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Ask HN: Is Substack the new Medium?

186 points by chatterhead 4y ago

Seeing a lot more Substack and fewer and fewer Medium articles. Anyone else notice this seemingly happened slowly but consistently over the last year?

galaxyLogic 4y ago
I wrote several Medium articles. But then trying to read other people's articles I hit the free-limit and couldn't read them. I had hoped that even if my articles don't make we money at least they could let me read articles written by others on the same "medium". But it didn't. So I stopped publishing on Medium. Maybe I'll give Substack a try.
augasur 4y ago
I liked Medium from the beginning, when it launched, it was one of my favorite platforms to read, lots of great articles, always found something new to read in the tech or crypto space, but as the time has passed articles became worse and worse, lots of paywalls, some interesting authors stopped posting and I left it. I can't even remember when I last logged in there.
Comevius 4y ago
Substack makes a lot of money from promoting misinformation on vaccines, climate change and other issues, harming a lot of people. I rarely click on Substack links, they managed to attract all the propagandists and cultists other platforms weeded out for a reason.
- chatterhead 4y ago
  You should start a Substack to combat all that misinformation. Facts are facts and people will recognize truth, right?
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    It takes an herculean amount of effort to counter misinformation. Deep state, conspiracy, Dr. Who is paid by Pfizer. Heads you lose; tails you lose. All of that crap. It's a losing game that keeps you on the defensive. You can cite facts and evidence but your up against memes essentially to reduce the sound bite to its essence. They will make shit up and have fake experts to support their positions and publish it in second tier places including substack. It drives clicks. Mainstream news orgs cite twitter of all places. All you can do is encourage critical thinking which means asking people to explain their positions and being genuinely curious about their answers.
    - theGnuMe 4y ago
      I bet you could study this on hacker news of all places. Take posts on specific subject matter and have experts rate the comments. Then have a random set of people rate them. See what you get. I bet most of us are wrong in our opinions. There's that weird effect when you read a newspaper article about something you are expert in and notice everything they get wrong... then read the next article and take it all in verbatim. Not sure what the psychologists call it.. if it doesn't have a name it needs one.
scottcorgan 4y ago
This is InVsion vs Figma.
ksherlock 4y ago
I was thinking that the other day, but for a different reason. In the beginning, quora, medium, substack, etc, they succeed due to good content. Once they build a reputation, they open the floodgates and throw it away. For the past few years, I skip over medium links -- not because paywalls but because it's probably low quality garbage. HN substack links have generally been good quality. But the last couple I've seen here were trending downwards.
preseinger 4y ago
No.
chatterhead 4y ago
OP here. My takeaway from this entire thread is this: We need a publishing platform that is owned by the writers based on their paid subscriber counts, time on platform and number of posts. It's really the only way to create a platform with staying power and maintainable core values.
- joegahona 4y ago
  Can you say more about this? > We need a publishing platform that is owned by the writers based on their paid subscriber counts, time on platform and number of posts. I'm not getting what you mean by "based on."
ageek123 4y ago
It's like Medium but with a much higher ratio of quality blogs to garbage.
- raydiatian 4y ago
  I can’t agree more. Hopefully it doesn’t go the way of Medium.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    My overly cynical interpretation: All signs point to 'eventually' don't they? Look at the history of everything, it's inevitable. Either you get big enough to become garbage, or you stay small and fade out. The single exception to this is Bandcamp. <-- evidently I jinxed it. So maybe Bandcamp is not the exception.
    - russelg 4y ago
      Bandcamp was recently acquired by Epic so we'll see how long that lasts...
      - echelon 4y ago
        Epic wants to nurture creatives, so I strongly doubt they'd try to squeeze it. Especially not before the full plan comes into fruition. The game plan is this: 1. Draw capital from Fortnite and investments (Tencent, Sony, etc.) 2. Build up creative tools (Unreal Engine, Metahuman), marketplace ecosystems (Bandcamp, ArtStation), and platforms (Epic Games Store) to build the movies and games of tomorrow. Make them more compelling and synergistic than peer competitors. Tim Sweeney is gambling he can turn anyone creative into a filmmaker or game designer. The long term game is to then take 10-15%. It'll be interesting to see if Godot develops at a fast enough clip to become compelling to the next generation of game developers and eventually companies that want full IP rights. It'll also be interesting to see if Adobe and other media companies can stop Epic from eating their Hollywood lunch. AI/ML might also throw a wrench into these plans.
ecshafer 4y ago
Substack might be the new medium, and I think that's a good thing. Substack has a way for writers to get paid. I do pay for a few writers on substack, I don't even know if that is a thing at medium. Best thing about Substack over Medium, is that Medium was the most annoying blogging platform, it didn't like that I highlighted as I read. And it was really bad at finding more from an author.
- rhaksw 4y ago
  Yeah, Substack is something new and seems to be gaining traction. I wonder if its success has contributed at all to Reddit's CEO saying he wants users to earn money, > Spez - I want our users, user-users and moderator users, to make money on reddit. Specifically, I want them to make money from other users. And so we need to have business models where users are paying money to other users or to subreddits. I would like subreddits to have the ability to be businesses. We have a lot of subreddits that are kind of trying to do this, but the platform just doesn't support it. https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/xhuaqf/are_we_allowed_to_discuss_what_spez_brought_up_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/xhuaqf/are_we_a...
