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Substack writers, you need a website

elizabethtai.com

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Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#71

Post by sfRattan »

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…

> 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.

The real choke point is one step up the chain with payment processors, and since 9/11 and stricter KYC with banks, there's not a reliable, widely accepted path around those regulations. Cryptocurrency remains fringe. Running a self-hosted ghost or WordPress powered blog or newsletter will encounter the same bottleneck wherever money changes hands among average-Joes online.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#72

Post by doublepg23 »

shimman wrote: post #68
doublepg23 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which podcast is this? It's not on my radar, def interested.

https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com

I've been listening to the network for decades now and directly credit my IT career to the people who've been platformed on the various shows over the years. Lots of great content.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#73

Post by skippyfish »

ValdikSS wrote: post #65
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…

If you write news, posts that needs discussion, information that relatively quickly becomes obsolete, then probably yes, you won't want a website because few people will search for it deliberately. But if you're writing for yourself , articles with multimedia, or want to use advanced features, no platform provides anything close to what you can do on your website. Take a look at https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ for exa…

No one is writing purely for themselves. It's something we like to say, and there's some value in writing down your thoughts - but deep down inside, every blogger is dreaming of having a positive impact on other people's lives. That requires reaching these people in the first place.

I promise you that Bartosz would be bummed out if he had an audience of one. And while relying on HN to accidentally discover you can work, it's not a sustainable model for anything.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#74

Post by thataccount »

sfRattan wrote: post #71
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…

> 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. The real choke point is one step up the chain with payment processors, and since 9/11 and stricter KYC with banks, there's not a reliable, widely accepted path around those regulations. Cryptocurrency remains fringe. Running a self-hosted ghost or WordPress powered blog or newsl…

Most internet providers I've seen around lately have clauses against hosting your own website on residential providers. That provides two choke points. I used to be a Monero fan before its Blockchain became the size of Cyberpunk 2077.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#75

Post by benoliver999 »

zahlman wrote: post #43
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.

My RSS reader accepts email newsletters so I subscribe using that and funnel them all into feedbin

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#76

Post by wofo »

zahlman wrote: post #43
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.

My blog used to be RSS only, because I thought email subscriptions were a plot of "content creators" and not something readers actually wanted... until one of my readers told me he really recommended adding email as an option. I did, and a surprising number of people subscribed since then.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#77

Post by true_religion »

ImJamal wrote: post #49
cosmicgadget wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be nice if services like Substack supported exportability, so when a writer eventually becomes successful enough to migrate away, or the platform itself is no longer a good fit, then there aren't any losses.

Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#78

Post by drdexebtjl »

pitchlatte wrote: post #53
firasd wrote: post #34

I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but like ‘oh great now I gotta deal with this’. So that’s why Medium in the past and now Substack etc end up as fallbacks

given that wordpress.com is just managed hosting i wonder if other providers can bring that cost down. installing it yourself is trivial though because of Softaculous, and web hosting is much cheaper.

Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess.

But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it.

Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0.

If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#79

Post by throw0101d »

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…

> 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.

I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. Substack allows for exporting posts (which would be good to do regularly just for backups in case of (account) compromise):

* https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037466012-...

so if you ever feel like the company is acting questionably, you can take that file and bring it in elsewhere, e.g.

* https://wordpress.com/support/import-from-substack/

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#80

Post by tombert »

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…

Agreed.

I have a blog, I don't really promote it, and no one reads it.

Now, there is an argument that there's nothing on my blog worth reading, and yeah there might be truth to that, but regardless my traffic is on the order like 100 unique views per month, and I don't know what percentage of that is just scraping bots.

I'm fine with this, I had no delusions of becoming a famous writer or making any money from it or anything, my blog is basically just a dumping ground for thoughts that I think are interesting, but if I actually did care about people visiting my blog I would probably use Substack or something similar.

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