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Substack writers, you need a website

elizabethtai.com

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Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#301

Post by bilekas »

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…

Why not do all automatically? My concern with substack is that it's a single point of truth. If they decide to blanket paywall everything after they sell to private equity for example. Or start to force all users to pay to be visible at all including old content. You're at the mercy of whatever they decide.

We've seen it so often.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#302

Post by ggsp »

inigyou wrote: post #295
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…

How do people get to your Substack? Does it have a recommendations system like social media?

It does

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#303

Post by inigyou »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #216
inigyou wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying something about Facebook is convenient?

Yes, absolutely. Facebook became successful because at the time it was much more convenient than existing ways of accomplishing the same thing it did (interacting socially with other people, meeting new people), including even existing websites like myspace which were themselves more convenient than trying to create one's own website and grow a community, or traveling to meet people face-to-face. Why do you think it…

So... what about Facebook is convenient?

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#304

Post by inigyou »

drnick1 wrote: post #200
IshKebab wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> rarely had people's real names & photos on it This is a feature, not a bug. There is nothing worse for a society's collective privacy than a surveillance machine where people willingly post every detail of their lives. Stalin would have dreamed of today's anti-social media as a surveillance tool. > There's so much that's great about it. There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up yo…

Clearly people wanted real names and photos. There's space for both private and public spaces. I won't tell you my real name on this account, but I'll tell it to my WhatsApp friends.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#305

Post by inigyou »

kelnos wrote: post #233
simonsarris wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the point of talking about utility in the first place. I have no interest in lamentations. If you told someone to stay away from social networks because of their flaws, you would be doing them a cultural and professional disservice. As a more moderate metaphor it's like someone saying they like living in one city, for all its flaws, and someone else comes along and extolls the virtues of sever…

The hole in that analogy is that in some cases these other platforms aren't imaginary. The open, ad-free, privacy-protecting, you-own-your-data alternative to Twitter actually exists: Mastodon. The problem, of course, is that the utility of a social network is right in the name: the network of users it connects. If the people you want to interact with aren't on Mastodon, then you have to use Twitter. But ethically-go…

Do people even want to interact with specific others on these platforms, or just the amorphous mass of others? Both X and Mastodon have two different amorphous masses you can interact with.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#306

Post by inigyou »

noosphr wrote: post #251
incompatible wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, tolerate Nazis, give them a place to share their words, let them be part of the mainstream, let them take part in elections, play their dirty tricks and form paramilitaries and win control of government. It's a shame that that leads to certain groups, like Jews, LGBTQ, non-whites, or immigrants getting exterminated, but that's just the price you have to pay for free speech.

Let's see what the man who coined the term paradox of tolerance had to say about this: >In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force;…

> as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion

this is a load-bearing condition, also nobody thinks that punching a nazi makes someone a nazi

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#307

Post by wyclif »

rsingel wrote: post #250
willy_k wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Substack has gone out of its way to platform the right and has been very proud to work with folks like Andrew Tate, Graham Linehan, and anti-vaxxers whose disinfo helped kill tens of thousands of Americans. https://counterhate.com/blog/substack-generates-at-least-2-5...

Eh, I think you have a classification problem. Andrew Tate is far, far right and Linehan...this is the man who created "Father Ted"... is "right" just because he thinks men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and spaces? I'll leave out the issue of the massive numbers of people who were injured by the jab.

All I'll maintain here is that Substack is not in the business of censoring or deciding who gets to publish on their platform according to one group's political preferences.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#308

Post by inigyou »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #59
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…

At 66,000 messages/week, you’d actually be spending around $50-$80 monthly with SES and a VPS + database for handling bounces and unsubscribe requests.

Amazon is always overpriced though. How is it at other providers?

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#309

Post by inigyou »

cosmicgadget wrote: post #48
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.

Or just opening the website once a day.

(I subscribe to Cory Doctorow's list though)

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#310

Post by noosphr »

inigyou wrote: post #306
noosphr wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's see what the man who coined the term paradox of tolerance had to say about this: >In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force;…

> as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion this is a load-bearing condition, also nobody thinks that punching a nazi makes someone a nazi

Scratch liberal and a fascist bleeds.
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