5 ms·

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 t

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 2mo 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 2mo ago
  I miss the days when I'd regularly get forwards from friends about stuff they found on the internet.
  - brunoarueira 2mo 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 2mo ago
      >"I don't know how you read so much content" And then they spend hours every day doomscrolling and binge watching shit
rusk 2mo ago
I actively skip stuff that’s on substack just like I do medium and blogger. Maybe there’s good stuff on there but it’s usually a by-word for slop. I figure if anyone has anything that interesting to say they’d make the effort and put it up on something more serious looking.
- dpkirchner 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - zahlman 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - wizzwizz4 2mo ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20251221230655/https://www.usermag.co/p/substack-sent-a-push-alert-promoting-nazi-white-supremacist-blog https://web.archive.org/web/20251221230655/https://www.userm... > Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.” […] The newsletter's logo is a swastika and it has pushed Holocaust denialism along with news and opinion content for the 'White Nationalist Community.' […] Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.
      - zahlman 2mo ago
        Your source is Taylor Lorenz, on her own Substack (with a custom domain). She apparently wasn't bothered enough to disassociate with the service. This is someone who makes claims like "Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric." (Something which Wikipedia editors would be tripping over each other to evidence if it were true, but their article says nothing about it.) There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content, nor that they were ever "proud" of it. A cursory inspection shows that while the "facing" page for the group in question still loads, the underlying profile and content are all gone. It is a known tactic of agitators to post objectionable (or even highly illegal) content on distribution networks (or in communities) they dislike and then try to get media attention attributing it to the network/community rather than themselves.
billyp-rva 2mo ago
> Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read. How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future? That's the path basically every other platform has gone down.
- throw1234567891 2mo ago
  When they will, you’ll be free to take action.
  - shimman 2mo ago
    Yeah and having a site is a way to mitigate that risk...
- c16 2mo ago
  Gmail has categories. So they already are.
- Bratmon 2mo ago
  The entire pitch of Substack is "You can export the email addresses of your current subscribers at any time" So if they stop doing the "email my subscribers whenever I post" step, another service will fill the gap pretty quick.
  - rsingel 2mo ago
    Substack notes is non exportable; the newsletter now no longer have a link to read it on your site on substack and instead link to the substack app, and subscriptions started in the app pay Substack through Apple and Google and you can't export them. Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
    - sixtyj 2mo ago
      Thanks for this. I can hear Substack marketing saying that “We don’t have any intention to put you into a vendor-lock.” I had a lot of discussions with companies about their marketing. Why do you upload your events’ photos to FB instead of your site? Why do you have news on LI feed and don’t make it a post on your site as well? Do you think they can hear it? :) Substack is going to become a similar service as FB, LI are… no possibility to export your data easily or not at all.
cosmicgadget 2mo ago
I mean, can't you accomplish the same thing with "enter your email/social handle to be notified when I post something"?
- bonestamp2 2mo ago
  For sure. I had a huge following on my wordpress blog 15 years ago and email was how everyone got notified of new content. I'm sure there's a way to at least do sms now if people want that level of notification.
- ImJamal 2mo ago
  Most writers just want to write and don't want to start maintaining servers and databases to handle the collection and storing of emails. This is why they outsource that functionality to a service like Substack.
  - true_religion 2mo ago
    It would be nice if services like Substack supported exportability, so when a writer eventually becomes successful enough to migrate away, or the platform itself is no longer a good fit, then there aren't any losses. Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.
yrds96 2mo ago
Fediverse. We need to push Fediverse
game_the0ry 2mo ago
> You need a push mechanism to reach readers. Ghost blog includes newsletter for push.
- coldtea 2mo ago
  Push as in a newsletter alone isn't doing anything. It's the "show ocassional posts of you on an already captive audience of millions and especially readers with similar interests" (the whole Substack base) that does it.
- interstingstuff 2mo ago
  I use self-hosted Listmonk. Works great in combination with my blog. But yeah its slow growth. But that's actually what I prefer, because if you grow fast on Substack, these are gone as fast IMO as people don't really read substack emails anymore after getting 10 of them every day (as subscribing is so easy on Substack). So having a slow, but honest subscribers and then sharing it on socials or reddit in places where it genuinely helps people, there will always be some who will subscribe and read. I agree, if you don't publish anywhere and just write on your website, and you're not yet known, it's hard for people to discover initially. But in the beginning, the writint is also more for you, than for others. I haven't read from anyone that writes super good on day one. That will come with the reps, and by then, people will read you, have discovered you.
BorisMelnik 2mo ago
this tide will turn, and the day of reckoning is coming for AI slop and large domains owning the search results. small publishers are going to have their time very soon.
zahlman 2mo ago
What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure? What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.
