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Substack Notes Launched
- gumby 4y agoIs there a way to follow notes via RSS? This is how I read regular substack posts.
- jeff_tyrrill 4y agoThere does not appear to be officially. No RSS feed is declared in the main index page metadata, and adding /feed to the URL doesn't work as it does with "newsletter" pages. However, by poking around in my browser debugger's XHR calls, it only took me a few hours to write a translator from Substack's (not-publicly-supported) JSON-based browser API to RSS.
- amadeuspagel 4y agoI've already noted that when you select text on substack, it shows a popover with a "ReStack Quote" button. I think when any blogging platform — medium does this as well — shows a popover when you select text, it's over. Selecting text is such a natural mechanic, there are so many reasons you might want to select text, I often even do it to "play" with the text, or to focus on a specific part.
- abhayhegde 4y agoIs that basically like Twitter then? A micro-blogging feature? Maybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links containing to Substack.
- ARandomerDude 4y ago> Maybe that's why Twitter had blocked retweeting links containing to Substack. That seems to have accelerated the shift for some to Substack [1] (imagine if Google blocked searches for Bing or Brave!). Suppressing Substack makes the Twitter brand look weak and nervous. 1. https://reason.com/2023/04/10/elon-musk-matt-taibbi-twitter-substack/ https://reason.com/2023/04/10/elon-musk-matt-taibbi-twitter-...
- gwen-shapira 4y agoSubstack also removed the "Also publish to Twitter" checkbox from the settings screen before publishing each post.
- reaperducer 4y agoIs that Substack being evil, or the result of Twitter locking almost everyone out of its API recently?
- gwen-shapira 4y agoI just shared an interesting fact that I learned while posting on Substack this morning. I don't know the reason, and generally I don't think of product changes in terms of good and evil.
- basisword 4y agoI think that was because Twitter revoked their API access including breaking their Sign in with Twitter feature (at least that’s what I read a few days back).
- LegitShady 4y agoprediction - substack goes nowhere, like they currently are. Suppressing substack when substack is trying to advertise for a twitter competitor is just common sense. There's no need for twitter to advertise for a competitor. That isn't censorship, thats just normal business. If substack was depending on twitter for free data and free advertising they were the ones who were weak and nervous.
- r053bud 4y agoTwitter was supposed to be the "public square", even Elon said as much. Restricting which goods and services are sold or marketed in said square is a shift away from that mentality.
- 4y ago
- rchaud 4y agoIt's admitting that managing infrastructure for email newsletters is not a viable business. After all, you can't serve people targeted third party ads with just email.
- runnerup 4y agoWhy not? Could insert an ad into the email. Personalized for each recipient even.
- jabradoodle 4y agoIt depends what you mean by viable. Substack newsletters have a paid option, substack can take a cut of that and the infra costs of sending emails is tiny. If you want to bethe next massive aquistion/IPO, then maybe not.
- dilap 4y agoI think it was a bad move by Elon to ban (and good move to reverse, though some damage already done), but I see why he was pissed: it's a straight-up Twitter clone.
- praisewhitey 4y agodefaulting to a "Home" feed that includes posts from people I've never heard of is a bad start https://substack.com/notes https://substack.com/notes
- Laaas 4y agoHow would you know people are using it otherwise? Better than an empty feed.
- rchaud 4y agoJust a few days back, I was downvoted for guessing that this would be their "algorithmic recommendation" moment, because I was seemingly assuming malice about the developers' intentions. Uh, no, I was observing how every other "social media" company has done this, and was guessing that Substack, having already told its users to write more frequently, would jump in with both feet.
- coldpie 4y agoFor me, it's just an empty login form, and I'm not going to register an account just to see what's there. I'm sympathetic to the idea of paying for content directly (I spend over $100/mo on Patreon), but I feel like Substack has cultivated a nasty branding issue for themselves. To me, and I know I'm not alone, Substack is where you go when you want to hear some 17-year-old who got high for the first time tell you what THE MANNNN doesn't want you to know, duuude. Greenwald and Taibbi and the like. I guess there's probably other types of content on there, but that's all I ever see from the domain. Anyway I'm not going to register an account to see whatever's going on with Notes. Good luck, guys.
- ugh0 4y ago[flagged]
- drcongo 4y agoYou're not alone. Substack is also where former journalists publish when those pesky editors decide to fact check them and find them wanting.
- ugh0 4y ago[flagged]
- claytonjy 4y agoOn the hand I know exactly what you mean about Greenwald and Taibbi (and so many other neoreactionary media folks), but it's also where I get great content from economists (Noah Smith, Claudia Sahm, Doomberg) and technologists (our own Simon Willison, Gergely Orosz, Molly White). The media folks are clearly escaping scrutiny and playing to their base, but there are many excellent Substackers in other fields!
- jononomo 4y agoI think it would be fantastic if Substack Notes were to become dominant and replace Twitter.
- Johnie 4y agoWhat's the rationale?
