14 ms·

Substack writers, you need a website

646 points by speckx 3mo ago

npras1 3mo ago
In this case, I think we should learn from the direct marketing guys (wait, here me out.) The problems mentioned several times in this thread can all be addressed by their ways, although it requires work, and not treating this "getting paid to write" thing as merely a hobby. - how not to rely on a central authority for your work - how to solve the problem of getting paid - how not to get banned by the publishing site and also the payment processor for saying things they might deem controversial - and even how to keep your subscribers and also prevent your paid content from leaking to the LLMs This is how people like Ben Settle (considered as one of the greatest email marketers), Dan Kennedy (Ben looks up to him) and Matt Furey (Ben and Dan both revere him) earned their way into wealth. * they paywall their premium newsletters. but you can't access them via a website by logging in with a username/password, or a forgotten password flow. No. It's delivered to your home as printed booklets via courier [1]. * Ben has a rule: if you subscribe to his paid newsletter ($97/mo) and then unsub, you won't even be able to join back [2]. * Dan Kennedy has no email. You'll have to fax him to get his attention. * Ben often talks about the perils of having your entire business at the mercy of platforms and payment processors. His solution is to have multiple merchant accounts [3]. * By keeping their premium content away from the internet, they're able to keep off piracy, and that same playbook is now protecting their content from LLM bots. And by charging big numbers ($97/mo vs $5/mo) they're able to deinsentivise the subscribers from uploading them to the internet. They have proud long-time subscribers who are loyal to them and don't want to harm their business. One of the main discussion points in this thread is the importance of owning your list. And nobody takes that job seriously than these direct marketers. To them, it's all about controlling as many different parts of the machinery as they could. And finally, if they're doing offline business, what do they keep their websites for? To build the list of course. And then sell their paid stuff to that list via email. Yes, it seems like a chicken and egg problem, but then I believe you only need a few fans to keep the ball rolling (kelly 1000 true fans etc). [1] - https://emailplayers.com/ https://emailplayers.com/ [2] - https://bensettle.com/blog/why-i-banned-you/ https://bensettle.com/blog/why-i-banned-you/ [3] - https://bensettle.com/blog/merchant-account-kicks-my-app/ https://bensettle.com/blog/merchant-account-kicks-my-app/ - matt furey's $97/mo digital newsletter https://knockoutmarketing.com/zen-mastery-newsletter/ https://knockoutmarketing.com/zen-mastery-newsletter/
josefritzishere 3mo ago
TLDR: POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
- pavlov 3mo ago
  Is there a guide for how to do the “syndicate elsewhere” part? For the HN audience, the first part is trivially easy (getting a domain, publishing on it) but the second probably isn’t obvious.
  - cosmicgadget 3mo ago
    There are guides but it amounts to "use popular services to link to your website". Post snippets on the bird apps, social media hellscapes, and aggregators like this one. Duplicate your content on the blogging services. Have an RSS feed and submit it to discovery engines and web directories/rings. And send me a link so I can index you. Stickers are neat too.
  - dghlsakjg 3mo ago
    Depending on how often you write copy and paste to “elsewhere” is the easy answer. Substack really wants you to use them as a primary publisher so they don’t make it easy to programmatically put content up. Other platforms have varying levels of ease around this.
mertbio 3mo ago
I recently started to write newsletters about Hamburg (https://alsterrunde.com https://alsterrunde.com). Before doing that I also considered Substack but seeing that I have to pay 50$ for just using my domain was a no-go. In the end, I ended up with my friend's hosted Ghost solution (https://www.synapsmedia.com https://www.synapsmedia.com). If you already have a Substack, you can also easily migrate to Ghost. Since it is open source, you can also host it on Hetzner, if you want to manage it yourself.
- BirAdam 3mo ago
  This saved me when X killed Substack tweets. My Substack uses a custom domain and thus was fine. People tweeted it out with no blocking.
dynm 3mo ago
For what it's worth, I have a markdown-based website with a domain I own, and I stubbornly link to that website only, treating substack as just a temporary distribution channel.[^1] And I am constantly, endlessly asking myself if all the extra friction I've added to my life is worth it. [^1]: I can't stand how slow and tracking-heavy substack is, but the problem of "send email and not get filtered as spam" is non-trivial.
skippyfish 3mo ago
Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers. RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read. So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web. There's a lot of value in backing up your Substack subscribers' emails so that you can move somewhere else down the line, and the nice thing about Substack is that they let you do that. If they stop, that's a trap.
- Topology1 3mo ago
  I feel like the transition from substack to website + newsletter wouldn't be terrible, although I'm sure your traffic would decrease after making the switch.
  - cosmicgadget 3mo ago
    I miss the days when I'd regularly get forwards from friends about stuff they found on the internet.
    - brunoarueira 3mo ago
      One of my first jobs after graduate, I used to share a lot of posts with my coworkers until a certain point where one of them said "I don't know how you read so much content", worthless to say him was a Master's student, so I'm expecting him to be able to consume more content than myself, although different more towards academic stuff.
      - coldtea 3mo ago
        >"I don't know how you read so much content" And then they spend hours every day doomscrolling and binge watching shit
acmnrs 3mo ago
Alternatively, use an open platform that doesn't lock you in: * Leaflet<https://leaflet.pub> * Offprint<https://offprint.app> * Pckt<https://pckt.blog>
- spelk 3mo ago
  I think from a technical perspective, newsletters are a solved problems with lots of options as you've mentioned. Substack thrives because it's built a reputation for having well-reasoned or engaging voices in a newsletter format. They pushed a big campaign to onboard writers like Bill Bishop (Sinocism) onto the platform early on. Because of that, newer writers are likely seeking to tap into the network effects/discovery systems that comes with having big names on the platform. People log onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, etc. because the people they're interested are already on the platform, and the platform provides a recommendation system that allows newer "creators" to tap into an existing audience for others in their niche.
- wuliwong 3mo ago
  I get that we all want people to be on open platforms but I feel like the really staunch part of the open platforms only crowd is not taking the time to understand why people like platforms like substack.
  - schlagetown 3mo ago
    I agree, very aware it's way more than just the publishing / email tools! Also posted a top-level comment about building alternatives with https://leaflet.pub https://leaflet.pub and https://standard.site https://standard.site - and yes I think really important to consider the full list of things you get with Substack: blog + email, easy to customize, monetization, social features + network, all in one platform, long tail of features… Did a short talk on this at a local meetup recently, basically on how we might collectively re-create the entire stack of what Substack offers, in an open ecosystem, with a strong focus on network / distribution, more so than just features. It's a tall order but I do think there's a big opportunity here beyond what any single app can or should tackle, in building an open alternative to the whole longform publishing stack, combining the tools and the social network side. AT Protocol and the Atmosphere (ecosystem of folks building on it) are pretty well positioned here. Lots of nice ways to get autonomy and ownership with web publishing + distribution and social affordances at the same time. Of course a big challenge in bootstrapping the network and building the cultural footprint and giving folks flexible ways to make money and reach new readers, but I'm encouraged by how much progress we've made collectively just this past year.
spelk 3mo ago
I am quite sad that Kagi Smallweb excludes Substack. I understand that less technical writers have started moving to Substack both to build an audience and have access to effective publishing tools, but it feels like I'm missing out on some really interesting new perspectives, similar to early Medium.
doublepg23 3mo ago
I've always understood platforms like Substack or Patreon to really be a solution to the payment processing problem first and foremost.
- t-writescode 3mo ago
  That’s exactly right. Finding ways to get paid for your work, and all the very complicated way taxes interact with it all, unless you’re going all-in on ads, is a messy problem that people will happily centralize for. And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.
  - doublepg23 3mo ago
    I follow a very prolific open-source/FOSS podcasting network. All of their infrastructure from the very bottom to the very top is FOSS - except their membership program. It links to a third-party which processes payments compliantly. They've attempted a pivot to funding the network via BTC/Lightning but clearly that's polarizing to a lot of people even though it better aligns with their philosophy.
    - shimman 3mo ago
      Which podcast is this? It's not on my radar, def interested.
      - doublepg23 3mo ago
        https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com I've been listening to the network for decades now and directly credit my IT career to the people who've been platformed on the various shows over the years. Lots of great content.
    - t-writescode 3mo ago
      I'm not a lawyer; but I believe that even if they take payment through BTC, etc, they're going to need to take sales tax, etc, based on the location that their subscriber is ... which means they need to handle the tax hell that comes with it, so they'll find themselves better off with a Merchant of Record that can handle that for them ... which is almost certainly proprietary because ... it's a big mess.
raincole 3mo ago
Did we really learn nothing from Medium's situation?
- wuliwong 3mo ago
  What did you learn from the Medium situation?
  - shimman 3mo ago
    Staking your own kingdom has infinitely more potential than settling into someone's fief.
elgolem89 3mo ago
who reads websites these days?
- slater 3mo ago
  You? For example, on this site?
f311a 3mo ago
Substack gives a really nice exposure though, unlike medium and other platforms. It's very hard to gain readers now on independent websites. Google search is dead (very few people now search for tech content), social media platforms penalize you for posting links and so on. You can get a few thousand subscribers on Substack just by being consistent and interacting with other people. Now try gaining 1000 subscribers to an e-mail newsletter or RSS from your personal blog. People who tried it know that 5,000 views on your blog can convert to a few subscribers, and you need to get those 5000 somehow first. A lot of people just repost their articles to substack for a reason. It's not forbidden. You can repost them from your personal blog.
- rsingel 3mo ago
  Not true. Ghost sites grow quite well and much of Substack's network effects don't turn into real subscribers
- cosmicgadget 3mo ago
  This is why it'd be great if bloggers more frequently provided topical, off-site recommendations in post footers. It's functionally like Substack's internal links but connects the open web.
simonw 3mo ago
I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter. I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth. Here's the tool I use for the copy-pasting: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blog-to-newsletter https://tools.simonwillison.net/blog-to-newsletter Substack doesn't have an API for composing a newsletter, but their rich text editor DOES accept copy-pasted data - and copy-paste is the universal API.
- rsingel 3mo ago
  You could do the same thing through Ghost, which has an API, and not be using a service that proudly platforms the Tates and nazis.
  - simonw 3mo ago
    Ghost would cost $288/month (or $241/month paid yearly).
    - rsingel 3mo ago
      With 66k subscribers you could cover that without even really trying by setting up a $5/month donation tier or putting a tip jar on the site. With a tiny bit of effort, you could make thousands a month. Substack lets you get away with sending that many emails without attempting to monetize because you pay them in clout and with your reader data. I think they are getting the better deal given how good your writing is and your reputation.
    - rsingel 3mo ago
