(1) they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform"

(2) they let the writer own their audience / mailing list (so they can leave with their audience, if they want to)

(3) they advanced money to popular writers

These things with the addition of a simple writing/reading/subscription platform that isn't overrun with adverts gives writers confidence that substack is aligned with their interests and will make money while being on their side (this is true at least for now).

Additionally, the financial success of many writers on the platform has raised the status of creating a substack. I think this is an important secondary effect -- you can disparage this as "pseudo-intellectual" but there are people that are winning from it and doing well is always cool.

---

*Edit*: Put another way, Substack's success is due to realism. They've made a realistic attempt to incentivize excellent writers to writing on their platform. They incentivize even those that are already very popular, by not locking them in and by giving them control of their audience. They have even gone as far as giving very significant upfront financial incentives to get the most famous writers on the internet onto their platform.

Other platforms try to own their writers and treat them like commodities producing SEO content. This was obviously not an attractive offer to talented or independent writers, let alone writers that have already grown huge audiences.

This is a gross inversion of normal relationships between people. I hope that Substack's model becomes more popular and people choose to eject exploitative mediators and force them to be third party service providers where they belong.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30420113

I took a step back while writing my comment and realised that it must seem kind of like random success to some people. I don't think it is at all. Other startups tried to create "blog platforms" and worked on the product/technology/UI, but the founders of Substack took a look at "what will make good quality writers sign-up" and executed on this.

It shows me that even when an idea looks simple and like it has been done before with no success, if your thinking isn't clouded by what has gone before and you actually have a new perspective and are able to understand the market incentives better than others you have a chance to do much better.

"Anti-censorship" is hugely unpopular with the mainstream intellectual community these days. It's close to being a dog whistle for the alt-right. I'm surprised this is a stance that would attract more "excellent writers".

[1] - https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

Excellent writers could have been ignored by the mainstream market previously if they were outside of the norm and sometimes found in baskets with bad apples (e.g. "alt-right"). The non-mainstream is actually a collection of smaller minority groups -- it tends to be the mainstream that is more homogenous. It doesn't surprise me that Substack has found success by not treating the non-mainstream as equally worthy of scorn.

It also won't surprise me when they start to attract more writers from the mainstream. The mainstream can sometimes appear to be totally homogenous in their hatred of liberal content policies but this is mostly due to the efforts of a small minority. If the offering is good, others will slowly come aboard.

As another commentator noted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31084791), Substack's policy is politically more in line with neoliberal complaints of censorship than the complaints from those in the alt-right. (Their comment is better than mine since it is a more direct response to the core of your comment, which could be read as suggesting that use of Substack points towards sympathy for the "alt-right".)

I'd disagree. It's unpopular with left-leaning mainstream audiences, but among intellectuals who write for a living, I imagine that extra assurances of not getting kicked off the platform are rather attractive.

It is truly wild how HN often frames censorship as something coming purely from the left while ignoring the laws coming out of conservative state legislatures across the country. There is a wide spectrum of people both pushing for censorship and pushing against it.

Maybe you are aware of some example that i'm not, though.

Children eventually become adults. How do we expect the adults of the future to deal with difficult topics like race if we prevent them from learning about them?

>Maybe you are aware of some example that i'm not, though.

I linked to another example in a different comment.[1]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31085565

[1] - https://www.natlawreview.com/article/florida-s-stop-woke-act...

Another thing dying is the defense of protests. I made a couple comments in popular Canadian subreddits about the truckers and was banned from a few for saying "protest isn't meant to make people feel happy and if the protestors don't make you feel uncomfortable you either agree with them or they're not doing their job". I got banned from one with the reason being "be gone nazi scum go try parler".

Additionally, the sub saw many multiples of normal traffic, so mods were quick to ban anyone posting anything resembling a Fox talking point.

Here's exactly my problem. This is the only narrative people are allowed to have on mainstream subreddits.

I'll admit it wasn't 100% peaceful but let's be honest here - it wasn't violent either and it wasn't an occupation. They demanded the PM step down or be removed by the GG because they don't understand how politics work here but visit some Canadian subreddits and what was done is widely regarded as a coup attempt. The view that it was a coup, or even an attempted coup, is literally insane and hysterical.