- jononomo 4y agoI got banned from Twitter for tweeting that I would commit suicide if I were still programming in Java after the age of 50. I appealed, and I got rejected by a bot (I know because my appeal was rejected instantaneously). So I think Twitter is stupid. Also, Elon is stupid.
- barbazoo 4y agoBig Twitter alternative announced on ... Twitter
- capital_guy 4y agoYeah, I think @dang should change this link to the official announcement at https://on.substack.com/p/notes https://on.substack.com/p/notes
- oldstrangers 4y agoCurious how they plan to handle handles. Right now they're using full names for link text and having the URL as the unique identifier. Seems difficult to account for in the actual notes when you have multiple instances of the same name or full name (for example I'm @Zachary).
- skybrian 4y agoIt’s a start. Hopefully they’ll improve the reader experience. Having a single general-purpose forum (a “firehose”) doesn’t really work for me since it’s so random, but with so little content, it’s probably necessary for now. Subscribing needs improvement. Subscribing to a hashtag might make sense? It seems like subscribing to someone’s notes and their blog should be independent, because maybe someone has a good blog but you don’t care for their notes, or vice-versa. Having them tied together also doesn’t work for people like me who use RSS. I don’t usually want email from blogs I read, so I only subscribe to blogs where I’m interested in the paid content and usually turn the email off. I think this loses what makes Substack interesting, though, which is keeping the community for each blog separate, so you don’t care what people are saying on other blogs that you don’t read. Putting everyone in one community, or an unclear blob of overlapping communities, seems likely to be bad for the same reasons Twitter can often be bad. I guess blogs need discovery, though, and maybe external sites aren’t enough? (I think I’ll repost this as a note, since they need the content.)
- jabradoodle 4y ago> I think this loses what makes Substack interesting I have the same concern. Substack creators are paid for highly engaging content as individuals subscribe to individual content creators. I don't see how that mechanism works with short form content; it could easily prove to be another platform where number of minutes of eyes on content is the metric that's optimised, rather than engagement with high quality content.
- _jplc 4y ago> Sub stack dot com / notes Elon's regexp for matching Substack links just got defeated.
- capital_guy 4y agoI'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.
- hereme888 4y agoThey were messing with Twitter by downloading massive amounts of data from them. Why wouldn't Elon do what he did? I returned to Twitter recently due to great features like Community Notes. I don't see what people are complaining about.
- hersko 4y agoHow is twitter ruined? My personal experience on the site has not changed much.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoSame. Except for the new “For You” tab, my feed is almost 100% the same.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoCounter anecdote: my personal experience is that the site is less entertaining. I've encountered technical bugs more, such as replies not loading without refreshing multiple times. The "for you" page doesn't show me anything I want to see. The checkmark thing remains super confusing to me. The quality of the ads I've been served have noticeably decreased/gotten more skuzzy.
- LastTrain 4y ago> The quality of the ads I've been served have noticeably decreased/gotten more skuzzy. This is my experience as well, and is the thing the higher ups at Twitter should be really concerned about. Low rent.
- lpolovets 4y agoI’m a little unclear on what subscribing means in the context of Notes + Newsletters. Does subscribing to someone in the Notes product mean I’m also subscribed to emails from the person? If so, that’s not a great dynamic — I’d like to follow 100s of people in Notes, but that doesn’t mean I want to subscribe to 100s of newsletters.
- clessg 4y agoThis appears to be correct based on my extremely limited experience thus far. It's pretty confusing. However, apparently the emails can be disabled: https://substack.com/profile/364398-judd-legum/note/c-14472668 https://substack.com/profile/364398-judd-legum/note/c-144726... > 1. Go to Settings on the web version of substack.com > 2. Scroll down to you publications > 3. Click into any publication you don’t want to get emails. > 4. Deselect “Receive emails for new posts” Hoping they improve the experience.
- 7h3rAm 4y agoSocial 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/ https://nostr.how/
- Night_Thastus 4y agoEvery time I have seen any form of social media/platform/forum/whatever put "free speech" and anti-censorship as their primary goals, it always ends the same way - hate speech, antisemitism, racism, sexism, etc. Whether by design or because such sites just attract those kind of individuals, that's not good for a couple of key reasons: 1: Those kinds of interactions turn away many potential users 2: It makes advertising basically impossible (No potential advertiser wants to be associated with that kind of site) There's a good reason that as sites like Reddit got larger, they started to clamp down on less desirable content. And any form of social media with no advertising is always going to be very tiny and niche, and in general likely to die out quickly.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoNo thanks. Social networks are non essential. Twitter and Substack Notes can go away tomorrow and no one will bat an eyelid. In these cases, people just want to go to a website or a mobile app, click around and have some foolish fun for sometime. Banking networks need protocols, not social media, which is intrinsically about dumb fun. That is why Mastodon and these things will never be as popular.
- inpdx 4y agoYou seem to have no recollection of how Twitter has played an outsized role in fast reporting on breaking events, such as the Arab Spring.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoTwitter is not important. Breaking news were always there on TV from the beginning of time.