- goostavos 2mo ago
  ...I use email notifications. I follow very few people (fewer than 10), so I'm always happy when an email pops up letting me know they've written something. I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
- nickthegreek 2mo ago
  > What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure? Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web. > What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
  - skippyfish 2mo ago
    > I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though. Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.
  - hungryhobbit 2mo ago
    Pick Medium, it's great ... if you want a paywall to turn away half your visitors!
    - nickthegreek 2mo ago
      The author has the option to enable that or not.
efilife 2mo ago
It's addressed in the article
f311a 2mo ago
> no one will visit your website. Yep, let's suppose an average HN user reads 30-100 articles a month on independent websites (personal domains) posted on HN. Out of 100, he probably subscribes to 0-2 at best (via RSS/e-mail). Now, imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience. There is too much friction for a user to subscribe. Substack is similar to a social platform. People open it to read new articles in a similar way to HN, and they can subscribe to anyone by pressing a single button. There is a recommendation feed as well. Since Google search for tech content is dead, getting views on independent blogs is extremely hard.
- weird-eye-issue 2mo ago
  > imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience HN is NOT the right marketing tool for 99.9999% of people and businesses
  - f311a 2mo ago
    Personal blogs are not a business, usually.
    - weird-eye-issue 2mo ago
      I said people and businesses
ValdikSS 2mo ago
If you write news, posts that needs discussion, information that relatively quickly becomes obsolete, then probably yes, you won't want a website because few people will search for it deliberately. But if you're writing for yourself, articles with multimedia, or want to use advanced features, no platform provides anything close to what you can do on your website. Take a look at https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ for example.
- skippyfish 2mo ago
  No one is writing purely for themselves. It's something we like to say, and there's some value in writing down your thoughts - but deep down inside, every blogger is dreaming of having a positive impact on other people's lives. That requires reaching these people in the first place. I promise you that Bartosz would be bummed out if he had an audience of one. And while relying on HN to accidentally discover you can work, it's not a sustainable model for anything.
  - ValdikSS 2mo ago
    >No one is writing purely for themselves Every time I see posts like this one and go into comments, everyone in the comments treat writing as a hobby which they would like to turn into work and earn money from, more or less. And I suppose the words "writing" and "blogging" associate with the community around themselves in their minds, not with the text information per se. I'm writing technical articles (blog posts) my whole life most of the time as a result of me learning something new, to structure the information on some topic for myself and others. If it's a research, I make a post with all the information and final result of it in public, primarily for myself and sometimes for others, because 95% of the time it's not secret and there's no point to store it privately. If it's a helpful information (software: unofficial bugfix, hacky workaround, poorly documented feature somewhere, etc), I want it to be searchable/indexed, only that. I don't care about attribution, about who reads my writing (be it me, my friends, people I don't know, or AI), I have no incentive to push (as in post here or on social networks) or promote these articles in any way. I don't want people to get back to my site, to subscribe to it, or to build a community around it. If the user types "How do I solve issue X" and by a mere coincidence I solved and documented it, I don't care if the user gets the solution from my website, from the scrape & repost websites, or from AI agent which scraped the site. If this helps the user to fix the issue or to learn something new, every way is fine for me!
tombert 2mo ago
Agreed. I have a blog, I don't really promote it, and no one reads it. Now, there is an argument that there's nothing on my blog worth reading, and yeah there might be truth to that, but regardless my traffic is on the order like 100 unique views per month, and I don't know what percentage of that is just scraping bots. I'm fine with this, I had no delusions of becoming a famous writer or making any money from it or anything, my blog is basically just a dumping ground for thoughts that I think are interesting, but if I actually did care about people visiting my blog I would probably use Substack or something similar.
- lylo 2mo ago
  Blogs on indie platforms like Bear and Pagecord get promoted in the Discover (and Spotlight, on Pagecord) feeds which definitely drives traffic
throw0101d 2mo 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. I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. Substack allows for exporting posts (which would be good to do regularly just for backups in case of (account) compromise): * https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037466012-How-do-I-export-my-posts https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037466012-... so if you ever feel like the company is acting questionably, you can take that file and bring it in elsewhere, e.g. * https://wordpress.com/support/import-from-substack/ https://wordpress.com/support/import-from-substack/
- Stratoscope 2mo ago
  > I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. I thought about this question when I recently started writing a few articles on Substack. I chose not to use my own domain, even though I have a few. Why? I want my writing to outlive me. When I am no longer able to pay for domain renewals, my own domains will expire. Hopefully {my-hn-username}.substack.com will still be around. Time will tell.
  - throw0101d 2mo ago
    > Why? I want my writing to outlive me. Donate to archive.org.