Regarding the length of the protest - Ottawa police sat on their hands and did nothing to stop or remove the truckers. When they finally did lift a finger to remove them they successfully removed them. It took 3 days but if they had just done something earlier it wouldn't have grown to as big as it did.

The cynical take is that free speech is great when you're the institutional gate-keeper, but not so much when the plebs can publish what they want.

It may be important here to separate journalists and political activists from the intellectual community. Not to say that they aren’t intellectuals, but the issue could be limited to that set of intellectuals in particular.

It makes me wonder: how many of the opinions that we are exposed to originate from journalists/activists? How much are we mixing up the opinions of these people as representing the opinions of scientists, engineers and philosophers? How much are we mixing up the opinions of journalists/activists as representing those of your average person?

I'm starting to see a deep issue with the preeminence of journalist/activist opinion.

I don’t know where did you get this idea? What did you mean “mainstream intellectual community”? Do you have any evidence like mass signatures supporting censorship from mainstream intellectuals?

People consume too much Reddit / Twitter sometimes live in an alternative reality.

"Anti-censorship" is definitely a dog whistle call out to the right wing: "Feel free to lie and spread dangerous misinformation on our platform."

I don't know if Substack actually allows "Fauci is the devil, all liberals are socialist pedophiles" writers on their site, but that's what they're promising to support.

Substack has a different financial incentive structure that attracts writers away from alternatives such as Medium.com or hosted WordPress:

- monetization is easy to go from "free" to "paid newsletters". The pricing is set by the author and the revenue isn't shared with other writers

- for paid subscriptions, the writer has the subscribers' email addresses for a more direct relationship

In contrast, Medium does not reveal email addresses and does a revenue share of a flat $50 subscription price.

Looked at a certain way, Substack replaces MailChimp (an email audience relationship tool) more so than Medium.

The founder of Substack gave an interview and he said that Substack is a SaaS backoffice of Ben Thompson's "Stratechery" paid newsletter. Ben was one of the early pioneers of the paid email newsletters resurgence but since Substack didn't exist, he had to string together the payments and emails logistics himself. The later writers wanting to get paid for newsletters can just use Substack instead of reinventing Ben's tech stack.

Big picture: we believe that what you read matters, and that therefore great writing (and great intellectual culture in general) is valuable. In our view the great promise of the internet is that it can unlock a flourishing of culture, but the first phase was dominated by a land-grab for attention which gave us the current landscape of ad-driven platforms which optimize for the wrong things and don't serve great writing. Substack is an attempt to create an alternate universe on the internet, with different laws of physics, that fulfills the original promise. Where writers can make real money by earning and keeping the trust of an audience who deeply values their work. Where readers can take back their mind, and decide for themselves who to trust and how to spend their attention.

Practical terms: we try to focus really hard on serving the people that use Substack. The writers, obviously, by giving them something that genuinely works. I think of this as "we do everything for you except the hard part". Which means if you can write something great, the job of the product is to handle the rest. This means not just the right features, but smart defaults everywhere that help you succeed. For readers, we try to make the experience very clean and frictionless, and communicate right from the get-go that this is a place that respects you and your attention, to the point that it might be worth paying for. The things others have noted - smart defaults, fast loading, clean design, etc. etc. are expressions of this. We're focused serving people, and we're not shy about using 'boring' technology (like email, for example) to make it happen.

Putting this together, the magic of the Substack model is not that it gives writers a way to get paid for doing the thing they might have done elsewhere. It creates a system where the kind of thing you do to succeed is qualitatively different and better than what succeeds elsewhere. For writers, that can mean getting paid -- sometimes very handsomely -- to do the work you actually believe in. It can unlock this for people who weren't professional writers before. And for readers, it means a lot of the best writing to be found anywhere is on Substack.

That's the theory at least! We're hiring, by the way: https://substack.com/jobs

What are your thoughts on handling this aspect of the economic piece of the content puzzle?