      I'll put my money where my mouth is. We at Outpost will host your site on Ghost for a year for free and migrate all your substack subscribers, with the only caveats that 1) you put a tip jar link (either to Ghost's or Outpost's) at the end of every email with some text like support us being on an indie platform and 2) at the end of the year or earlier report how it went.
thataccount 3mo ago
As a writer who has been on the web for a long time, I no longer write much for the sake of the web. My personal website I took down this year because I didn't like the idea of AI snarfing up everything I wrote. I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. While I don't write only for money, I certainly write with the idea of needing a certain amount of money to keep on writing. The internet just doesn't offer that kind of environment anymore in my opinion. I do like the Indie web, and to me, it is more just the way the internet was/has been/needs to be. What is missing are neutral kinds of payment layers/vendors that won't pull your funding if you say something someone somewhere doesn't like.
- 01284a7e 3mo ago
  Same - I wrote on the web for 25 years (2000 to 2025). I can attribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of income to it. I no longer have any websites, as nothing came out of it for a couple years. ~90% of all my traffic ended up bots. And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.
- sfRattan 3mo ago
  > I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. The real choke point is one step up the chain with payment processors, and since 9/11 and stricter KYC with banks, there's not a reliable, widely accepted path around those regulations. Cryptocurrency remains fringe. Running a self-hosted ghost or WordPress powered blog or newsletter will encounter the same bottleneck wherever money changes hands among average-Joes online.
  - thataccount 3mo ago
    Most internet providers I've seen around lately have clauses against hosting your own website on residential providers. That provides two choke points. I used to be a Monero fan before its Blockchain became the size of Cyberpunk 2077.
firasd 3mo ago
I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but like ‘oh great now I gotta deal with this’. So that’s why Medium in the past and now Substack etc end up as fallbacks
- pitchlatte 3mo ago
  given that wordpress.com is just managed hosting i wonder if other providers can bring that cost down. installing it yourself is trivial though because of Softaculous, and web hosting is much cheaper.
  - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
    Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess. But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it. Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0. If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.
    - gertop 3mo ago
      > Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess. There are literally thousands of PHP hosting providers. There are also dozens, possibly hundreds of deviated wordpress hosting services, aside from WordPress.com.
      - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
        Your point being? These thousands of hosting providers all charge around $5 or more to host your Wordpress instance, because that’s what it actually costs to run Wordpress. A more modern CMS can bring costs down by serving pages from a CDN cache and, most importantly, selectively re-rendering only pages that changed. This is hard to do with Wordpress because plugins can essentially render anything and depend on any data.
millipede 3mo ago
Whenever I see Substack or Medium URLs, I avoid clicking them. They are so spammy with their call to subscribe, that it's not even worth me visiting them. People recognize quality, and they don't need to be pressured to subscribe. The websites I visit every day never asked me to come back.
- Silamoth 3mo ago
  Interesting. I feel the same way about Medium - it’s mostly a bunch of undergrads and tech bootcamp students regurgitating basic tutorials. But in my experience, Substack is much higher quality. I actually read several Substack blogs regularly because they’re better and more consistent than most blogs I come across. YMMV, I guess, but I have at least half a dozen blogs I actively follow on Substack, compared to maybe 1 elsewhere.
- d_k_h 3mo ago
  Same. I'm sure there are good things there but most of what I have come across has been trash so it makes a great filter.
- eluru 3mo ago
  same for me on medium, but susbstack not necesarily, they seem to be more focused on the author not like medium
CM30 3mo ago
Yeah, even if the website itself gets less traffic than the places you syndicate the content to, it's at least a stable home base that's there if those platforms fall apart. Are you posting something that corporations or celebrities don't like/want to see shared? Then posting it on your own site means that the buck stops with you, and they'll have to force you to take it down in court rather than relying on advertiser pressure/'encouraging' the platform to ignore fair use. Did you do something controversial that means platforms don't want to deal with you or individuals want to ruin your life? Having your own site means you can generally tell them to pound sand. And there's no worries regarding things like forced logins, forced ads, obnoxious cookie banners (especially if you don't need to collect personal info anyway), age verification restrictions, etc. Plus there's just a level of control over the design and features that you can't get elsewhere. Want to make the site look completely unlike any other? It's 100% doable, as plenty of blogs posted here show very well. Want to add a new feature like polls or surveys or quizzes or interactive infographics or what not? You don't need a third party service or some premium account, you just add it yourself. Running a website is like owning a home rather than renting one. You decide what furniture, what colours, what utilities and service providers, whether you want pets, etc.
- cosmicgadget 3mo ago
  And HN is kind of like the HOA of websites, giving you notices about color choice, pets, and under construction gifs.
8organicbits 3mo ago
The linked article "What I learned from one year of Substack" [1] perfectly sums up my experience. I can't read the article because I only see a coercive demand to subscribe first. Perhaps that's the joke. [1] https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-year-of-substack/ https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-...
- klelatti 3mo ago
  It's not a Substack site and virtually no Substack sites do this.
wxw 3mo ago
I think https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE is generally a good compromise. Frankly, if writing is becoming a serious business for you, it's probably better to work across ALL of Substack/personal site/X/etc. They're all worthwhile distribution and monetization channels and can serve different purposes.
ryanthedev 3mo ago
If you ever need a home. I built it mainly for me and all the stuff that I work on. https://upubli.sh/ https://upubli.sh/
- byterivet 3mo ago
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npn 3mo ago
There is a list of a few websites that I subconsciously think only have garbage articles and never really pay serious attention to them: quora, medium and substack. Surely dev.to also filled with low level articles, but at least people there spent effort to write articles then gave it for free. But those users of the previous websites mostly write it for money. Don't get me wrong, quality articles deserve to have money in return, you can't get far without sustainable business. But writing for the sake of writing (and earning money for the quantity not quality) is what is causing those websites to be filled with shallow contents.
asimpletune 3mo ago
For anyone who’s interested in this stuff: I made a FOSS commenting system for websites that accepts comments via email. https://r3ply.com https://r3ply.com You combine your website/blog with that and you have a pretty nice setup that you own. You can even use RSS to allow people to subscribe to replies to comments, threads, a page, etc…
ArcHound 3mo ago
Also take into account Substack moderation policy. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-substack-makes-money-from-hosting-nazi-newsletters https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s... Natsoc newsletters are apparently fine, but showing porn is too much and you'll be moderated. Go on, tell me how one is more harmful to kids than the other.
- pessimizer 3mo ago
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rafaquintanilha 3mo ago
I debated this for longer than I would like, and in the end regretted not joining Substack soon enough. I keep a personal blog since 2012 [1] which, in its last iteration, is hosted in Ghost. There is something really reassuring in knowing that you own a space in the internet, that nobody can shut you down, and that ceteris paribus it will survive till eternity. However, discoverability is indeed a problem. If in the past we had to play the SEO game in order to get some traffic (I would crosspost in Reddit but the amount of uncalled hate I would get from an unqualified audience hardly pays off – I manage to make to the top of HN once though), now it's even worse with AI. I agree with those who say that as much as we like to say we write for ourselves (and I do think this is true), it's as important to have contact with the public. In Le vie intellectuele Fr. Sertillanges would argue that critics help you shape the argument and make it clearer and more correct. Therefore, having a distribution channel is important. After all, if all you want is to brain dump or write as an exercise, write it in Obsidian or similar software, connect it to Git and be done with it. Now, after I started my Substack [2] I was able to attract over ~2.3k subs to date. It's true that a lot of that came from other channels (like my YouTube channel), but in the past it was always slow and Ghost newsletter never really worked well for me. In Substack I often get recommendations from other writers, and you can also refer to people you respect as well. If Substack ever ceases to allow you to export your posts or subscribers, then I agree the network effect won't be as decisive. Currently, I write my drafts in Obsidian so I always have a local copy, then copy, paste and refine in the Substack editor (so it looks optimized there), and press publish. [1] https://rafaelquintanilha.com https://rafaelquintanilha.com [2] https://codecapital.substack.com https://codecapital.substack.com
dsr_ 3mo ago
In system after system, people enthusiastically swarm to something which is easy to use. Then, after enshittification, they hang around too long because it's so hard to extract and send the meaningful data and metadata elsewhere. If you write all your stuff in a location you control, and syndicate that out to the popular platform of the day, you can minimize your loss. An astoundingly large percentage of my personal technical policies are guided by the idea that I want to minimize my losses after the next sudden yet inevitable betrayal.
schlagetown 3mo ago
I'm one of the creators of Leaflet - https://leaflet.pub https://leaflet.pub - also mentioned in another comment. We're making a publishing app kind of like Substack or Ghost, but connected to the open social ecosystem building on AT Protocol. There a lot of potential here, and a lot of tools that already exist. We collaborated with other publishing apps (pckt & Offprint) to make Standard.site - https://standard.site https://standard.site - a simple set of standards for publishing interop that enables something like RSS but on top of a whole social network. More context: https://lab.leaflet.pub/3moomxyjssk2p https://lab.leaflet.pub/3moomxyjssk2p Others can leverage this to make e.g. a whole reader app where you can find everything people in your network are publishing: https://standard-reader.app https://standard-reader.app A key thing is it's very flexible, you can publish on Leaflet, or on a self-hosted blog, and make your content discoverable and subscribeable in the same way. And in either case, you own your content — even if you use Leaflet as your hosted CMS, published data lives in your PDS where you control it, and all the social graph stuff persists even if you stop using Leaflet or we ever shut down. Self-hosting a website is great but also considerable overhead for many folks, and we want to make it easy to publish and still have control and avoid lock-in. We even see folks doing hybrid approaches, e.g. using Leaflet to publish (for easy to use CMS + nice social features) but also pulling published data to render directly on their own website. It's very different from what you get with a concentrated single platform like Substack (or Instagram, YouTube, etc) as far as audience reach, and early days with the ecosystem, but I think it's valuable in a different way. It's more aligned with the open web, and importantly, it's more antifragile — there are many ways to reach people and interact with your readers, from Bluesky to Leaflet to other reader apps, search tools, etc. Network effects aren't there yet to the degree of Substack, but a lot of cool things are emerging and it feels like an exciting time to build here together.