    - Stratoscope 2mo ago
      Excellent point! In fact I do have an automatic monthly donation to The Internet Archive. Of course the URLs all change in archived pages, but at least the content is there for anyone motivated enough to find it. A funny coincidence... I registered geary.com (my last name) in 1994, and just used it for email. A few years later I got a letter from a group of civic boosters in Geary, Oklahoma. They even enclosed a Geary Water Tower T-shirt which I still have. They saw that I didn't have a website up on this domain and asked me if they could have it. I explained that this would be impractical since it was also my email address. So they registered gearyok.com instead and put up a website built around Java applets. Oops. But it got me thinking. I put up a static page (frequently edited by me) that I called Geary Central: A Guide to Gearys on the Net. This page is still up: https://www.geary.com/oldsite.html https://www.geary.com/oldsite.html Naturally I gave Geary, Oklahoma top billing for inspiring this. A few years after that I changed geary.com to a MoinMoin wiki devoted to the same topic, and moved the old static page to its current location. Just a few days ago, someone emailed me about how they had stumbled onto my oldsite.html page and enjoyed this "blast from the past". In 2011, my old ISP decommissioned the server I had the wiki on. I was planning to migrate it to something more modern like Drupal, but the time and effort weren't worth it to me at the time. I did find the latest version of the "new" Geary Central on archive.org and shared it in my reply: https://web.archive.org/web/20110927053309/http://www.geary.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110927053309/http://www.geary....
clickety_clack 2mo ago
The lift to make your own website is so low now, and the benefits of future-proofing are so great that it's just the right decision to make. You don’t even have to drive all your readers there, you’ll just have it available for everyone if the audience ever decides to gradually move on from substack (which seems to happen pretty much every social media platform).
dmitrygr 2mo ago
> no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. I am not convinced. My traffic counter spins quite rapidly, and I only publish on http://dmitry.gr http://dmitry.gr
- coldtea 2mo ago
  That's because it's a tech vlog with posts that also serve as technical reference and tutorials and such like: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm There's a big audience for that that's actively search for such keywords. Not the same with essays or fiction writing
4ndrewl 2mo ago
It's not really a counterpoint when it's addressed in the article. "The biggest pushback I hear from writers is: “But my website doesn’t have an audience! Substack does.” But you don’t have to completely abandon social media or platforms like Substack to protect your autonomy (personally, I prefer the word sovereignty but it does sound a tad dramatic)."
div3rs3 2mo ago
You mention RSS, but Substack is about paid subscribers, is it not? What do you think converts a Substack user to a subscriber; is it just a numbers game?
rambambram 2mo ago
[flagged]
cpill 2mo ago
the point is that they are not mutually exclusive. you can have both. just don't put all your eggs in the corporate basket
system7rocks 2mo ago
Yes, I think people who move away from Substack already need to have a brand and a number of followers to drive people to their personal websites, even if they use Ghost. And I do get the concerns that Substack has some super bizarre and awful content in the mix. Their feed shows me stuff every once in a while, from uber-conservative right wing Christians to conspiracy theory nonsense. But my dumb soccer blog/podcast putters along and grows slowly, in some cases, not even from social media posts. It's an interesting platform.
Loxicon 2mo ago
you said: "...from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website" This is false. It's more accurate to say that "no one will visit your website if you do not properly setup a distribution ecosystem". It's hard work. But it works. All of my companies have been built by writing online --> distribution --> people finding my/our stuff. Your experience of 'doing it for decades' reveals that publishing, in of itself, does nothing. And if all people do is publish (without the distribution engine), then, I agree it's a waste of time. I write 1 hour per day. I spend about 2 hours working on distribution. Sometimes, I spend 4 hours on distribution.
- zoilism 2mo ago
  I write 1-2 hours a day but I dont spend anywhere near that much time on distribution so this is a learning opportunity... would be great if you could help me understand the activities/tasks you undertake? What do you do to spend the 2 - 4 hours on distribution? Is this daily? Or per task/article??
  - Loxicon 2mo ago
    sure, well there are two categories of activity: (1) no-money distribution and (2) with money distribution * No Money * You have to invest time. On all new projects I start here, even if I have a budget. That is because you can learn a lot more by "being on the ground" so to speak. Here are some activities you can do: - post on news aggregator sites like hacker news (there are lots of different ones that are niche specific) - post on social media. This will require you to build up your social media in the first place. This takes a lot of time if you are starting. - guest content for other peoples platform - finding similar, non competing people in your niche and create for them, link back to you. - Spend time writing and re-writing really helpful stuff. This helps with word of mouth. - hardest one - actually making friends. I have made many online friends over the years by taking an interest in them. Some of them are now massive. They sometimes distribute the things they like of mine - CRITICAL: a lot of people will read the above and think "okay, but he has a network...that is why it works", and they would be correct. But, and this is key, building a network is a skill. Learn it. When I said I spend 2-4 hours per day sometimes, these are the things I'm doing above. * With Money * - SEO - seo is very expensive. backlinks, promoted content, optimization - paid traffic to content - can start the budget low but need to be skilled in paid ads to make this work. - Paid media buys - for example paying for your content to be featured in someone else's newsletter. If they have a list of 50,000, as an example, you might pay $1,000 for that placement. If that same list was in the finance space, you might pay $30,000. It's contextual. Even though these paid strategies are paid, they still take time.
