311–320 of 373 posts
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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.
Email is so well designed, so resilient, and so ubiquitous that's very hard to displace it's use as a central check-in.
Recently, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s surprisingly easy these days. I already have a domain on Cloudflare, and I had Codex build a simple blogging system for me. I write everything in Markdown, the site is hosted on Cloudflare, comments are stored in Cloudflare D1, and all articles live in the repository as Markdown files. GitHub Actions takes care of publishing automatically and also performs regular backups. To reduce comment spam, I use Cloudflare Turnstile, which has been working really well. For comment moderation, I protect the admin interface with Cloudflare Zero Trust, using email-based authentication, so I don’t need to build or maintain my own authentication system. Overall, the setup has been incredibly simple, reliable, and has required very little ongoing maintenance.
Great idea. Recently, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s surprisingly easy these days. I already have a domain on Cloudflare, and I had Codex build a simple blogging system for me. I write everything in Markdown, the site is hosted on Cloudflare, comments are stored in Cloudflare D1, and all articles live in the repository as Markdown files. GitHub Actions takes care of publishing automatically and also per…
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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…
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…
you said: "...from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website" This is false. It's more accurate to say that "no one will visit your website if you do not properly setup a distribution ecosystem". It's hard work. But it works. All of my companies have been built by writing online --> distribution --> people finding my/our stuff. Your experience of 'doing it for decades'…
I don’t get how someone can have used the internet for decades and not know how this all works!
The website itself is slow, it cannot render the whole comments section, it constantly nags readers with subscribe forms.
It can not handle single account across my subscriptions.
Its just crap.
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> 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.
I (unsurprisingly) agree authors should own their own website and email list (btw based on hundreds of data points we know converts about 100 to 1 versus social followers for book sales) but the issue is how to make it effortless to set up and maintain a website.
We built a system where you enter one ISBN and we instantly import your entire book catalog, including books, reviews, metadata, author bio, etc. Btw one book to all the authors’ books is not trivial problem (see how often Amazon gets it wrong) due to lack of universal author ID. We’ve since built author-specific email marketing, ecommerce, etc all on a domain each author owns (we make it seamless). Now that we have 9k+ happy (65 NPS) authors we’re adding author cross promotion for distribution but the author’s owned domain and capturing their own emails remains at center.
Anyways if anyone wants to check it out for free (no CC needed) would welcome feedback from HN community. https://authors.tertulia.com/
Substack fails to deliver the single thing it supposed to do - great reading experience. The website itself is slow, it cannot render the whole comments section, it constantly nags readers with subscribe forms. It can not handle single account across my subscriptions. Its just crap.
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> 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.…
It's very unlikely Substack will still be around when you die, if you're younger than 60.