8 ms·

Leaving Substack

91 points by 8organicbits 3y ago

cranberryturkey 3y ago
ghost is way better. good choice OP!
cmpit 3y ago
I never got the hype of Substack. I use Ghost for a while now and it's fantastic. The fact that it's open-source, self-hostable, super customizable (themes), has free/premium memberships and can be used both as a blog and newsletter is what makes me stick to it.
- freddie_mercury 3y ago
  Substack is free to start. You only start paying once you have paying subscribers. Ghost is $9/month to start, even if only your mom is reading it to start. (And you don't get customisable themes at that tier.) Not hard to see why one is much more popular than the other.
  - smatija 3y ago
    Well Ghost is free if you self-host - but I agree that while hosting it is simple, it is still a barrier to entry.
    - freddie_mercury 3y ago
      Self hosting isn't free. It costs money to run a server.
      - hu3 3y ago
        GitHub pages is free.
- mimon 3y ago
  As we saw recently with Mastodon, for a very large section of users, views on "open-source, self-hostable and super customizable" will range from "don't care" at best to "that's too much hassle, pass" at worst. People just want to write their article and have it come up at the top of Google search results, that's the hype.
- sevagh 3y ago
  Ghost does not have a free membership option on their website: https://ghost.org/pricing/ https://ghost.org/pricing/
vouaobrasil 3y ago
I like substack and write my newsletter on it. That being said, I agree with the author that random platform changes can be very annoying. The only true antitode of sanity is self-hosted, and Ghost self-hosted is an example of this. That being said, I think the big problem with the internet is the very existence of these sorts of large-tech platforms. I wish such platforms didn't exist at all, and people just went to small websites. Following Ivan Illich, I wish there were a "speed/size limit" on the internet so that companies beyond a certain size like Google, Medium, Substack, etc. were precluded from existing.
- brtkdotse 3y ago
  > I wish such platforms didn't exist at all, and people just went to small websites. I wish it too but at this point this is basically pining for Usenet while everyone is on PhpBB-boards. The world has moved on and won’t be coming back.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    UX-wise, what is the difference between Usenet and PhpBB? Both offer threaded topics, chronologically ordered. There are no "likes" or other gamification features. You can subscribe to topics via email and respond via email with both.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  I personally like Mataroa and smol.pub a lot. No nonsense, absolutely minimal spaces to put your thoughts on. I'm not in it for the money, and Mataroa fills what I needs pretty nicely. It stores my small image files, plus markdown files, and represent them as readable coherent block. It provides RSS and Newsletters (which I have disabled), and basic analytics. If you want to see, it's at https://blog.bayindirh.io https://blog.bayindirh.io
  - sureglymop 3y ago
    It looks cool! But, can I fully self-host it and not just point it at my domain? I would support the project but as a sysadmin, I just have an urge to run what I can on my hardware.
tarkin2 3y ago
Medium and Substack are a plight on the web. Substack is better but it'll go the same way as Medium. They start out nice, but then become slow with trackers and what-have-you, and then start charging a commission to read: bait-and-walled-garden. I know not everyone is a programmer and not everyone can make their own website, but I've started to yearn for a livejournal or blogger site and wince when I find myself on a medium.com page
- GardenLetter27 3y ago
  It's a shame as there are economies of scale to having a big platform too. Like I can (and do) host a static blog, but I don't have much time to attend to it - so it's nice on the main platforms that they handle comments and so on.
  - tarkin2 3y ago
    Comments were the only annoying thing on my old site. I used disqus but then that was rather invasive and annoying. A single SQLite3 table and a post, approve and delete end points would be about 100 lines of code and would cater for 90% of hobby/personal sites Part of the reason the web is so soulless and drab is that people no longer have the skills to create simple functionality. I almost yearn for the days of PHP
    - GardenLetter27 3y ago
      ISPs no longer providing free hosting and VMs, and blocking port forwarding doesn't help either.
    - tomhoward 3y ago
      Spam management is the hardest thing about comments. That’s a big part of what Disqus takes care of. I know you wrote that you would want approve and delete so as to moderate comments, but it becomes a big and unpleasant task, wading through the spam comments to find the good ones.
      - 3y ago
Handprint4469 3y ago
> That’s what Substack was in its original form, but now they seem to be focusing on growth for growth’s sake. They also seem to be evolving into a social media platform that thrives on the kind of conflicts and divisiveness that has driven people away from other platforms. Ah yes, the classic enshittification pattern. I was hoping Substack would avoid it by virtue of actually charging readers instead of depending on ad revenue, but there must be something else going wrong here that I'm not aware of. sighs
- aa_is_op 3y ago
  That entire platform's demise can be traced back to that interview where the CEO did everything to avoid saying "nazis are bad." What you're seeing here is society's antibodies at work, slowly carving out the infected part.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    I mean, I think that was certainly an accelerating event, and probably the immediate trigger to move for many, but its other problems had been slowly building, anyway.
  - logrot 3y ago
    Do you have a link to that interview?
    - erinnh 3y ago
      I think hes talking about this podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/can-substack-ceo-chris-best-build-a-new-model-for-journalism/id1011668648?i=1000501710354 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/can-substack-ceo-chris...