- ghiculescu 4y agoI love Substack. But apart from to mess with Twitter I really don’t understand the point of this. https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-14461479 https://substack.com/profile/241262-casey-newton/note/c-1446... I’d a good summary. I don’t want to subscribe to hundreds of newsletters to see tweet (sorry, notes). But if you change that setup, it really is a Twitter clone with no upside to writers.
- ALittleLight 4y agoI kind of see this as the whole "Substack is trying to become Twitter before Twitter becomes Substack" kind of race. Twitter added long tweets and subscriptions, if you could do markdown formatting and inline images in your long tweets - why would Substack authors stay on Substack when they could post basically the same thing to Twitter and have more audience (or potential audience) exposure. If Substack sees the above as an existential risk - which it might be if Twitter executes well, then Substack is replying by trying to do the reverse to Twitter.
- soneca 4y ago> ”why would Substack authors stay on Substack when they could post basically the same thing to Twitter and have more audience (or potential audience) exposure.” Because they wouldn’t have the followers’ email addresses, which is a big advantage to Substack.
- rcarr 4y agoThey really needed this to exist about 6 months ago or whenever it was that Musk bought Twitter. There was a mass exodus then to Mastodon, and if they’d have brought this out then I reckon they would have done a good job of immediately dethroning Twitter as I reckon lots of journalists and writers would have jumped on board. Now they’re going to have to do it the long hard way and try and build the audience organically. I reckon they might be able to do it, but it’ll take them at least a few years because they missed the golden goose.
- linuxftw 4y ago
- japhyr 4y agoI'm looking forward to trying this, but the app crashed after posting my first reply to someone. Busy day for Substack engineers, I imagine!
- xd1936 4y agoThis would be much more interesting to me if it was a member of the Fediverse and supported ActivityPub.
- einpoklum 4y agoHow would this be better than Mastodon? (Really asking, I only ever tried Mastodon for a bit.)
- xuancanh 4y agoMastodon lacks personalized sorting in its news feed as well as account-to-follow recommendations. A news feed that is strictly organized in chronological order becomes unusable when users follow more than 100 accounts. This can only be solved by having a centralized services like Substack.
- internetter 4y agoAgreed. I commented this on the announcement thread, but there's so much... Bluesky, T2, Hive, Post, now this. I'm not gonna jump to a new microblogging platform when 10% of my friends are on one, 10% on another. If you are making a twitter clone, AP is the only way to go
- Andrex 4y agoI don't understand why providing and consuming RSS/Atom is so problematic the technical headaches couldn't be overcome...
- arrakeen 4y agoplease no. Substack Notes is a self-quarantine zone for the kind of self-promoting Twitter users who viewed the site as a place for them to engage an audience. despite its many, many faults, at least the Fediverse has real people hanging out and chatting with each other.
- abzolv 4y agoIf you subscribe to someone’s Notes you also subscribe to their email articles. No thank you, especially if aal their articles are behind a paywall. Not sure why Musk is so freaked out over Notes. Probably just general paranoia.
- msabalau 4y agoYou can just receive their notes without subscribing to their newsletter. You'll see their notes in your stream, albeit with an option to subscribe. You can also post notes without even having a newsletter.
- ctvo 4y agoI love that it looks identical to Twitter but is orange. I love that it's going to enrage Elon. He's going to realize that he paid 44 billion for something that's going to lose users to Substack's side project.
- leobg 4y agoEven if that were true, what would you gain from that? If it makes you feel better that Elon Musk (or anyone else) failed at something, you may want to re-evaluate your life's loss function.
- timmytokyo 4y agoOr maybe people want him to fail for the same reason they want someone like Martin Shkreli or Kanye West to fail: because he's bad for society.
- leobg 4y agoI think there are better ways to make the world a better place than wanting someone you don't like to fail. Besides, there's often an ulterior motive - not just for wanting that person to fail, but also for telling yourself that they are "bad for society". Where one cannot love, one should – pass by. - Nietzsche
- mlindner 4y agoReally? It's hard to imagine him doing anything at this point that would offset the good he's done for society. He upset and tore down the military-industrial complex launch monopoly saving the collective US tax payers billions through starting SpaceX (and could soon revolutionize access to space for the average person within the next decade). (Also note that without SpaceX, we'd still be paying money to Russia to send US astronauts to space, which wouldn't be a good look during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.) He created an electrical vehicle revolution that's taking the world by storm, changing industries and pushing us much faster toward ending global warming than would have happened without. It's hard to imagine a few misguided political opinions could offset all of that. Let's be realistic here. (Yes you can't attribute all that to him solely, as Elon himself says commonly, the praise should be given to the workers at SpaceX and Tesla, not him. But at the same time, without him, they would have never happened.)
