5 ms·

Dear Substack: Quit Sending Me Your Corporate Propaganda

39 points by shortformblog 3y ago

shortformblog 3y ago
I noticed this guy’s post after seeing him comment on a similar post today: https://on.substack.com/p/boomerang/comment/16218081 https://on.substack.com/p/boomerang/comment/16218081 I thought it was useful to point out because it highlights the way that overly positive messaging comes off to people who aren’t seeing success with your tools. I don’t know the solution to this problem, but I think he raises some very valid points about getting too high on your own supply.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Substack has the serious problem that it gets almost all its revenue from two handfuls of superstars and any of them could afford to hire some web developers to hook up an e-mail newsletter script to a payment gateway and keep more money. These authors are promoting Substack and not the way around. In the end it leads to Twitter-style enshitification as opposed to Facebook or Google-style enshitification because it is not a matter of a greedy company feeling pressured to take more but rather a matter of a “situation that can’t go on won’t.”
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    The timing of your comment is uncanny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35974037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35974037
  - flappyeagle 3y ago
    They would need to hire a team for that. They are not going to run their own servers. Now they are distracted from writing. Back to substack they go.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      Remember Digg?
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      Superstar substackers make upward of $1M a year and can afford the team. Myself I developed a paid API gateway (oddly commercial API gateways that bribe bloggers to spam spam spam to promote themselves and have a huge marketing budget offer every feature other than charging to access your API) and an email newsletter script that ran serverless in AWS. Both have run for years without me looking at them. If they had a baby that would be a substack replacement. Quite a few ‘creator economy’ types who have had problems with the big platforms have struck out on their own like this guy https://www.combatvetnews.com/ https://www.combatvetnews.com/
      - jdminhbg 3y ago
        > Superstar substackers make upward of $1M a year and can afford the team. $1M means $100k in Substack take, how much of a team are you going to buy for that? Yes, you might be able to contract a team to set you up for less than that, but you might also not know what you're doing and contract a team that wastes $50k and doesn't deliver.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  You can click on his name and read some of his material, and then find out why he isn't getting any conversions. Not everyone who dreams of being a writer is writing something other people are interested in. Substack has problems and I don't use it or read anything on it regularly, but I don't think thats why that particular poster is having trouble.
  - InitialLastName 3y ago
    Even if the writing were interesting (which, I can't rule out short-form serialized fictional therapy sessions being interesting to someone), it's a really bad fit for a blog promotion platform like substack. The way the posts end up arranged makes it actively difficult to get to the beginning and figure out what's going on, especially with indistinguishable titles.
    - shortformblog 3y ago
      I would argue the issues that both of you raise are rooted in the fact that there may not be enough hand-holding at the beginning of the newsletter building process.
boringg 3y ago
Substack is going to go the way of clubhouse.
- nickff 3y ago
  What exactly do you mean, and why do you think that? As originally posted, your comment strikes me as vague and unpersuasive.
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  False. My statement with no supporting evidence or even a semblance of an argument holds the same veracity as yours.
  - boringg 3y ago
    Thats true. Its anecdotal. My comment really should be more concise that after considerable hype it seems to be waning and has lost traction with most likely a retreat as oppose to a total collapse similar to clubhouse. Anecdotally people keep bad mouthing substack, not a great sign.
    - flappyeagle 3y ago
      The difference is, I pay money for multiple substack subscriptions to authors I enjoy reading and find value in. Those authors don't show any sign of leaving the platform because they get to run a newsletter without hiring any technical staff and the money keeps coming in. I don't think the same could be said of anyone on clubhouse.
- tacker2000 3y ago
  Bad comparison. Medium would be a much better example.
benjaminwootton 3y ago
This seems like an overly negative take. You can be a user or customer or a service, and still be part of an important movement or community. In this case the movement of compensating independent writers is quite a noble one I can get behind. This can of course be cynically exploited by corporates, but I don’t if it’s done with authenticity then i dont find it to offensive.