    - manuelmoreale 3y ago
      https://www.theverge.com/23681875/substack-notes-twitter-elon-musk-content-moderation-free-speech https://www.theverge.com/23681875/substack-notes-twitter-elo...
jtwaleson 3y ago
Ghost vs. Substack is like Supabase vs. Firebase. I'm with Ghost & Supabase, really enjoy their offerings and very fair and predictable pricing.
noduerme 3y ago
er what's wrong with just putting up static webpages? Very little sysop work required.
- ben_w 3y ago
  My (new) blog is a static webpage. No comment. I wasn't getting many comments on the Wordpress one neither, so that's actually fine for me, but if I was getting many, it would matter a lot.
- joseferben 3y ago
  recent google algo changes seem to penalize domains with a low domain rank even more. if you want to be found through search it makes sense to use an established platform.
- valvar 3y ago
  It's hard for SaaS platforms to monetize, that's what's wrong with it
- vertis 3y ago
  Yes, let's make everyone learn how to deploy static webpages just so they can write a blog or newsletter (◔_◔) (and I say this as someone that has used Jekyll for over a decade)
  - squigz 3y ago
    You know, I'm not sure why this is always put up as some kind of unreasonable expectation. But society has various expectations about skills needed to survive and thrive in the modern day - while not entirely universal, driving might be one of those expectations. Would it be crazy to expect one of those skills to be basic computer & sysadmin knowledge? With that, I would expect most people could host a site on, say, GH pages or similar
    - vertis 3y ago
      It IS an unreasonable expectation. There are so many reasons it's unrealistic, from the fact that it's a niche skill, to the friction that it creates before one can just write or interact with others. Comparing it to driving is not a good example; a much better one might be everyone learning to fly. Because you know then we wouldn't have to take commercial flights. My partner deals with a large set of people that can't manage to print a PDF, let alone deploy a static site to GitHub pages. Lack of technical ability does not imply lack of intelligence. Most of the people she serves could learn to patternmake and design their own garments, but instead they buy her sewing patterns and download them. Because at the end of the day, they want to sew a garment and enjoy it, not jump through the learning required to design the patterns from scratch (though a small subset might eventually do that). I grant you that an increasing set of children are getting a technical education, but they're only one part of a very large global population.
Temporary_31337 3y ago
Something not really covered in the article is the SEO boost from using substack and an easier conversion if you ever decide to monetise your blog directly.
freddie_mercury 3y ago
"I started using Substack because I was looking for a simple newsletter platform that would let me focus on writing. That’s what Substack was in its original form, but now they seem to be focusing on growth for growth’s sake." The article's author is surprised that a VC backed company that has raised $100 million in funding is pursuing growth? It's not "growth for growth's sake". It's "growth to pay back investors".
- Shish2k 3y ago
  I do wonder how long until the average consumer starts considering “VC-backed” as a curse rather than a blessing. Is there merit in advertising my small-scale tech services as “Not vc-backed. Our business model is to serve you, not to sell you out to our investors”?
- Eremotherium 3y ago
  The bigger question IMO is: why the fuck did they raise so much money? Don't they primarily just distribute text content? I can see people getting stupid ideas if they have resources at their hands that far outpace their needs. Ideas that in the end might torpedo your original vision and customer base. But maybe that's just a sign of me not having an entrepreneur's mind.
bradley13 3y ago
now they seem to be focusing on growth for growth’s sake The enshittification begins. Investors want their 100-bagger. Nice to hear that there is an OSS-based solution.
setgree 3y ago
Substack is climbing the enshittification ladder. The reader interface puts all kinds of barriers between you and the words, which should be a cardinal sin for a newsletter platform. Writers who say it’s easier to work with should be cognizant that the costs are just being borne elsewhere.
caseyy 3y ago
Related — https://briefs.video/videos/i-am-leaving/ https://briefs.video/videos/i-am-leaving/
rglullis 3y ago
Another nice thing about Ghost is that they recently announced they will add support to ActivityPub: https://activitypub.ghost.org/ https://activitypub.ghost.org/
tomlong 3y ago
Is anyone using Ghost and unhappy with it or moving away from it? I recently set up a blog (a pretty private, small scale travel diary to share with close family as I don't use social media) and did some research before I chose something. With no desire for a newsletter or monetisation or SEO or any of those features I still found the experience of spinning up a Ghost containter[1] got me from 0 to a really good and featureful blog. The composer works well out of the box on a phone, the defaults are fairly sane, and the selection of out of the box themes is pretty well thought out. In the past I've used Hugo or other static generators for this kind of thing. That's been far more work for a less user friendly result and the mobile workflow for posting isn't very kind even on a tablet. [1] https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost/ https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost/
joshlk 3y ago
I now use GitHub pages to host websites and it works like a charm. Free hosting and you can edit the pages using the GitHube website
mtlynch 3y ago
