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Medium lived long enough to become the villain. It was honestly quite the heel turn, but they’re all in. As far as I am concerned everyone should just move to
by donatj 4y ago
Medium lived long enough to become the villain. It was honestly quite the heel turn, but they’re all in.
As far as I am concerned everyone should just move to substack at this point.
- lzauz 4y agoMedium has been the villain for quite some time now. But not so fast about Substack... they recently started showing modals. In the end, running a website costs money. What are you going to do.
- canadianfella 4y ago
- donatj 4y agoFor what it’s worth I find their modals relatively unobtrusive and easily dismissed. It’s not great but like you said, they need to make a living.
- thinkmcfly 4y agoSwitch platforms before investors can make their money back. Everyone wins!
- thinkingemote 4y agoAre the modals opt in or configurable by the author?
- cpcallen 4y agoSubstack also gets lots of revenue from subscriptions. If that's not enough to keep the platform up then perhaps they need to try to take a bigger cut (or not offer service to authors who have too few subscribers). There's no reason for authors (who are Substack's customers) to want to make the platform more annoying for readers (some of whom are the author's customers). If the author is not making enough money (perhaps because Substack has started taking a bigger cut to cover costs) they need only to improve their writing and/or put more of it behind the paywall in order to get more subscribers.
- imglorp 4y agoThose modals are infuriating. Every time you go to SS for a different article, it will nag you. Does anyone have a uBlock rule to drop them all?
- dredmorbius 4y agoI'm using this in Stylish, a CSS manager browser extension: /* Substack modals, nags, etc. */ [class*="frontend-components-SubscribePrompt"] { display: none; } Saved as "Substack" and applied to any page/domain which uses Substack. Otherwise, for UBO, these two should work: ###.frontend-components-SubscribePrompt-module__subscribeDialog--2_6UY.frontend-pencraft-FlexBox-module__flex-align-center--21WCV.frontend-pencraft-FlexBox-module__flex-direction-column--2sph3.frontend-pencraft-FlexBox-module__flex--fK-9V ###.frontend-components-SubscribePrompt-module__background--2DQPj I suspect Substack vary their element names (e.g., the "2_6UY" and "2DQPj" strings in the above list), so that substring matches as I've used in my CSS example should be more robust. UBO uses the Easylist blocking syntax which ... I can't seem to find documented, so I'm guessing as to the specific patterns. Corrections/clues welcomed.
- james_pm 4y agoWhy move from one corporate entity to another? Substack will end up going down the same road in time. Get your own domain, fire up a CMS and start publishing on something you control and own.
- mcv 4y agoWe really need to move towards self-hosted content, self-hosted social media, etc, instead of surrendering ourselves to arbitrarily-run walled gardens.
- jbaber 4y agoThis is hard for non-technical people and I want to hear what they have to say. The only thing I like about twitter/facebook/medium/etc. is that I get to see what the whole world would do if they knew how to `vim index.html`. In this case, it's even harder because it's about maintaining a website synchronized with a mailing list. Make something open source and ad-free and they'd all run to it, I'm sure.
- mcv 4y ago> This is hard for non-technical people and I want to hear what they have to say. I agree, so maybe we should work towards making it easier for them. I was thinking about spending my Christmas break fixing Friendica bugs, but now I'm suddenly thinking about building my own ActivityPub blogging platform (though no doubt one already exists). But of course that's not going to be enough; it needs to be trivial to deploy and host, at little cost. I believe many cloud hosting providers have a free tier. Would be nice if something like this could be easily deployed there. Create a tool that sets the whole thing up, handles the DNS name, the payments, and deploys the site. In fact, it would be nice if ISPs offered something like that for free with your internet connection, to finally do justice to that 'S' in their name.
- djbusby 4y agoThat used to be a thing they offered. A dial-up or DSL connection and like 25MB of web-hosting.
- paulgb 4y agoThe problem all these sites have is that the domain starts as a signal of high quality — either because they are initially exclusive like Medium, or pay high-quality writers to move over. Over time, they regress to the mean and the domain becomes a signal of mediocrity. I understand the need for things like substack to grow an audience, but I maintain that someone who really wants to run a blog for many years should own their audience.
- judgardner 4y agoGoogle results will also rank these “high quality” sites above a self hosted domain. To the point where even a direct string search on an indexed page will never return on Google. Kagi and Brave search do a better job here if you’re looking for content on someone’s self hosted blog.
- pmontra 4y agoHow long before seeing a comment like the next two paragraphs? Substack lived long enough to become the villain. It was honestly quite the heel turn, but they’re all in. As far as I am concerned everyone should just move to ${random_new_platform} at this point.
- orphea 4y agoSubstack did already. They have very annoying subscribe modals, and when they pop up, I just close the site.
- nwoli 4y agoWe shouldn’t move to substack it’ll for sure just repeat history. Just make your own minimal site, especially if you have things worth reading and draws attention
- rpgbr 4y agoCentralizing stuff in another VC-backed startup is… kind risky[1]? [1] https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2022/substack-centralization/ https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2022/substack-centralization/