  - technion 4y ago
    I read your quote and I thought "nah, it's probably just Spez pushing crypto again". Then I click your link and he goes on to suggest Reddit NFT have been a community success. Then he talks about making people's lives better. The more I read, the more I felt that initial suggestion was correct. I do acknowledge noone else in that thread seemed to jump on that point.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Of all the NFTs in the world the Reddit ones are the most pitiful.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I'm not sure how big of an issue writer pay is because there seems to be an infinite supply of people who will write for free trying to make a name for themselves.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I think of the average substacker as a serious writer, often they have a background doing journalism. I think the average Medium writer doesn’t have much to say other than maybe ‘me too’. There are quite a few right-wing sub stacks that I don’t agree with but they tend to be well written by people who treat it as a job. And that’s the thing, Medium is mostly a way to express or promote yourself, but some people really make a living writing a substack.
- yonaguska 4y ago
  It's the right wing writers, or more specifically, the medically controversial writers that got me onto the site in the first place, mostly because certain authors are deplatformed everywhere else, or they can't write about certain topics. I'm glad that they're leveraging this- but I also hope that this doesn't become the entire site. Seems like it's a very diverse range of writers so far, and I hope it stays that way.
  - Kye 4y ago
    >> "medically controversial writers" If you mean the people who think they know more about trans people than actual trans people and the entire credible medical establishment, here you go: (this first episode of the new season is free) https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/the-war-over-gender/umc.cmc.1jj39s607lehulo4k0iscsarp?showId=umc.cmc.4fcexvzqezr25p9weks6sxpob https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/the-war-over-gender/umc.cmc.... Of course, there's plenty of existing media and documentation, but he covers a lot of recent developments in anti-trans misinformation and even had on religious, conservative parents who were initially skeptical of their kids' trans identities in the panel portion. Jon Stewart is also way more liberal than the usual person who covers this, so he carries weight with the sort of people who fall prey to this sort of propaganda. The interview portion reminds me of his bits on Crossfire and Mad Money. He doesn't get mad, he gets aggressively disappointed. He likes to like people regardless of politics, and doesn't like when someone makes that hard, and it shows here.
    - yonaguska 4y ago
      I was actually commenting on the vaccine stuff, which I believe is right now much more heavily censored than the trans stuff. Either way, I'm not a fan of censoring "misinformation" in general, bad ideas should be countered with good ideas. I'll check out that episode, thanks for sharing.
quirino 4y ago
I'm a big fan of how simple, unobtrusive, and quick the pages on Substack are. Truly a breath of fresh air compared to so much of the web these days.
- DamnableNook 4y ago
  I think this is a byproduct of being email first. PMs love to hate on email because they can’t add a bunch of noise, animations, videos. But so far as I’m concerned, that’s not a limitation, it’s a feature.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  The one thing I don't like about Substack's design is the popup trying to get an email address. Its annoying to always have to click "let me read it first" instead of just being able to read the post. Because of that particular dark pattern to trick people into giving Substack their email addresses, I wouldn't call their design unobtrusive but it is nonetheless still better than most of the modern web.
  - majou 4y ago
    If they styled the "let me read first" to be more `democratic' (i.e. easier to scan for) I'd have 0 complaints. Maybe also as a button with an hr to separate it from the email form.
derekzhouzhen 4y ago
They aim at different markets. Substack is for writers that already have a following, it is more like a SaaS. Medium is for upstarts trying to gain a following through the platform, it is more like a social network.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Is this really true? I thought that Substack allowed for discovery because you could see what other publications someone followed. So if you saw a smart comment on a popular substack, you could then click on the author and discover what else she was reading. They obviously also promote rising stars, but IDK what it takes to become a rising star in the first place.
  - derekzhouzhen 4y ago
    Now that Substack is on the offense they are trying to branch into the social network market. Time will tell how successful they can be. Or there will be another SaaS encroach into their stronghold should Substack become too social-ly and antagonize the writers.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    it's basically true. Yes Substack has discovery mechanisms but given that most successful people on the platform are former social media personalities I doubt this cross pollination matters much. It's effectively a blog generator with a built in payment button. A lot of the success of Substack hinges on the fact that Twitter exists. It's the social media funnel to the site where most of the actual value is.
neerajdotname2 4y ago
This is a good write up on the difference between Substack and Medium. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-future-of-substack https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-future-of-...
koinedad 4y ago
I never got into Medium but I’m pretty optimistic about Substack, and have liked what I’ve seen so far
- aintmeit 4y ago
