapers.
Mangas are still published like this (in jump) I believe?
I'm surprised that substack shows up so often on HN. It doesn't support syntax highlighting, tables, Latex, and has no widgets for data or interactive visualizations. Perfect for lots of audiences who want long-form writing, but HN?
I've been building Smort to be the best place to read online. Just add smort.io/ before any URL to read the article in Smort. No login needed!
Demo: https://smort.io/demo/home
You can annotate, edit with markdown, save articles permanently and also share the annotated articles with other people. We also have inbuilt arXiv support so that you can read arXiv papers without wrangling PDFs. Latex equations are rendered quite well!
[1] https://smort.io
I'm surprised that substack shows up so often on HN. It doesn't support syntax highlighting, tables, Latex, and has no widgets for data or interactive visualizations. Perfect for lots of audiences who want long-form writing, but HN?
I think the cause will be a combination of being a YC company along with community that has a general skepticism of legacy media outlets and an enthusiasm for alternatives. Plus the nature of the platform as a “no curation” direct channel from writer to reader lends itself to a particular kind of writer that’s attractive to that same community.
Personally I’m not really on board and a “substack.com” domain is now a negative quality signal for me in the same way as “medium.com” has become, but I can totally see why it’s a hot topic for some.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no one on Gumroad that wants to read books. Substack is more than a e-commerce stripe checkout flow. Author can keep 100% of their earnings (except CC processing fees) if they use a static webpage and a Paypal button; this is missing the point entirely.
You’re saying gumroad doesn’t have the “discoverability” or “reachability”? I’m interested because I wanted to publish my next book through that platform.
You should plan to have a book web site, at least. And probably submit it on HN.