- Confiks 4y agoCompare the two homepages without cookies [1][2]. The rounded buttons in orange instead of Twitter-blue. The footer nagbar. The similar navigation menu. Following the whole banning-saga my impression was that Notes was a genuine extension of the Substack platform, but it being a frontend clone explains why such a tantrum was thrown by Musk. [1] https://twitter.com/ https://twitter.com/ [2] https://substack.com/notes https://substack.com/notes
- alsodumb 4y agoI'm not saying Twitter front end is that hard to clone, but I wonder how many ex-twitter employees are at Substack now working on Notes.
- paxys 4y agoSeems just like one of the many cookie-cutter Twitter clones out there. I don't think people would even be talking about Substack Notes had it not been for Musk's tantrum.
- lapetitejort 4y agoCompetitors are refining their Musk Tantrum Inducer algorithms to better market their products.
- drusepth 4y agoI wasn't able to see the Substack design until I hacked away at the obtrusive signup wall. Here's a side-by-side comparison for anyone that doesn't want to go through the same process: https://i.imgur.com/On0RZG8.png https://i.imgur.com/On0RZG8.png
- epolanski 4y agoStrikingly similar, but so are most websites anyway.
- twobitshifter 4y agoIf you sign in to twitter the sidebar becomes almost identical
- abzolv 4y agoI use a unique email address for each substack author that I subscribe to. That is incompatible with Notes.
- Obertr 4y agotwitter, is that you dude? what happened?
- 0xDEF 4y agoSubstack is an "absolute free speech" app. They have gotten away with it so far because nobody could see the highly offensive content unless they actively sought after it and subscribed. However now that Substack is becoming more like a conventional social media platform they will have a harder time being an "absolute free speech" app.
- amatecha 4y ago"Our host Nilay asked Substack CEO Chris Best the tough questions about whether racist speech should be allowed in their new consumer product, Substack Notes." https://www.tiktok.com/@decoderpod/video/7221602731998498094 https://www.tiktok.com/@decoderpod/video/7221602731998498094 Never using that shit :)
- snotrockets 4y agoYou make it sound like a bad thing. Being proud of harboring hate speech puts one in a very specific category of people, one I wouldn't be proud to be part of.
- w______roy 4y agoIt's a good thing, I think. "Absolute free speech" is most often championed by people who want to build society around pure logic rather than empirical evidence. The slippery slope bogeyman they gesture to is laughably dated in a time when misinformation and misdirection are so much easier.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tensor 4y agoOne thing that is often lost with the free speech argument is amplification. For example, no one is stopping most people from going and yelling on a street corner. But that doesn't mean that you need to be allowed to speak in a particular venue or platform. Our society is currently not one in which there is a right to "equal volume" on speech, and I think that's a good thing. The entire free speech movement was a response to government literally throwing people in jail for even talking about a given topic. It was never about allowing minority opinions to be as loud as majority opinions.
- kritiko 4y agoLooking at Notes, I get why Elon is so mad about it. They totally ripped off the Twitter UI. I follow Ed Zitron's Substack, and he is also a prolific Tweeter. He seems to be using Notes the same way he uses Twitter, for shitposting. I'm not sure that's really in line with the tone of Substack.
- jacquesm 4y ago> they totally ripped off the Twitter UI I wasn't aware of any IP protection of Twitter's UI, which in one form or another has been done 100's of times.
- kritiko 4y agoI didn't claim there was IP infringement. IG & lots of other companies stole the stories format from Snap. Makes it easier for users who recognize the ui, but it's still got to be galling.
- jacquesm 4y agoWhy? It's just a UI for something where there aren't many alternative ways to present it. Timeline, follower, following. That's it. The rest is styling and that is even less relevant.
- jjulius 4y ago>IG & lots of other companies stole the stores from Snap. I've been saying it since Twitter launched, but Twitter was/is just some folks stealing Facebook's status update.
- pests 4y agoI remember both MySpace and Facebook status updates actually being a copy of Twitter style updates. I don't think Facebook even had status updates as we know it today when Twitter released.
- seydor 4y ago
- runjake 4y agoAs far as I can tell, there's no Substack app (at least for iOS) that allows posting? If so, I don't really see this taking a notable chunk out of Twitter until this happens. I see a Substack Reader app, but it's more or less read-only.
- japhyr 4y agoI think you have to update the app today to get access to Notes.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- keiferski 4y agoSubstack has been adding a lot of random features lately and it makes me worry that they will lose focus on the email newsletter aspect of their platform, which is what I like about it.
- tootie 4y agoThere's a few reasons I'm skeptical. For one they have an equally spotty reputation for arbitrary editorial policy while claiming to be completely agnostic. And secondly there have been a few stories about their distressed fiscal situation. They spent a load of VC money from the zero interest era on prominent writers. Far more than they'd bring in as revenue in the hopes they'd juice the brand. Classic strategy of selling dollars for 75 cents to get traction. Only they'd paid disproportionate amounts to some controversial writers which is, in essence, an editorial policy that speaks in dollars. They've also punished critics. My general belief is that we won't get a better Twitter from VC world. I also have zero confidence in the Fediverse because it has no business strategy. https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/17/23309877/substack-forever-wars-editor-firing-moderation-hamish-mckenzie https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/17/23309877/substack-forever...