>Substack’s main revenue source is that it keeps 10% of all revenue from paid subscriptions. That means they’re under constant pressure to increase the number of paid subscriptions, and the amount that people are paying for those subscriptions. Ghost, and most other newsletter platforms, charge volume-based usage fees. That means those platforms can let individual writers choose how and when to prompt readers to consider a paid subscription. >It’s much easier to avoid the temptation to implement dark patterns if you have a sustainable business model in the first place. I don't have a strong preference for Ghost vs. Substack, but I don't understand this reasoning. I'm not even sure which platform they're accusing of using dark patterns. Both platforms are incentivized to earn revenue to fund the platform because a publishing platform can't survive if people aren't paying for it. I don't see why it's a dark pattern to make the funding a flat 10% of people who charge vs. allow platform publishers to do a freemium model. Neither choice seems obviously more sustainable to me than the other.
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  It’s an annoying trend that people extrgrate to make a point. Anything they don’t like is a dark pattern or scam or something. It’s the sort of moral grandstanding that developers do about stupid small stuff that annoys me about working in tech. Like somehow it’s a bad thing for a newsletter platform to optimise to help their customers grow. And really Substack doesn’t just fill up your subscriber counts it heavily filters out bad sign ups and whatnot. My subscriber count on my brand new newsletter is at 20 but looking at the traffic stats it’s blocked out 30-40 “subscribers” and from my experience on other newsletter those will be fake emails where people put in insults because they’re offended you asked them if they would like to subscribe.
  - unclebucknasty 3y ago
    >It’s an annoying trend that people extrgrate to make a point. Anything they don’t like is a dark pattern or scam or something. OTOH, some models really are friendlier to customers and can lead to better experiences.
    - 3y ago
clot27 3y ago
Ghost is integrating with Fediverse, much better.
mediumsmart 3y ago
getting paid for blogging is a slippery slope and I doubt that the compensation covers the damage. However - that being said, ghost is of course the perfect medium for this.
brightball 3y ago
For what it’s worth, I have been running a conference on Substack for over a year and it’s performed much better than I expected. I’m able to quickly keep people informed of new developments, reliably with a high open rate (around 40%). It’s easily the most important communication channel for making things work. In September I also launched a podcast for the conference and their platform has made it incredibly easy. I just upload the video and write the show notes. They handle extracting the audio version, generating the transcript and publishing to all of the various platforms while hosting the video too. I personally haven’t seen any benefit or engagement from their attempt at social media though. Carolina Code Conference and Carolina Code Cast if you’re curious.
hrishikshpathak 3y ago
I have a newsletter in substack. I think all the effort they are making to convert the site into a social media is not giving results. Their notes feature is very empty.
rednafi 3y ago
I don’t like having comments on my blog. I write the posts out of my own necessity and don’t want strangers to stomp on them. Sometimes if someone finds something useful, they appear at the front page of hackernews and people can discuss it there. That being said, I never understood the appeal of medium or substack. I have a simple site built with hugo and posting new contents is as easy as doing it on any of those platforms. Also, people care a wee bit too much about the audience. If your stuff is useful or interesting, people will find it. site: https://rednafi.com https://rednafi.com source: https://github.com/rednafi/rednafi.com https://github.com/rednafi/rednafi.com
ivylee 3y ago
I just moved my newsletter[1] away from Substack to Ghost over the weekend - the writing experience is better, especially SEO settings. Substack has grown way too complicated (just look at the settings page) and useless (the social features), it still prompts you to post your links to twitter/facebook anyways (implying that's where the traffic comes?). At this point Substack's value prop is non-existent. [1]: https://www.signalstalk.com https://www.signalstalk.com
- japhyr 3y ago
  FYI I get a message that your server can't be found.
simonsarris 3y ago
> They also seem to be evolving into a social media platform that thrives on the kind of conflicts and divisiveness that has driven people away from other platforms. This seems like a strange criticism in light of moving to Ghost. There's no reason you have to use Substack Notes, or any of the other social features, if you really don't want to. And it's not really Substack specific > Last fall Substack was called out quite publicly for allowing literal Nazi content on their platform. When they finally responded to an open letter from Substack writers, they basically said they don’t like Nazis but believe that any level of moderation equates to censorship. This free-speech absolutism is disingenuous; every public communication platform has to deal with moderation. I don't know what its like now but a couple years ago the Ghost CEO was a real jerk and would just delete the blogs of people who he didn't like or who criticized the platform: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1487633638502154242 https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1487633638502154242 I would much prefer Substack here. I'm very fond of Substack generally because I think they deserve a lot of credit for 1. starting a new blogging renaissance generally. Lots of my friends started writing and I really love it, and they make it easy to share their work. 2. normalizing writers getting paid. It used to be very difficult to make any money at all writing online. Usually you had to hope a big outfit would pay you pennies for a few words. Substack has minted millionaires from people just posting. I think that's wonderful. Maybe Ghost can help with that, but I think the learning curve and start up cost is much worse.