weird-eye-issue 2mo ago
Yeah so I guess the hundreds of billions of page views from organic search every single month is just a total myth? As somebody who has made a lot of money publishing on the internet you absolutely can get people to read your website organically but it takes specific strategies and you can't just write about whatever you want however you want and expect traffic.
- adithyassekhar 2mo ago
  [dead]
kelnos 2mo ago
I think you're conflating two things. You can absolutely have your own website, and still use Substack. Then if you do have to move off Substack, you aren't "moving" in the sense that your URLs remain the same. Getting a list of your existing subscribers' emails from Substack in order to migrate notifications to your new platform (hosted behind the same domain name you own) is of course an important part of moving, though. The argument from the article is that you should be hosting your writing on blog.mywebsite.com, not mywebsite.substack.com, even if those two pages are identical and are both hosted by Substack. That's the entire point it's trying to make. Whether or not your readers visit your website or consume your content entirely through email notifications isn't relevant to the point the author was trying to make. Because despite your absolutist "no one", some people will visit your website, and having a stable location that you control yourself is important. (Also please consider that while you may have been publishing on the internet for decades, your experience may not be universal.) It is absolutely crazy to me that anyone with a serious web presence doesn't have their own domain name, even if that website is backed by someone else's hosted platform.
eviks 2mo ago
> so that you can move somewhere else down the line And potentiality lose all your precious posts and reader discussions in the process? That's part of the special value of having a website.
riffraff 2mo ago
I'm outside the loop so please forgive me, but what is different between substack and a self managed mailing list? I've been subscribed to a few website/blogs newsletters for years and they appear to work fine, and I think the owners are not particularly technical, there's WordPress plugins.
- iamflimflam1 2mo ago
  Substack is free - so there are no hosting costs. Everything is managed for you. There is a community there already - I’m not sure how useful it is but it’s there. You can charge for newsletters - this is particularly popular for finance type things.
- ajb 2mo ago
  Substack is trying to turn itself into a social network, so comments on substack posts by other substack bloggers let people find other blogs. This is why half the comments on popular substacks are from other bloggers casually mentioning the articles they wrote. It also means that if you comment on a substack, other people can find all the comments you made on every substack, by default.
Theodores 2mo ago
Substack also comes with a brand, and having a substack is a social cue that you are a higher status person, it goes with the beefed up LinkedIn profile, playing tennis and conspicuous consumption. Having a substack shows that you are time rich, yet at the same time, it does not come with overtones of vanity. Serious discourse allegedly goes on with substack, if you are writing there, then you are rolling it with the pros. Yet every platform goes through phases, ending with the inevitable 'enshittification'. Soon the reader will see substack as a byword for best avoided, much like having to download a PDF or open an inevitably paywalled mainstream media news article, not worth the click. With one's own website you are outside of the loop, and the theory still holds that, if you have anything worth seeing, they will come. However, most people will stay on platforms until there is something to actually buy. Recently I was doom scrolling until I came across this vacuum cleaner for cats, that enables you to harvest the fur. I want this as a joke present for a cat I know, so I was prepared to escape the platform to buy the product. If it was a lengthy essay on how to make felt clothing from cat fur on substack, then I probably would not have clicked. Yes I am that shallow! Hence, if you have something to sell, then an independent website is what you want, and a sales funnel to get people there. This does mean social media, the newsletter, SEO, the substack and even paid advertising. Not everyone has something to sell though.
jlengrand 2mo ago
oh I can tell you that lately, hundreds of bots are very much visiting my website every day in volumes that I have never seen in the past... Unsure that's a good news though
- chromadon 2mo ago
  The LLMs love your site!
- paganel 2mo ago
  > much visiting my website every day The same thing is happening on one of my Blogger instances, the one where I publish about a very niche interest (old floor-mill buildings from the Romanian countryside). Most of the hits are coming from countries like Vietnam and Singapore, most of them associated with Android use, so I think it's a new-ish thing that Google Analytics' anti-bot/anti-spam algorithm just can't (won't?) catch.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Hundreds a day is nothing. Unless they cause a problem, you don't need to do anything.
inigyou 2mo ago
How do people get to your Substack? Does it have a recommendations system like social media?
- ggsp 2mo ago
  It does
bilekas 2mo ago
Why not do all automatically? My concern with substack is that it's a single point of truth. If they decide to blanket paywall everything after they sell to private equity for example. Or start to force all users to pay to be visible at all including old content. You're at the mercy of whatever they decide. We've seen it so often.
sam_lowry_ 2mo ago
> no one will visit your website... RSS could be it I thought it too, then I broke the RSS feed on my blog and someone complained immediately.