abnercoimbre 3y ago
What's interesting is some of the investors who helped fund Twitter also helped fund Substack, so their rivalry seems suspect. Seems the real game is going on "up there" and we're just not clued in.
giftedhorse 3y ago
What an ironic post given that the author's domain is "Empathy Novel". Or was that intentional? Here are some ways this author is misguided: - "Appeal to emotion is bad": No, it's a totally valid business strategy. Literally all good marketing (Apple billboards, etc) is appeal to emotion. Sure, maybe you're "above" that, but many people aren't. Lots of people want to feel like they're a part of something instead of just being an emotionless business robot. - "Substack relies entirely on external traffic": If I remember correctly, Substack has said that traffic from Twitter is ~2% of their inbound traffic. I could be wrong though. Also, so what? - "pay hundreds of dollars per year to read their goddamn blogs" - Substack is literally mostly free. What is this guy on about? Honestly it seems like a guy who didn't see any personal success on Substack maybe because his writing (and logic) aren't superb, then received a poorly-timed email from Substack and decided to vent about it.
- ldehaan 3y ago
  [dead]
- giftedhorse 3y ago
  I looked at this author's other posts, and I sort of understand why he's so angry. He complains again in April about lack of discovery on Substack (aka 'nobody's reading my stuff'). But are the posts worth recommending? His posts are all snippets of some sort of book (or play?) that he's writing. Example - his latest post is titled "Empathy No. 123 01/11/03, Roderick bedrm. 2:00 PM (approx)". It's a few sentences of dialog that have zero context. Even if these posts were recommended, what would you guess the clickthrough rate for a title like that is? I'd say that Substack's recommendation algorithm is doing just fine not recommending these posts. Sure, Substack could probably do better at discovery. But there are other possible explanations for "nobody's reading my writing" than simply "Substack sucks".
- RheingoldRiver 3y ago
  > If I remember correctly, Substack has said that traffic from Twitter is ~2% of their inbound traffic. FWIW this is unlikely to have any correlation to their total inbound traffic, but moreso to demonstrate that Twitter itself is notoriously bad at generating any outbound traffic (from Twitter to anything) itself. I was actually surprised that the author mentioned Twitter in their list of referrals period for this reason. It was known by advertisers for ages that Twitter was a poor source of click-throughs but when Twitter started showing view metrics on tweets, everyone started realizing the click-through rates on links were abysmal compared to other social media sites. It's like Tiktok, you're consuming short bytes of content, you stay there to continue consuming short bytes of content. You don't leave to go read a long [whatever].
pembrook 3y ago
The problem with Substack is they'll never make enough revenue to cover all the VC expectations they raised without turning into a network effects/semi-walled-garden social media platform. They just don't know it yet. You can see this dilemma first hand in that email they spammed everyone with today. It starts by saying: "Unlike most other online media platforms, we don’t seek to lock our customers into a walled garden by controlling their relationship with their audience" Yet, at the end of the same email they tout the benefits of their walled garden and customer lock-in: "37% of my paying subscribers had existing Substack accounts. 27% had saved credit cards on the Substack system, which made it a one-click experience to sign up for my paid newsletter. 11% came from platform features like Substack leaderboards, recommendations, or promotions." So which is it? Are you an open platform, or are you a network effects business pedaling access to that network for a 10% cut? The evidence is clear when you look under the hood. Substack won't allow you to recommend any non-Substack publication on their growth widgets. They try to get readers to download the Substack app to fully own the eyeballs that creators bring them. They've even launched a Twitter competitor. They're not building some non-profit open protocol here...and that's okay! Let's just stop pretending otherwise. Personally, I think Substack should lean fully into becoming the next Twitter and stop trying to play the "good guy" card. Shut off custom domains and fully own the traffic like they're trying to do anyways. If they were to lean into the walled-garden social aspects, maybe the platform wouldn't have looked so rudderless to investors and they wouldn't have failed to raise their last round.
- tacker2000 3y ago
  I agree, they are going to go the way all these platforms have gone, such as Medium, etc…
medion 3y ago
This: “For all the talk you’ve made about changing things, your service remains an absolute nightmare of discovery. There is no meaningful way to grow an audience on this site - it has to come from outside.”