This probably extends outside the digital realm and applies to modern consumerism in general. If paying for the actual cost of consumption goods is unbearable, perhaps it's a sign we should be cutting back on how much of it we are consuming?

Take a look at someone like Freddie deBoer. He was a very popular blogger, had written for all the prestigious publications, and was about to accept a $15/hr manual labor job before substack offered him a contract. Now he's making 200k+ a year.

Once enough popular writers were on the platform, and with some help from twitter controversies, the network effect took over.

I love it because it's fast and minimalist. No ads, no nonsense, just the text.

Also coincidentally on substack...

"He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth."

IMO the more accurate claim is that FDB wants everyone's lives to have an equally comfortable floor. Whatever happens after this floor gets established (by a state, or otherwise) is not his main concern... and in my view, at least, it'll be a very different world so what happens is less important argue about.

Alexander then writes as if FDB hates whenever meritocracy dictates anything, but to me the important point is that the meritocracy dictates the floor.

"... Teacher tourism might be a factor, but hardly justifies DeBoer's "charter schools are frauds, shut them down" perspective."

I think FDB wants to shut down charters because he recognizes that they're immoral, and public schools are simply what we're supposed to maintain for taking care of and educating our kids (at this moment in history.) It seems like Alexander is just saying "you're dreaming too big!"; in every era some people always exist to say this.

"Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true."

What Alexander describes here is the reactionary progressive strain of anti-IQ that is only as strong as progressivism's enemies' focus on IQ. It's an inverse function; I don't think liberals actually care that much about less intelligent people, people with educational disabilities and so on.

"DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time."

I had to skim this ending part. Maybe I missed it, but Alexander doesn't mention that: FDB wants to lower the dropout age to 12; Schools guarentee that kids get to have interactions with lots of other kids, even in very rural areas; Schools guarentee parents time to themselves, to not worry about keeping their kids safe. Aren't these important points?

Respectable and respectful review, but I am still with FDB in ethos.

>'FDB wants to lower the dropout age to 12; Schools guarentee that kids get to have interactions with lots of other kids, even in very rural areas; Schools guarentee parents time to themselves, to not worry about keeping their kids safe. Aren't these important points?'

Yes, but 5 - 12 is still a looong time for a kid. All those points are orthogonal to charters.

>'I think FDB wants to shut down charters because he recognizes that they're immoral [citation needed], and public schools are simply what we're supposed to maintain for taking care of and educating our kids (at this moment in history.) It seems like Alexander is just saying "you're dreaming too big!"; in every era some people always exist to say this."'

Personally, I'm very fond of Alexander's passage against public-schools-only near the end:

"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!"

p174 : "There is no such thing as a 'public charter.' 'Public' does not just denote public money but also public accountability; most charter schools are not under the control of the parents and local citizens at all and thus cannot be called public."

p177: "[T]he very competitive landscape that charters are meant to foster creates a structural bias toward dishonest practices."

All public guarantees in this modern time are going to end up with a lot of shitty conditions and outcomes, when people in power don't care about them. Maybe that's a poor reply but it's my reply. The book indeed mixes "just overthrow the culture and machines of capitalism" and "here's some reforms I like, each of which may or may not be precluded by the overthrowy bit, at least a little." I think an unstated and reasonable assumption of FDB's is that if we enact these reforms, it will be because we've convinced the public that public schools and teachers are important. The ideas aren't just to put legal language on paper, they are cultural reforms advanced through appeals to compassion ("As a socialist, my interest lies in expanding the degree to which the community takes responsibility each all of its members, in deepening our societal commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of everyone.") Did the gay and lesbian community get marriage legalized by just crafting the most perfect bill texts?

It's hard to deny that leftism is in a confused way right now. They (generally, not deBoer afaik) think prostitution is liberating!

Minor quibble about this: On large pages, it can be quite slow. E.g., on https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t... , it takes a few seconds after initial loading for it be responsive to pressing the PgDown key, at least on my machine.

I tried it out and was kind of shocked by the formatting lock-in and all the embedded tracking... I couldn't make it just default to plain text and I wasn't sure what the GDPR implications would be, i.e. whether I as an EU resident can do a Substack newsletter for EU subscribers and if so what do I have to ask them to agree to exactly.

