Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Substack Notes Launched

on.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 789 posts

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#551

Post by archagon »

somsak2 wrote: post #476
dymk wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine and valuable, but it doesn't sound like much of a moat. Those thought leaders used something else before Twitter - even if it takes a while, it's not a crazy idea that they'd eventually move somewhere else if the grass is greener.

What is this "something else" that you refer to? In fact, this kind of short-form, global conversation wasn't happening before Twitter, at least not on their scale.

Is it really a conversation, though? I rarely see “thought leaders” actually engage with their audience in a meaningful way.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#552

Post by joegahona »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #265

Whoever approved that name must be crazy. Googling that is coming up with everything else. Looking on the AppStore is the same.

That occurred to me too. You want something that has meaning but isn't insanely generic. So something between "Notes" and "Nostr."

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#553

Post by sanderjd »

jacquesm wrote: post #181
capital_guy wrote: post #33

I've just checked it out and it's much closer to a Twitter clone than I anticipated. Now it's clear why Elon made the drastic decision to mess with substack links on Twitter. The site is clean and simple. I'm very disappointed in Musk for essentially ruining one of the world's great information platforms. Mastodon was just not the thing people were looking for. I hope this takes off.

I hope it doesn't. Because it essentially sets us up for a repeat. If Mastodon was 'just not the thing people were looking for' then at least it solves the problems that both Twitter and Substack have, which is that they are not federated. Better to fix Mastodon than to waste another decade on something that will ultimately blow up and with the way Substack has - in my head at least - been associated negatively with…

Unfortunately, this perspective seems very head-in-a-bubble to me. It's a tiny tiny number of people who think the problem with Twitter and Substack is that they aren't federated. Federation isn't a feature people broadly care about. If it makes the platform work better, great! But I don't think that's the case for Mastodon or any other federated platform I've come across. It's the opposite, they make concessions on the experience in order to support federation. That would be ok if those sacrifices were for functionality people really want, but federation just ... isn't that.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#554

Post by sanderjd »

Jare wrote: post #90
hersko wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is twitter ruined? My personal experience on the site has not changed much.

- People I follow have left. Most have moved to Mastodon so I can still follow them there. It's a constant trickle but some day the weight will be higher on Mastodon's side of the balance. - Ads range from obnoxious to downright scams. I know some people used to block ad senders as a matter of routine, but I didn't, most of the time they were valid and I was happy to support the site via their ads. After Musk, most a…

Yeah to me it's less that it's dead and more that it's clearly not sustainable without a new business model. Blue is a total flop, and you can tell from the ads they're running now that their ad revenue must be way down. And they needed to grow revenue significantly after the acquisition because of the debt structuring, but it seems like a certainty they've done the opposite.

So it's not that it's dead today, but how long can they make it like this?

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#555

Post by fogzen »

lovvtide wrote: post #189
7h3rAm wrote: post #38

Social network must be a protocol, not a platform. That's the only way to gurantee free speech and cencorship resistance. Nostr[1] is proving to be a good first step in this direction. [1] https://nostr.how/

Nostr is the real deal. I first heard about nostr last in November when Twitter tried to ban it. There's an incredible dev ecosystem developing — so much so that I decided to rebuild Satellite ( https://satellite.earth ) the social platform I'd been working on to become a client for the protocol. There's a bunch of other clients too. Someone started a directory here https://www.nostrapps.com/ I'm happy to answer tech…

The big downside with Nostr is it’s not built on the web. With blogs and webmention the feeds are websites. And there’s already a huge ecosystem for blogs. I’d prefer people build on that instead. Especially if the end result is more or less the same: blogs with comments.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#556

Post by getcrunk »

2h wrote: post #496
obblekk wrote: post #201

This is a case where an algorithmic feed would make this into a truly amazing product. I don't want email spam from every follower, but do want to see the best snippets on substack. Super easy to create a for you page, given text content: Step 1: embed every article I ever read, or note I liked/comment/share and stuff it in a DB. Step 2: every time a new note is posted (by anyone anywhere), embed it, search the db fo…

> This is a case where an algorithmic feed would make this into a truly amazing product. how many platforms need to be ruined by an algorithmic feed before people understand that its a terrible idea?

The terrible idea is only having an algorithmic feed. If you always offer the user the option to not use it and instead have a feed they can control, then it’s a non issue

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#557

Post by heylook »

dan-robertson wrote: post #504
heylook wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many many senses. First, it's already been built. Now people now how to build it. In fact, many of the people that actually built it have left the company and could presumably help to build it again. Second, the toolchain has matured in absolutely huge ways. AWS exists. Twitter had to build their own cloud to meet scaling needs. Languages have matured or been purpose-written to enable building/scaling these types of…

Twitter used to go down a lot. In some sense, struggling under load is a nice problem to have (as you want the users) though. I find I’m not super convinced that ‘aws exists’ or whatever solves the problems Twitter had. Though I guess a bunch of the problems with eg distributing a notification to millions of followers or super-deep reply chains or football games or new years or whatever can be punted on until you hav…

Seriously? I think "AWS exists" is self-evident enough to almost be a tautology. It's a hugely successful business whose business is making tools that make it easier/faster/cheaper to build and scale software and internet products. If that doesn't prove how much easier it is now to build the technology of Twitter, I'm genuinely curious if you could present a hypothetical set of facts that would actually be convincing to you.

ETA: I want to be careful to say that it's not "lol easy peasy" to build Twitter, but that the question "How likely would an investor be to pass on your Twitter clone startup because they thought the technology couldn't be built by your team with their investment?" is laughable, possibly even if the founding team is non-technical. With $5m, anyone competent enough to even file a YC application could hire a good enough technical consultancy to get a Twitter clone that scales to millions of users.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#558

Post by phs318u »

Nathanba wrote: post #531
inpdx wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and is successful at it." Overpaying, creating a mass exodus, destabilizing the platform, and losing tons of advertisers is "successful?"

The Twitter thing is still in progress and probably his first project where you could say that he has a problem

I’d argue that one of the reasons Tesla and SpaceX are successful is not just because Elno is a “visionary” (or functional equivalent). It’s because he was/is supported by a cadre of “true believers” (eg that we must disrupt the auto industry in order to do something radical about climate change). Those true believers (like all true believers), are willing to put up with lots of strange behaviour in the name of that belief.

Twitter on the other hand was bought with a management layer that could fairly be characterised as the opposite of true believers in whatever Elon is selling. Hence the implosion.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#559

Post by czbond »

a4isms wrote: post #278
czbond wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's barrier wasn't that it was technically hard - it was that it was free and had critical mass. There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views

There still isn't much of a reason to move away from it, except for those who want to signal their disdain for Musk's political views This says so much more about you than about anyone leaving Twitter. I'm a person of colour. Do I have not have a reason to leave a web site that platforms people who espouse the belief that my children are a disease that needs to be eradicated with fire?[1] Of course I do, and you know…

@a4isms We probably just have very different streams, based on who we follow and what they retweet, etc. I follow a very small amount of strictly business / technology / economy as technical topics and cull if they strayed from that (as it was my intended use). I don't see the more broad universe of content many see on Twitter due to that curation.

Re: Substack Notes Launched

#560

Post by lovvtide »

cmh89 wrote: post #529
lovvtide wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dangerous speech?

Yes, if you go back and take a gander at US history, you'll learn that there is a long history of restricting speech that is likely to cause another person harm. Is that something you are unaware of?

You're still looking at this from a legalistic perspective.
Post reply on HN