39 points by shortformblog 3y ago

I noticed this guy’s post after seeing him comment on a similar post today: https://on.substack.com/p/boomerang/comment/16218081 https://on.substack.com/p/boomerang/comment/16218081 I thought it was useful to point out because it highlights the way that overly positive messaging comes off to people who aren’t seeing success with your tools. I don’t know the solution to this problem, but I think he raises some very valid points about getting too high on your own supply.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Substack has the serious problem that it gets almost all its revenue from two handfuls of superstars and any of them could afford to hire some web developers to hook up an e-mail newsletter script to a payment gateway and keep more money. These authors are promoting Substack and not the way around. In the end it leads to Twitter-style enshitification as opposed to Facebook or Google-style enshitification because it is not a matter of a greedy company feeling pressured to take more but rather a matter of a “situation that can’t go on won’t.”
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  The timing of your comment is uncanny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35974037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35974037
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  They would need to hire a team for that. They are not going to run their own servers. Now they are distracted from writing. Back to substack they go.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Remember Digg?
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Superstar substackers make upward of $1M a year and can afford the team. Myself I developed a paid API gateway (oddly commercial API gateways that bribe bloggers to spam spam spam to promote themselves and have a huge marketing budget offer every feature other than charging to access your API) and an email newsletter script that ran serverless in AWS. Both have run for years without me looking at them. If they had a baby that would be a substack replacement. Quite a few ‘creator economy’ types who have had problems with the big platforms have struck out on their own like this guy https://www.combatvetnews.com/ https://www.combatvetnews.com/
    - jdminhbg 3y ago
      > Superstar substackers make upward of $1M a year and can afford the team. $1M means $100k in Substack take, how much of a team are you going to buy for that? Yes, you might be able to contract a team to set you up for less than that, but you might also not know what you're doing and contract a team that wastes $50k and doesn't deliver.
LegitShady 3y ago
You can click on his name and read some of his material, and then find out why he isn't getting any conversions. Not everyone who dreams of being a writer is writing something other people are interested in. Substack has problems and I don't use it or read anything on it regularly, but I don't think thats why that particular poster is having trouble.
- InitialLastName 3y ago
  Even if the writing were interesting (which, I can't rule out short-form serialized fictional therapy sessions being interesting to someone), it's a really bad fit for a blog promotion platform like substack. The way the posts end up arranged makes it actively difficult to get to the beginning and figure out what's going on, especially with indistinguishable titles.
  - shortformblog 3y ago
    I would argue the issues that both of you raise are rooted in the fact that there may not be enough hand-holding at the beginning of the newsletter building process.

boringg 3y ago

Substack is going to go the way of clubhouse.

nickff 3y ago
What exactly do you mean, and why do you think that? As originally posted, your comment strikes me as vague and unpersuasive.
flappyeagle 3y ago
False. My statement with no supporting evidence or even a semblance of an argument holds the same veracity as yours.
- boringg 3y ago
  Thats true. Its anecdotal. My comment really should be more concise that after considerable hype it seems to be waning and has lost traction with most likely a retreat as oppose to a total collapse similar to clubhouse. Anecdotally people keep bad mouthing substack, not a great sign.
  - flappyeagle 3y ago
    The difference is, I pay money for multiple substack subscriptions to authors I enjoy reading and find value in. Those authors don't show any sign of leaving the platform because they get to run a newsletter without hiring any technical staff and the money keeps coming in. I don't think the same could be said of anyone on clubhouse.
tacker2000 3y ago
Bad comparison. Medium would be a much better example.

benjaminwootton 3y ago

This seems like an overly negative take. You can be a user or customer or a service, and still be part of an important movement or community. In this case the movement of compensating independent writers is quite a noble one I can get behind. This can of course be cynically exploited by corporates, but I don’t if it’s done with authenticity then i dont find it to offensive.

abnercoimbre 3y ago

What's interesting is some of the investors who helped fund Twitter also helped fund Substack, so their rivalry seems suspect. Seems the real game is going on "up there" and we're just not clued in.

