5 ms·

I’d be interested to see if the author will get as much exposure to new potential subscribers without a platform like Substack of Medium promoting it. IMO, it’s

by monus 6y ago

I’d be interested to see if the author will get as much exposure to new potential subscribers without a platform like Substack of Medium promoting it. IMO, it’s always been the community aspect of these platforms that keep the authors locked in rather than the technical difficulties of setting up your own website.

alexmingoia 6y ago
I’d imagine Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and HN would be a bigger top for the funnel than Medium or Substack.
- andreilys 6y ago
  If you write for big medium publications you can get a lot of traction. Often they do the promotion for you (newsletters, twitter, etc.). That’s not to mention the medium algo that can pick up on your article and recommend it to others. I’ve had one post reach 100k+ reads, unlikely that would happen on my own site.
  - kevin_indig 6y ago
    > If you write for big medium publications you can get a lot of traction. If you leverage their algorithm cleverly, yes. But you still don't own your content or the platform. You're at the same mercy as on Facebook, Twitter, or Google.
polote 6y ago
Substack doesn't offer exposition, they barely have a discover page https://substack.com/discover https://substack.com/discover which always show the same newsletters And actually the effect can be negative as, Substack is known to make payment based newsletters, people could avoid those links
- skohan 6y ago
  As a consumer, I actually think this approach is great. I think a lot of the issues platforms deal with in terms of making hard decisions around content standards comes down to the fact that they put things in front of the user, and therefore have some responsibility for what you see. I think the only way you can really have a true "free speech" platform is to make it entirely self-serve. As soon as there is algorithmic content discovery, bad actors will attempt to game it to get their ideas in front of people.
- csmiller 6y ago
  Yeah, whenever I see a submission with xyz.substack.com I get a little nervous about being upsold or “converted”
pier25 6y ago
When I was on Medium not much traffic came from Medium itself. Probably around 10-15%. I had a couple of decently popular articles. The most popular had about 170k reads before I deleted my Medium account.
- kevin_indig 6y ago
  What did you switch to?
  - pier25 6y ago
    I moved some of the articles to my own static blog. This experience was actually the inspiration for the project I'm working on. See my profile for links.

by monus 6y ago

alexmingoia 6y ago

I’d imagine Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and HN would be a bigger top for the funnel than Medium or Substack.

andreilys 6y ago
If you write for big medium publications you can get a lot of traction. Often they do the promotion for you (newsletters, twitter, etc.). That’s not to mention the medium algo that can pick up on your article and recommend it to others. I’ve had one post reach 100k+ reads, unlikely that would happen on my own site.
- kevin_indig 6y ago
  > If you write for big medium publications you can get a lot of traction. If you leverage their algorithm cleverly, yes. But you still don't own your content or the platform. You're at the same mercy as on Facebook, Twitter, or Google.

polote 6y ago

Substack doesn't offer exposition, they barely have a discover page https://substack.com/discover https://substack.com/discover which always show the same newsletters And actually the effect can be negative as, Substack is known to make payment based newsletters, people could avoid those links

skohan 6y ago
As a consumer, I actually think this approach is great. I think a lot of the issues platforms deal with in terms of making hard decisions around content standards comes down to the fact that they put things in front of the user, and therefore have some responsibility for what you see. I think the only way you can really have a true "free speech" platform is to make it entirely self-serve. As soon as there is algorithmic content discovery, bad actors will attempt to game it to get their ideas in front of people.
csmiller 6y ago
Yeah, whenever I see a submission with xyz.substack.com I get a little nervous about being upsold or “converted”

pier25 6y ago

When I was on Medium not much traffic came from Medium itself. Probably around 10-15%. I had a couple of decently popular articles. The most popular had about 170k reads before I deleted my Medium account.

kevin_indig 6y ago
What did you switch to?
- pier25 6y ago
  I moved some of the articles to my own static blog. This experience was actually the inspiration for the project I'm working on. See my profile for links.