91 points by 8organicbits 3y ago

ghost is way better. good choice OP!

I never got the hype of Substack. I use Ghost for a while now and it's fantastic. The fact that it's open-source, self-hostable, super customizable (themes), has free/premium memberships and can be used both as a blog and newsletter is what makes me stick to it.

freddie_mercury 3y ago
Substack is free to start. You only start paying once you have paying subscribers. Ghost is $9/month to start, even if only your mom is reading it to start. (And you don't get customisable themes at that tier.) Not hard to see why one is much more popular than the other.
- smatija 3y ago
  Well Ghost is free if you self-host - but I agree that while hosting it is simple, it is still a barrier to entry.
  - freddie_mercury 3y ago
    Self hosting isn't free. It costs money to run a server.
    - hu3 3y ago
      GitHub pages is free.
mimon 3y ago
As we saw recently with Mastodon, for a very large section of users, views on "open-source, self-hostable and super customizable" will range from "don't care" at best to "that's too much hassle, pass" at worst. People just want to write their article and have it come up at the top of Google search results, that's the hype.
sevagh 3y ago
Ghost does not have a free membership option on their website: https://ghost.org/pricing/ https://ghost.org/pricing/

vouaobrasil 3y ago

I like substack and write my newsletter on it. That being said, I agree with the author that random platform changes can be very annoying. The only true antitode of sanity is self-hosted, and Ghost self-hosted is an example of this. That being said, I think the big problem with the internet is the very existence of these sorts of large-tech platforms. I wish such platforms didn't exist at all, and people just went to small websites. Following Ivan Illich, I wish there were a "speed/size limit" on the internet so that companies beyond a certain size like Google, Medium, Substack, etc. were precluded from existing.

