[saltymimir]

It might just be me, but I'm not sure what substack has over other platforms that offer better commission rates or even flat fees. They have some social graph / discovery features, but it feels very half-baked at this point. Most of the people who're tremendously successful on substack, Ted included, seem to already have an audience outside of the platform itself anyway.

In fact, some of the controls that I have to cede to them just to get my posts pay-walled were just unacceptable to me. Just the other day I realized that it's very easy to bypass the paywall to any substack websites. You just simply have to:

1. Change the useragent to 'googlebot'

2. Clear your cookies, if you'd visited the before.

3. Profit(?)

I get that they probably did it for some SEO optimization purposes, but I'd like to have to liberty to opt out of this behavior for my newsletter, hosted under my own domain no less.