  Yes, maybe the next Substack article will be the blog that saves you. Maybe it'll tell you how to free yourself from the checkmate that fate has you in.
guywithahat 4y ago
I think the real question is why didn't Medium do what Substack does? Seems like the logical business move (although maybe it wasn't as obvious when Substack started)
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Medium tried to cater to specific writers and promoting specific publications even before Substack was a thing, but like most of Medium's initiatives it died due to neglect.
gonehome 4y ago
Medium sucked - it’s the opposite of Substack. Substack lets writers retain their own brand and their own access to their audience. They empower their writers with the platform. Medium requires writers to give up that independence to support Medium’s (imo crappy) brand and ad driven model.
aliqot 4y ago
Yes
1123581321 4y ago
Yes, from the demand side, it is the new Medium because that's where readers that didn't have a curated set of blog/column subscriptions or bookmarks are going for breath-of-fresh-air articles and technical analysis. On the supply side, it's a different business and discovery model, as many others have noted. But you are asking about the demand side, i.e., what people are reading and sharing.
krallja 4y ago
Always has been.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
ghaff 4y ago
The main (only?) value of Medium from my perspective was that I occasionally cross-posted there when I had something of general interest that 1.) I wanted some broader discovery and/or 2.) It seemed to suggest (however incorrectly) a greater gravitas than a personal blog for linking from another site. Maybe substack is similar. And maybe it's better at monetization though I don't really care and I suspect serious monetization is a real power law thing anyway. I'm not convinced personally about posting to substack rather than keeping on an independent blog.
gnicholas 4y ago
At one point I thought that Substack did what Medium should have done. Then I realized they launched many years apart, and probably if Medium had tried the Substack approach, it wouldn't have succeeded. I also find it interesting that Substack is now migrating toward an app approach ("read all your articles in this app!"), which is basically what Medium was from the beginning. I have wondered how much the Substack team intended this from the beginning, and if the newsletter angle was largely for differentiation ("what makes you guys different from Medium?"). Also, in case anyone was not aware, Medium's founder/CEO (Ev William) departed this summer. [1] I wonder what the circumstances were, who owned what share, etc. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliecoleman/2022/07/12/medium-founder-evan-williams-is-stepping-down-as-ceo/?sh=3b76528a1cdf https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliecoleman/2022/07/12/medium-...
- tonystubblebine 4y ago
  He’s still the majority shareholder and effectively in control. I am the new CEO and he is my boss through his role as chairman. I talk to him a couple times a week.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing. Is there a way to get in touch? I had chatted with Ev about a collaboration a few years back and would be interested to find out if our tech (which increases reader engagement) would be a fit for the direction you're taking Medium. My contact info is in my profile. Either way, good luck! I will look forward to seeing what you have in store.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    If he's still in control, how does being the CEO work? Isn't he still basically the chief executive decision maker at the end of the day even though you are named CEO?
    - tonystubblebine 4y ago
      This is board dynamics. The CEO runs the company but the board decides whether the CEO keeps their job. Since Ev controls the board he is effectively the decision maker on my job. Thus he is my boss. I talk to him because he knows a lot and we had a prior working relationship. It ends up that he is my sounding board and advisor. But he doesn’t make decisions or plans or lead the teams.
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
These things seem to come and go in cycles. In a few years Substack will probably end up just like Medium as they try to "cross the chasm" - Typical VC-funded company incentives. There is already a lot of low-quality spam on the platform. You don't need $50-100M in funding and (soon) hundreds of employees to run a simple newsletter site. This only forces the company to over-engineer and push intrusive monetization to make meaningful investor returns. Just like Medium, Quora, etc. These were great simple products, until the pressure to justify their valuation and return money to investors ruined them.
- baby 4y ago
  ^ this. It’s too easy to create your blog, and there isn’t much that you can bring to a writer besides a promise of an audience. I don’t think any of these products will ever win. It’s also sort of uncool to write for these platforms, sort of how uncool wordpress was in its early days.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Thorentis 4y ago
    Writing for Substack isn't uncool. In fact if anything, it is extremely in vogue right now. But I agree with GP that eventually it will go the way of Medium, and a new "cooler" platform will take its place.
    - baby 4y ago
      I don’t know any top blogger who used that platform, so I’m not sure I understand your comment.
      - ifqwz 4y ago
        Top bloggers aren't stupid enough to put their blogs in someone else's platform.
    - 4y ago
blockwriter 4y ago
I’m a fan of Substack, was never a fan of Medium, but I do worry that Substack will gradually get better and better for writers, and then gradually worse and worse until it becomes unusable.
victor9000 4y ago
Nothing is more infuriating than being blocked from reading an article on Medium when the original author clearly had the goal of freely educating as many people as possible.
- smitty1e 4y ago
  You can subscribe via RSS and obtain Medium content.
- cyounkins 4y ago
  I don't think this happens unless the author enables monetization on the article?