But yeah if you don't care about that stuff it's pretty frictionless and I will probably give it another try if I get my newsletter act together. And I like that I can save Substack articles (the web versions) to Pocket for plain-text reading offline, a lot of sites don't support that.

1. Substack pages load quickly and cleanly. You don't have to watch your browser have a seizure as it brings in a long tail of weird ad/tracking crap.

2. The page is very low-distraction. The writing is given pride of place.

3. I hit paywalls and login walls on Medium much more often than on Substack.

4. I know many interesting writers on Substack. I don't know any interesting writers on Medium.

Substack kept it clean for both.

The first two points are also important! I love reading articles on substack. It's fast, it's clean, I know I'll be able to get to the article, read it, and maybe sub if I want to read more of the author's work. It's a great experience. Medium is the opposite. It feels slower, and if the article happens to not be interesting, I feel annoyed because I used up one of my free articles. It's bad enough that I now actively avoid Medium if I can.

I used Medium before. Medium treats your data as its a generic post about some topic. If I wrote an article on AI, it would recommend other articles about AI from various authors. That's fine for some purposes, but as a writer trying to build an audience, I'd like to think people come to my post because they like something I have to say and would prefer a recommender system to recommend other posts by me.

Medium's monetization model is to get people to pay for Medium articles, not those of the author.

Another gross example of this is that you cannot easily see a publications from a publication. On a site, you see a tiny link called "archive" to see a writer's historical posts. There you can filter on month but can't see a dump of everything the person has written. They don't even offer "load more posts" or a calendar view. It's very hostile to the writer.

I had around 1k followers on Medium but if I posted something and didn't publish it on social media, I would get maybe a few dozen readers. Whereas Substack I consistently get around 20-25% of people that are subscribed open my publication.

Is there something between Medium and Substack? Probably, but I don't really care to look around. Substack offers you a chance to build a reader base, gives you access to emails and lets you easily monetize directly without being part of the global pool of generic low quality articles like Medium does.

I wrote more about it here.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/migrating-from-medium-to...

https://future.a16z.com/passion-economy/

I'd wager it's also popular on HN because of the current debate about free speech online and 'cancel culture'. Substack is the upstart here against the stodgy big media status quo, so that will always pull in some level of ideological support.

I don't think that's a question to be asked of Hacker News readers in general, as presumably most of us aren't Substack writers, just readers.

To be honest, I don't like Substack as an application. Their commenting defaults are terrible. I'm not a fan of the push model of newsletters in general and prefer the pull model of going to the site whenever you feel like being updated on your own schedule. But I like the writers, so I go there anyway.

Getting paid directly for writing, without dealing with the administrative overhead of things not specifically built for writing, like Patreon.

We can talk about censorship all day until we're prohibited from doing so by a private entity and move to another platform, but it won't change the fact that the writers yelling the most about it could've easily set up a Patreon with a monthly plan and published long-form text there. Plenty of people still do it. Substack just does that one thing better.

https://akarlin.substack.com/p/happening-the-ukraine-war-202...

One of his previous posts is his analysis of the (then, upcoming) war, its context, and causes.

Of course, you need to take it with an open pit sized block of salt — eg he predicted that the Russia will most likely conquer Ukraine in less than a week. This, needless to say, turned to be laughably wrong, and makes rest of his analysis rather questionable.

The point is, however, that you are unlikely to see this sort of unabashed (indeed, proud) and undistorted Russian perspective elsewhere in western media sphere — indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if this comment got downvoted for “spreading Russian propaganda”. Myself, I think it is extremely important to understand the perspective and motivation of the enemy, so that you can predict their movements and effectively prevent or resist them.

Gives an insight into the thought processes behind starting and continuing this war, and why some Russians might be supporting Putin and the war, and what to expect going forward.