- noirscape 4y agoHonestly, my confidence in the Fediverse is in part because it has no business strategy. The tooling behind it is at the moment pretty much universally AGPL (a license which I don't think is very good but it seems to keep away big businesses). It probably won't reach mass-appeal outside of gradually amassing tech nerds, but at the same time... maybe that's for the better? I dunno, I think a lot of the enshittification[0] of social media companies comes in part because of their business strategies. VCs demand eternal growth or an eventual buyout. Fedi doesn't have that incentive. The worst that can happen to it is what happened to e-mail, where you get a few nebulously large providers but it's still more than possible (although with e-mail, rather aggravating due to an outdated tech stack that we've bolted a bunch of asterisks onto to try and make it more suited for general use) to live outside that bubble and interact with that big provider bubble anyway. [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
- rchaud 4y agoWow, didn't exactly stick their necks out on the design did they? Almost zero visual differentiation from the noisy flamewars of Twitter this is supposed to be the antidote to.
- s1k3s 4y agoDoes anyone know what software they use to make these short demo videos? I see them in lots of app landing pages and I'm curious how to make them.
- DoubleDerper 4y agoanimated gifs. lots of free tools available. substack probably has staff designers to make it extra pretty.
- mstade 4y agoI use gifski, it's perfect: https://gif.ski/ https://gif.ski/
- livinglist 4y agothis seems really nice.
- drusepth 4y agoCan gifski handle the initial recording (e.g. selecting an area of your monitor and recording)? Or is it just for converting other recordings into gif?
- mstade 4y agoIt's just for converting. For the actual recording I use the built-in functionality in macOS, it's pretty great: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721
- karaterobot 4y agoNegative. Just a converter.
- rasengan 4y agoOn macOS, you can use Quicktime which lets you also select a geometric region within the screen. Then, you can edit, crop and so forth in iMovie. Finally, you can use ffmpeg to convert to gif. The following command works well: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "fps=10" -loop 0 out.gif To be clear, the loop 0 will make the gif infinitely loop. By setting a number n, it will set the gif to loop n times.
- user00012-ab 4y agoOne thing I noticed right away, is when I scrolled down their page it didn't pop up that horrible popup all substack pages have asking you to subscribe; maybe they can ditch Notes and implement that feature on the rest of substack.
- processing 4y agoclicks link to Notes “Log in to Substack” closes tab
- feliixh 4y ago+1
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pornel 4y agoTo be fair, the signup process is hassle-free.
- twobitshifter 4y agoNo signup on twitter anymore
- potamic 4y agoVery precisely my course of action. As consumers, we will do well to protest and boycott services that ask you to identify yourself unnecessarily. But I had to scroll far to see this comment. The general interest here for a new product and the willingness to look past mandatory login in worrying. I feel companies have successfully normalized this and consumers don't question this much any more.
- jpmattia 4y agoIt wasn't like Twitter's business had a large technical barrier-to-entry. And Musk seems to be pissing away his non-technical barrier-to-entry just about as hard as he can. Good luck to Substack on eating twitter's lunch! Edit: That said, I've found mastodon (@jpmattia@mastodon.mit.edu) to be a much more pleasant interaction compared to twitter, so I'm curious what the landscape looks like in a couple of years.
- Cardinal7167 4y agoThe great shake up has started. Google pissing their pants with AIs abrupt arrival, Twitter dying a death by a million cuts, Facebook in mid-air making their VR play, the tech skyline will look very different in 5 years.
- jimsimmons 4y agoYou should look up global search volumes and Google share of it. There’s no dent
- dmix 4y agoPeople like to be predictors of doom before the hard evidence comes out.
- cfeduke 4y ago> There’s no dent By the time there is a dent, it's too late.
- andy_ppp 4y agoSounds great but you’ll have to provide some logic because I don’t automatically follow your extremely confident opinion…
- lenkite 4y agoPeople here are praying very hard for Twitter to fail. Nearly any social media post nowadays has 50-100 comments predicting Twitter's failure and ranting about Musk. He is living rent-free in many heads now. Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever Twitter/Musk is mentioned.
- oefrha 4y agoHonestly, you can basically do all of Substack + this Notes thing in Tumblr, maybe minus the email newsletter. Damn, that’s something I haven’t heard about in a long time; apparently they support paid content now.
- tedmiston 4y agoMy thoughts exactly. But... paying for a Tumblr sounds weird. People are already used to paying for Substacks, so there's that.
- guywithahat 4y agoWhile cool, this has coincided with Substack not paying the twitter API fee and you can no longer embed tweets on new articles (at least for now)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- upstream 4y agoSubstack and Beehiv is my favorite.