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    This is true, but the author is strongly incentivized to allow monetization because the question is posed in terms of "do you want publications to be able to republish this article" (paraphrasing). If you want this to be possible, then the article is put behind the paywall.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  The author can set the visibility status. If the author wants it to be freely available, that's an option. The downside is that the article then cannot be pulled into publications.
busymom0 4y ago
I never paid for a single article or author on medium and I have no idea if I even can? On Substack, I have been a paid subscriber to 6 pages and wish I could pay subscribe to even more if I could afford it.
- chatterhead 4y ago
  I'm very curious as to why that is.
  - amitgupta6 4y ago
    Same here. Wow I just realized that I wouldn't pay $5/month to medium but I am paying over $50/month to various subscriptions on substack.
majou 4y ago
No. Medium is bloated trash with dark patterns; Substack has always loaded quickly for me and has transparent monetization. I expect this to remain the case because they do cool things like provide legal support for their customers https://on.substack.com/p/legal-support-for-substack-writers https://on.substack.com/p/legal-support-for-substack-writers
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Medium started like that too. It's the circle of startup life.
- cube00 4y ago
  For now, until stock holders demand higher returns year on year.
ryanSrich 4y ago
Was Medium paying people to write? Substack’s current growth hack seems to be paying certain writers as a way to subsidize subscription support. So I don’t think Substack’s goal is as clear as some might think. They aren’t a picks and shovels newsletter company. That was just a way to get people writing for them. It seems their real goal is to become a genuine publishing company.
- joegahona 4y ago
  Yes, Medium introduced some kind of rev-share model a few years ago. https://medium.com/earn https://medium.com/earn
tptacek 4y ago
Yes.
the-printer 4y ago
This is my first time ever using the phrase “signal-to-noise ratio”, but I think that Substack’s is starting to lean on the side of noise. There is something about consciously writing and publishing with a subscriber count and monetization model looming over you that may make writing poor or attract poorer writers in general. I reckon it’s 6 months away from officially becoming “Diet Medium”.
personjerry 4y ago
Related, recently I've seen a lot of HN links to blogs published using this: https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/ At first I thought it was a Bear.app feature but it's actually a separate free, open-source blog service: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/ https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/
- altilunium 4y ago
  Bearblog and prose.sh is very good. I use them both.
- chatterhead 4y ago
  "Shun the bloat of the current web, embrace the bear necessities." I'm signing up just for the pun I didn't see coming.
jemurray 4y ago
There are a great number of people who write just for the love of writing. I wish more of these people would forego the “centralized blogging” platforms and publish using independent systems. When Covid hit I set out to write one article a day using my own self hosted site. Over time it organically started to become more popular. A few of posts are now first page search results. As pointed out by a number of people already, money will end up corrupting what was once a great and easy outlet for people to share original ideas. A better alternative is to continue building systems that make it easier to publish independently AND create search engines that are not optimized to return SEO optimized click bait garbage for profits. I want blogs from real people who write because they want to teach me something. Let’s get back to writing good content, share it freely, and change the world.
- atq2119 4y ago
  Writing well is a way to distill what you've learned into a concentrated form that makes it worth reading. Therefore, unless it's basically a diary, writing one "article" per day will necessarily either stop or turn to blogspam over time.
  - jemurray 4y ago
    I could not agree more. My daily updates did stop. Writing something that is not complete shit for an entire year was hard. However, writing is also a personal experience. This again, is why I say write for the joy of writing. My goals were 1) become a better writer 2) focus on something that takes more then a few days, and see it through 3) document as much as I could about things I've learned over my career 4) write about things I love, which is something I think other nerdy people enjoy. In this example, my blog became more of a conscious stream. The articles that resinated with "my people" organically became popular. No SEO. No clickbait. No search-engine/spam shenanigans. Real writing from a real person with a real goal.
cmod 4y ago
Substack does suffer from the same potential terminal illness as Medium: An extremely high valuation relative to addressable market. I think both businesses were good low hundred-million-dollar businesses. Medium never found a way to justify their ~$1B cap. Substack's current valuation is currently $650M based on recent funding.
- tonystubblebine 4y ago
  Not that it matters, but Medium never had a $1B cap.
klelatti 4y ago
I wrote a post about writing on Substack on my (tech-focused) Substack a few weeks ago [1]. TLDR it's helped cure my procrastination. Two further observations: - The fact that it is a newsletter service and articles land in people's inboxes makes me much more cautious about trying to ensure that the work is of sufficient quality than I suspect would be the case for a blog / medium. I don't want to be embarrassed and I don't want readers to unsubscribe. This seems quite different to Medium. - Substack's recommendation system does provide a very meaningful boost in subscriber numbers. There is quite a bit of concern though about whether this is reduces incentives for writers to attract new readers to Substack and so will ultimately harm the platform. [1] https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/substack-friction-and-the-paradox https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/substack-friction-and-t...