Topology1 2mo 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 2mo ago
I miss the days when I'd regularly get forwards from friends about stuff they found on the internet.
- brunoarueira 2mo 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 2mo ago
    >"I don't know how you read so much content" And then they spend hours every day doomscrolling and binge watching shit

rusk 2mo ago

I actively skip stuff that’s on substack just like I do medium and blogger. Maybe there’s good stuff on there but it’s usually a by-word for slop. I figure if anyone has anything that interesting to say they’d make the effort and put it up on something more serious looking.

dpkirchner 2mo ago
[flagged]
- zahlman 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - wizzwizz4 2mo ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20251221230655/https://www.usermag.co/p/substack-sent-a-push-alert-promoting-nazi-white-supremacist-blog https://web.archive.org/web/20251221230655/https://www.userm... > Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.” […] The newsletter's logo is a swastika and it has pushed Holocaust denialism along with news and opinion content for the 'White Nationalist Community.' […] Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.
    - zahlman 2mo ago
      Your source is Taylor Lorenz, on her own Substack (with a custom domain). She apparently wasn't bothered enough to disassociate with the service. This is someone who makes claims like "Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric." (Something which Wikipedia editors would be tripping over each other to evidence if it were true, but their article says nothing about it.) There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content, nor that they were ever "proud" of it. A cursory inspection shows that while the "facing" page for the group in question still loads, the underlying profile and content are all gone. It is a known tactic of agitators to post objectionable (or even highly illegal) content on distribution networks (or in communities) they dislike and then try to get media attention attributing it to the network/community rather than themselves.

billyp-rva 2mo ago

> Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read. How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future? That's the path basically every other platform has gone down.

throw1234567891 2mo ago
When they will, you’ll be free to take action.
- shimman 2mo ago
  Yeah and having a site is a way to mitigate that risk...
c16 2mo ago
Gmail has categories. So they already are.
Bratmon 2mo ago
The entire pitch of Substack is "You can export the email addresses of your current subscribers at any time" So if they stop doing the "email my subscribers whenever I post" step, another service will fill the gap pretty quick.
- rsingel 2mo ago
  Substack notes is non exportable; the newsletter now no longer have a link to read it on your site on substack and instead link to the substack app, and subscriptions started in the app pay Substack through Apple and Google and you can't export them. Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
  - sixtyj 2mo ago
    Thanks for this. I can hear Substack marketing saying that “We don’t have any intention to put you into a vendor-lock.” I had a lot of discussions with companies about their marketing. Why do you upload your events’ photos to FB instead of your site? Why do you have news on LI feed and don’t make it a post on your site as well? Do you think they can hear it? :) Substack is going to become a similar service as FB, LI are… no possibility to export your data easily or not at all.

cosmicgadget 2mo ago

I mean, can't you accomplish the same thing with "enter your email/social handle to be notified when I post something"?

bonestamp2 2mo ago
For sure. I had a huge following on my wordpress blog 15 years ago and email was how everyone got notified of new content. I'm sure there's a way to at least do sms now if people want that level of notification.
ImJamal 2mo ago
Most writers just want to write and don't want to start maintaining servers and databases to handle the collection and storing of emails. This is why they outsource that functionality to a service like Substack.
- true_religion 2mo ago
  It would be nice if services like Substack supported exportability, so when a writer eventually becomes successful enough to migrate away, or the platform itself is no longer a good fit, then there aren't any losses. Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.

yrds96 2mo ago

Fediverse. We need to push Fediverse

game_the0ry 2mo ago

> You need a push mechanism to reach readers. Ghost blog includes newsletter for push.

coldtea 2mo ago
Push as in a newsletter alone isn't doing anything. It's the "show ocassional posts of you on an already captive audience of millions and especially readers with similar interests" (the whole Substack base) that does it.
interstingstuff 2mo ago
I use self-hosted Listmonk. Works great in combination with my blog. But yeah its slow growth. But that's actually what I prefer, because if you grow fast on Substack, these are gone as fast IMO as people don't really read substack emails anymore after getting 10 of them every day (as subscribing is so easy on Substack). So having a slow, but honest subscribers and then sharing it on socials or reddit in places where it genuinely helps people, there will always be some who will subscribe and read. I agree, if you don't publish anywhere and just write on your website, and you're not yet known, it's hard for people to discover initially. But in the beginning, the writint is also more for you, than for others. I haven't read from anyone that writes super good on day one. That will come with the reps, and by then, people will read you, have discovered you.