Even wrong perspectives can be valuable and informative.

https://graymirror.substack.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

Also Nick Land:

https://zerophilosophy.substack.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land

https://russiandissent.substack.com/

https://boriquagato.substack.com/

(Former NY Times reporter)

If you're interested in censored material more broadly, you might be interested in the ALA's most challenged books lists [2] which include such classics as "Of Mice and Men" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" along with books as widely loved as "Harry Potter" and "James and the Giant Peach"

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/27/substac... [2] https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbook... https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbook...

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/maximum-vaccination

According to this Guardian article, the "Center for Countering Digital Hate" (also mentioned in your article) would be happy if Substack hadn't given it the platform:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/27/anti-vaxx...

The idea that Yet Another Generic NGO needs to "counter hate" because someone on the internet thinks the vaccine is not going to stop the pandemic is completely bonkers.

What I want to say is, a lot of the controversy around Substack seems to be that it is not aligned with the Right Side in the Culture War. I think they have some great writers, but they're not the next WikiLeaks or anything.

This was pretty obvious in 2015/2016 with the Trump campaign managing to get a lot of exposure everywhere.

But it's also a self-reinforcing thing, because e.g. Twitter has earned millions from all of the engagement that anything Trump did on the platform; he tweeted, millions would flock to the replies, and tens or hundreds of millions would know that he tweeted through the thousands of news outlets that pounced on it. I'm pretty confident that if it wasn't for Trump, Twitter would've petered out years ago.

>We don’t allow content that promotes harmful or illegal activities, including material that advocates, threatens, or shows you causing harm to yourself, other people, or animals.

I have seen plenty of substacks talking about the war in Ukraine (for example [0]). This is _clearly_ advocating harm to other people -- you're talking about soldiers and weapons in war after all. Is this breaking the guidelines? Taken literally yes, but of course not in practice.

Eventually, somebody's idea of what is acceptable will clash with the moderation, and we will see the same cries of censorship and deplatforming we see everywhere else.

[0] https://patrickfox.substack.com/p/lets-fck-with-vlad-part3

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_child_pornography

* It's free. Mailchimp gets surprisingly expensive pretty quick as your audience grows, with no path for revenue.

* It's easy to start. Very easy to move over to it from mailchimp and set it all up. Even after two years of additional features, it's quite streamlined.

* It's simple. The feature set is pretty minimalist in a good way, puts composing and putting out content first in a way that makes it pretty frictionless to use.

* It's monetizable. Kinda obvious, but I was surprised by how many people are willing to be paying subscribers tbh.

I do have some gripes: like Medium it provides very few options for customization, and it is very much designed with the assumption the newsletter is stand-alone (meaning no associated website for which the newsletter serves to provides updates). Still, on the whole it's quite nice.

From a reader perspective, I would assume it's popular because a lot of good writers/newsletters have been started with it lately due to the above reasons.

2. They basically solve the business model issue for writers, so you really can focus on the writing. At least, more so than the alternatives.

3. Their design is actually pretty nice, and focused on just two things: list building and content.

4. The defaults make sense, and solve real problems for people who want to make money with their writing.

Paying for what is essentially celebrity endorsements seems like the exact opposite of "astorturfed".

* edit: free choice as in "not swayed by payment"

Musicians complain a lot about Spotify being a poor deal for them financially, but there's no doubt it was an excellent deal for Joe Rogan.

However, a guaranteed paycheck for the first year is lower risk, so they took the deal.

This all depend on your own efforts building an audience and it's still the case that most authors won't make much. But it seems like better terms than Spotify for moderately successful authors.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/financial-transparency

Paying writers for their work means they didn't choose to join Substack?

But then people who don't know or understand this yet might subscribe to one of these paid contributors and think, gee, Substack must be a great platform because Famous McBrain writes on it, as opposed to the subtly more accurate point that Substack's _money_ must be great because Famous McBrain took it.

He most definitely didn’t pretend to “just go there”, and his post on the subject mentioned a few others with similar deals by name.

Do you have a problem when a publisher pays an advance to (say) Stephen King in order to get him to publish through them?

Celebrity endorsements are not astroturfing.

You could make the argument that there are enough celebrity accounts and that those accounts are run by the substack marketing team that it should be considered astroturf but that seems like a long stretch to me.