186 points by chatterhead 4y ago

Seeing a lot more Substack and fewer and fewer Medium articles. Anyone else notice this seemingly happened slowly but consistently over the last year?

galaxyLogic 4y ago

I wrote several Medium articles. But then trying to read other people's articles I hit the free-limit and couldn't read them. I had hoped that even if my articles don't make we money at least they could let me read articles written by others on the same "medium". But it didn't. So I stopped publishing on Medium. Maybe I'll give Substack a try.

augasur 4y ago

I liked Medium from the beginning, when it launched, it was one of my favorite platforms to read, lots of great articles, always found something new to read in the tech or crypto space, but as the time has passed articles became worse and worse, lots of paywalls, some interesting authors stopped posting and I left it. I can't even remember when I last logged in there.

Comevius 4y ago

Substack makes a lot of money from promoting misinformation on vaccines, climate change and other issues, harming a lot of people. I rarely click on Substack links, they managed to attract all the propagandists and cultists other platforms weeded out for a reason.

chatterhead 4y ago
You should start a Substack to combat all that misinformation. Facts are facts and people will recognize truth, right?
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  It takes an herculean amount of effort to counter misinformation. Deep state, conspiracy, Dr. Who is paid by Pfizer. Heads you lose; tails you lose. All of that crap. It's a losing game that keeps you on the defensive. You can cite facts and evidence but your up against memes essentially to reduce the sound bite to its essence. They will make shit up and have fake experts to support their positions and publish it in second tier places including substack. It drives clicks. Mainstream news orgs cite twitter of all places. All you can do is encourage critical thinking which means asking people to explain their positions and being genuinely curious about their answers.
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    I bet you could study this on hacker news of all places. Take posts on specific subject matter and have experts rate the comments. Then have a random set of people rate them. See what you get. I bet most of us are wrong in our opinions. There's that weird effect when you read a newspaper article about something you are expert in and notice everything they get wrong... then read the next article and take it all in verbatim. Not sure what the psychologists call it.. if it doesn't have a name it needs one.

scottcorgan 4y ago

This is InVsion vs Figma.

ksherlock 4y ago

I was thinking that the other day, but for a different reason. In the beginning, quora, medium, substack, etc, they succeed due to good content. Once they build a reputation, they open the floodgates and throw it away. For the past few years, I skip over medium links -- not because paywalls but because it's probably low quality garbage. HN substack links have generally been good quality. But the last couple I've seen here were trending downwards.

preseinger 4y ago

No.

chatterhead 4y ago

OP here. My takeaway from this entire thread is this: We need a publishing platform that is owned by the writers based on their paid subscriber counts, time on platform and number of posts. It's really the only way to create a platform with staying power and maintainable core values.

joegahona 4y ago
Can you say more about this? > We need a publishing platform that is owned by the writers based on their paid subscriber counts, time on platform and number of posts. I'm not getting what you mean by "based on."

ageek123 4y ago

It's like Medium but with a much higher ratio of quality blogs to garbage.

raydiatian 4y ago
I can’t agree more. Hopefully it doesn’t go the way of Medium.
- aliqot 4y ago
  My overly cynical interpretation: All signs point to 'eventually' don't they? Look at the history of everything, it's inevitable. Either you get big enough to become garbage, or you stay small and fade out. The single exception to this is Bandcamp. <-- evidently I jinxed it. So maybe Bandcamp is not the exception.
  - russelg 4y ago
    Bandcamp was recently acquired by Epic so we'll see how long that lasts...
    - echelon 4y ago
      Epic wants to nurture creatives, so I strongly doubt they'd try to squeeze it. Especially not before the full plan comes into fruition. The game plan is this: 1. Draw capital from Fortnite and investments (Tencent, Sony, etc.) 2. Build up creative tools (Unreal Engine, Metahuman), marketplace ecosystems (Bandcamp, ArtStation), and platforms (Epic Games Store) to build the movies and games of tomorrow. Make them more compelling and synergistic than peer competitors. Tim Sweeney is gambling he can turn anyone creative into a filmmaker or game designer. The long term game is to then take 10-15%. It'll be interesting to see if Godot develops at a fast enough clip to become compelling to the next generation of game developers and eventually companies that want full IP rights. It'll also be interesting to see if Adobe and other media companies can stop Epic from eating their Hollywood lunch. AI/ML might also throw a wrench into these plans.

ecshafer 4y ago

Substack might be the new medium, and I think that's a good thing. Substack has a way for writers to get paid. I do pay for a few writers on substack, I don't even know if that is a thing at medium. Best thing about Substack over Medium, is that Medium was the most annoying blogging platform, it didn't like that I highlighted as I read. And it was really bad at finding more from an author.