- dirkc 3mo ago
  I get a cloudflare 502 error for standard.site
- cpill 3mo ago
  can't we just make RSS cool again?!
simonsarris 3mo ago
I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting. But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than its fees, because the counterfactual is that I don't have any of those things. I think it's a huge mistake to lump those together as "convenience", its a lot more than convenient! The only important thing to me about having a non-substack website is that its good to have a place for more permanent information, lists, contact, etc. But even for many writers, that kind of stuff becomes stale so quickly that the personal sites don't tend to matter much, or even make them look worse! The floating social network spaces are much more valuable. Even losing my x.com would be much worse to my day-to-day life than losing my domain, though I may wish it were otherwise. And I cannot replicate that elsewhere. The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
- jdthedisciple 3mo ago
  How easy/difficult was it getting off the ground on substack? Did you get interactions right from your first post? Is there visibility for new writers?
  - moralestapia 3mo ago
    Please x2. If you could write a small guide, that'd be phenomenal.
    - hnped 3mo ago
      What is genuinely interesting is how Hacker News moderators will edit user posts, such that it looks as if the user replied to another post originally, without ever making that clear. What other lies and manipulation do they come with? Directly editing the content of posts silently, no sign of being edited?
  - brightball 3mo ago
plantain 3mo ago
Substack is unreadable for anyone in Australia, as it forces you unnecessarily through age verification.
efields 3mo ago
Did Wordpress write this?
peteforde 3mo ago
Everyone's experience will be different, but I will say that I have not received significant network effects traffic on Substack nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content. In short, I think that for the vast majority of casual posters, the aspirational upsides of joining a network are going to fall flat. Like with most aggregators, the popular things tend to be promoted more. So, for me at least, if I'm going to get very low traffic, I'd prefer to get that very low traffic on my own website. It might be a pyrrhic victory but I sleep just a little better knowing that as one of the 1% that actually creates stuff, I did what little I could.
- InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
  Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source. Maybe there is a network effect on substack that makes it easier to get these external links, but I doubt most actual readers are coming from inside the substack ecosystem.
  - pessimizer 3mo ago
    > Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source. I think the parent was talking about having a substack, not reading things on Substack. But I also think the direct network effects don't come from casuals (other than that they repost to social networks.) People who are paying for a substack will look at others because it doesn't involve another signup or separate bill, they can just add the subscription for a buck or two. Now they can tour the subscriber content, and they can drop it after a little while if it doesn't ultimately appeal to them with just a click or three. For non-subscribers, a substack isn't any different from any other blog.
    - peteforde 3mo ago
      Maybe I'm an outlier, but I find that my main reason for discontinuing Ground News/Nebula/whatever is that I subscribe aspirationally and never actually make time to consume the content. One year I got my partner and I subscriptions to Masterclass and at the end of the year neither one of us had watched a single video. Basically, I don't know anyone who is ever bored. Who the hell has time to click on and read random posts? The entire value of HN is that other smart people surface the top 1% of 1% of stuff I'd probably find interesting. The notion of reading Substack posts just because I'm a subscriber seems like fantasy.
pryelluw 3mo ago
I agree and am working on it. It’s been a stream of progress after launching my comedy writings under https://yelluw.com https://yelluw.com I’ve focused mostly on writing by postponing the actual editorial/cms side of things. I’d rather prove that I can write and write well than spend all my energy getting the perfect cms setup. The one issue I have today is copyright and all the extreme scraping being done by ai companies. I wonder how others are dealing with that.
interstingstuff 3mo ago
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jmmv 3mo ago
I've been blogging for 22 years now. At the beginning I could tell I had a relatively steady audience based on frequent comments (when comments on blogs were a thing). These died off over the years. Then, in 2020, I implemented my own unobtrusive subscription mechanism and email distribution to try to regain such an audience. And... it's pretty disappointing. I've gotten less than 200 subscribers that way; conversions just don't happy. Then I "switched" to Substack 3 years ago and the audience growth is real. I'm approaching 2000 subscribers (some of which are paid, which always surprises me and I appreciate), and these keep growing organically although I'm sure a large portion of which are fake. It's hard to say it doesn't work or isn't worth it. Now... spoiler: I never "switched" to Substack. I continue to write all of my content on my website _first_, with all of the features it had before, but now I copy/paste the content into Substack and distribute it that way. It's painful, but I have scars from when I moved off of Medium and want to ensure I "own" the originals. If you are curious, I had written more about this 2 years ago in https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging
- interstingstuff 3mo ago
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Chaseraph 3mo ago
Substack writers, you need to move to Ghost.
ninjahawk1 3mo ago
If you can generate traffic to your website while having a deep email list as well of people who are alerted when you write, you essentially make yourself unable to be censored or deplatformed. Large companies want you there so they make money from your content, make your own platform and get your own users and you have the keys to the kingdom.
irishmanlondon 3mo ago
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babblingfish 3mo ago
The real pro move is to have zero traffic so it doesn't matter either way
MinimalAction 3mo ago
Thank you! I don't like substack at all. I hate the typography overall. It's not hard to power up a static website, especially these days using Jekyll, Hugo, or hundreds of other such framework in so many different languages. The only thing good about Substack is to find new people to read from, but I'm less inclined to follow them for long because who knows how Substack changes things.
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dzonga 3mo ago
unfortunately a lot of people never read history to understand how certain things in the modern world came to be. if you've a chance read a bit on sharecropping, the feudal system. then you will see a good population of people are willingly getting into serfdom.
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fnoef 3mo ago
Thank you for saying this. Every time I see a substack article I simply do not open it, because if I do, especially on mobile, 90% of the screen will be covered for popups banners and what not
stevenally 3mo ago
I am surprised that people pay $12/ month for a single Substack newsletter.
whalesalad 3mo ago
My biggest grievance with Substack is that the font treatment (kerning is way off), coloring, spacing, etc of all of the posts is difficult to read. I can't read anything on Substack without a 3rd party reader tool. This is ironic because the core competency of a publishing tool is ensuring that your audience can read the content.
ciefa 3mo ago
Earlier I got an email from Substack telling me to check out my stats for my bewest blog post. It has 2 views, lol. I just post it all to blog.ciefas.cafe now, I have no audience so I feel like Substack is useless to me.
slater 3mo ago
Obligatory: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e... Archive link: https://archive.ph/rfnc5 https://archive.ph/rfnc5
ryukoposting 3mo ago
I wrote this for my own self-hosted blog a few years ago: > My goal is to write good blog posts, and µstack exists for the purpose of making it as easy as possible for me to write good blog posts. As far as I can tell, there’s no meaningful correlation between the quality of work published on a website, and the amount of engagement that website receives. I could track clicks or traffic or RSS feed queries, but that data would only tell me how many people are reading what I write - it wouldn’t tell me if my writing is any good. I feel like it's relevant here. The OP tacitly assumes that engagement is the goal, that your purpose in writing is to get eyes on what you wrote. I argue that, for most writers, the goal is self-expression. If that drives engagement, cool. If it doesn't, the purpose has still been fulfilled. If I were to provide an addendum to the OP, it would be this: consider the goals of your blog, artistic and otherwise. The answer to "what platform is right for me?" might be no platform at all. If you make good art (or blog posts), people will find you, "platform" or not. The internet is cool that way. Eyes do not good art make.
- a57721 3mo ago
  I feel like the internet used to be "cool that way", but it's not anymore. You don't do stuff for "engagement", but you probably want some audience and feedback, otherwise why bother publishing your work at all. Nowadays almost all audience got sucked up by the black hole of social media and LLMs, and most authors just scream into the void.
SkyEyedGreyWyrm 3mo ago
Seeing some of the conversations in the comments reminded me of this thread and post from a few years back "Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39016734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39016734 https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/ https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghos...
aetherspawn 3mo ago
A great article written on this theme is “DON’T BUILD YOUR CASTLE IN OTHER PEOPLE’S KINGDOMS” (2021) https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/ https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
vasco 3mo ago
If you have a substack you probably do not need a website. You probably need a personal diary.
jeena 3mo ago
I was reading and reading and thinking that's the ages old advise POSSE, and then they even mention the Indieweb, nice.
jdw64 3mo ago
I run an independent technical homepage. The monthly cost is about $65 USD. Of course, it's money I can spend on a hobby, but it's still quite a lot. The only reason I can manage it is because I'm a programmer—I can handle things like caching strategies and various other tedious tasks. I get about 600 visitors a day.(The site could be hosted much more cheaply. I deliberately run a more involved architecture because part of its purpose is to serve as an operational portfolio. I needed public evidence that I could design, deploy, monitor, and operate a real system over time. Generally, for a site of about my size, around $40 a month should be enough.) Writing itself takes a lot of effort. First: 1.You have to define your target audience. 2.You have to choose topics they'll find interesting. 3.You need to collect materials. 4.You read through the materials, build the structure, and go through multiple drafts and revisions. Even a short post usually takes about a week. And even after all that, will people actually read it? Not really. So I have to promote it on external sites like HN and Reddit, and keep updating the sitemap until my site starts showing up in Google search results. The problem is that most people want to make money through writing. That's completely understandable. With the economy getting tougher, even hobbies cost money. The issue is that once you step away from platforms like Substack and Medium, it becomes much harder for people to find your content, and you lose the community itself. In fact, that's the real strength of Substack and Medium—people are already there to spend money because they're earning from the same ecosystem. But if you move to an independent site, even putting up ads can cause strong backlash (especially since Google often shows low-quality ads—like porn ads—to people who don't share their personal data). In my case, I created my site because I needed a portfolio that made me look professional. Since I don't have experience at prestigious companies or universities, and I've mostly moved between small contractors, I needed something to show that I know certain things, have relevant experience, and have built actual products. (In the Korean market, the only work available to programmers without capital is small NDA-bound jobs.) On the other hand, people with good careers don't need to take this risk—their reputation comes from successful products they've worked on in the market. So I needed a metric like 'I run my own site, it uses MSA, and I have experience running it stably over the long term.' Of course, I could list the projects I've worked on, but most of them don't have a strong track record of market success. So I think that unless you're in a special situation, it's better to stay within existing writing communities.