brtkdotse 3y ago
> I wish such platforms didn't exist at all, and people just went to small websites. I wish it too but at this point this is basically pining for Usenet while everyone is on PhpBB-boards. The world has moved on and won’t be coming back.
- rchaud 3y ago
  UX-wise, what is the difference between Usenet and PhpBB? Both offer threaded topics, chronologically ordered. There are no "likes" or other gamification features. You can subscribe to topics via email and respond via email with both.
bayindirh 3y ago
I personally like Mataroa and smol.pub a lot. No nonsense, absolutely minimal spaces to put your thoughts on. I'm not in it for the money, and Mataroa fills what I needs pretty nicely. It stores my small image files, plus markdown files, and represent them as readable coherent block. It provides RSS and Newsletters (which I have disabled), and basic analytics. If you want to see, it's at https://blog.bayindirh.io https://blog.bayindirh.io
- sureglymop 3y ago
  It looks cool! But, can I fully self-host it and not just point it at my domain? I would support the project but as a sysadmin, I just have an urge to run what I can on my hardware.

tarkin2 3y ago

Medium and Substack are a plight on the web. Substack is better but it'll go the same way as Medium. They start out nice, but then become slow with trackers and what-have-you, and then start charging a commission to read: bait-and-walled-garden. I know not everyone is a programmer and not everyone can make their own website, but I've started to yearn for a livejournal or blogger site and wince when I find myself on a medium.com page

GardenLetter27 3y ago
It's a shame as there are economies of scale to having a big platform too. Like I can (and do) host a static blog, but I don't have much time to attend to it - so it's nice on the main platforms that they handle comments and so on.
- tarkin2 3y ago
  Comments were the only annoying thing on my old site. I used disqus but then that was rather invasive and annoying. A single SQLite3 table and a post, approve and delete end points would be about 100 lines of code and would cater for 90% of hobby/personal sites Part of the reason the web is so soulless and drab is that people no longer have the skills to create simple functionality. I almost yearn for the days of PHP
  - GardenLetter27 3y ago
    ISPs no longer providing free hosting and VMs, and blocking port forwarding doesn't help either.
  - tomhoward 3y ago
    Spam management is the hardest thing about comments. That’s a big part of what Disqus takes care of. I know you wrote that you would want approve and delete so as to moderate comments, but it becomes a big and unpleasant task, wading through the spam comments to find the good ones.
    - 3y ago

Handprint4469 3y ago

> That’s what Substack was in its original form, but now they seem to be focusing on growth for growth’s sake. They also seem to be evolving into a social media platform that thrives on the kind of conflicts and divisiveness that has driven people away from other platforms. Ah yes, the classic enshittification pattern. I was hoping Substack would avoid it by virtue of actually charging readers instead of depending on ad revenue, but there must be something else going wrong here that I'm not aware of. sighs

aa_is_op 3y ago
That entire platform's demise can be traced back to that interview where the CEO did everything to avoid saying "nazis are bad." What you're seeing here is society's antibodies at work, slowly carving out the infected part.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I mean, I think that was certainly an accelerating event, and probably the immediate trigger to move for many, but its other problems had been slowly building, anyway.
- logrot 3y ago
  Do you have a link to that interview?
  - erinnh 3y ago
    I think hes talking about this podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/can-substack-ceo-chris-best-build-a-new-model-for-journalism/id1011668648?i=1000501710354 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/can-substack-ceo-chris...
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    https://www.theverge.com/23681875/substack-notes-twitter-elon-musk-content-moderation-free-speech https://www.theverge.com/23681875/substack-notes-twitter-elo...

jtwaleson 3y ago

Ghost vs. Substack is like Supabase vs. Firebase. I'm with Ghost & Supabase, really enjoy their offerings and very fair and predictable pricing.

noduerme 3y ago

er what's wrong with just putting up static webpages? Very little sysop work required.