rhaksw 4y ago
Yeah, Substack is something new and seems to be gaining traction. I wonder if its success has contributed at all to Reddit's CEO saying he wants users to earn money, > Spez - I want our users, user-users and moderator users, to make money on reddit. Specifically, I want them to make money from other users. And so we need to have business models where users are paying money to other users or to subreddits. I would like subreddits to have the ability to be businesses. We have a lot of subreddits that are kind of trying to do this, but the platform just doesn't support it. https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/xhuaqf/are_we_allowed_to_discuss_what_spez_brought_up_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/xhuaqf/are_we_a...
- technion 4y ago
  I read your quote and I thought "nah, it's probably just Spez pushing crypto again". Then I click your link and he goes on to suggest Reddit NFT have been a community success. Then he talks about making people's lives better. The more I read, the more I felt that initial suggestion was correct. I do acknowledge noone else in that thread seemed to jump on that point.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Of all the NFTs in the world the Reddit ones are the most pitiful.
dehrmann 4y ago
I'm not sure how big of an issue writer pay is because there seems to be an infinite supply of people who will write for free trying to make a name for themselves.

PaulHoule 4y ago

I think of the average substacker as a serious writer, often they have a background doing journalism. I think the average Medium writer doesn’t have much to say other than maybe ‘me too’. There are quite a few right-wing sub stacks that I don’t agree with but they tend to be well written by people who treat it as a job. And that’s the thing, Medium is mostly a way to express or promote yourself, but some people really make a living writing a substack.

yonaguska 4y ago
It's the right wing writers, or more specifically, the medically controversial writers that got me onto the site in the first place, mostly because certain authors are deplatformed everywhere else, or they can't write about certain topics. I'm glad that they're leveraging this- but I also hope that this doesn't become the entire site. Seems like it's a very diverse range of writers so far, and I hope it stays that way.
- Kye 4y ago
  >> "medically controversial writers" If you mean the people who think they know more about trans people than actual trans people and the entire credible medical establishment, here you go: (this first episode of the new season is free) https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/the-war-over-gender/umc.cmc.1jj39s607lehulo4k0iscsarp?showId=umc.cmc.4fcexvzqezr25p9weks6sxpob https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/the-war-over-gender/umc.cmc.... Of course, there's plenty of existing media and documentation, but he covers a lot of recent developments in anti-trans misinformation and even had on religious, conservative parents who were initially skeptical of their kids' trans identities in the panel portion. Jon Stewart is also way more liberal than the usual person who covers this, so he carries weight with the sort of people who fall prey to this sort of propaganda. The interview portion reminds me of his bits on Crossfire and Mad Money. He doesn't get mad, he gets aggressively disappointed. He likes to like people regardless of politics, and doesn't like when someone makes that hard, and it shows here.
  - yonaguska 4y ago
    I was actually commenting on the vaccine stuff, which I believe is right now much more heavily censored than the trans stuff. Either way, I'm not a fan of censoring "misinformation" in general, bad ideas should be countered with good ideas. I'll check out that episode, thanks for sharing.

quirino 4y ago

I'm a big fan of how simple, unobtrusive, and quick the pages on Substack are. Truly a breath of fresh air compared to so much of the web these days.

DamnableNook 4y ago
I think this is a byproduct of being email first. PMs love to hate on email because they can’t add a bunch of noise, animations, videos. But so far as I’m concerned, that’s not a limitation, it’s a feature.
bdw5204 4y ago
The one thing I don't like about Substack's design is the popup trying to get an email address. Its annoying to always have to click "let me read it first" instead of just being able to read the post. Because of that particular dark pattern to trick people into giving Substack their email addresses, I wouldn't call their design unobtrusive but it is nonetheless still better than most of the modern web.
- majou 4y ago
  If they styled the "let me read first" to be more `democratic' (i.e. easier to scan for) I'd have 0 complaints. Maybe also as a button with an hr to separate it from the email form.

derekzhouzhen 4y ago

They aim at different markets. Substack is for writers that already have a following, it is more like a SaaS. Medium is for upstarts trying to gain a following through the platform, it is more like a social network.

gnicholas 4y ago
Is this really true? I thought that Substack allowed for discovery because you could see what other publications someone followed. So if you saw a smart comment on a popular substack, you could then click on the author and discover what else she was reading. They obviously also promote rising stars, but IDK what it takes to become a rising star in the first place.
- derekzhouzhen 4y ago
  Now that Substack is on the offense they are trying to branch into the social network market. Time will tell how successful they can be. Or there will be another SaaS encroach into their stronghold should Substack become too social-ly and antagonize the writers.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  it's basically true. Yes Substack has discovery mechanisms but given that most successful people on the platform are former social media personalities I doubt this cross pollination matters much. It's effectively a blog generator with a built in payment button. A lot of the success of Substack hinges on the fact that Twitter exists. It's the social media funnel to the site where most of the actual value is.

neerajdotname2 4y ago

This is a good write up on the difference between Substack and Medium. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-future-of-substack https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-future-of-...

koinedad 4y ago

I never got into Medium but I’m pretty optimistic about Substack, and have liked what I’ve seen so far

aintmeit 4y ago
Yes, maybe the next Substack article will be the blog that saves you. Maybe it'll tell you how to free yourself from the checkmate that fate has you in.