hazrmard 3mo ago
I resonate with the author's point that I can modify my own website to my will. I use hugo to build my website and I wrote my own theme. It's clunky, but control over the design/build lets me: - Put PyIodide into posts to make ML code explainers interactive (https://iahmed.me/post/poor_mans_autograd/) - Inject custom widgets to illustrate theoretical ideas (https://iahmed.me/post/surprise-derivation-entropy/) - Have multiple layouts to suit my needs (https://iahmed.me/resume/ rendered from json at build time for SEO) On the flip side, I'm not good at SEO :) It works because SEO is not my primary goal, but I'd love to have a bigger audience. The flexibility I'm afforded is an ok compromise.
khanhnguyen8386 3mo ago
[flagged]
ProAm 3mo ago
The age of the individual is over...
Lockal 3mo ago
The page is AI slop, don't waste your time
real-hacker 3mo ago
Wake up. The ad revenue model of websites is dying.
madhu_ghalame 3mo ago
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danschuller 3mo ago
Does SEO even matter these days? Google Search seems to be on the way out as the dominant discovery mechanism. Really a better discovery mechanism is what writers need that's more aligned with with readers and writers and less with platform owners and advertisers.
pjmlp 3mo ago
The moment I get those popups on Substack or similar, to login to continue reading, those writers have lost a reader. So yeah, get a website.
jojobas 3mo ago
Isn't Substack's whole premise that you get raw cash for you priceless writing, not worrying about SEO and other crap? Those without an actual domain are sure very exposed.
mosbyllc 3mo ago
The website itself isn't the most important thing, what matters is the people who use it.
kenanfyi 3mo ago
I kind of agree with the author, but having such places is very convenient for most people considering most people do not know how to make websites. Yes, it is easy nowadays, but it is still a hurdle for many. Specifically on Substack though: I immediately close if a link I clicked is Substack. Many reasons for that. I find it very unpleasant to read stuff there, because of that banners and general design of the website. It all look generic and I hate generic. Second reason and even more important for me is that Substack platforms Nazis and white supremacists and they have apparently no problem about it. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-substack-makes-money-from-hosting-nazi-newsletters https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
t0bia_s 3mo ago
Technically you do not own domain. You just rent it from registrar for yearly fee.
cookingoils 3mo ago
Another reason for having a designed website instead of just a Substack is marketing. When I visit a site and see that it’s a Substack I don’t want to stay and explore. It feels generic and that hurts the writing. Making a custom site isn’t much trouble, especially these days so defaulting to Substack feels a little unconsidered
muragekibicho 3mo ago
Honestly, I shut down my webiste and Medium, then moved to Substack because they solved the "get paid for my writing" problem. In 2022, Medium was defacto blogging platform and getting into their paid program was close to impossible. In the first 2 days of setting up Subtack I got a 5 dollar deposit from my first paying reader. I couldn't have done that on either Medium or my personal blog.
- hamper653 3mo ago
  People pay to read blogs?
dmje 3mo ago
I'd consider Substack if it had options to make my blog the canonical. But AFAIK that isn't possible; the only way of doing it would be for Substack to be the canonical and my blog the "copy", and that seems dumb from a future thinking perspective?
lylo 3mo ago
I agree! That's why I built Pagecord. Like Substack it's a blog with a mailing list, but it's also your personal website (pages, for example) with a custom domain. Also, source available. Most people will defer to Substack because (A) the brand, and (B) it can be monetised which is probably the biggest draw. Maybe I need to bring monetisation to Pagecord? :) https://pagecord.com https://pagecord.com https://github.com/lylo/pagecord https://github.com/lylo/pagecord
alphadelphi 3mo ago
Amen to that
weberress 3mo ago
so true ! since 1995 !
stared 3mo ago
Now the friction is close to none, at least for techies. Set a GitHub repo, use pnpm + Astro, and your favourite AI to migrate data there, brew some coffee, and before you finish it, you have your page up. It does not prevent you from posting elsewhere. But that way, you have full control both on the fruits of your own work, and how you display it.
Havoc 3mo ago
Yet another walled garden leveraging network effects
paraschopra 3mo ago
I used to pay Mailchimp $100+/month and would write 3-4 articles per month. It seemed illogical to me how much mailchimp would charge. I now have a substack + a wordpress website. An article goes to both places, and substack acts as a subscriber growth + email distribution tool for me.
- pembrook 3mo ago
  Substack is free because you act as a growth/distribution engine for them. They plaster your emails with ads to download their app and will even email your list whenever they feel like it and when you leave they will still email your list substack-related content and offers. When someone subscribed via the app btw, they own that person, not you. If you’re okay with that trade off, fine, but I thought we learned this lesson about the trap of “free” with the social media companies before…
  - mindsolutions 3mo ago
    [flagged]
mintflow 3mo ago
Great idea. Recently, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s surprisingly easy these days. I already have a domain on Cloudflare, and I had Codex build a simple blogging system for me. I write everything in Markdown, the site is hosted on Cloudflare, comments are stored in Cloudflare D1, and all articles live in the repository as Markdown files. GitHub Actions takes care of publishing automatically and also performs regular backups. To reduce comment spam, I use Cloudflare Turnstile, which has been working really well. For comment moderation, I protect the admin interface with Cloudflare Zero Trust, using email-based authentication, so I don’t need to build or maintain my own authentication system. Overall, the setup has been incredibly simple, reliable, and has required very little ongoing maintenance.
- brabel 3mo ago
  This is not a simple setup. Most people would be just fine with a static site that can be hosted for free on Netlify, Cloudfare Pages, GitHub Pages and so on.
  - andrew-jack 3mo ago
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rozhok 3mo ago
Substack fails to deliver the single thing it supposed to do - great reading experience. The website itself is slow, it cannot render the whole comments section, it constantly nags readers with subscribe forms. It can not handle single account across my subscriptions. Its just crap.
- infinitifall 3mo ago
  We have made peace with the dichotomy of a computer delivering AAA titles at 4k 144Hz while simultaneously struggling to render a few hundred comments on Substack.
scwilich 3mo ago
I’m the founder of Tertulia so take this with appropriate grain of salt. I (unsurprisingly) agree authors should own their own website and email list (btw based on hundreds of data points we know converts about 100 to 1 versus social followers for book sales) but the issue is how to make it effortless to set up and maintain a website. We built a system where you enter one ISBN and we instantly import your entire book catalog, including books, reviews, metadata, author bio, etc. Btw one book to all the authors’ books is not trivial problem (see how often Amazon gets it wrong) due to lack of universal author ID. We’ve since built author-specific email marketing, ecommerce, etc all on a domain each author owns (we make it seamless). Now that we have 9k+ happy (65 NPS) authors we’re adding author cross promotion for distribution but the author’s owned domain and capturing their own emails remains at center. Anyways if anyone wants to check it out for free (no CC needed) would welcome feedback from HN community. https://authors.tertulia.com/ https://authors.tertulia.com/
jreynar 3mo ago
My two cents here is that if you're trying to growth hack yourself, you need to be on a platform that's also growth hacking. Building an audience anywhere is genuinely hard. Algorithmic feeds like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. force you to play a game they control and that may not align with your content. Medium, substack, etc. will build your audience only to the extent that it aligns with their goals. Hosting your own blog means somehow getting traffic to it -- which might mean playing the google search game, which then depends on aligning with user queries and getting your site ranked. Or it may mean somehow driving traffic to your blog, such as from a newsletter or social site. But that brings us back to either algorithmic feeds or newsletter products. Don't think there's an easy answer here and I bet YMMV depending on the type of content you have, how much of audience you already have, etc. I tried the reverse -- syndicating content on medium that we publish on our blog. 0 impressions, literally, for 5 posts that got some readership on our blog.
- wepple 3mo ago
  It sounds like you’ve given up on an open web. Possibly the rational thing for you to do in your circumstances, but nonetheless a sad place we are in.
voxleone 3mo ago
There's an exact parallel with business owners - in my geographic region (BR) at least - in general. It still surprises me how many small and even medium-sized businesses don't bother registering their own domain name anymore, preferring instead to rely entirely on an Instagram page.
Wicher 3mo ago
RSS is great for informing readers of new content. Sadly only a few actually use it, except (unknowingly, for a large part of the population) for... Podcasts. So, thinking out loud: you could offer people to subscribe to your website by publishing a RSS feed with dummy audio, using a link in the the episode description to get people to hop through to your website. And then you offer the appropriate "subscribe in iTunes / Spotify / generic podcasting app" buttons on your website page. And then suddenly the masses can sign up to your updates! And they can easily unsubscribe! And you don't have to deal with email, and can use static file hosting! There'd even be a discovery inroad as presumably the Apples and Spotifies of this world will push it through the personalized recommendations pipe just as they would for any other podcast. It's a bit subversive but it would work wouldn't it?
- rad-b 3mo ago
  Good idea, and unfortunately one of those that would work only while it’s not popular. If it turns out to be good enough to become popular, here comes the enforcement.
  - Wicher 3mo ago
    It'd be hard to detect from structure. Episode descriptions can and do legitimately have links. And if/when it comes to deep inspection, instead of a dummy audio file one could use a TTS-ed audio version of the post, there's some legitimacy there. You can even flip it around and claim that the blogpost is the "audio transcription" "for those who want it". But yeah let's not underestimate the power we're giving these platforms. If down the road it doesn't match the monetization strategy? Platform giveth, platform taketh.
shekharupadhaya 3mo ago
Why do they need a website, their newsletter is their channel and social profiles on X would be sufficient?
8by3 3mo ago
Exporting your subscriber list isn't perfect. I did it after moving to https://tuhat.net https://tuhat.net, and then after posting from tuhat, got emails from subscribers asking who I was and why I was writing to them. The majority of said subscribers, came from an article I wrote about leaving substack, so you'd think they'd have figured it out. Some of them were far less polite, never mind that it would have taken them less time to click unsubscribe then writing some insulting email to someone they chose to follow.
Magicrafter13 3mo ago
In my mind this always went without saying, but realistically I know most people never think long term about this sort of thing. I've been hosting my own web content for nearly a decade now, including a 6 year old blog, and I've always kept it there only, using social media to advertise it. Frankly I think self hosting is super easy in 2026 (and virtually free unless you want personalized domains or subdomains), especially for simple web content, but I also understand the aversion to it and at least hope that more and more people will spend their money on VPS (or other hosting services like Wordpress), rather than these random websites that appear overnight like Substack.
wittyurchin 3mo ago
[flagged]
npras1 3mo ago
sivers does posse efficiently. https://sive.rs/socials https://sive.rs/socials
Jeiperd 3mo ago
Hey! Saw your post — we build websites & online stores and we'll show you a FREE visual preview of YOUR site within 48h, before you pay anything. Happy to prepare one: https://jeiperdsolutions.com https://jeiperdsolutions.com