ben_w 3y ago
My (new) blog is a static webpage. No comment. I wasn't getting many comments on the Wordpress one neither, so that's actually fine for me, but if I was getting many, it would matter a lot.
joseferben 3y ago
recent google algo changes seem to penalize domains with a low domain rank even more. if you want to be found through search it makes sense to use an established platform.
valvar 3y ago
It's hard for SaaS platforms to monetize, that's what's wrong with it
vertis 3y ago
Yes, let's make everyone learn how to deploy static webpages just so they can write a blog or newsletter (◔_◔) (and I say this as someone that has used Jekyll for over a decade)
- squigz 3y ago
  You know, I'm not sure why this is always put up as some kind of unreasonable expectation. But society has various expectations about skills needed to survive and thrive in the modern day - while not entirely universal, driving might be one of those expectations. Would it be crazy to expect one of those skills to be basic computer & sysadmin knowledge? With that, I would expect most people could host a site on, say, GH pages or similar
  - vertis 3y ago
    It IS an unreasonable expectation. There are so many reasons it's unrealistic, from the fact that it's a niche skill, to the friction that it creates before one can just write or interact with others. Comparing it to driving is not a good example; a much better one might be everyone learning to fly. Because you know then we wouldn't have to take commercial flights. My partner deals with a large set of people that can't manage to print a PDF, let alone deploy a static site to GitHub pages. Lack of technical ability does not imply lack of intelligence. Most of the people she serves could learn to patternmake and design their own garments, but instead they buy her sewing patterns and download them. Because at the end of the day, they want to sew a garment and enjoy it, not jump through the learning required to design the patterns from scratch (though a small subset might eventually do that). I grant you that an increasing set of children are getting a technical education, but they're only one part of a very large global population.

Temporary_31337 3y ago

Something not really covered in the article is the SEO boost from using substack and an easier conversion if you ever decide to monetise your blog directly.

freddie_mercury 3y ago

"I started using Substack because I was looking for a simple newsletter platform that would let me focus on writing. That’s what Substack was in its original form, but now they seem to be focusing on growth for growth’s sake." The article's author is surprised that a VC backed company that has raised $100 million in funding is pursuing growth? It's not "growth for growth's sake". It's "growth to pay back investors".

Shish2k 3y ago
I do wonder how long until the average consumer starts considering “VC-backed” as a curse rather than a blessing. Is there merit in advertising my small-scale tech services as “Not vc-backed. Our business model is to serve you, not to sell you out to our investors”?
Eremotherium 3y ago
The bigger question IMO is: why the fuck did they raise so much money? Don't they primarily just distribute text content? I can see people getting stupid ideas if they have resources at their hands that far outpace their needs. Ideas that in the end might torpedo your original vision and customer base. But maybe that's just a sign of me not having an entrepreneur's mind.

bradley13 3y ago

now they seem to be focusing on growth for growth’s sake The enshittification begins. Investors want their 100-bagger. Nice to hear that there is an OSS-based solution.

setgree 3y ago

Substack is climbing the enshittification ladder. The reader interface puts all kinds of barriers between you and the words, which should be a cardinal sin for a newsletter platform. Writers who say it’s easier to work with should be cognizant that the costs are just being borne elsewhere.

caseyy 3y ago

Related — https://briefs.video/videos/i-am-leaving/ https://briefs.video/videos/i-am-leaving/

rglullis 3y ago

Another nice thing about Ghost is that they recently announced they will add support to ActivityPub: https://activitypub.ghost.org/ https://activitypub.ghost.org/

tomlong 3y ago

Is anyone using Ghost and unhappy with it or moving away from it? I recently set up a blog (a pretty private, small scale travel diary to share with close family as I don't use social media) and did some research before I chose something. With no desire for a newsletter or monetisation or SEO or any of those features I still found the experience of spinning up a Ghost containter[1] got me from 0 to a really good and featureful blog. The composer works well out of the box on a phone, the defaults are fairly sane, and the selection of out of the box themes is pretty well thought out. In the past I've used Hugo or other static generators for this kind of thing. That's been far more work for a less user friendly result and the mobile workflow for posting isn't very kind even on a tablet. [1] https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost/ https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost/

joshlk 3y ago

I now use GitHub pages to host websites and it works like a charm. Free hosting and you can edit the pages using the GitHube website

mtlynch 3y ago

>Substack’s main revenue source is that it keeps 10% of all revenue from paid subscriptions. That means they’re under constant pressure to increase the number of paid subscriptions, and the amount that people are paying for those subscriptions. Ghost, and most other newsletter platforms, charge volume-based usage fees. That means those platforms can let individual writers choose how and when to prompt readers to consider a paid subscription. >It’s much easier to avoid the temptation to implement dark patterns if you have a sustainable business model in the first place. I don't have a strong preference for Ghost vs. Substack, but I don't understand this reasoning. I'm not even sure which platform they're accusing of using dark patterns. Both platforms are incentivized to earn revenue to fund the platform because a publishing platform can't survive if people aren't paying for it. I don't see why it's a dark pattern to make the funding a flat 10% of people who charge vs. allow platform publishers to do a freemium model. Neither choice seems obviously more sustainable to me than the other.