BorisMelnik 2mo ago

this tide will turn, and the day of reckoning is coming for AI slop and large domains owning the search results. small publishers are going to have their time very soon.

zahlman 2mo ago

What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure? What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.

goostavos 2mo ago
...I use email notifications. I follow very few people (fewer than 10), so I'm always happy when an email pops up letting me know they've written something. I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
nickthegreek 2mo ago
> What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure? Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web. > What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
- skippyfish 2mo ago
  > I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though. Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.
- hungryhobbit 2mo ago
  Pick Medium, it's great ... if you want a paywall to turn away half your visitors!
  - nickthegreek 2mo ago
    The author has the option to enable that or not.

efilife 2mo ago

It's addressed in the article

f311a 2mo ago

> no one will visit your website. Yep, let's suppose an average HN user reads 30-100 articles a month on independent websites (personal domains) posted on HN. Out of 100, he probably subscribes to 0-2 at best (via RSS/e-mail). Now, imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience. There is too much friction for a user to subscribe. Substack is similar to a social platform. People open it to read new articles in a similar way to HN, and they can subscribe to anyone by pressing a single button. There is a recommendation feed as well. Since Google search for tech content is dead, getting views on independent blogs is extremely hard.

weird-eye-issue 2mo ago
> imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience HN is NOT the right marketing tool for 99.9999% of people and businesses
- f311a 2mo ago
  Personal blogs are not a business, usually.
  - weird-eye-issue 2mo ago
    I said people and businesses

ValdikSS 2mo ago

If you write news, posts that needs discussion, information that relatively quickly becomes obsolete, then probably yes, you won't want a website because few people will search for it deliberately. But if you're writing for yourself, articles with multimedia, or want to use advanced features, no platform provides anything close to what you can do on your website. Take a look at https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ for example.

skippyfish 2mo ago
No one is writing purely for themselves. It's something we like to say, and there's some value in writing down your thoughts - but deep down inside, every blogger is dreaming of having a positive impact on other people's lives. That requires reaching these people in the first place. I promise you that Bartosz would be bummed out if he had an audience of one. And while relying on HN to accidentally discover you can work, it's not a sustainable model for anything.
- ValdikSS 2mo ago
  >No one is writing purely for themselves Every time I see posts like this one and go into comments, everyone in the comments treat writing as a hobby which they would like to turn into work and earn money from, more or less. And I suppose the words "writing" and "blogging" associate with the community around themselves in their minds, not with the text information per se. I'm writing technical articles (blog posts) my whole life most of the time as a result of me learning something new, to structure the information on some topic for myself and others. If it's a research, I make a post with all the information and final result of it in public, primarily for myself and sometimes for others, because 95% of the time it's not secret and there's no point to store it privately. If it's a helpful information (software: unofficial bugfix, hacky workaround, poorly documented feature somewhere, etc), I want it to be searchable/indexed, only that. I don't care about attribution, about who reads my writing (be it me, my friends, people I don't know, or AI), I have no incentive to push (as in post here or on social networks) or promote these articles in any way. I don't want people to get back to my site, to subscribe to it, or to build a community around it. If the user types "How do I solve issue X" and by a mere coincidence I solved and documented it, I don't care if the user gets the solution from my website, from the scrape & repost websites, or from AI agent which scraped the site. If this helps the user to fix the issue or to learn something new, every way is fine for me!

tombert 2mo ago

Agreed. I have a blog, I don't really promote it, and no one reads it. Now, there is an argument that there's nothing on my blog worth reading, and yeah there might be truth to that, but regardless my traffic is on the order like 100 unique views per month, and I don't know what percentage of that is just scraping bots. I'm fine with this, I had no delusions of becoming a famous writer or making any money from it or anything, my blog is basically just a dumping ground for thoughts that I think are interesting, but if I actually did care about people visiting my blog I would probably use Substack or something similar.

lylo 2mo ago
Blogs on indie platforms like Bear and Pagecord get promoted in the Discover (and Spotlight, on Pagecord) feeds which definitely drives traffic

throw0101d 2mo 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. I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. Substack allows for exporting posts (which would be good to do regularly just for backups in case of (account) compromise): * https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037466012-How-do-I-export-my-posts https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037466012-... so if you ever feel like the company is acting questionably, you can take that file and bring it in elsewhere, e.g. * https://wordpress.com/support/import-from-substack/ https://wordpress.com/support/import-from-substack/

