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Substack writers, you need a website

elizabethtai.com

321–330 of 373 posts

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#321

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…

> 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.

Your host can kick you and DNS can block you.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#322
My two cents here is that if you're trying to growth hack yourself, you need to be on a platform that's also growth hacking. Building an audience anywhere is genuinely hard. Algorithmic feeds like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. force you to play a game they control and that may not align with your content. Medium, substack, etc. will build your audience only to the extent that it aligns with their goals. Hosting your own blog means somehow getting traffic to it -- which might mean playing the google search game, which then depends on aligning with user queries and getting your site ranked. Or it may mean somehow driving traffic to your blog, such as from a newsletter or social site. But that brings us back to either algorithmic feeds or newsletter products. Don't think there's an easy answer here and I bet YMMV depending on the type of content you have, how much of audience you already have, etc.

I tried the reverse -- syndicating content on medium that we publish on our blog. 0 impressions, literally, for 5 posts that got some readership on our blog.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#323

My two cents here is that if you're trying to growth hack yourself, you need to be on a platform that's also growth hacking. Building an audience anywhere is genuinely hard. Algorithmic feeds like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. force you to play a game they control and that may not align with your content. Medium, substack, etc. will build your audience only to the extent that it aligns with their goals. Hosting y…

It sounds like you’ve given up on an open web. Possibly the rational thing for you to do in your circumstances, but nonetheless a sad place we are in.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> There's one NYT link on the Andreessen Horowitz article I see no mention of the far right in the article; the only NYT source with "right" in the title that I can find is "The Tech Right Gets Its Own Phyllis Schlafly", but this is only being used to cite Boyle investing in some aerospace/miltech companies. As for Marc, we're at multiple layers of guilt by association now, but even so I don't see what's extreme abou…

> I see no mention of the far right in the article

I see no mention of the far right in Taylor Lorenz's article. I do see mentions of Donald Trump, DOGE, and the Republican party in the NYT article cited in the "Politics" section. As I understand, these entities are considered "right-wing" in US terms, and many of their actions would certainly be considered "extreme". ("Extreme" is somewhat subjective, so for the sake of foreshortening this argument, I'll set it at the objective threshold of ten thousand dead children.)

> "The Tech Right […]", but this is only being used to cite Boyle

So, you found a source describing Katherine Boyle, in her capacity as manager of Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism fund, as right-wing. This seems to support Taylor Lorenz's claim.

> but even so I don't see what's extreme about anything attributed to [Marc Andreessen] in his own article.

Aside from working for DOGE, and strongly supporting cryptocurrency and AI, I would agree with your expectation that a large percentage of Americans would find his views agreeable: I would expect slightly under half the US population. These views are not so popular internationally.

As a reminder: I would rather not debate this here. TFA is an article about Substack, not Andreessen Horowitz's political leanings: we should be discussing Substack, not its investor.

> FWIW, I consider that the actual literal Nazis were a step beyond typical contemporary American white supremacists.

To start with, the Nazis were much, much tamer. For example, the Nazis neither owned, whipped, nor branded people in 1924, whereas the second KKK had only just started to fracture at that point. It was only once the Nazis got control of the state apparatus that they got really bad: the Night of Broken Glass, Aktion T4, the invasion of Poland, the Holocaust…. Adolf Hitler (claimed to have) modelled parts of the Nazi regime on American white supremacist practices.

The Nazi party started with the recruitment of Nazis. By the time they were an organised fascist paramilitary capable of attempting a coup (1922–1923), it was almost too late to stop them.

> Note that the headline of your own source explicitly describes Substack as having offered an apology,

A qualified apology, of the form: "We're sorry if our policies lead to the systematic platforming of white supremacist hatemongers, and of course the active promotion of this neo-Nazi organisation by our computer systems was a one-off mistake, but we won't change our policies: if we don't give Nazis a voice, then they'll say even worse things!" That's not really an apology: it's a "we're sorry for the bad press we're experiencing".

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#325
post #76
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I have found out the hard way that an entire generation or two of internet users has lost the ability to visit a website to see what's there. They rely on having notifications or emails come in so that they can react to things rather than proactively go seek them out. I tend to eschew push the forms of communication, for the same reason my mobile isn't covered in a colorful grid of apps: I want to actively be choosing what I do rather than having a set of options put in front of me that I get to pick from.

But that's all just a rant. Your core point is completely correct. If you want readers, you have to cater to this 'push' mentality, I think.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#326

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…

Yeah so I guess the hundreds of billions of page views from organic search every single month is just a total myth? As somebody who has made a lot of money publishing on the internet you absolutely can get people to read your website organically but it takes specific strategies and you can't just write about whatever you want however you want and expect traffic.

[dead]

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.co…

> 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.…

This strategy for your legacy would not have been successful with stratoscope.geocities.com (RIP 2009), skyblog.com/stratoscobe (died in 2023 with no data export path offered), Posterous, MSN Spaces, Vine, and many others.

I am willing to bet that most of my domains will outlive "username.substack.com".

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#328
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Simon, I'm not sure I get it completely. If I get it, you're basically using Substack as an email platform. So the blog (the "original") can use Wordpress, Ghost, whatever ; and this is the canonical place that all articles go to. But then you duplicate the content onto Substack so it gets pushed out as emails. My understanding of what it means: - the blog doesn't have its own subscription system ; you link out to…

I don't like subscription popups - see recent John Gruber rants on the subject: https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover I'm willing to take the hit to subscriber numbers for not having that kind of thing on my own site. From an SEO perspective, I think I might be beating Substack comfortably. My blog has a different page for each item, plus it ties them together with tags. The Substack email is a full w…

Thank you! My coauthor Brad and I were subscribing to Ghost just yesterday ; we're going to adopt your model.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#329
There's an exact parallel with business owners - in my geographic region (BR) at least - in general. It still surprises me how many small and even medium-sized businesses don't bother registering their own domain name anymore, preferring instead to rely entirely on an Instagram page.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#330

I used to pay Mailchimp $100+/month and would write 3-4 articles per month. It seemed illogical to me how much mailchimp would charge. I now have a substack + a wordpress website. An article goes to both places, and substack acts as a subscriber growth + email distribution tool for me.

Substack is free because you act as a growth/distribution engine for them. They plaster your emails with ads to download their app and will even email your list whenever they feel like it and when you leave they will still email your list substack-related content and offers. When someone subscribed via the app btw, they own that person, not you. If you’re okay with that trade off, fine, but I thought we learned this…

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