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Substack writers, you need a website

elizabethtai.com

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Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#81

Post by clickety_clack »

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…

The lift to make your own website is so low now, and the benefits of future-proofing are so great that it's just the right decision to make. You don’t even have to drive all your readers there, you’ll just have it available for everyone if the audience ever decides to gradually move on from substack (which seems to happen pretty much every social media platform).

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#82

Post by brunoarueira »

cosmicgadget wrote: post #35
Topology1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the transition from substack to website + newsletter wouldn't be terrible, although I'm sure your traffic would decrease after making the switch.

I miss the days when I'd regularly get forwards from friends about stuff they found on the internet.

One of my first jobs after graduate, I used to share a lot of posts with my coworkers until a certain point where one of them said "I don't know how you read so much content", worthless to say him was a Master's student, so I'm expecting him to be able to consume more content than myself, although different more towards academic stuff.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#83

Post by bryanrasmussen »

carlosjobim wrote: post #47
billyp-rva wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Hackers always use this argument against everything because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.

Thus they argue that you should not trust your things to other people but do it yourself, because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#84

Post by willy_k »

rsingel wrote: post #39
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…

You could do the same thing through Ghost, which has an API, and not be using a service that proudly platforms the Tates and nazis.

I don’t know anything about the specific situation you’re referencing. That being said, getting mad at an organization, one that is built to be a “platform” for people to share their words, for not going out of its way to police which people share which words, seems to me to be unproductive at best, if not actively close minded and tribalistic.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#85

Post by npn »

There is a list of a few websites that I subconsciously think only have garbage articles and never really pay serious attention to them: quora, medium and substack.

Surely dev.to also filled with low level articles, but at least people there spent effort to write articles then gave it for free. But those users of the previous websites mostly write it for money.

Don't get me wrong, quality articles deserve to have money in return, you can't get far without sustainable business. But writing for the sake of writing (and earning money for the quantity not quality) is what is causing those websites to be filled with shallow contents.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#86

Post by sixtyj »

rsingel wrote: post #32
Bratmon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire pitch of Substack is "You can export the email addresses of your current subscribers at any time" So if they stop doing the "email my subscribers whenever I post" step, another service will fill the gap pretty quick.

Substack notes is non exportable; the newsletter now no longer have a link to read it on your site on substack and instead link to the substack app, and subscriptions started in the app pay Substack through Apple and Google and you can't export them. Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise

Thanks for this.

I can hear Substack marketing saying that “We don’t have any intention to put you into a vendor-lock.”

I had a lot of discussions with companies about their marketing.

Why do you upload your events’ photos to FB instead of your site?

Why do you have news on LI feed and don’t make it a post on your site as well?

Do you think they can hear it? :)

Substack is going to become a similar service as FB, LI are… no possibility to export your data easily or not at all.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#87

Post by ValdikSS »

skippyfish wrote: post #73
ValdikSS wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

>No one is writing purely for themselves

Every time I see posts like this one and go into comments, everyone in the comments treat writing as a hobby which they would like to turn into work and earn money from, more or less. And I suppose the words "writing" and "blogging" associate with the community around themselves in their minds, not with the text information per se.

I'm writing technical articles (blog posts) my whole life most of the time as a result of me learning something new, to structure the information on some topic for myself and others.

If it's a research, I make a post with all the information and final result of it in public, primarily for myself and sometimes for others, because 95% of the time it's not secret and there's no point to store it privately.

If it's a helpful information (software: unofficial bugfix, hacky workaround, poorly documented feature somewhere, etc), I want it to be searchable/indexed, only that.

I don't care about attribution, about who reads my writing (be it me, my friends, people I don't know, or AI), I have no incentive to push (as in post here or on social networks) or promote these articles in any way. I don't want people to get back to my site, to subscribe to it, or to build a community around it.

If the user types "How do I solve issue X" and by a mere coincidence I solved and documented it, I don't care if the user gets the solution from my website, from the scrape & repost websites, or from AI agent which scraped the site. If this helps the user to fix the issue or to learn something new, every way is fine for me!

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#88

Post by wizzwizz4 »

zahlman wrote: post #62
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251221230655/https://www.userm... > Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.” […] The newsletter's logo is a swastika and it has pushed Holocaust denialism along with news and opinion content for the 'White Nationalist Community.' […] Substack…

Your source is Taylor Lorenz, on her own Substack (with a custom domain). She apparently wasn't bothered enough to disassociate with the service. This is someone who makes claims like "Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric." (Something which Wikipedia editors would be tripping over each other to evidence if it were true, but their article say…

> Your source is Taylor Lorenz,

One of the first newsy types to report this particular issue, but certainly not the only one. See https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p..., which quotes a press release from Substack. Arguably, my source is therefore Substack themselves, via Ars Technica.

> Something which Wikipedia editors would be tripping over each other to evidence if it were true, but their article says nothing about it.

Actually, this information is on Wikipedia. There's one NYT link on the Andreessen Horowitz article, and several paragraphs on Marc Andreessen's. I don't know enough about US politics to know whether all this adds up to "extreme far right rhetoric" (and I'd rather not debate that here), but there's definitely extreme, and right-wing, political advocacy described in Marc Andreessen's article. I have not confirmed whether the claims in the Wikipedia article are correct; if you dispute them, then please let me know as a courtesy (I like having accurate knowledge), then take it up with the Wikipedia editors.

> There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content,

But they do continue to host it. This has been a problem for years (see e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e..., https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...). Do you need an article from last month? Or do I need to link you to a Nazi blog directly? They are not very hard to find: just type "site:substack.com" followed by some keywords. It took me 20 seconds to find one called "White Free Press", with such wonderful articles as "David Lane and the Foundations of His Racial Ideology", "The Contemporary Conceptual Framework of the White Ethnostate", and "The Immutable Animosity: blacts [sic] hate White People, and Nothing Can Change It".

> It is a known tactic of agitators […]

Quoting the Ars Technica article:

> Of those accounts created in February, only the Substack account is still online, which Fisher-Birch suggested likely sends a message to Nazi groups that their Substack content is “less likely to be removed than other platforms.” At least one Terrorgram-adjacent white supremacist account that Fisher-Birch found in March 2024 confirmed that Substack was viewed as a back-up to Telegram because it was that much more reliable to post content there.

> “Groups that want to recruit members or build a neo-fascist counter-culture see Substack as a way to get their message out,” Fisher-Birch told Ars.

I don't think "this is all some kind of contrived false flag operation" is a particularly likely explanation.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#89

Post by asimpletune »

For anyone who’s interested in this stuff: I made a FOSS commenting system for websites that accepts comments via email. https://r3ply.com

You combine your website/blog with that and you have a pretty nice setup that you own. You can even use RSS to allow people to subscribe to replies to comments, threads, a page, etc…

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#90

Post by dmitrygr »

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. It's as simple as that.

I am not convinced. My traffic counter spins quite rapidly, and I only publish on http://dmitry.gr

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