Substack writers, you need a website • Hacker News Board

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#41

Post by 01284a7e » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

thataccount wrote: post #31

As a writer who has been on the web for a long time, I no longer write much for the sake of the web. My personal website I took down this year because I didn't like the idea of AI snarfing up everything I wrote. I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. While I don't write only for money, I certainly write with the idea o…

Same - I wrote on the web for 25 years (2000 to 2025). I can attribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of income to it. I no longer have any websites, as nothing came out of it for a couple years. ~90% of all my traffic ended up bots.

And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#42

Post by doublepg23 » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

t-writescode wrote: post #19

doublepg23 wrote: post #13

I've always understood platforms like Substack or Patreon to really be a solution to the payment processing problem first and foremost.

That’s exactly right. Finding ways to get paid for your work, and all the very complicated way taxes interact with it all, unless you’re going all-in on ads, is a messy problem that people will happily centralize for. And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and S…

I follow a very prolific open-source/FOSS podcasting network.

All of their infrastructure from the very bottom to the very top is FOSS - except their membership program. It links to a third-party which processes payments compliantly.

They've attempted a pivot to funding the network via BTC/Lightning but clearly that's polarizing to a lot of people even though it better aligns with their philosophy.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#43

Post by zahlman » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

skippyfish wrote: post #6

Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers. RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a…

What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?

What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#44

Post by 8organicbits » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

The linked article "What I learned from one year of Substack" [1] perfectly sums up my experience. I can't read the article because I only see a coercive demand to subscribe first. Perhaps that's the joke.

[1] https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-...

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#45

Post by zahlman » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

dpkirchner wrote: post #24

rusk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actively skip stuff that’s on substack just like I do medium and blogger. Maybe there’s good stuff on there but it’s usually a by-word for slop. I figure if anyone has anything that interesting to say they’d make the effort and put it up on something more serious looking.

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Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#46

Post by efilife » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

skippyfish wrote: post #6

Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers. RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a…

It's addressed in the article

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#47

Post by carlosjobim » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

billyp-rva wrote: post #15

skippyfish wrote: post #6

Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers. RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a…

> Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read. How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future? That's the path basically every other platform has gone down.

> How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future?

You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#48

Post by cosmicgadget » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #30

I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter. I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth. Here's the tool I use for the copy-pasting: https…

It's sort of disgusting that inbox clutter from a publishing service is the dominant delivery paradigm as opposed to browsers natively checking bookmarked RSS feeds.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#49

Post by ImJamal » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

cosmicgadget wrote: post #18

skippyfish wrote: post #6

Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers. RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a…

I mean, can't you accomplish the same thing with "enter your email/social handle to be notified when I post something"?

Most writers just want to write and don't want to start maintaining servers and databases to handle the collection and storing of emails. This is why they outsource that functionality to a service like Substack.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#50

Post by f311a » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

skippyfish wrote: post #6

Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers. RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a…

> no one will visit your website.

Yep, let's suppose an average HN user reads 30-100 articles a month on independent websites (personal domains) posted on HN. Out of 100, he probably subscribes to 0-2 at best (via RSS/e-mail). Now, imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience. There is too much friction for a user to subscribe.

Substack is similar to a social platform. People open it to read new articles in a similar way to HN, and they can subscribe to anyone by pressing a single button. There is a recommendation feed as well.

Since Google search for tech content is dead, getting views on independent blogs is extremely hard.