[throwawaaaaay17]

Substack is driving a blog renaissance. A ton of high-quality niche blogs popping up everywhere.

See, for example, https://antonhowes.substack.com/ (I'm not affiliated with the writer, though I am considering switching from free to paid)

[brabel]

Why would I use this instead of my own domain and a website hosted for free on Netlify or GitHub Pages?

I can get quite a lot of views by posting my latest posts to the relevant forums (HN, Reddit, programming forums)... if there's any advantage I am not seeing, I actually do want to know.

[dilap]

I follow a bunch of people on substack. Things I've noticed as a reader:

- It's both an email newsletter and a very nicely designed, clean web page

- There's an easy-to-use payments system (I pitch in a few bucks to my favorite blogs). The writer can control on a per-post basis how much extra content paid subs get -- whole post, whole post but no ability to comment, or just a preview of the post.

- They've actively recruited excellent writers, offering them contracts with minimum $ guarantees.

There's nothing mind-blowing about it, but it's really well and tastefully done, which is more than you can say about 99% of the commericial web offerings.

[Torwald]

> Why would I use this instead of my own domain and a website hosted for free on Netlify or GitHub Pages?

Email subscriptions made easy enough for a non-techie audience to subscribe.

[kowalevski]

some blogs that are available on domain etc have form with email subscription (for example by using Convertkit service). i did this on my blog website.

[yawnxyz]

Substack is free for the author vs. Mailchimp etc. f

[rchaud]

You'd go to Substack if the endgame was to develop a paying audience. Views alone don't pay writers' bills.

[brabel]

Ah ok, but when I talk about blogging in the sense we're talking here, I think of it mostly as a non-professional activity as it used to be... just people sharing their thoughts/knowledge.

[mkr-hn]

The problem with Substack (and Revue) is their publisher policy. The moment you turn on payments, you either bend to the ambiguity and only get your income from them, or you risk it with a Patreon or an online store for a purpose that isn't well-served by a newsletter.

[pixelgeek]

Well it is for professional writers. I think that the initial wave of blogs lead to a lot of people getting work as paid writers and now Substack is helping those people build their own market outside of the declining magazine and newspaper industries.

[JohnWhigham]

I agree with the high-quality niche part, but the same was said about Medium in its early days. They're on borrowed time like every other SV funny-money-funded company.