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Ask HN: Is Substack worth the hassle in 2022?

by DrNuke on 1/9/22, 2:06 PM with 24 comments

• by detaro on 1/9/22, 3:16 PM

  It's at high risk to run in the medium-reputation-problem: If you have e.g. the choice between your stuff being linked as "foobar.platform.com" and "foobar.com", the former is great if the platform confers a positive image over any other random URL. That's often the case early-on for new platforms, when they pull in cool early adopters and thus are associated with high-quality content. E.g. the trope-namer medium.com early on had a reputation for nice clean pages and good content. The problem is, that often changes over time, and now a medium.com link encountered in the wild suggests "stupid subscription nagging" and "low-quality self-promotion think-pieces", it's not the neighborhood you want your content to be seen in if it is any good.

  For now substack isn't there yet (although you start to hear the first sentiments in that direction), and their focus on subscription helps avoid it to a degree too, I also see more often people point to "their substack" from elsewhere. But if they go the path of putting the platform more in the foreground, i.e. not "foobars newsletter, which happens to be on substack, but you don't really need to know or notice that", but more "go to substack to find cool content!", that risk increases. Again the medium-comparison: medium was and is big on finding other stuff on medium. Which means even if you read a good article, right next to it medium will push you to read more fluff, because their algorithms have no clue how to promote relevant high-quality content.

• by neural_thing on 1/9/22, 2:46 PM

  Disclaimer: I work at Substack.

  For readers - yes, there is something on Substack you will absolutely love. We don't do a fantastic job of surfacing all the content yet, but we're working on it.

  For writers - depends on what you want. If you want to self-host or customize every bit of design - we probably aren't for you. If you want it to be super easy to publish a free or paid newsletter - Substack is great.

  If you are wondering if the field is saturated yet - I don't think so. I see new successes on Substack popping up every week.

• by h2odragon on 1/9/22, 2:22 PM

  There seems to be no way to feed them already formatted text; either do your layout in their "in browser" editor or feed them an RSS feed and accept their translation. Also there's some size limit operating? I kept getting "too large" popup things playing with it, with 8k to 20k of input HTML or markdown.

  If what you want to publish is text in their allowed lengths, and allowed formats, in the way they're set up to do, maybe it's worth it.

• by larqts on 1/9/22, 3:09 PM

  Your question appears to imply that writers are unhappy, without mentioning specifics.

  I'm just a reader who finds that many of the most interesting written opinion pieces on the Internet are on Substack these days. So, for readers it is definitely worth it!

• by obarthelemy on 1/9/22, 2:39 PM

  Is it worth the hassle trying to guess what you mean by that very vague question ?

  edit: ...in 2022.

• by nik5 on 1/9/22, 2:55 PM

  I use substack for sharing links in form of newsletter. I like the platform, it is simple, does one thing well, has a full content RSS feed, editor could use markdown support. Buttondown is better, but I'm currently not planning on paying anything for a while so not switching.

  As a reader, I like how I can find relevant blogs to read without subscribing and no doubt it is better than medium in every aspect.

• by PaulHoule on 1/9/22, 2:09 PM

  Worth the hassle for a content provider to join or worth the hassle for readers?

• by hestefisk on 1/9/22, 2:39 PM

  What alternatives do you see? Medium?