646 points by speckx 3mo ago

In this case, I think we should learn from the direct marketing guys (wait, here me out.) The problems mentioned several times in this thread can all be addressed by their ways, although it requires work, and not treating this "getting paid to write" thing as merely a hobby. - how not to rely on a central authority for your work - how to solve the problem of getting paid - how not to get banned by the publishing site and also the payment processor for saying things they might deem controversial - and even how to keep your subscribers and also prevent your paid content from leaking to the LLMs This is how people like Ben Settle (considered as one of the greatest email marketers), Dan Kennedy (Ben looks up to him) and Matt Furey (Ben and Dan both revere him) earned their way into wealth. * they paywall their premium newsletters. but you can't access them via a website by logging in with a username/password, or a forgotten password flow. No. It's delivered to your home as printed booklets via courier [1]. * Ben has a rule: if you subscribe to his paid newsletter ($97/mo) and then unsub, you won't even be able to join back [2]. * Dan Kennedy has no email. You'll have to fax him to get his attention. * Ben often talks about the perils of having your entire business at the mercy of platforms and payment processors. His solution is to have multiple merchant accounts [3]. * By keeping their premium content away from the internet, they're able to keep off piracy, and that same playbook is now protecting their content from LLM bots. And by charging big numbers ($97/mo vs $5/mo) they're able to deinsentivise the subscribers from uploading them to the internet. They have proud long-time subscribers who are loyal to them and don't want to harm their business. One of the main discussion points in this thread is the importance of owning your list. And nobody takes that job seriously than these direct marketers. To them, it's all about controlling as many different parts of the machinery as they could. And finally, if they're doing offline business, what do they keep their websites for? To build the list of course. And then sell their paid stuff to that list via email. Yes, it seems like a chicken and egg problem, but then I believe you only need a few fans to keep the ball rolling (kelly 1000 true fans etc). [1] - https://emailplayers.com/ https://emailplayers.com/ [2] - https://bensettle.com/blog/why-i-banned-you/ https://bensettle.com/blog/why-i-banned-you/ [3] - https://bensettle.com/blog/merchant-account-kicks-my-app/ https://bensettle.com/blog/merchant-account-kicks-my-app/ - matt furey's $97/mo digital newsletter https://knockoutmarketing.com/zen-mastery-newsletter/ https://knockoutmarketing.com/zen-mastery-newsletter/

josefritzishere 3mo ago

TLDR: POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

pavlov 3mo ago
Is there a guide for how to do the “syndicate elsewhere” part? For the HN audience, the first part is trivially easy (getting a domain, publishing on it) but the second probably isn’t obvious.
- cosmicgadget 3mo ago
  There are guides but it amounts to "use popular services to link to your website". Post snippets on the bird apps, social media hellscapes, and aggregators like this one. Duplicate your content on the blogging services. Have an RSS feed and submit it to discovery engines and web directories/rings. And send me a link so I can index you. Stickers are neat too.
- dghlsakjg 3mo ago
  Depending on how often you write copy and paste to “elsewhere” is the easy answer. Substack really wants you to use them as a primary publisher so they don’t make it easy to programmatically put content up. Other platforms have varying levels of ease around this.

mertbio 3mo ago

I recently started to write newsletters about Hamburg (https://alsterrunde.com https://alsterrunde.com). Before doing that I also considered Substack but seeing that I have to pay 50$ for just using my domain was a no-go. In the end, I ended up with my friend's hosted Ghost solution (https://www.synapsmedia.com https://www.synapsmedia.com). If you already have a Substack, you can also easily migrate to Ghost. Since it is open source, you can also host it on Hetzner, if you want to manage it yourself.

BirAdam 3mo ago
This saved me when X killed Substack tweets. My Substack uses a custom domain and thus was fine. People tweeted it out with no blocking.

dynm 3mo ago

For what it's worth, I have a markdown-based website with a domain I own, and I stubbornly link to that website only, treating substack as just a temporary distribution channel.[^1] And I am constantly, endlessly asking myself if all the extra friction I've added to my life is worth it. [^1]: I can't stand how slow and tracking-heavy substack is, but the problem of "send email and not get filtered as spam" is non-trivial.

skippyfish 3mo ago

Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers. RSS could be it, but it's too niche. Social media is kinda it, but algorithmic feeds reward political clickbait and just because someone clicks "follow" or "subscribe" is not a guarantee that they will ever see your posts. Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read. So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web. There's a lot of value in backing up your Substack subscribers' emails so that you can move somewhere else down the line, and the nice thing about Substack is that they let you do that. If they stop, that's a trap.

Topology1 3mo ago
I feel like the transition from substack to website + newsletter wouldn't be terrible, although I'm sure your traffic would decrease after making the switch.
- cosmicgadget 3mo ago
  I miss the days when I'd regularly get forwards from friends about stuff they found on the internet.
  - brunoarueira 3mo ago
    One of my first jobs after graduate, I used to share a lot of posts with my coworkers until a certain point where one of them said "I don't know how you read so much content", worthless to say him was a Master's student, so I'm expecting him to be able to consume more content than myself, although different more towards academic stuff.
    - coldtea 3mo ago
      >"I don't know how you read so much content" And then they spend hours every day doomscrolling and binge watching shit

acmnrs 3mo ago

Alternatively, use an open platform that doesn't lock you in: * Leaflet<https://leaflet.pub> * Offprint<https://offprint.app> * Pckt<https://pckt.blog>

spelk 3mo ago
I think from a technical perspective, newsletters are a solved problems with lots of options as you've mentioned. Substack thrives because it's built a reputation for having well-reasoned or engaging voices in a newsletter format. They pushed a big campaign to onboard writers like Bill Bishop (Sinocism) onto the platform early on. Because of that, newer writers are likely seeking to tap into the network effects/discovery systems that comes with having big names on the platform. People log onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, etc. because the people they're interested are already on the platform, and the platform provides a recommendation system that allows newer "creators" to tap into an existing audience for others in their niche.
wuliwong 3mo ago
I get that we all want people to be on open platforms but I feel like the really staunch part of the open platforms only crowd is not taking the time to understand why people like platforms like substack.
- schlagetown 3mo ago
  I agree, very aware it's way more than just the publishing / email tools! Also posted a top-level comment about building alternatives with https://leaflet.pub https://leaflet.pub and https://standard.site https://standard.site - and yes I think really important to consider the full list of things you get with Substack: blog + email, easy to customize, monetization, social features + network, all in one platform, long tail of features… Did a short talk on this at a local meetup recently, basically on how we might collectively re-create the entire stack of what Substack offers, in an open ecosystem, with a strong focus on network / distribution, more so than just features. It's a tall order but I do think there's a big opportunity here beyond what any single app can or should tackle, in building an open alternative to the whole longform publishing stack, combining the tools and the social network side. AT Protocol and the Atmosphere (ecosystem of folks building on it) are pretty well positioned here. Lots of nice ways to get autonomy and ownership with web publishing + distribution and social affordances at the same time. Of course a big challenge in bootstrapping the network and building the cultural footprint and giving folks flexible ways to make money and reach new readers, but I'm encouraged by how much progress we've made collectively just this past year.

spelk 3mo ago

I am quite sad that Kagi Smallweb excludes Substack. I understand that less technical writers have started moving to Substack both to build an audience and have access to effective publishing tools, but it feels like I'm missing out on some really interesting new perspectives, similar to early Medium.

doublepg23 3mo ago

I've always understood platforms like Substack or Patreon to really be a solution to the payment processing problem first and foremost.

t-writescode 3mo ago
That’s exactly right. Finding ways to get paid for your work, and all the very complicated way taxes interact with it all, unless you’re going all-in on ads, is a messy problem that people will happily centralize for. And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.
- doublepg23 3mo ago
  I follow a very prolific open-source/FOSS podcasting network. All of their infrastructure from the very bottom to the very top is FOSS - except their membership program. It links to a third-party which processes payments compliantly. They've attempted a pivot to funding the network via BTC/Lightning but clearly that's polarizing to a lot of people even though it better aligns with their philosophy.
  - shimman 3mo ago
    Which podcast is this? It's not on my radar, def interested.
    - doublepg23 3mo ago
      https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com I've been listening to the network for decades now and directly credit my IT career to the people who've been platformed on the various shows over the years. Lots of great content.
  - t-writescode 3mo ago
    I'm not a lawyer; but I believe that even if they take payment through BTC, etc, they're going to need to take sales tax, etc, based on the location that their subscriber is ... which means they need to handle the tax hell that comes with it, so they'll find themselves better off with a Merchant of Record that can handle that for them ... which is almost certainly proprietary because ... it's a big mess.

raincole 3mo ago

Did we really learn nothing from Medium's situation?

wuliwong 3mo ago
What did you learn from the Medium situation?
- shimman 3mo ago
  Staking your own kingdom has infinitely more potential than settling into someone's fief.

elgolem89 3mo ago

who reads websites these days?

slater 3mo ago
You? For example, on this site?

f311a 3mo ago

Substack gives a really nice exposure though, unlike medium and other platforms. It's very hard to gain readers now on independent websites. Google search is dead (very few people now search for tech content), social media platforms penalize you for posting links and so on. You can get a few thousand subscribers on Substack just by being consistent and interacting with other people. Now try gaining 1000 subscribers to an e-mail newsletter or RSS from your personal blog. People who tried it know that 5,000 views on your blog can convert to a few subscribers, and you need to get those 5000 somehow first. A lot of people just repost their articles to substack for a reason. It's not forbidden. You can repost them from your personal blog.

rsingel 3mo ago
Not true. Ghost sites grow quite well and much of Substack's network effects don't turn into real subscribers
cosmicgadget 3mo ago
This is why it'd be great if bloggers more frequently provided topical, off-site recommendations in post footers. It's functionally like Substack's internal links but connects the open web.

simonw 3mo ago

I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter. I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth. Here's the tool I use for the copy-pasting: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blog-to-newsletter https://tools.simonwillison.net/blog-to-newsletter Substack doesn't have an API for composing a newsletter, but their rich text editor DOES accept copy-pasted data - and copy-paste is the universal API.

rsingel 3mo ago
You could do the same thing through Ghost, which has an API, and not be using a service that proudly platforms the Tates and nazis.
- simonw 3mo ago
  Ghost would cost $288/month (or $241/month paid yearly).
  - rsingel 3mo ago
    With 66k subscribers you could cover that without even really trying by setting up a $5/month donation tier or putting a tip jar on the site. With a tiny bit of effort, you could make thousands a month. Substack lets you get away with sending that many emails without attempting to monetize because you pay them in clout and with your reader data. I think they are getting the better deal given how good your writing is and your reputation.
  - rsingel 3mo ago
    I'll put my money where my mouth is. We at Outpost will host your site on Ghost for a year for free and migrate all your substack subscribers, with the only caveats that 1) you put a tip jar link (either to Ghost's or Outpost's) at the end of every email with some text like support us being on an indie platform and 2) at the end of the year or earlier report how it went.

thataccount 3mo ago

As a writer who has been on the web for a long time, I no longer write much for the sake of the web. My personal website I took down this year because I didn't like the idea of AI snarfing up everything I wrote. I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. While I don't write only for money, I certainly write with the idea of needing a certain amount of money to keep on writing. The internet just doesn't offer that kind of environment anymore in my opinion. I do like the Indie web, and to me, it is more just the way the internet was/has been/needs to be. What is missing are neutral kinds of payment layers/vendors that won't pull your funding if you say something someone somewhere doesn't like.

