"their creator economy", not "the creator economy".
Substack just killed the creator economy
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Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#52If you're still actively using Substack as a creator, you're obviously very okay with them sending out Swastika missives, and you don't feel it's detrimental to your own brand – you'll not get any sympathy from me.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#53This website format is really really really bad to read.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#54Is 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.
You could do all of those on Typepad in 2008 except sending some posts only to paying subscribers https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2009/11/feedburner-typep... You had to wait until 2017 for that https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2017/07/making-money-wit...
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, I don't remember the last time a Medium article trended on HN. I suspect Substack will have a similar fate eventually, for the same reasons.
I was self-hosting my blog on my own server until very recently, but I moved to Cloudflare Pages and thus far I find it to be the least-awful platform I've used for it. Cloudflare might eventually turn out to be evil, but at least since I have my own domain name and it's just a static site, it's trivial to move to a different provider or even just host again myself if necessary.
I really would like to figure out a good way to syndicate though; there's really no discoverability with the current iteration.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#56Is 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 i…
DigitalOcean has one-click WordPress.
But if you’re clicking around in the DO control panel, you’ve already conquered a significant amount of technophobia.
You still need a domain, though.
Which makes me recall that many domain registrars have complementary web hosting.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#57Apple's advertising campaign "there's an app for that" during the 2010s has liquefied an entire generation's brains into thinking they need to download an app for something that displays words and pictures.
Like most people, I tried most of these apps. It wasn't long before I uninstalled them in favour of the mobile website versions. Most "content" apps provide no value to the user in app form. "Get the app for a better experience" - yeah, better for them. Installing the app is a way for them to access your contacts list, microphone and camera, and use your home screen and notification center as a billboard.
With the growth of the "platform services" lock-in like app stores and wallets, the value drops to practically negative, as now you have to cover not just payment processing fees, but also the passed-down cost of the digital land baron's tariff for the privilege of transacting on their turf.
No thanks.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#58Is 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.
People have made money on the Internet for decades before Substack. Ask your customers to mail you a cheque, or send them a Paypal/Venmo/Cashapp payment and manually process their subscription. People will understand that you're not Amazon and waiting a day or two to get access to your content won't be a dealbreaker for them. This way, you control the pricing and spare your customer the hassle of another monthly subscription.
If your newsletter is a side gig, sure, use Substack. But if it's your primary source of income, it's bad business to be subject to the whims of a platform you have no control over. Worse still when it's not a self-sustaining business whose primary obligations are to venture capitalist growthbros rather than paying customers.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#59Self 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…
> but isn't part of the appeal of Substack discoverability?
Discoverability should be happening on non-paid platforms like social media, message boards or channels independent of Substack itself. If customer acquisition is based on your presence on Substack, you will have to stay on it forever, paying whatever they charge, because migrating to a different platform will damage acquisition. Which of course is exactly what Substack's strategy is.
Re: Substack just killed the creator economy
#60This website format is really really really bad to read.
agreed. starting off with a giant ad for some AI-something-or-other was bad enough, but the design makes it hard to visually scan for where the article starts.