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Substack writers, you need a website

elizabethtai.com

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Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#171

Post by monknomo »

willy_k wrote: post #84
rsingel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about for going out of their way to find and pay despicable people for their words?

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#172

Post by Stratoscope »

throw0101d wrote: post #156
Stratoscope wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. I thought about this question when I recently started writing a few articles on Substack. I chose not to use my own domain, even though I have a few. Why? I want my writing to outlive me. When I am no longer able to pay for domain renewals, my own domains will expire. Hopefully {my-hn-username}.substack.com will still be around.…

> Why? I want my writing to outlive me. Donate to archive.org.

Excellent point! In fact I do have an automatic monthly donation to The Internet Archive.

Of course the URLs all change in archived pages, but at least the content is there for anyone motivated enough to find it.

A funny coincidence... I registered geary.com (my last name) in 1994, and just used it for email. A few years later I got a letter from a group of civic boosters in Geary, Oklahoma. They even enclosed a Geary Water Tower T-shirt which I still have. They saw that I didn't have a website up on this domain and asked me if they could have it.

I explained that this would be impractical since it was also my email address.

So they registered gearyok.com instead and put up a website built around Java applets. Oops.

But it got me thinking. I put up a static page (frequently edited by me) that I called Geary Central: A Guide to Gearys on the Net. This page is still up:

https://www.geary.com/oldsite.html

Naturally I gave Geary, Oklahoma top billing for inspiring this.

A few years after that I changed geary.com to a MoinMoin wiki devoted to the same topic, and moved the old static page to its current location.

Just a few days ago, someone emailed me about how they had stumbled onto my oldsite.html page and enjoyed this "blast from the past".

In 2011, my old ISP decommissioned the server I had the wiki on. I was planning to migrate it to something more modern like Drupal, but the time and effort weren't worth it to me at the time.

I did find the latest version of the "new" Geary Central on archive.org and shared it in my reply:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110927053309/http://www.geary....

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#173

Post by iamacyborg »

pessimizer wrote: post #166
IshKebab wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is wrong, but so are you. The truth is that social networks are big because they HAD genuine utility. The Facebook was amazing... at least until about 2010. I was at uni when it started and I vividly remember thinking "I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is" (we didn't have physical face books in the UK) and then a year later thefacebook turned up. Amazing for everyone's so…

> I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is Did you miss Myspace and Friendster? Orkut had a market, I think. The reason that Facebook succeeded later is because it had a good API and invited people to write apps for it (mostly surveys and games, remember Zynga?), tracked its users across the internet, and sold them in targeted slices to advertisers. It was Friendster as a commer…

> It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.

I might be misremembering a bunch but myspace never had a feed that showed you your friend’s updates.

It also wasn’t able to magically show you the people who were at that random house party you went to the night before that you hit it off with but were too drunk to get their number.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#174

Post by IshKebab »

pessimizer wrote: post #166
IshKebab wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is wrong, but so are you. The truth is that social networks are big because they HAD genuine utility. The Facebook was amazing... at least until about 2010. I was at uni when it started and I vividly remember thinking "I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is" (we didn't have physical face books in the UK) and then a year later thefacebook turned up. Amazing for everyone's so…

> I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is Did you miss Myspace and Friendster? Orkut had a market, I think. The reason that Facebook succeeded later is because it had a good API and invited people to write apps for it (mostly surveys and games, remember Zynga?), tracked its users across the internet, and sold them in targeted slices to advertisers. It was Friendster as a commer…

> Did you miss Myspace and Friendster?

MySpace was a) awful, b) only used by a tiny tiny fraction of people (1% maybe), and c) rarely had people's real names & photos on it. Not remotely comparable to Facebook. Even fewer people used Friendster and Orkut, at least in the UK.

> I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput

Free. No ads. Reliable. E2E encryption. Group chats. Cross platform. There's so much that's great about it. It was successful because the alternative was SMS which was shit. I'm guessing you're American.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#175

Post by IshKebab »

iamacyborg wrote: post #173
pessimizer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is Did you miss Myspace and Friendster? Orkut had a market, I think. The reason that Facebook succeeded later is because it had a good API and invited people to write apps for it (mostly surveys and games, remember Zynga?), tracked its users across the internet, and sold them in targeted slices to advertisers. It was Friendster as a commer…

> It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse. I might be misremembering a bunch but myspace never had a feed that showed you your friend’s updates. It also wasn’t able to magically show you the people who were at that random house party you went to the night before that you hit it off with but were too drunk to get their number.

Facebook didn't have the feed initially either (and it was really disliked when it was introduced - people thought it was like stalking). But yes to your second point. Real people who you actually wanted to know and had actually met were on Facebook. That wasn't really true of any of the other sites.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#177

Post by pessimizer »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #122
peteforde wrote: post #114

Everyone's experience will be different, but I will say that I have not received significant network effects traffic on Substack nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content. In short, I think that for the vast majority of casual posters, the aspirational upsides of joining a network are going to fall flat. Like with most aggregators, the popular things tend to be promoted more. So, for…

Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source. Maybe there is a network effect on substack that makes it easier to get these external links, but I doubt most actual readers are coming from inside the substack ecosystem.

> Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source.

I think the parent was talking about having a substack, not reading things on Substack.

But I also think the direct network effects don't come from casuals (other than that they repost to social networks.) People who are paying for a substack will look at others because it doesn't involve another signup or separate bill, they can just add the subscription for a buck or two. Now they can tour the subscriber content, and they can drop it after a little while if it doesn't ultimately appeal to them with just a click or three.

For non-subscribers, a substack isn't any different from any other blog.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#178

Post by carlosjobim »

autoexec wrote: post #67
carlosjobim wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You absolutely can know something about what someone will do in the future. You gain those insights by looking at their past and present behavior and the behavior of others in similar circumstances. Hackers tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can often see where things are heading. Enshittification is a pretty smart bet.

So your ex girlfriend cheated on you and now you reject all contact with women because you know that "sooner or later" she's going to cheat on you? In my ears it sounds the same when hackers say you can never buy anything or use any service, because "sooner or later" it will go to crap.

It's probably easy being a cynic, because you can always wait for decades (as another commenter argued) until you are right. In the meanwhile you have missed out on life - for no personal benefit at all.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#179

Post by skybrian »

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

Can't you link to whatever you want in your own blog post?

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#180

Post by pessimizer »

ArcHound wrote: post #92

Also take into account Substack moderation policy. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s... Natsoc newsletters are apparently fine, but showing porn is too much and you'll be moderated. Go on, tell me how one is more harmful to kids than the other.

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