- dang 4y agoUrl changed from https://twitter.com/cjgbest/status/1645804524068818945 https://twitter.com/cjgbest/status/1645804524068818945, which (sort of) points to this.
- 1attice 4y agoI honestly can't imagine a better marketing campaign for Substack Notes than Elon 'Streisand Effect' Musk's ongoing shenanigans. I'm left in awe of the wranglers at SpaceX and Tesla who have managed to keep the companies in question profitable despite being surgically sewn to a narcissistic fauntleroy
- posharma 4y agoMay be I'm old, but I love long form content and twitter took that away. People write long tweet threads instead of thinking things through and writing it in long form. This gives rise to tons of twitter thread collapsing tools/startups that push the concatenation of these tweets to Notion or whatever. This seems utterly silly to me. It almost looks like tech for the sake of tech. It's unfortunate that substack is going in the same direction. Are there no better problems to solve using tech?
- dmix 4y agoYou still don't see many people using long tweets which is good. I used to despise seeing tweet threads starting with [1/20] for years but Twitter integrating their Threader acquisition via "reader mode" which turns multi-tweet threads into a single page like a blog post really helped solved the UI issue with that (blue feature) but I still tend to avoid threads.
- throwaway5752 4y agoSubstack is great for subscription long form content already. It is reliant on Twitter on creating a network for information distribution and curation, though. I don't think Substack is attempting to be more like Twitter - I think Substack needs something like Twitter to sustain the long-form subscription content and this is a defensive move to make sure that Twitter's ongoing collapse doesn't take them out, too.
- tedmiston 4y agoComing Soon: Substack Orange
- charlierguo 4y agoI've been checking out Notes all morning (I write a jargon-free, FOMO-free, AI newsletter). It's kind of a weird product launch? My feed is primarily content that the people I subscribe to post or comment on, but I don't subscribe to that many people. I'm not sure what the average number of subscriptions a Substack user has, but it seems like a very echo-chambery setup right now. As an author there are definitely things that I want to share that aren't worth of an email, but I'm pretty sure very few of my audience members are going to see it. Maybe this makes more sense for writers with audiences who are on the Substack app all day.
- austincassidy 4y agoCompletely agree with this. This is basically the perfect formula for creating mini echo-chambers. If Substack wants to make this a real competitor to Twitter, it needs to have the "two feed" set up that both TikTok and Twitter have: a feed for algorithm-based recommendations and a feed solely for people that the user follows. They also need to make it so that you can follow someone's notes without also following their newsletter.
- jazzyjackson 4y agoSince when did "ignoring-shit-I-didn't-subscribe-to" become a "formula for creating mini echo-chambers" Is my email inbox an echo chamber because I don't get random newsletters from political activists?
- austincassidy 4y agoYour email inbox isn't an echo chamber because it's not a social platform. According to this research study, these are the two main ingredients: 1) Homophily in the interaction networks 2) Bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023301118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023301118 Substack Notes is their way to venture into the social platform realm, which differs from the personal email inbox model, which isn't a social platform. With that in mind, for ingredient #1: people can only see notes from people they follow. People will overwhelmingly only follow people that align with their ideas/political leanings/beliefs. This creates the homophily in interaction networks. For #2, users can easily share biased information to their like-minded peers without pushback/opposing views since their social network is comprised of people with the same viewpoints. To be clear, algorithms can definitely create echo chambers as well but ideally an algorithm based feed will promote discourse and dialogue about ideas. An anecdote: I follow quite a few people on TikTok that post about housing policy in NYC. TikTok's algorithm exposes these videos to people with varying viewpoints, which creates a ton of dialogue on proposed solutions and pushback on ideas that could potentially harm certain demographics/historical areas, etc. This pushback is very important but is only possible when there is a chance for those with opposing views to discover it, which means there needs to be an algorithmic recommendation feature. If TikTok had no FYP and instead people could only watch videos from people they follow, this would create a closed loop system and those opposing views for housing policy would not be nearly as prevalent.
- hiidrew 4y agoI have mixed feelings about this and some of the other twitters clones I've been experimenting with: bluesky, mastodon, read.cv's posts, farcaster. They're reminding me of the wave of audio-first social features that came after the Clubhouse hype. Though I do appreciate the niche focuses of these apps, e.g. posts is primarily designers, farcaster is a lot of crypto people, etc, I still use Twitter for most of my content discovery.
- phtrivier 4y agoYou can now start a timer until they announce that they're going to algorithmically organize the feed of "Notes" because "chronological order is too hard to follow." Then, they will let an Algo organize the feed of articles. Then the ads - no, wait, the "sponsored post - will start popping in, etc, etc... Maybe they won't. I enjoy substack as it is today, and maybe they'll pull it off. But I can't help seing this as the next step towards enshitification. In the words of a 21s century social media author : "so sad".
- MikusR 4y agoCan you explain what you enjoy about substack? It just seems to be Forbes contributors with even less vetting.