Substack is a better solution for this, and it includes the mailing list building features that make it a superior solution to the social media treadmill.

1 is a marketing ploy, and while "astroturfing" sounds bad, it's fairly accurate and also a really good idea for what is a pretty niche market.

All that said, I wish it wasn't this way. Siloing Internet content, even if the operation was an open, squeaky-clean, First Amendment-loving angel, is antithetical to the Internet ethos. And based on extensive experience, even the angelic operations eventually become not-so-angelic.

I'm happy to pay $50/year to support these independent voices.

So they are a proven-successful platform, and that attracts other writers.

The get paid part is important. You like one writer on substack, you give em 5 bucks a month. You like someone else, it's exactly the same process to give 5 bucks.

It's the same as Twitch (for gamers) - where people give 5$/month to people who just stream themselves playing computer games. It's because it's a single click and it's the same click for all other streamers.

The barrier substack has broken, is the shitshow that is payments online - they did it for journalists, twitch did it for gamers, onlyfans did it for chicks showing their body parts, etc.

Of course the problem that'll destroy Substack is when they will inevitably raise their fees, piss off their writers and in 10 years, some other Substack like thing will pop up, that'll do the same thing and so the cycle continues.

It makes it easy to write and get paid for writing; the incentives are very much against doing journalism, and even the former journalists on substack that I’ve seen mostly aren't doing journalism, and some are quite open that escaping journalistic standards and norms and was a big part of their motivation.

The most prominent figures on there are journalists or ex-journalists however.

It is a bit like Twitch - it doesn't have to be for gamers, but since 99% of the streamers and 99% of the watchers are interested in games when they go there, it is what it is.

As for doing journalism - there is no incentive to do good work in just about every field. Sad face shrug.

I’m not going to spend $100/month to follow my ten favorite bloggers.

As a platform it's host to a lot of the kinds of semi-philosophical writing of the sort that the hacker news audience tends to rate highly, which is why you'll see it pop up a lot here. The "pro-freedom-of-speech" or "anti-censorship" stuff you'll probably see in the responses is a little overblown generally – but since it's an individual publishing platform for writers (rather than a distinct media presence in its own right) you're more likely to see views that more mainstream publications don't want to promote. Again, something that the HN crowd is pretty hot on.

(I will say generally that a Hacker News post from a Substack domain at this point has become a bit of a negative signal for me in the same way that Medium has – except instead of suffering through a terrible React tutorial you'll be sitting through a contrarian middlebrow essay. But of course exceptions abound and YMMV).

Substack crunched the numbers, figured out how much people were willing to pay for certain bloggers' materials. Then they found some very prominent bloggers and paid them huge advances to join the platform. It was very risky but it clearly worked.

And now we are seeing the downstream market adapting in kind.

An example of a product that's JOYOUS to use is Substack. It feels beautiful to write and format. There aren't tons of distracting non-features. The product team seems to consistently look for how people are using it and make sure they can use it in those ways better.

It's especially incredible in a world where Blogger and WordPress both languished for years, never bothering to simply make the authoring process pleasant. Medium was able to do this, and had a good start because of it, then (inexplicably) found 5000 ways to drop the ball.

thread: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1514400886365302784

(1) A modern "minimalist" themed blog focused on written content (2) An email newsletter with the same content (3) Optionally allow paid subscribers

I've tried everything in the blog world, and most are a headache to maintain. The closest would be Ghost, but they haven't done as well on the GTM side. Substack has set itself apart by landing "tech twitter" influencers who philosophize... which is probably why you're seeing it bleed into the HN world.

  - No ads, popups, random paywalls.
  - Authors looking for paid subs offer quite a bit of free content.
  - Substack feels like it loads faster than Medium. Very snappy.
  - Simple email sub/unsub.
  - Substack doesn't treat me like a child & decide some ideas are too dangerous for me to read about.
  - I don't worry that an article/newsletter I like (or dislike!) will suddenly disappear off the internet.

As I understand it, when Substack first started it did a funny one: it paid some successful bloggers to jump ship to substack and convinced them of a secure and promising subscription-based income. My favorite example being Scott Alexander Siskind.

