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Substack writers, you need a website

elizabethtai.com

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Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#331

Post by Dezvous »

wyclif wrote: post #307
rsingel wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>"just because he thinks men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and spaces"

You're telling on yourself with this one, transphobe.

Lineham is an anti-trans activist. There's quite literally a whole section on his Wikipedia page dedicated to it, in fact it's the longest section on there. He's practically dedicated his life to the cause.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#332

Post by Wicher »

RSS is great for informing readers of new content. Sadly only a few actually use it, except (unknowingly, for a large part of the population) for... Podcasts.

So, thinking out loud: you could offer people to subscribe to your website by publishing a RSS feed with dummy audio, using a link in the the episode description to get people to hop through to your website. And then you offer the appropriate "subscribe in iTunes / Spotify / generic podcasting app" buttons on your website page.

And then suddenly the masses can sign up to your updates! And they can easily unsubscribe! And you don't have to deal with email, and can use static file hosting! There'd even be a discovery inroad as presumably the Apples and Spotifies of this world will push it through the personalized recommendations pipe just as they would for any other podcast.

It's a bit subversive but it would work wouldn't it?

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#333

Post by rad-b »

Wicher wrote: post #332

RSS is great for informing readers of new content. Sadly only a few actually use it, except (unknowingly, for a large part of the population) for... Podcasts. So, thinking out loud: you could offer people to subscribe to your website by publishing a RSS feed with dummy audio, using a link in the the episode description to get people to hop through to your website. And then you offer the appropriate "subscribe in iTun…

Good idea, and unfortunately one of those that would work only while it’s not popular. If it turns out to be good enough to become popular, here comes the enforcement.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#334

Post by wyclif »

Dezvous wrote: post #331
wyclif wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>"just because he thinks men shouldn't use women's bathrooms and spaces" You're telling on yourself with this one, transphobe. Lineham is an anti-trans activist. There's quite literally a whole section on his Wikipedia page dedicated to it, in fact it's the longest section on there. He's practically dedicated his life to the cause.

Sorry not sorry, but Substack isn't going to run off Lineham because he thinks that people with a dick shouldn't be in a female locker room.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#336

Post by [deleted] »

carlosjobim wrote: post #47
billyp-rva wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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?

[deleted]

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#337

Post by 8by3 »

Exporting your subscriber list isn't perfect. I did it after moving to https://tuhat.net, and then after posting from tuhat, got emails from subscribers asking who I was and why I was writing to them. The majority of said subscribers, came from an article I wrote about leaving substack, so you'd think they'd have figured it out.

Some of them were far less polite, never mind that it would have taken them less time to click unsubscribe then writing some insulting email to someone they chose to follow.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#338

Post by samspot »

rpdillon wrote: post #325
wofo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

Ok, so if you want to read https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/, which is now publishing less than once a month, you prefer to refresh the website once a week hoping there's an article to read?

That's unimaginable to me. Most of the writers I read publish infrequently. Email is great. I don't have to be on any social media. Articles come in and I can read them at my leisure.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#339

Post by Magicrafter13 »

In my mind this always went without saying, but realistically I know most people never think long term about this sort of thing. I've been hosting my own web content for nearly a decade now, including a 6 year old blog, and I've always kept it there only, using social media to advertise it.

Frankly I think self hosting is super easy in 2026 (and virtually free unless you want personalized domains or subdomains), especially for simple web content, but I also understand the aversion to it and at least hope that more and more people will spend their money on VPS (or other hosting services like Wordpress), rather than these random websites that appear overnight like Substack.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#340

Post by Wicher »

rad-b wrote: post #333
Wicher wrote: post #332

RSS is great for informing readers of new content. Sadly only a few actually use it, except (unknowingly, for a large part of the population) for... Podcasts. So, thinking out loud: you could offer people to subscribe to your website by publishing a RSS feed with dummy audio, using a link in the the episode description to get people to hop through to your website. And then you offer the appropriate "subscribe in iTun…

Good idea, and unfortunately one of those that would work only while it’s not popular. If it turns out to be good enough to become popular, here comes the enforcement.

It'd be hard to detect from structure. Episode descriptions can and do legitimately have links. And if/when it comes to deep inspection, instead of a dummy audio file one could use a TTS-ed audio version of the post, there's some legitimacy there. You can even flip it around and claim that the blogpost is the "audio transcription" "for those who want it".

But yeah let's not underestimate the power we're giving these platforms. If down the road it doesn't match the monetization strategy? Platform giveth, platform taketh.

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