It's probably worth pointing out that the author is a founder of beehiiv, a Substack competitor.
Thanks for that. I knew something felt off with how much beehiiv was being plugged. Very lame to not be transparent about that.
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Substack just killed the creator economy
31–40 of 60 posts
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#32Related/unrelated: anyone notice the seemingly big uptick in Substack submissions around here? Like ones reaching the front page, often submitted by newer-ish accounts. What's that about? Did (1) alot of bloggers switch to Substack recently? and (2) is there a concerted effort to take advantage of HN traffic bumps here?
I think it's just that it's the cool place to write blog posts now. It was similar five or six years ago with Medium, or Github Pages. I don't think conspiratorial thinking is really necessary.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#33Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.
I think the difficulty isn't so much in the making of the blog, but the hosting it. I think a non-technical person could probably Google their way through getting Hugo to render with one of the default templates, but it's still kind of hard to understand how to deploy stuff to a place to host the
Like, I know how to do that with Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages or S3 or spinning up an Nginx server, but none of that is intuitive, and it can be overwhelming to people who aren't familiar with Git or web hosting.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#34Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.
> Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters?
What Substack provides for its users:
- Webpage
- CMS
- WYSIWYG editor
- Email newsletters / notifications
- Payment processing / Subscription handling
I'm going to go with yes.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#35Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.
I think one problem people have is payment processing. There really needs to be a federal program to allow people to easily transfer money as payment. There are too many extractive middlemen with rentier economies and ethics. There's no reason why Congress can make something like what Brazil has with Pix. Having a public option for payment processing can do a tremendous amount of good.
I believe that this is where someone like Supertab [1] could really pop off. I don’t honestly don’t think having this as a country-specific service would be useful/beneficial. Not affiliated with ST, just have a friend who works there. I’m yet to encounter a website that offers them, though.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#36clicked the minus sign on the ad "window"
worked as a hyperlink instead, same as clicking on the ad itself
not very "denk" imo
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#37Is it still too hard for people to make their own website blog / newsletters? I know it takes a bit of technical knowledge, but compared to a decade ago there are so many options and tutorials. It's comical at this point the number of platforms that people adopt, love, and then turn hostile towards their users.
Email deliverability is a nightmare. You need mega reputation to not end up in spam filters.
ghost + stripe + mailgun = ez mode
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#38Self hosting and using your payment processor of choice is always the best move. Own your own data or be prepared for the jig to be up at some point. This is what every platform that scales does.
I don't use Substack [1], but isn't part of the appeal of Substack discoverability? Like that's part of the reason that a lot of these platforms get popular. Most software engineers could write something to upload, transcode, and host videos in an afternoon or two, but that only gets you 10% of YouTube's value. The thing that keeps YouTube on top is it's hyper-addictive recommendation system. I assume that Substack o…
"publish on ur own site, syndicate everywhere" has never been more salient
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#39Surprised not to find any discussion of Stripe refusing to process payments for otherwise legal content on other platforms (Steam, itch.io, Patreon). It’s very likely their hyper-vigilance will extend to Substack as well.
they are very annoying at first re: kyc
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#40Related/unrelated: anyone notice the seemingly big uptick in Substack submissions around here? Like ones reaching the front page, often submitted by newer-ish accounts. What's that about? Did (1) alot of bloggers switch to Substack recently? and (2) is there a concerted effort to take advantage of HN traffic bumps here?
I think it's just that it's the cool place to write blog posts now. It was similar five or six years ago with Medium, or Github Pages. I don't think conspiratorial thinking is really necessary.
Funny how quickly the worm turned on Medium due to the constant nagging and paywalling. It's looked down on in the same way as linking to a Quora article at this point.