guywithahat 4y ago

I think the real question is why didn't Medium do what Substack does? Seems like the logical business move (although maybe it wasn't as obvious when Substack started)

minimaxir 4y ago
Medium tried to cater to specific writers and promoting specific publications even before Substack was a thing, but like most of Medium's initiatives it died due to neglect.

gonehome 4y ago

Medium sucked - it’s the opposite of Substack. Substack lets writers retain their own brand and their own access to their audience. They empower their writers with the platform. Medium requires writers to give up that independence to support Medium’s (imo crappy) brand and ad driven model.

aliqot 4y ago

Yes

1123581321 4y ago

Yes, from the demand side, it is the new Medium because that's where readers that didn't have a curated set of blog/column subscriptions or bookmarks are going for breath-of-fresh-air articles and technical analysis. On the supply side, it's a different business and discovery model, as many others have noted. But you are asking about the demand side, i.e., what people are reading and sharing.

krallja 4y ago

Always has been.

quickthrower2 4y ago

ghaff 4y ago

The main (only?) value of Medium from my perspective was that I occasionally cross-posted there when I had something of general interest that 1.) I wanted some broader discovery and/or 2.) It seemed to suggest (however incorrectly) a greater gravitas than a personal blog for linking from another site. Maybe substack is similar. And maybe it's better at monetization though I don't really care and I suspect serious monetization is a real power law thing anyway. I'm not convinced personally about posting to substack rather than keeping on an independent blog.

gnicholas 4y ago

At one point I thought that Substack did what Medium should have done. Then I realized they launched many years apart, and probably if Medium had tried the Substack approach, it wouldn't have succeeded. I also find it interesting that Substack is now migrating toward an app approach ("read all your articles in this app!"), which is basically what Medium was from the beginning. I have wondered how much the Substack team intended this from the beginning, and if the newsletter angle was largely for differentiation ("what makes you guys different from Medium?"). Also, in case anyone was not aware, Medium's founder/CEO (Ev William) departed this summer. [1] I wonder what the circumstances were, who owned what share, etc. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliecoleman/2022/07/12/medium-founder-evan-williams-is-stepping-down-as-ceo/?sh=3b76528a1cdf https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliecoleman/2022/07/12/medium-...

tonystubblebine 4y ago
He’s still the majority shareholder and effectively in control. I am the new CEO and he is my boss through his role as chairman. I talk to him a couple times a week.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Is there a way to get in touch? I had chatted with Ev about a collaboration a few years back and would be interested to find out if our tech (which increases reader engagement) would be a fit for the direction you're taking Medium. My contact info is in my profile. Either way, good luck! I will look forward to seeing what you have in store.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  If he's still in control, how does being the CEO work? Isn't he still basically the chief executive decision maker at the end of the day even though you are named CEO?
  - tonystubblebine 4y ago
    This is board dynamics. The CEO runs the company but the board decides whether the CEO keeps their job. Since Ev controls the board he is effectively the decision maker on my job. Thus he is my boss. I talk to him because he knows a lot and we had a prior working relationship. It ends up that he is my sounding board and advisor. But he doesn’t make decisions or plans or lead the teams.

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

These things seem to come and go in cycles. In a few years Substack will probably end up just like Medium as they try to "cross the chasm" - Typical VC-funded company incentives. There is already a lot of low-quality spam on the platform. You don't need $50-100M in funding and (soon) hundreds of employees to run a simple newsletter site. This only forces the company to over-engineer and push intrusive monetization to make meaningful investor returns. Just like Medium, Quora, etc. These were great simple products, until the pressure to justify their valuation and return money to investors ruined them.

baby 4y ago
^ this. It’s too easy to create your blog, and there isn’t much that you can bring to a writer besides a promise of an audience. I don’t think any of these products will ever win. It’s also sort of uncool to write for these platforms, sort of how uncool wordpress was in its early days.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Thorentis 4y ago
  Writing for Substack isn't uncool. In fact if anything, it is extremely in vogue right now. But I agree with GP that eventually it will go the way of Medium, and a new "cooler" platform will take its place.
  - baby 4y ago
    I don’t know any top blogger who used that platform, so I’m not sure I understand your comment.
    - ifqwz 4y ago
      Top bloggers aren't stupid enough to put their blogs in someone else's platform.
  - 4y ago

blockwriter 4y ago

I’m a fan of Substack, was never a fan of Medium, but I do worry that Substack will gradually get better and better for writers, and then gradually worse and worse until it becomes unusable.

victor9000 4y ago

Nothing is more infuriating than being blocked from reading an article on Medium when the original author clearly had the goal of freely educating as many people as possible.