I have no concern about what medium the content I want is presented in (so long as they don't use low contrast or silly fonts), I will just go wherever I can find Scott. And Scott now happens to be in substack so I go to substack.

One thing I think is powerful is that they let you own your audience. If they ever fuck up, writers can just bounce. It means substack should focus on tools writers want, rather than building an indentured trap by holding their audience ransom like most other publishing platforms do. The platform's politics don't matter if they can't deplatform you.

A key part of the value I get out of other subscriptions is aggregation.

I've backed lots of projects via Kickstarter etc - I'm down for supporting things and people that tick my boxes. Maybe I'm just allergic to the idea of paying for emails. I didn't sign up when the NYTimes tried to productize their newsletters either.

A free service for running a mailing list and podcast with the ability to jump ship at any time (you can export your list from there) and the ability to flip a switch and start making money directly from your audience at a reasonable cost is all fantastic.

In such a subtle way it covers much of what substack is doing well and twitter isn't doing well.

>Does it have some kind of a hidden feature that makes it very appealing?

Really just a lack of certain hidden features. Ones that twitter excels at.

TLDR - First off yeah employees are posting here duh. But HN people want writers/journalism, and Substack is "getting paid to write". Or, it's Patreon before Patreon started blatantly censoring views they disagreed with politically. But I'm not even blaming Patreon per se, I mean larger world forces cutting off many forms of expression. If you haven't followed, look up how the United States government has attempted to freeze the porn industry from being able to accept credit cards or keep bank accounts (including the Obama admin just so you know the left does it too).

Credentials: Divorced from a journalism major who turned advertising and works c-level of an international company. I work as a programmer in ecommerce where I work very closely with marketers, and have seen this experience repeated.

Journalism is about as useful of a degree as Gender Studies, which given the political undertones is a good comparison as there is a ton of crossover. Journalism as a field - in America, across most types of employment - is an insanely incestuous clique of mostly liberal East Coast elitists. I mean that very literally, as in people who think either Boston or New York City are the be-all end-all of the world and how could you possibly live anywhere else. (well, pre-pandemic.)

So my ex went to an Elite East Coast College. What happens after you rack up five or six figures of student debt is that you go to a Mad Men sweatshop. Some sort of agency generating copy for newspapers or ads or whatever. You're worked 80+ hours a week for minimum-ish wage (certainly too little given the stress). You'll walk into work and get told you need to crank out something absolutely absurd. Just for fun let's say it's 20 articles of 800 words by end of day for a field you've never even written before so you don't even know the jargon. So you may end up working from 8am to 11pm, and only being paid crap wages for 8 hours that day because it's not their fault you can't make quota. You're just madly copying and pasting garbage to make requirements and hit SEO targets. That's how vast amounts of the Internet is generated. All the mommy blogs and recipe sites that seem like a word salad. "Recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies. I recall fondly my mother used to make chocolate chip cookies..." (page length requirements, reader time on site requirements, keywords...)

So you racked up near to six figures of debt, as far as you're concerned a 40-hour week for fair pay is a myth capitalists make up to torture you, and you've spent the first 20-ish years of your life building up little more than a damaged liver.

So who's left in journalism? AKA who can Substack target?

0) Bright-eyed college kids who don't know any better. Keep in mind that if someone tells them they'd make more money at Substack, then Buzzfeed calls that an "alt-right dogwhistle" from a "controversial figure" to keep the peons in line. When a Buzzfeed goes bust as their employees finally figure out the Ponzi scheme, they all end up on other platforms anyway. No need to invest here.

1) True die-hards who stuck with it, which I'd say is people like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenewald. You'll notice both of these people are in hot water with the political left for various offenses, and are desperately looking for a better revenue model to keep journalism alive. Substack does that for them, like Patreon but less censorship. As people posted - they're helping censored Russians of all walks of life to be able to publish after sites like Patreon have axed those people because mumble mumble oligarchs? True free speech stuff, even if you disagree with their other views, these people are net positives on the world. They're already hungry for Substack.