01284a7e 3mo ago
Same - I wrote on the web for 25 years (2000 to 2025). I can attribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of income to it. I no longer have any websites, as nothing came out of it for a couple years. ~90% of all my traffic ended up bots. And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.
sfRattan 3mo ago
> I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. The real choke point is one step up the chain with payment processors, and since 9/11 and stricter KYC with banks, there's not a reliable, widely accepted path around those regulations. Cryptocurrency remains fringe. Running a self-hosted ghost or WordPress powered blog or newsletter will encounter the same bottleneck wherever money changes hands among average-Joes online.
- thataccount 3mo ago
  Most internet providers I've seen around lately have clauses against hosting your own website on residential providers. That provides two choke points. I used to be a Monero fan before its Blockchain became the size of Cyberpunk 2077.

firasd 3mo ago

I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but like ‘oh great now I gotta deal with this’. So that’s why Medium in the past and now Substack etc end up as fallbacks

pitchlatte 3mo ago
given that wordpress.com is just managed hosting i wonder if other providers can bring that cost down. installing it yourself is trivial though because of Softaculous, and web hosting is much cheaper.
- drdexebtjl 3mo ago
  Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess. But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it. Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0. If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.
  - gertop 3mo ago
    > Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess. There are literally thousands of PHP hosting providers. There are also dozens, possibly hundreds of deviated wordpress hosting services, aside from WordPress.com.
    - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
      Your point being? These thousands of hosting providers all charge around $5 or more to host your Wordpress instance, because that’s what it actually costs to run Wordpress. A more modern CMS can bring costs down by serving pages from a CDN cache and, most importantly, selectively re-rendering only pages that changed. This is hard to do with Wordpress because plugins can essentially render anything and depend on any data.

millipede 3mo ago

Whenever I see Substack or Medium URLs, I avoid clicking them. They are so spammy with their call to subscribe, that it's not even worth me visiting them. People recognize quality, and they don't need to be pressured to subscribe. The websites I visit every day never asked me to come back.

Silamoth 3mo ago
Interesting. I feel the same way about Medium - it’s mostly a bunch of undergrads and tech bootcamp students regurgitating basic tutorials. But in my experience, Substack is much higher quality. I actually read several Substack blogs regularly because they’re better and more consistent than most blogs I come across. YMMV, I guess, but I have at least half a dozen blogs I actively follow on Substack, compared to maybe 1 elsewhere.
d_k_h 3mo ago
Same. I'm sure there are good things there but most of what I have come across has been trash so it makes a great filter.
eluru 3mo ago
same for me on medium, but susbstack not necesarily, they seem to be more focused on the author not like medium

CM30 3mo ago

Yeah, even if the website itself gets less traffic than the places you syndicate the content to, it's at least a stable home base that's there if those platforms fall apart. Are you posting something that corporations or celebrities don't like/want to see shared? Then posting it on your own site means that the buck stops with you, and they'll have to force you to take it down in court rather than relying on advertiser pressure/'encouraging' the platform to ignore fair use. Did you do something controversial that means platforms don't want to deal with you or individuals want to ruin your life? Having your own site means you can generally tell them to pound sand. And there's no worries regarding things like forced logins, forced ads, obnoxious cookie banners (especially if you don't need to collect personal info anyway), age verification restrictions, etc. Plus there's just a level of control over the design and features that you can't get elsewhere. Want to make the site look completely unlike any other? It's 100% doable, as plenty of blogs posted here show very well. Want to add a new feature like polls or surveys or quizzes or interactive infographics or what not? You don't need a third party service or some premium account, you just add it yourself. Running a website is like owning a home rather than renting one. You decide what furniture, what colours, what utilities and service providers, whether you want pets, etc.

cosmicgadget 3mo ago
And HN is kind of like the HOA of websites, giving you notices about color choice, pets, and under construction gifs.

8organicbits 3mo ago

The linked article "What I learned from one year of Substack" [1] perfectly sums up my experience. I can't read the article because I only see a coercive demand to subscribe first. Perhaps that's the joke. [1] https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-year-of-substack/ https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-...

klelatti 3mo ago
It's not a Substack site and virtually no Substack sites do this.

wxw 3mo ago

I think https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE is generally a good compromise. Frankly, if writing is becoming a serious business for you, it's probably better to work across ALL of Substack/personal site/X/etc. They're all worthwhile distribution and monetization channels and can serve different purposes.

ryanthedev 3mo ago

If you ever need a home. I built it mainly for me and all the stuff that I work on. https://upubli.sh/ https://upubli.sh/

byterivet 3mo ago
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npn 3mo ago

There is a list of a few websites that I subconsciously think only have garbage articles and never really pay serious attention to them: quora, medium and substack. Surely dev.to also filled with low level articles, but at least people there spent effort to write articles then gave it for free. But those users of the previous websites mostly write it for money. Don't get me wrong, quality articles deserve to have money in return, you can't get far without sustainable business. But writing for the sake of writing (and earning money for the quantity not quality) is what is causing those websites to be filled with shallow contents.

asimpletune 3mo ago

For anyone who’s interested in this stuff: I made a FOSS commenting system for websites that accepts comments via email. https://r3ply.com https://r3ply.com You combine your website/blog with that and you have a pretty nice setup that you own. You can even use RSS to allow people to subscribe to replies to comments, threads, a page, etc…

ArcHound 3mo ago

Also take into account Substack moderation policy. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-substack-makes-money-from-hosting-nazi-newsletters https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s... Natsoc newsletters are apparently fine, but showing porn is too much and you'll be moderated. Go on, tell me how one is more harmful to kids than the other.

pessimizer 3mo ago
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rafaquintanilha 3mo ago

I debated this for longer than I would like, and in the end regretted not joining Substack soon enough. I keep a personal blog since 2012 [1] which, in its last iteration, is hosted in Ghost. There is something really reassuring in knowing that you own a space in the internet, that nobody can shut you down, and that ceteris paribus it will survive till eternity. However, discoverability is indeed a problem. If in the past we had to play the SEO game in order to get some traffic (I would crosspost in Reddit but the amount of uncalled hate I would get from an unqualified audience hardly pays off – I manage to make to the top of HN once though), now it's even worse with AI. I agree with those who say that as much as we like to say we write for ourselves (and I do think this is true), it's as important to have contact with the public. In Le vie intellectuele Fr. Sertillanges would argue that critics help you shape the argument and make it clearer and more correct. Therefore, having a distribution channel is important. After all, if all you want is to brain dump or write as an exercise, write it in Obsidian or similar software, connect it to Git and be done with it. Now, after I started my Substack [2] I was able to attract over ~2.3k subs to date. It's true that a lot of that came from other channels (like my YouTube channel), but in the past it was always slow and Ghost newsletter never really worked well for me. In Substack I often get recommendations from other writers, and you can also refer to people you respect as well. If Substack ever ceases to allow you to export your posts or subscribers, then I agree the network effect won't be as decisive. Currently, I write my drafts in Obsidian so I always have a local copy, then copy, paste and refine in the Substack editor (so it looks optimized there), and press publish. [1] https://rafaelquintanilha.com https://rafaelquintanilha.com [2] https://codecapital.substack.com https://codecapital.substack.com

dsr_ 3mo ago

In system after system, people enthusiastically swarm to something which is easy to use. Then, after enshittification, they hang around too long because it's so hard to extract and send the meaningful data and metadata elsewhere. If you write all your stuff in a location you control, and syndicate that out to the popular platform of the day, you can minimize your loss. An astoundingly large percentage of my personal technical policies are guided by the idea that I want to minimize my losses after the next sudden yet inevitable betrayal.

schlagetown 3mo ago

I'm one of the creators of Leaflet - https://leaflet.pub https://leaflet.pub - also mentioned in another comment. We're making a publishing app kind of like Substack or Ghost, but connected to the open social ecosystem building on AT Protocol. There a lot of potential here, and a lot of tools that already exist. We collaborated with other publishing apps (pckt & Offprint) to make Standard.site - https://standard.site https://standard.site - a simple set of standards for publishing interop that enables something like RSS but on top of a whole social network. More context: https://lab.leaflet.pub/3moomxyjssk2p https://lab.leaflet.pub/3moomxyjssk2p Others can leverage this to make e.g. a whole reader app where you can find everything people in your network are publishing: https://standard-reader.app https://standard-reader.app A key thing is it's very flexible, you can publish on Leaflet, or on a self-hosted blog, and make your content discoverable and subscribeable in the same way. And in either case, you own your content — even if you use Leaflet as your hosted CMS, published data lives in your PDS where you control it, and all the social graph stuff persists even if you stop using Leaflet or we ever shut down. Self-hosting a website is great but also considerable overhead for many folks, and we want to make it easy to publish and still have control and avoid lock-in. We even see folks doing hybrid approaches, e.g. using Leaflet to publish (for easy to use CMS + nice social features) but also pulling published data to render directly on their own website. It's very different from what you get with a concentrated single platform like Substack (or Instagram, YouTube, etc) as far as audience reach, and early days with the ecosystem, but I think it's valuable in a different way. It's more aligned with the open web, and importantly, it's more antifragile — there are many ways to reach people and interact with your readers, from Bluesky to Leaflet to other reader apps, search tools, etc. Network effects aren't there yet to the degree of Substack, but a lot of cool things are emerging and it feels like an exciting time to build here together.