smitty1e 4y ago
You can subscribe via RSS and obtain Medium content.
cyounkins 4y ago
I don't think this happens unless the author enables monetization on the article?
- gnicholas 4y ago
  This is true, but the author is strongly incentivized to allow monetization because the question is posed in terms of "do you want publications to be able to republish this article" (paraphrasing). If you want this to be possible, then the article is put behind the paywall.
gnicholas 4y ago
The author can set the visibility status. If the author wants it to be freely available, that's an option. The downside is that the article then cannot be pulled into publications.

busymom0 4y ago

I never paid for a single article or author on medium and I have no idea if I even can? On Substack, I have been a paid subscriber to 6 pages and wish I could pay subscribe to even more if I could afford it.

chatterhead 4y ago
I'm very curious as to why that is.
- amitgupta6 4y ago
  Same here. Wow I just realized that I wouldn't pay $5/month to medium but I am paying over $50/month to various subscriptions on substack.

majou 4y ago

No. Medium is bloated trash with dark patterns; Substack has always loaded quickly for me and has transparent monetization. I expect this to remain the case because they do cool things like provide legal support for their customers https://on.substack.com/p/legal-support-for-substack-writers https://on.substack.com/p/legal-support-for-substack-writers

IshKebab 4y ago
Medium started like that too. It's the circle of startup life.
cube00 4y ago
For now, until stock holders demand higher returns year on year.

ryanSrich 4y ago

Was Medium paying people to write? Substack’s current growth hack seems to be paying certain writers as a way to subsidize subscription support. So I don’t think Substack’s goal is as clear as some might think. They aren’t a picks and shovels newsletter company. That was just a way to get people writing for them. It seems their real goal is to become a genuine publishing company.

joegahona 4y ago
Yes, Medium introduced some kind of rev-share model a few years ago. https://medium.com/earn https://medium.com/earn

tptacek 4y ago

Yes.

the-printer 4y ago

This is my first time ever using the phrase “signal-to-noise ratio”, but I think that Substack’s is starting to lean on the side of noise. There is something about consciously writing and publishing with a subscriber count and monetization model looming over you that may make writing poor or attract poorer writers in general. I reckon it’s 6 months away from officially becoming “Diet Medium”.

personjerry 4y ago

Related, recently I've seen a lot of HN links to blogs published using this: https://bearblog.dev/ https://bearblog.dev/ At first I thought it was a Bear.app feature but it's actually a separate free, open-source blog service: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/ https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/

altilunium 4y ago
Bearblog and prose.sh is very good. I use them both.
chatterhead 4y ago
"Shun the bloat of the current web, embrace the bear necessities." I'm signing up just for the pun I didn't see coming.

jemurray 4y ago

There are a great number of people who write just for the love of writing. I wish more of these people would forego the “centralized blogging” platforms and publish using independent systems. When Covid hit I set out to write one article a day using my own self hosted site. Over time it organically started to become more popular. A few of posts are now first page search results. As pointed out by a number of people already, money will end up corrupting what was once a great and easy outlet for people to share original ideas. A better alternative is to continue building systems that make it easier to publish independently AND create search engines that are not optimized to return SEO optimized click bait garbage for profits. I want blogs from real people who write because they want to teach me something. Let’s get back to writing good content, share it freely, and change the world.

atq2119 4y ago
Writing well is a way to distill what you've learned into a concentrated form that makes it worth reading. Therefore, unless it's basically a diary, writing one "article" per day will necessarily either stop or turn to blogspam over time.
- jemurray 4y ago
  I could not agree more. My daily updates did stop. Writing something that is not complete shit for an entire year was hard. However, writing is also a personal experience. This again, is why I say write for the joy of writing. My goals were 1) become a better writer 2) focus on something that takes more then a few days, and see it through 3) document as much as I could about things I've learned over my career 4) write about things I love, which is something I think other nerdy people enjoy. In this example, my blog became more of a conscious stream. The articles that resinated with "my people" organically became popular. No SEO. No clickbait. No search-engine/spam shenanigans. Real writing from a real person with a real goal.

cmod 4y ago

Substack does suffer from the same potential terminal illness as Medium: An extremely high valuation relative to addressable market. I think both businesses were good low hundred-million-dollar businesses. Medium never found a way to justify their ~$1B cap. Substack's current valuation is currently $650M based on recent funding.

tonystubblebine 4y ago
Not that it matters, but Medium never had a $1B cap.

klelatti 4y ago

I wrote a post about writing on Substack on my (tech-focused) Substack a few weeks ago [1]. TLDR it's helped cure my procrastination. Two further observations: - The fact that it is a newsletter service and articles land in people's inboxes makes me much more cautious about trying to ensure that the work is of sufficient quality than I suspect would be the case for a blog / medium. I don't want to be embarrassed and I don't want readers to unsubscribe. This seems quite different to Medium. - Substack's recommendation system does provide a very meaningful boost in subscriber numbers. There is quite a bit of concern though about whether this is reduces incentives for writers to attract new readers to Substack and so will ultimately harm the platform. [1] https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/substack-friction-and-the-paradox https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/substack-friction-and-t...