2) People who have other funding, like the marketers, who were probably paid to join. People like Chuck Palahniuk didn't really need Substack, but it's hot, and it's like Patreon except he presumably gets a better kickback. So why not. I know comparitively few people in this camp unless it's terribly obvious they had the following to get paid.

So Substack did the right thing in every regard. The site gets people paid, it's fairly easy to use. They went after category 1, they paid off some people in 2, and I'm sure they keep an ear to the ground and drop some timely social media posts when a 0 event happens. And yeah, look around. They're posting right here, right now, where it's effective.

They're the right tool, at the right time.

They took great advantage of that trend by directly paying newspaper writers to make it even more popular. The writers brought their existing audiences from whatever platform they were coming from, and wrote a lot about the process of switching to substack.

and then they leveraged the popularity among newspaper writers to sell an image of "make a substack and you too can be a popular and successful writer", which brought in the mass market.

Look around you.. any platform that does this is also successful.

It’s not about censorship, Privacy, the ability to switch or “on the side of writers” etc.

They’ve made it easy for writers to collect money. Period.

I don't get why they needed to put this in unless they they are trying to say the platform is racist and sexist. Maybe the NYT is afraid of competition?

What I found most amusing about that article was the lack of mention of Bari Weiss, the extremely popular Jewish journalist who wrote for the NYT for years before joining Substack and quickly becoming one of their most popular paid newsletters. It seems like a pretty relevant detail in the Substack story, but because it doesn't aid the narrative of the platform being a haven for right-wing white males, NYT naturally left it out. Pretty poor reporting, IMO.

Then further down the article, they list the top sellers: "The most successful is the history professor Heather Cox Richardson, who has more than a million paid and unpaid subscribers. Other notable writers include the knighted novelist Salman Rushdie, the punk poet laureate Patti Smith and the Eisner-winning comic book writer James Tynion IV."

How many of this list is white and male?

> The platform portrayed itself as a haven for independent writers with fewer resources while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men.

Is just describing how it was formed and indeed the list of 'recruits' was largely male and white (Greenwald, Yglesias, Singal, Deboer, Sullivan, etc). This is perhaps an unfair framing because there were indeed Women and PoC in their list of Substack Pros as well, but they had smaller audiences and their advances were substantially smaller.

> "The most successful is the history professor Heather Cox Richardson, who has more than a million paid and unpaid subscribers. Other notable writers include the knighted novelist Salman Rushdie, the punk poet laureate Patti Smith and the Eisner-winning comic book writer James Tynion IV."

Is describing who's popular on it today.

Those two paragraphs don't have to be consistent for the story to be accurate..

As other have mentioned the lack of Paywall is nice tho. Medium had one of the most frustrating iirc.

This may be really bad over analysis combined with misremembering, but both sites felt like they reflected the HN users-base (or vice versa).

I remember circa 2015-2016 Medium posts and HN comments felt in sync in regards to the tone, content etc. I feel the same thing with many Substack blogs seem feeling like an HN comment section turned into an article.

Substack has a more journalistic feel to it. It also seems to have a broader audience than Medium, which I mostly associate with tech content.

You could follow me! https://link.medium.com/w4fPh9dzmpb

But really i don't think I actually consume content by following people . I consume content via social media or aggregators like HN and enough of that contains medium that makes it worth it.

AKA the 'burning investor capital' stage.

I remember when Uber could ignore the laws of economics and freely undercut taxicab prices. Now they cost the same, if not more.

It's clearer which writer is getting paid for what. On many news sites, you don't know if the money is going to the company and which writer is getting compensated. The focus is to pay writers you like to write more, and is not centered on the writing that gets enough payment from advertisers. You also don't get much in terms of ads from the writers too.

You know what your paying for, what you're getting, and from whom. You know that what you are reading will stay available to you because it is in your email, which cannot be paywalled or taken off the internet because something happened to the business model or to the website. You own the right to read the content you paid to get, and it will always be available as long as you have your emails saved and accessible.

The business model is also distinct in which domain experts are incentivized to create quality content due to their income directly tied to specialized niche subscribers.