dirkc 3mo ago
I get a cloudflare 502 error for standard.site
cpill 3mo ago
can't we just make RSS cool again?!

simonsarris 3mo ago

I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting. But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than its fees, because the counterfactual is that I don't have any of those things. I think it's a huge mistake to lump those together as "convenience", its a lot more than convenient! The only important thing to me about having a non-substack website is that its good to have a place for more permanent information, lists, contact, etc. But even for many writers, that kind of stuff becomes stale so quickly that the personal sites don't tend to matter much, or even make them look worse! The floating social network spaces are much more valuable. Even losing my x.com would be much worse to my day-to-day life than losing my domain, though I may wish it were otherwise. And I cannot replicate that elsewhere. The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.

jdthedisciple 3mo ago
How easy/difficult was it getting off the ground on substack? Did you get interactions right from your first post? Is there visibility for new writers?
- moralestapia 3mo ago
  Please x2. If you could write a small guide, that'd be phenomenal.
  - hnped 3mo ago
    What is genuinely interesting is how Hacker News moderators will edit user posts, such that it looks as if the user replied to another post originally, without ever making that clear. What other lies and manipulation do they come with? Directly editing the content of posts silently, no sign of being edited?
- brightball 3mo ago

plantain 3mo ago

Substack is unreadable for anyone in Australia, as it forces you unnecessarily through age verification.

efields 3mo ago

Did Wordpress write this?

peteforde 3mo ago

Everyone's experience will be different, but I will say that I have not received significant network effects traffic on Substack nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content. In short, I think that for the vast majority of casual posters, the aspirational upsides of joining a network are going to fall flat. Like with most aggregators, the popular things tend to be promoted more. So, for me at least, if I'm going to get very low traffic, I'd prefer to get that very low traffic on my own website. It might be a pyrrhic victory but I sleep just a little better knowing that as one of the 1% that actually creates stuff, I did what little I could.

InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source. Maybe there is a network effect on substack that makes it easier to get these external links, but I doubt most actual readers are coming from inside the substack ecosystem.
- pessimizer 3mo ago
  > Same, every time I end up on a substack post, it's from an external source. I think the parent was talking about having a substack, not reading things on Substack. But I also think the direct network effects don't come from casuals (other than that they repost to social networks.) People who are paying for a substack will look at others because it doesn't involve another signup or separate bill, they can just add the subscription for a buck or two. Now they can tour the subscriber content, and they can drop it after a little while if it doesn't ultimately appeal to them with just a click or three. For non-subscribers, a substack isn't any different from any other blog.
  - peteforde 3mo ago
    Maybe I'm an outlier, but I find that my main reason for discontinuing Ground News/Nebula/whatever is that I subscribe aspirationally and never actually make time to consume the content. One year I got my partner and I subscriptions to Masterclass and at the end of the year neither one of us had watched a single video. Basically, I don't know anyone who is ever bored. Who the hell has time to click on and read random posts? The entire value of HN is that other smart people surface the top 1% of 1% of stuff I'd probably find interesting. The notion of reading Substack posts just because I'm a subscriber seems like fantasy.

pryelluw 3mo ago

I agree and am working on it. It’s been a stream of progress after launching my comedy writings under https://yelluw.com https://yelluw.com I’ve focused mostly on writing by postponing the actual editorial/cms side of things. I’d rather prove that I can write and write well than spend all my energy getting the perfect cms setup. The one issue I have today is copyright and all the extreme scraping being done by ai companies. I wonder how others are dealing with that.

interstingstuff 3mo ago

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jmmv 3mo ago

I've been blogging for 22 years now. At the beginning I could tell I had a relatively steady audience based on frequent comments (when comments on blogs were a thing). These died off over the years. Then, in 2020, I implemented my own unobtrusive subscription mechanism and email distribution to try to regain such an audience. And... it's pretty disappointing. I've gotten less than 200 subscribers that way; conversions just don't happy. Then I "switched" to Substack 3 years ago and the audience growth is real. I'm approaching 2000 subscribers (some of which are paid, which always surprises me and I appreciate), and these keep growing organically although I'm sure a large portion of which are fake. It's hard to say it doesn't work or isn't worth it. Now... spoiler: I never "switched" to Substack. I continue to write all of my content on my website _first_, with all of the features it had before, but now I copy/paste the content into Substack and distribute it that way. It's painful, but I have scars from when I moved off of Medium and want to ensure I "own" the originals. If you are curious, I had written more about this 2 years ago in https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging

interstingstuff 3mo ago
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Chaseraph 3mo ago

Substack writers, you need to move to Ghost.

ninjahawk1 3mo ago

If you can generate traffic to your website while having a deep email list as well of people who are alerted when you write, you essentially make yourself unable to be censored or deplatformed. Large companies want you there so they make money from your content, make your own platform and get your own users and you have the keys to the kingdom.

irishmanlondon 3mo ago

[dead]

babblingfish 3mo ago

The real pro move is to have zero traffic so it doesn't matter either way

MinimalAction 3mo ago

Thank you! I don't like substack at all. I hate the typography overall. It's not hard to power up a static website, especially these days using Jekyll, Hugo, or hundreds of other such framework in so many different languages. The only thing good about Substack is to find new people to read from, but I'm less inclined to follow them for long because who knows how Substack changes things.

deleted 3mo ago

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dzonga 3mo ago

unfortunately a lot of people never read history to understand how certain things in the modern world came to be. if you've a chance read a bit on sharecropping, the feudal system. then you will see a good population of people are willingly getting into serfdom.

deleted 3mo ago

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fnoef 3mo ago

Thank you for saying this. Every time I see a substack article I simply do not open it, because if I do, especially on mobile, 90% of the screen will be covered for popups banners and what not

stevenally 3mo ago

I am surprised that people pay $12/ month for a single Substack newsletter.

whalesalad 3mo ago

My biggest grievance with Substack is that the font treatment (kerning is way off), coloring, spacing, etc of all of the posts is difficult to read. I can't read anything on Substack without a 3rd party reader tool. This is ironic because the core competency of a publishing tool is ensuring that your audience can read the content.

ciefa 3mo ago

Earlier I got an email from Substack telling me to check out my stats for my bewest blog post. It has 2 views, lol. I just post it all to blog.ciefas.cafe now, I have no audience so I feel like Substack is useless to me.

slater 3mo ago

Obligatory: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e... Archive link: https://archive.ph/rfnc5 https://archive.ph/rfnc5

ryukoposting 3mo ago

I wrote this for my own self-hosted blog a few years ago: > My goal is to write good blog posts, and µstack exists for the purpose of making it as easy as possible for me to write good blog posts. As far as I can tell, there’s no meaningful correlation between the quality of work published on a website, and the amount of engagement that website receives. I could track clicks or traffic or RSS feed queries, but that data would only tell me how many people are reading what I write - it wouldn’t tell me if my writing is any good. I feel like it's relevant here. The OP tacitly assumes that engagement is the goal, that your purpose in writing is to get eyes on what you wrote. I argue that, for most writers, the goal is self-expression. If that drives engagement, cool. If it doesn't, the purpose has still been fulfilled. If I were to provide an addendum to the OP, it would be this: consider the goals of your blog, artistic and otherwise. The answer to "what platform is right for me?" might be no platform at all. If you make good art (or blog posts), people will find you, "platform" or not. The internet is cool that way. Eyes do not good art make.

a57721 3mo ago
I feel like the internet used to be "cool that way", but it's not anymore. You don't do stuff for "engagement", but you probably want some audience and feedback, otherwise why bother publishing your work at all. Nowadays almost all audience got sucked up by the black hole of social media and LLMs, and most authors just scream into the void.

SkyEyedGreyWyrm 3mo ago

Seeing some of the conversations in the comments reminded me of this thread and post from a few years back "Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39016734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39016734 https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/ https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghos...

aetherspawn 3mo ago

A great article written on this theme is “DON’T BUILD YOUR CASTLE IN OTHER PEOPLE’S KINGDOMS” (2021) https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/ https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...

vasco 3mo ago

If you have a substack you probably do not need a website. You probably need a personal diary.

jeena 3mo ago

I was reading and reading and thinking that's the ages old advise POSSE, and then they even mention the Indieweb, nice.

jdw64 3mo ago

I run an independent technical homepage. The monthly cost is about $65 USD. Of course, it's money I can spend on a hobby, but it's still quite a lot. The only reason I can manage it is because I'm a programmer—I can handle things like caching strategies and various other tedious tasks. I get about 600 visitors a day.(The site could be hosted much more cheaply. I deliberately run a more involved architecture because part of its purpose is to serve as an operational portfolio. I needed public evidence that I could design, deploy, monitor, and operate a real system over time. Generally, for a site of about my size, around $40 a month should be enough.) Writing itself takes a lot of effort. First: 1.You have to define your target audience. 2.You have to choose topics they'll find interesting. 3.You need to collect materials. 4.You read through the materials, build the structure, and go through multiple drafts and revisions. Even a short post usually takes about a week. And even after all that, will people actually read it? Not really. So I have to promote it on external sites like HN and Reddit, and keep updating the sitemap until my site starts showing up in Google search results. The problem is that most people want to make money through writing. That's completely understandable. With the economy getting tougher, even hobbies cost money. The issue is that once you step away from platforms like Substack and Medium, it becomes much harder for people to find your content, and you lose the community itself. In fact, that's the real strength of Substack and Medium—people are already there to spend money because they're earning from the same ecosystem. But if you move to an independent site, even putting up ads can cause strong backlash (especially since Google often shows low-quality ads—like porn ads—to people who don't share their personal data). In my case, I created my site because I needed a portfolio that made me look professional. Since I don't have experience at prestigious companies or universities, and I've mostly moved between small contractors, I needed something to show that I know certain things, have relevant experience, and have built actual products. (In the Korean market, the only work available to programmers without capital is small NDA-bound jobs.) On the other hand, people with good careers don't need to take this risk—their reputation comes from successful products they've worked on in the market. So I needed a metric like 'I run my own site, it uses MSA, and I have experience running it stably over the long term.' Of course, I could list the projects I've worked on, but most of them don't have a strong track record of market success. So I think that unless you're in a special situation, it's better to stay within existing writing communities.

hazrmard 3mo ago

I resonate with the author's point that I can modify my own website to my will. I use hugo to build my website and I wrote my own theme. It's clunky, but control over the design/build lets me: - Put PyIodide into posts to make ML code explainers interactive (https://iahmed.me/post/poor_mans_autograd/) - Inject custom widgets to illustrate theoretical ideas (https://iahmed.me/post/surprise-derivation-entropy/) - Have multiple layouts to suit my needs (https://iahmed.me/resume/ rendered from json at build time for SEO) On the flip side, I'm not good at SEO :) It works because SEO is not my primary goal, but I'd love to have a bigger audience. The flexibility I'm afforded is an ok compromise.

khanhnguyen8386 3mo ago

[flagged]

ProAm 3mo ago

The age of the individual is over...