- ugh0 4y ago[flagged]
- adamrezich 4y agocan you explain what you mean by "It just seems to be Forbes contributors with even less vetting"? I am subscribed to several different columns, with a couple of paid subscriptions, all about a very wide variety of topics—it's just a blog/podcast platform.
- neither_color 4y agoLayperson here: When I click on a forbes article I usually don't notice the author. On Substack I'm subscribed to specific authors and one former newspaper/ now independent journalist I follow.
- manuelmoreale 4y agoHonest question: why is noticing/not noticing the author relevant to you? Isn’t the point of reading something to consume the actual content? I totally get the point of following people you’re already familiar with and have a track record of quality. Not arguing against that. I’m just interested in your comment about not noticing the author.
- mrahmadawais 4y agoPerfect way to grow Substack. Didn't see this coming.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nullgeo 4y agoThe sign in flow is completely broken for me. I am signing up with an email, after I click the verification link it takes me to a page where I need to enter my email yet again. Here it says I already might have an account and sends another verification email which does the same thing again. Also found other issues the site after going to the home page. Multiple modals overlapping with the sign in flow.
- Hamuko 4y agoSame. Managed to get in by opening one of the links in Chrome instead of my usual Firefox. Haven't managed to set a password yet though. It's a real fucking mess.
- lcnmrn 4y ago[flagged]
- obblekk 4y agoThis 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 for my last 100 embedded items, and see if new note has relevance > 50%. If so, add it to my feed inventory. Resort my feed inventory by semantic relevance every hour. Remove items older than 7 days from feed inventory every hour. Step 3: On page load, move everything in my feed inventory to my feed archive - never rerank again. (Bonus points for tracking note level views rather than assuming all were viewed, but small detail). Bonus Step 4: Every 4th item in my feed inventory, intersperse something that's solely there based on popularity/top liked note of all notes visible to all of my followings. i.e., show me something possibly irrelevant but viral. That'll get you pretty far, each step can be endlessly optimized over time. I want to see the results of this so bad that I'll volunteer to build v1 this weekend if you really don't have time to do it internally. Tiktok for text... could be amazing.
- 2h 4y ago> 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?
- DanHulton 4y ago...and his actions. He's not just a nebulous political creature, thinking thoughts but not acting upon them. He's actually _doing_ things that people might rightly not agree with. Not to mention, a good chunk of those actual actions have resulted in Twitter being a legitimately worse place for a great number of people to spend time on/engage with, and thus they... leave.
- rosywoozlechan 4y agoWhenever someone criticizes Elon Musk I just remember he sent a car he drove, a car built by a company he leads, into heliocentric orbit using his own rockets via his own space launching tech company. I don't know how you can talk about the guy without that context. People talk about him like he's just another jerk on Twitter. His car is in space. He's also the wealthiest person on the planet. And his car is in space.
- deanCommie 4y agoWhenever someone criticizes Elon Musk, it's not about his abilities to launch a car into space. In fact most of us would much prefer that he focused on his space launching abilities and electric-car making abilities (with the usual caveat that it's not clear how much of both are based on his contributions vs others, but I'm willing to give some benefit of doubt). He doesn't know anything about tunneling (boring company), mass transit (hyper loop), software (twitter), or social platforms (twitter). And those are the areas he gets criticized for.
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- exizt88 4y agoLooks very good. I wonder how the product team is thinking about user retention. I caught myself thinking "Huh, there's a lot of interesting content here — I hope I don't forget to look at it tomorrow". Not sure how to solve that without being annoying, TBH.
- buzzwords 4y agoThe fact that I have to be signed in to see people's notes/tweets means that I will not use it any time soon.
- 13years 4y agoSo, I gave it a try today. Was hopeful, because on Twitter all my posts go essentially into the void. However, Substack Notes seems to have no method for discovery. They add some random larger accounts to my feed. You can't search Notes to find people posting content in order to find others potentially interested in similar content. So, unless you already have a large following, seems like posting into another void. People are reluctant to follow you as well, since you must subscribe to the persons newsletter, they are the same action.
- jononomo 4y agoPerhaps they will have improved the product in a few months. I'm sure they're collecting a lot of feedback.
- 13years 4y agoI'm just amazed that no social media has really attempted to put what you view in mostly the control of users. I put forward this suggestion to Twitter, I doubt they will use it, but it is currently ranked 4th by up votes. https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/1363 https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/1363
- hrpnk 4y agoI use Substack by subscribing to every blog with a unique email address, just as one would do for a newsletter. Forcing me to login to a single account is not going to work beyond a single email address that I can pick.
- seydor 4y agoBut the name ... couldnt they name it "Stacks" or something
- that_guy_iain 4y agoWhoever approved that name must be crazy. Googling that is coming up with everything else. Looking on the AppStore is the same.
- joegahona 4y agoThat occurred to me too. You want something that has meaning but isn't insanely generic. So something between "Notes" and "Nostr."
- therealmarv 4y agoDead on arrival. You cannot transfer a crowd to another platform.