Stratoscope 2mo ago
> I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. I thought about this question when I recently started writing a few articles on Substack. I chose not to use my own domain, even though I have a few. Why? I want my writing to outlive me. When I am no longer able to pay for domain renewals, my own domains will expire. Hopefully {my-hn-username}.substack.com will still be around. Time will tell.
- throw0101d 2mo ago
  > Why? I want my writing to outlive me. Donate to archive.org.
  - Stratoscope 2mo ago
    Excellent point! In fact I do have an automatic monthly donation to The Internet Archive. Of course the URLs all change in archived pages, but at least the content is there for anyone motivated enough to find it. A funny coincidence... I registered geary.com (my last name) in 1994, and just used it for email. A few years later I got a letter from a group of civic boosters in Geary, Oklahoma. They even enclosed a Geary Water Tower T-shirt which I still have. They saw that I didn't have a website up on this domain and asked me if they could have it. I explained that this would be impractical since it was also my email address. So they registered gearyok.com instead and put up a website built around Java applets. Oops. But it got me thinking. I put up a static page (frequently edited by me) that I called Geary Central: A Guide to Gearys on the Net. This page is still up: https://www.geary.com/oldsite.html https://www.geary.com/oldsite.html Naturally I gave Geary, Oklahoma top billing for inspiring this. A few years after that I changed geary.com to a MoinMoin wiki devoted to the same topic, and moved the old static page to its current location. Just a few days ago, someone emailed me about how they had stumbled onto my oldsite.html page and enjoyed this "blast from the past". In 2011, my old ISP decommissioned the server I had the wiki on. I was planning to migrate it to something more modern like Drupal, but the time and effort weren't worth it to me at the time. I did find the latest version of the "new" Geary Central on archive.org and shared it in my reply: https://web.archive.org/web/20110927053309/http://www.geary.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110927053309/http://www.geary....

clickety_clack 2mo ago

The lift to make your own website is so low now, and the benefits of future-proofing are so great that it's just the right decision to make. You don’t even have to drive all your readers there, you’ll just have it available for everyone if the audience ever decides to gradually move on from substack (which seems to happen pretty much every social media platform).

dmitrygr 2mo ago

> no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. I am not convinced. My traffic counter spins quite rapidly, and I only publish on http://dmitry.gr http://dmitry.gr

coldtea 2mo ago
That's because it's a tech vlog with posts that also serve as technical reference and tutorials and such like: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm There's a big audience for that that's actively search for such keywords. Not the same with essays or fiction writing

4ndrewl 2mo ago

It's not really a counterpoint when it's addressed in the article. "The biggest pushback I hear from writers is: “But my website doesn’t have an audience! Substack does.” But you don’t have to completely abandon social media or platforms like Substack to protect your autonomy (personally, I prefer the word sovereignty but it does sound a tad dramatic)."

div3rs3 2mo ago

You mention RSS, but Substack is about paid subscribers, is it not? What do you think converts a Substack user to a subscriber; is it just a numbers game?

rambambram 2mo ago

[flagged]

cpill 2mo ago

the point is that they are not mutually exclusive. you can have both. just don't put all your eggs in the corporate basket

system7rocks 2mo ago

Yes, I think people who move away from Substack already need to have a brand and a number of followers to drive people to their personal websites, even if they use Ghost. And I do get the concerns that Substack has some super bizarre and awful content in the mix. Their feed shows me stuff every once in a while, from uber-conservative right wing Christians to conspiracy theory nonsense. But my dumb soccer blog/podcast putters along and grows slowly, in some cases, not even from social media posts. It's an interesting platform.

Loxicon 2mo ago

you said: "...from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website" This is false. It's more accurate to say that "no one will visit your website if you do not properly setup a distribution ecosystem". It's hard work. But it works. All of my companies have been built by writing online --> distribution --> people finding my/our stuff. Your experience of 'doing it for decades' reveals that publishing, in of itself, does nothing. And if all people do is publish (without the distribution engine), then, I agree it's a waste of time. I write 1 hour per day. I spend about 2 hours working on distribution. Sometimes, I spend 4 hours on distribution.

zoilism 2mo ago
I write 1-2 hours a day but I dont spend anywhere near that much time on distribution so this is a learning opportunity... would be great if you could help me understand the activities/tasks you undertake? What do you do to spend the 2 - 4 hours on distribution? Is this daily? Or per task/article??
- Loxicon 2mo ago
  sure, well there are two categories of activity: (1) no-money distribution and (2) with money distribution * No Money * You have to invest time. On all new projects I start here, even if I have a budget. That is because you can learn a lot more by "being on the ground" so to speak. Here are some activities you can do: - post on news aggregator sites like hacker news (there are lots of different ones that are niche specific) - post on social media. This will require you to build up your social media in the first place. This takes a lot of time if you are starting. - guest content for other peoples platform - finding similar, non competing people in your niche and create for them, link back to you. - Spend time writing and re-writing really helpful stuff. This helps with word of mouth. - hardest one - actually making friends. I have made many online friends over the years by taking an interest in them. Some of them are now massive. They sometimes distribute the things they like of mine - CRITICAL: a lot of people will read the above and think "okay, but he has a network...that is why it works", and they would be correct. But, and this is key, building a network is a skill. Learn it. When I said I spend 2-4 hours per day sometimes, these are the things I'm doing above. * With Money * - SEO - seo is very expensive. backlinks, promoted content, optimization - paid traffic to content - can start the budget low but need to be skilled in paid ads to make this work. - Paid media buys - for example paying for your content to be featured in someone else's newsletter. If they have a list of 50,000, as an example, you might pay $1,000 for that placement. If that same list was in the finance space, you might pay $30,000. It's contextual. Even though these paid strategies are paid, they still take time.