that_guy_iain 3y ago
It’s an annoying trend that people extrgrate to make a point. Anything they don’t like is a dark pattern or scam or something. It’s the sort of moral grandstanding that developers do about stupid small stuff that annoys me about working in tech. Like somehow it’s a bad thing for a newsletter platform to optimise to help their customers grow. And really Substack doesn’t just fill up your subscriber counts it heavily filters out bad sign ups and whatnot. My subscriber count on my brand new newsletter is at 20 but looking at the traffic stats it’s blocked out 30-40 “subscribers” and from my experience on other newsletter those will be fake emails where people put in insults because they’re offended you asked them if they would like to subscribe.
- unclebucknasty 3y ago
  >It’s an annoying trend that people extrgrate to make a point. Anything they don’t like is a dark pattern or scam or something. OTOH, some models really are friendlier to customers and can lead to better experiences.
  - 3y ago

clot27 3y ago

Ghost is integrating with Fediverse, much better.

mediumsmart 3y ago

getting paid for blogging is a slippery slope and I doubt that the compensation covers the damage. However - that being said, ghost is of course the perfect medium for this.

brightball 3y ago

For what it’s worth, I have been running a conference on Substack for over a year and it’s performed much better than I expected. I’m able to quickly keep people informed of new developments, reliably with a high open rate (around 40%). It’s easily the most important communication channel for making things work. In September I also launched a podcast for the conference and their platform has made it incredibly easy. I just upload the video and write the show notes. They handle extracting the audio version, generating the transcript and publishing to all of the various platforms while hosting the video too. I personally haven’t seen any benefit or engagement from their attempt at social media though. Carolina Code Conference and Carolina Code Cast if you’re curious.

hrishikshpathak 3y ago

I have a newsletter in substack. I think all the effort they are making to convert the site into a social media is not giving results. Their notes feature is very empty.

rednafi 3y ago

I don’t like having comments on my blog. I write the posts out of my own necessity and don’t want strangers to stomp on them. Sometimes if someone finds something useful, they appear at the front page of hackernews and people can discuss it there. That being said, I never understood the appeal of medium or substack. I have a simple site built with hugo and posting new contents is as easy as doing it on any of those platforms. Also, people care a wee bit too much about the audience. If your stuff is useful or interesting, people will find it. site: https://rednafi.com https://rednafi.com source: https://github.com/rednafi/rednafi.com https://github.com/rednafi/rednafi.com

ivylee 3y ago

I just moved my newsletter[1] away from Substack to Ghost over the weekend - the writing experience is better, especially SEO settings. Substack has grown way too complicated (just look at the settings page) and useless (the social features), it still prompts you to post your links to twitter/facebook anyways (implying that's where the traffic comes?). At this point Substack's value prop is non-existent. [1]: https://www.signalstalk.com https://www.signalstalk.com

japhyr 3y ago
FYI I get a message that your server can't be found.

simonsarris 3y ago

> They also seem to be evolving into a social media platform that thrives on the kind of conflicts and divisiveness that has driven people away from other platforms. This seems like a strange criticism in light of moving to Ghost. There's no reason you have to use Substack Notes, or any of the other social features, if you really don't want to. And it's not really Substack specific > Last fall Substack was called out quite publicly for allowing literal Nazi content on their platform. When they finally responded to an open letter from Substack writers, they basically said they don’t like Nazis but believe that any level of moderation equates to censorship. This free-speech absolutism is disingenuous; every public communication platform has to deal with moderation. I don't know what its like now but a couple years ago the Ghost CEO was a real jerk and would just delete the blogs of people who he didn't like or who criticized the platform: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1487633638502154242 https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1487633638502154242 I would much prefer Substack here. I'm very fond of Substack generally because I think they deserve a lot of credit for 1. starting a new blogging renaissance generally. Lots of my friends started writing and I really love it, and they make it easy to share their work. 2. normalizing writers getting paid. It used to be very difficult to make any money at all writing online. Usually you had to hope a big outfit would pay you pennies for a few words. Substack has minted millionaires from people just posting. I think that's wonderful. Maybe Ghost can help with that, but I think the learning curve and start up cost is much worse.