giftedhorse 3y ago

What an ironic post given that the author's domain is "Empathy Novel". Or was that intentional? Here are some ways this author is misguided: - "Appeal to emotion is bad": No, it's a totally valid business strategy. Literally all good marketing (Apple billboards, etc) is appeal to emotion. Sure, maybe you're "above" that, but many people aren't. Lots of people want to feel like they're a part of something instead of just being an emotionless business robot. - "Substack relies entirely on external traffic": If I remember correctly, Substack has said that traffic from Twitter is ~2% of their inbound traffic. I could be wrong though. Also, so what? - "pay hundreds of dollars per year to read their goddamn blogs" - Substack is literally mostly free. What is this guy on about? Honestly it seems like a guy who didn't see any personal success on Substack maybe because his writing (and logic) aren't superb, then received a poorly-timed email from Substack and decided to vent about it.

ldehaan 3y ago
[dead]
giftedhorse 3y ago
I looked at this author's other posts, and I sort of understand why he's so angry. He complains again in April about lack of discovery on Substack (aka 'nobody's reading my stuff'). But are the posts worth recommending? His posts are all snippets of some sort of book (or play?) that he's writing. Example - his latest post is titled "Empathy No. 123 01/11/03, Roderick bedrm. 2:00 PM (approx)". It's a few sentences of dialog that have zero context. Even if these posts were recommended, what would you guess the clickthrough rate for a title like that is? I'd say that Substack's recommendation algorithm is doing just fine not recommending these posts. Sure, Substack could probably do better at discovery. But there are other possible explanations for "nobody's reading my writing" than simply "Substack sucks".
RheingoldRiver 3y ago
> If I remember correctly, Substack has said that traffic from Twitter is ~2% of their inbound traffic. FWIW this is unlikely to have any correlation to their total inbound traffic, but moreso to demonstrate that Twitter itself is notoriously bad at generating any outbound traffic (from Twitter to anything) itself. I was actually surprised that the author mentioned Twitter in their list of referrals period for this reason. It was known by advertisers for ages that Twitter was a poor source of click-throughs but when Twitter started showing view metrics on tweets, everyone started realizing the click-through rates on links were abysmal compared to other social media sites. It's like Tiktok, you're consuming short bytes of content, you stay there to continue consuming short bytes of content. You don't leave to go read a long [whatever].

pembrook 3y ago

The problem with Substack is they'll never make enough revenue to cover all the VC expectations they raised without turning into a network effects/semi-walled-garden social media platform. They just don't know it yet. You can see this dilemma first hand in that email they spammed everyone with today. It starts by saying: "Unlike most other online media platforms, we don’t seek to lock our customers into a walled garden by controlling their relationship with their audience" Yet, at the end of the same email they tout the benefits of their walled garden and customer lock-in: "37% of my paying subscribers had existing Substack accounts. 27% had saved credit cards on the Substack system, which made it a one-click experience to sign up for my paid newsletter. 11% came from platform features like Substack leaderboards, recommendations, or promotions." So which is it? Are you an open platform, or are you a network effects business pedaling access to that network for a 10% cut? The evidence is clear when you look under the hood. Substack won't allow you to recommend any non-Substack publication on their growth widgets. They try to get readers to download the Substack app to fully own the eyeballs that creators bring them. They've even launched a Twitter competitor. They're not building some non-profit open protocol here...and that's okay! Let's just stop pretending otherwise. Personally, I think Substack should lean fully into becoming the next Twitter and stop trying to play the "good guy" card. Shut off custom domains and fully own the traffic like they're trying to do anyways. If they were to lean into the walled-garden social aspects, maybe the platform wouldn't have looked so rudderless to investors and they wouldn't have failed to raise their last round.

tacker2000 3y ago
I agree, they are going to go the way all these platforms have gone, such as Medium, etc…

medion 3y ago

This: “For all the talk you’ve made about changing things, your service remains an absolute nightmare of discovery. There is no meaningful way to grow an audience on this site - it has to come from outside.”