Lockal 3mo ago

The page is AI slop, don't waste your time

real-hacker 3mo ago

Wake up. The ad revenue model of websites is dying.

madhu_ghalame 3mo ago

[dead]

danschuller 3mo ago

Does SEO even matter these days? Google Search seems to be on the way out as the dominant discovery mechanism. Really a better discovery mechanism is what writers need that's more aligned with with readers and writers and less with platform owners and advertisers.

pjmlp 3mo ago

The moment I get those popups on Substack or similar, to login to continue reading, those writers have lost a reader. So yeah, get a website.

jojobas 3mo ago

Isn't Substack's whole premise that you get raw cash for you priceless writing, not worrying about SEO and other crap? Those without an actual domain are sure very exposed.

mosbyllc 3mo ago

The website itself isn't the most important thing, what matters is the people who use it.

kenanfyi 3mo ago

I kind of agree with the author, but having such places is very convenient for most people considering most people do not know how to make websites. Yes, it is easy nowadays, but it is still a hurdle for many. Specifically on Substack though: I immediately close if a link I clicked is Substack. Many reasons for that. I find it very unpleasant to read stuff there, because of that banners and general design of the website. It all look generic and I hate generic. Second reason and even more important for me is that Substack platforms Nazis and white supremacists and they have apparently no problem about it. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-substack-makes-money-from-hosting-nazi-newsletters https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...

t0bia_s 3mo ago

Technically you do not own domain. You just rent it from registrar for yearly fee.

cookingoils 3mo ago

Another reason for having a designed website instead of just a Substack is marketing. When I visit a site and see that it’s a Substack I don’t want to stay and explore. It feels generic and that hurts the writing. Making a custom site isn’t much trouble, especially these days so defaulting to Substack feels a little unconsidered

muragekibicho 3mo ago

Honestly, I shut down my webiste and Medium, then moved to Substack because they solved the "get paid for my writing" problem. In 2022, Medium was defacto blogging platform and getting into their paid program was close to impossible. In the first 2 days of setting up Subtack I got a 5 dollar deposit from my first paying reader. I couldn't have done that on either Medium or my personal blog.

hamper653 3mo ago
People pay to read blogs?

dmje 3mo ago

I'd consider Substack if it had options to make my blog the canonical. But AFAIK that isn't possible; the only way of doing it would be for Substack to be the canonical and my blog the "copy", and that seems dumb from a future thinking perspective?

lylo 3mo ago

I agree! That's why I built Pagecord. Like Substack it's a blog with a mailing list, but it's also your personal website (pages, for example) with a custom domain. Also, source available. Most people will defer to Substack because (A) the brand, and (B) it can be monetised which is probably the biggest draw. Maybe I need to bring monetisation to Pagecord? :) https://pagecord.com https://pagecord.com https://github.com/lylo/pagecord https://github.com/lylo/pagecord

alphadelphi 3mo ago

Amen to that

weberress 3mo ago

so true ! since 1995 !

stared 3mo ago

Now the friction is close to none, at least for techies. Set a GitHub repo, use pnpm + Astro, and your favourite AI to migrate data there, brew some coffee, and before you finish it, you have your page up. It does not prevent you from posting elsewhere. But that way, you have full control both on the fruits of your own work, and how you display it.

Havoc 3mo ago

Yet another walled garden leveraging network effects

paraschopra 3mo ago

I used to pay Mailchimp $100+/month and would write 3-4 articles per month. It seemed illogical to me how much mailchimp would charge. I now have a substack + a wordpress website. An article goes to both places, and substack acts as a subscriber growth + email distribution tool for me.

pembrook 3mo ago
Substack is free because you act as a growth/distribution engine for them. They plaster your emails with ads to download their app and will even email your list whenever they feel like it and when you leave they will still email your list substack-related content and offers. When someone subscribed via the app btw, they own that person, not you. If you’re okay with that trade off, fine, but I thought we learned this lesson about the trap of “free” with the social media companies before…
- mindsolutions 3mo ago
  [flagged]

mintflow 3mo ago

Great idea. Recently, I’ve decided to get back into blogging. It’s surprisingly easy these days. I already have a domain on Cloudflare, and I had Codex build a simple blogging system for me. I write everything in Markdown, the site is hosted on Cloudflare, comments are stored in Cloudflare D1, and all articles live in the repository as Markdown files. GitHub Actions takes care of publishing automatically and also performs regular backups. To reduce comment spam, I use Cloudflare Turnstile, which has been working really well. For comment moderation, I protect the admin interface with Cloudflare Zero Trust, using email-based authentication, so I don’t need to build or maintain my own authentication system. Overall, the setup has been incredibly simple, reliable, and has required very little ongoing maintenance.

brabel 3mo ago
This is not a simple setup. Most people would be just fine with a static site that can be hosted for free on Netlify, Cloudfare Pages, GitHub Pages and so on.
- andrew-jack 3mo ago
  [dead]

rozhok 3mo ago

Substack fails to deliver the single thing it supposed to do - great reading experience. The website itself is slow, it cannot render the whole comments section, it constantly nags readers with subscribe forms. It can not handle single account across my subscriptions. Its just crap.

infinitifall 3mo ago
We have made peace with the dichotomy of a computer delivering AAA titles at 4k 144Hz while simultaneously struggling to render a few hundred comments on Substack.

scwilich 3mo ago

I’m the founder of Tertulia so take this with appropriate grain of salt. I (unsurprisingly) agree authors should own their own website and email list (btw based on hundreds of data points we know converts about 100 to 1 versus social followers for book sales) but the issue is how to make it effortless to set up and maintain a website. We built a system where you enter one ISBN and we instantly import your entire book catalog, including books, reviews, metadata, author bio, etc. Btw one book to all the authors’ books is not trivial problem (see how often Amazon gets it wrong) due to lack of universal author ID. We’ve since built author-specific email marketing, ecommerce, etc all on a domain each author owns (we make it seamless). Now that we have 9k+ happy (65 NPS) authors we’re adding author cross promotion for distribution but the author’s owned domain and capturing their own emails remains at center. Anyways if anyone wants to check it out for free (no CC needed) would welcome feedback from HN community. https://authors.tertulia.com/ https://authors.tertulia.com/

jreynar 3mo ago

My two cents here is that if you're trying to growth hack yourself, you need to be on a platform that's also growth hacking. Building an audience anywhere is genuinely hard. Algorithmic feeds like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. force you to play a game they control and that may not align with your content. Medium, substack, etc. will build your audience only to the extent that it aligns with their goals. Hosting your own blog means somehow getting traffic to it -- which might mean playing the google search game, which then depends on aligning with user queries and getting your site ranked. Or it may mean somehow driving traffic to your blog, such as from a newsletter or social site. But that brings us back to either algorithmic feeds or newsletter products. Don't think there's an easy answer here and I bet YMMV depending on the type of content you have, how much of audience you already have, etc. I tried the reverse -- syndicating content on medium that we publish on our blog. 0 impressions, literally, for 5 posts that got some readership on our blog.

wepple 3mo ago
It sounds like you’ve given up on an open web. Possibly the rational thing for you to do in your circumstances, but nonetheless a sad place we are in.

voxleone 3mo ago

There's an exact parallel with business owners - in my geographic region (BR) at least - in general. It still surprises me how many small and even medium-sized businesses don't bother registering their own domain name anymore, preferring instead to rely entirely on an Instagram page.

Wicher 3mo ago

RSS is great for informing readers of new content. Sadly only a few actually use it, except (unknowingly, for a large part of the population) for... Podcasts. So, thinking out loud: you could offer people to subscribe to your website by publishing a RSS feed with dummy audio, using a link in the the episode description to get people to hop through to your website. And then you offer the appropriate "subscribe in iTunes / Spotify / generic podcasting app" buttons on your website page. And then suddenly the masses can sign up to your updates! And they can easily unsubscribe! And you don't have to deal with email, and can use static file hosting! There'd even be a discovery inroad as presumably the Apples and Spotifies of this world will push it through the personalized recommendations pipe just as they would for any other podcast. It's a bit subversive but it would work wouldn't it?

rad-b 3mo ago
Good idea, and unfortunately one of those that would work only while it’s not popular. If it turns out to be good enough to become popular, here comes the enforcement.
- Wicher 3mo ago
  It'd be hard to detect from structure. Episode descriptions can and do legitimately have links. And if/when it comes to deep inspection, instead of a dummy audio file one could use a TTS-ed audio version of the post, there's some legitimacy there. You can even flip it around and claim that the blogpost is the "audio transcription" "for those who want it". But yeah let's not underestimate the power we're giving these platforms. If down the road it doesn't match the monetization strategy? Platform giveth, platform taketh.

shekharupadhaya 3mo ago

Why do they need a website, their newsletter is their channel and social profiles on X would be sufficient?

8by3 3mo ago

Exporting your subscriber list isn't perfect. I did it after moving to https://tuhat.net https://tuhat.net, and then after posting from tuhat, got emails from subscribers asking who I was and why I was writing to them. The majority of said subscribers, came from an article I wrote about leaving substack, so you'd think they'd have figured it out. Some of them were far less polite, never mind that it would have taken them less time to click unsubscribe then writing some insulting email to someone they chose to follow.

Magicrafter13 3mo ago

In my mind this always went without saying, but realistically I know most people never think long term about this sort of thing. I've been hosting my own web content for nearly a decade now, including a 6 year old blog, and I've always kept it there only, using social media to advertise it. Frankly I think self hosting is super easy in 2026 (and virtually free unless you want personalized domains or subdomains), especially for simple web content, but I also understand the aversion to it and at least hope that more and more people will spend their money on VPS (or other hosting services like Wordpress), rather than these random websites that appear overnight like Substack.

wittyurchin 3mo ago

[flagged]

npras1 3mo ago

sivers does posse efficiently. https://sive.rs/socials https://sive.rs/socials

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