The UI and experience is generally pretty good, and it feels quite a lot like what Medium could have been but failed hard at. It's simple and does what it sets

The UI and experience is generally pretty good, and it feels quite a lot like what Medium could have been but failed hard at. It's simple and does what it sets out to do well, which is pretty rare considering how bad most content-driven platforms have become. If you want to subscribe to the content of a specific writer, it's an easy and direct way to do that. As a platform it's host to a lot of the kinds of semi-philosophical writing of the sort that the hacker news audience tends to rate highly, which is why you'll see it pop up a lot here. The "pro-freedom-of-speech" or "anti-censorship" stuff you'll probably see in the responses is a little overblown generally – but since it's an individual publishing platform for writers (rather than a distinct media presence in its own right) you're more likely to see views that more mainstream publications don't want to promote. Again, something that the HN crowd is pretty hot on. (I will say generally that a Hacker News post from a Substack domain at this point has become a bit of a negative signal for me in the same way that Medium has – except instead of suffering through a terrible React tutorial you'll be sitting through a contrarian middlebrow essay. But of course exceptions abound and YMMV).