weird-eye-issue 2mo ago

Yeah so I guess the hundreds of billions of page views from organic search every single month is just a total myth? As somebody who has made a lot of money publishing on the internet you absolutely can get people to read your website organically but it takes specific strategies and you can't just write about whatever you want however you want and expect traffic.

adithyassekhar 2mo ago
[dead]

kelnos 2mo ago

I think you're conflating two things. You can absolutely have your own website, and still use Substack. Then if you do have to move off Substack, you aren't "moving" in the sense that your URLs remain the same. Getting a list of your existing subscribers' emails from Substack in order to migrate notifications to your new platform (hosted behind the same domain name you own) is of course an important part of moving, though. The argument from the article is that you should be hosting your writing on blog.mywebsite.com, not mywebsite.substack.com, even if those two pages are identical and are both hosted by Substack. That's the entire point it's trying to make. Whether or not your readers visit your website or consume your content entirely through email notifications isn't relevant to the point the author was trying to make. Because despite your absolutist "no one", some people will visit your website, and having a stable location that you control yourself is important. (Also please consider that while you may have been publishing on the internet for decades, your experience may not be universal.) It is absolutely crazy to me that anyone with a serious web presence doesn't have their own domain name, even if that website is backed by someone else's hosted platform.

eviks 2mo ago

> so that you can move somewhere else down the line And potentiality lose all your precious posts and reader discussions in the process? That's part of the special value of having a website.

riffraff 2mo ago

I'm outside the loop so please forgive me, but what is different between substack and a self managed mailing list? I've been subscribed to a few website/blogs newsletters for years and they appear to work fine, and I think the owners are not particularly technical, there's WordPress plugins.

iamflimflam1 2mo ago
Substack is free - so there are no hosting costs. Everything is managed for you. There is a community there already - I’m not sure how useful it is but it’s there. You can charge for newsletters - this is particularly popular for finance type things.
ajb 2mo ago
Substack is trying to turn itself into a social network, so comments on substack posts by other substack bloggers let people find other blogs. This is why half the comments on popular substacks are from other bloggers casually mentioning the articles they wrote. It also means that if you comment on a substack, other people can find all the comments you made on every substack, by default.

Theodores 2mo ago

Substack also comes with a brand, and having a substack is a social cue that you are a higher status person, it goes with the beefed up LinkedIn profile, playing tennis and conspicuous consumption. Having a substack shows that you are time rich, yet at the same time, it does not come with overtones of vanity. Serious discourse allegedly goes on with substack, if you are writing there, then you are rolling it with the pros. Yet every platform goes through phases, ending with the inevitable 'enshittification'. Soon the reader will see substack as a byword for best avoided, much like having to download a PDF or open an inevitably paywalled mainstream media news article, not worth the click. With one's own website you are outside of the loop, and the theory still holds that, if you have anything worth seeing, they will come. However, most people will stay on platforms until there is something to actually buy. Recently I was doom scrolling until I came across this vacuum cleaner for cats, that enables you to harvest the fur. I want this as a joke present for a cat I know, so I was prepared to escape the platform to buy the product. If it was a lengthy essay on how to make felt clothing from cat fur on substack, then I probably would not have clicked. Yes I am that shallow! Hence, if you have something to sell, then an independent website is what you want, and a sales funnel to get people there. This does mean social media, the newsletter, SEO, the substack and even paid advertising. Not everyone has something to sell though.

jlengrand 2mo ago

oh I can tell you that lately, hundreds of bots are very much visiting my website every day in volumes that I have never seen in the past... Unsure that's a good news though

chromadon 2mo ago
The LLMs love your site!
paganel 2mo ago
> much visiting my website every day The same thing is happening on one of my Blogger instances, the one where I publish about a very niche interest (old floor-mill buildings from the Romanian countryside). Most of the hits are coming from countries like Vietnam and Singapore, most of them associated with Android use, so I think it's a new-ish thing that Google Analytics' anti-bot/anti-spam algorithm just can't (won't?) catch.
inigyou 2mo ago
Hundreds a day is nothing. Unless they cause a problem, you don't need to do anything.

inigyou 2mo ago

How do people get to your Substack? Does it have a recommendations system like social media?

ggsp 2mo ago
It does

bilekas 2mo ago

Why not do all automatically? My concern with substack is that it's a single point of truth. If they decide to blanket paywall everything after they sell to private equity for example. Or start to force all users to pay to be visible at all including old content. You're at the mercy of whatever they decide. We've seen it so often.

sam_lowry_ 2mo ago

> no one will visit your website... RSS could be it I thought it too, then I broke the RSS feed on my blog and someone complained immediately.