- abledon 4y agoPeople may berate twitter as being a 'simple' app, but everyone uses it because everyone is already there. Substack can't clone that 'first mover' advantage.
- willio58 4y agoAs someone who consumes twitter posts without even having an account, I don't really care if a 'tweet' comes from twitter or substack.
- yawnxyz 4y agowish they could have an API soon so you could create new notes / posts and get a list of them
- mrwnmonm 4y agoI can't take it anymore
- wdb 4y agoLooks like you can’t explore Notes without signing up? Bummer
- PaulHoule 4y agoSubstack really competes with creators leaving and setting up their own newsletter + payment gateway software. That’s like a $20,000 or so project from a web dev firm and for a creator who gets $200,000 a year from their newsletter it pays for itself in a year. The trouble is that substack makes almost all of its money from two handfuls of users who make more than that so if substack loses those creators it is left with all the expenses but none of the revenue. The question about any feature they add is “what does it do about that situation?”
- runako 4y agoThis is similar to the "Amazon problem," where manufacturers can earn a higher margin by selling direct. >The question about any feature they add is “what does it do about that situation?” The answer is the same in the cases of Amazon & Substack: generating sales isn't free, and in all likelihood the platform can do it cheaper than you can. Take the $200k writer who pays $20k to Substack annually. Either Substack can generate 166 subscriptions ($10/mo) annually so it's worth the money, or you move. (That's almost correct: if you are a writer, it may be worth it to you to let Substack continue to own this piece so that you don't have to run a business. There's a lot of value in being able to focus on thinking and writing and not SEO and ad placement.)
- PaulHoule 4y agoIt's an interesting case. So far the superstars of Substack (say Matt Taibbi) were superstars before Substack and promote Substack as opposed to the other way around. Substack competes with traditional journalism, which delivers more journalism per dollar than the typical Substack but is based around the strength of the brand of The Guardian or The Economist as opposed to that of the individual journalist. From the viewpoint of the journalist the newspaper is an aggregator that is doing their marketing work for them. Substack also competes with Medium which plausibly claims to be doing promotional work for its authors, but despite claiming to be a place which is a little bit better than the rest of the web it's actually a place that is a little worse than the rest of the web and isn't making significant amounts of money for anyone.
- 4y ago
- orsenthil 4y agoCan I look at a note without logging in first?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MasterScrat 4y agoI'm looking for a new platform to write technical blog posts, is Substack the right place? I'm basically looking for the "Medium from when Medium was good"
- asenna 4y agoI've been enjoying Farcaster in recent months. I think they've taken a very thoughtful approach with the "sufficiently decentralized" philosophy [1] and that openness is now helping them grow the ecosystem of apps using the network. [1] - https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decentralization-for-social-networks https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...
- Eumenes 4y agoOn this episode of a boring dystopia: a twitter clone
- Thorentis 4y agoThey should add a paid add-on where writers can have an LLM generate snippets from their articles and then post them as notes automatically in order to generate a bite sized feed from existing content. Gives Substack a foot in the AI door and paves the way for timelines and algorithmic feeds, etc.
- astroalex 4y agoAll substack.com pages freeze for me on iOS Firefox. Anyone else?
- bostonvaulter2 4y agoI'm surprised no one seems to have commented on the lack of usernames, I think the lack of usernames may hinder adoption since it's much harder to follow someone just from seeing a tweet, err note, displayed. With Substack Notes you'll need to know the user's id, or search by their non-unique name.
- j45 4y agoSubstack notes is an interesting reimagining of blog post comments to be presented in a more familiar social media style.
- hackerlight 4y agoDoes anyone have a method to discover good writers on Substack? There's so much trash there that I'm tuning out every writer that publishes on Substack, except for a small handful that I already knew about.
- getcrunk 4y agoI was in mobile and clicked the link to try notes and it redirected me to App Store. Lol So much for giving a new platform a try. I will never use this
- hnaouesteuho 4y agoI wonder if the founders really want to be launching this, or if this is a move pushed by their VCs.
- sidcool 4y agoAs much as I love Twitter, I welcome the competition. Twitter needs a vitamin shot
- ticviking 4y agoIf this isn’t in app I don’t see how it has any way to get traction.
- perceptronas 4y agoI wonder, if Substack Notes fail – will Substack survive? It feels like they are pivoting into not-that profitable domain
- rldjbpin 4y agoi am not an avid user of either platforms, but substack just seems like another take at medium to me, more than twitter. am i missing something in my understanding?
- padraic7a 4y agoI can't see a single Note without logging in, or in my case creating an account. That's a hard limit on exploration.
- papito 4y agoI can see why Elon is hysterical. An actual long-form publisher, with content creators, with proper "blue checks" and a customer base paying for more than vanity badges. I spent a few minutes on it, and yeah, it IS a Twitter clone, and it's a real threat.
- cyclecount 4y agoSeems like their infrastructure is not holding up today (a good sign that the launch has got a lot of attention?). I cannot load article pages without 2-3 tries.