[skippyfish]

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.

[billyp-rva]

> 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.

[Bratmon]

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]

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]

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.

[AussieWog93]

Not sure about LinkedIn, but Facebook does let you export all your data as a bit monolithic zip file.

[nicbou]

Every single thing substack does reeks of growth hacking. I suspect that it will only get worse. For that reason alone I chose to avoid it for my newsletter.

[skybrian]

Can't you link to whatever you want in your own blog post?

[ImJamal]

If Substack stops supporting that feature you would end up losing all of your subscribers when you move to the alternative unless you happen to have an up to date export.

[coldtea]

Which is trivial. Even once a month is enough.

[ImJamal]

How many writers are even thinking about that though? If they shut it off tomorrow, how many would have a list within the last year?

[coldtea]

I'm pretty sure all of them. Because they'll never shut it without advance warning, due to the backlash.

[Forgeties79]

Until they make it more difficult to export lol that’s the real canary in the coal mine if you ask me.

[ericjmorey]

The coal mine is already inhospitable

[throw1234567891]

When they will, you’ll be free to take action.

[shimman]

Yeah and having a site is a way to mitigate that risk...

[dlcarrier]

There's enough demand for the feature that if they stop supporting it, they won't be able to compete against anyone offering the feature.

[c16]

Gmail has categories. So they already are.

[jimbokun]

That’s when you leave.

[carlosjobim]

> How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future?

You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?

[xboxnolifes]

Its the terminating argument for FOSS hackers. When there is no good argument left, they fall onto that.

"You're only going to get 20 years of use out of this proprietary service before you'll need to spend a few hours switching off! You must switch now!"

[bryanrasmussen]

Hackers always use this argument against everything because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.

Thus they argue that you should not trust your things to other people but do it yourself, because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.

[coldtea]

>because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.

Nope. At best you merely know what your current self intends to do in the future. Whether you'll do them then, or whether you'll even still want to do them then, or be able to do them then, or have regretted ever wanting to do them, and many other such things, we don't know.

[bryanrasmussen]

Nope. As per my second paragraph which you may not have gotten to:

>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.

Furthermore the phrase "some things" does not actually mean all things.

So again, trying to put it another way to clarify anything that may have been unclear:

You can be reasonably certain at the time that you need to make a decision that you will try to do what you believe is the best for you. I will now not go on to make an exhaustive list showing every way that you in the future may not do what is right for you because it is normally understood that there are numerous ways in which the reasonable expectations of people can be countered but nonetheless, the reasonable expectations will still tend to hold more than any of the countering scenarios. This is why they are the reasonable expectations, while the countering scenarios are the notable exceptions that often show up in sensational news reports and fiction.

And finally I should note this comes down to the principle, which I would have thought was clear from my previous post but evidently not, that if you can reasonably expect that future you will try to do what future you thinks is best for them, you can just as reasonably expect that the future corporation you are buying a service from will try to what the future corporation thinks is best for them, without giving much consideration for what is best for you.

I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.

on edit: Note in my first post I referred to major illness, because major illness, including mental illness, is one of the most common ways in which people end up not attempting to do what is best for themselves.

[coldtea]

>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.

Regardless of major illness or not, people do stupid things, self destructive things, ill-thought things, impulsive things all the time. At best they'll do "what they think is best" not "what is best" for themselves. And frequently not even that, as people still do all kinds of things they know are bad for them but can't stop themselves anyway.

But even if it was correct, "you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future" is not really strong as an argument against the grandparent's:

"You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?"

The grantparent's argument is about not knowing what you'll be doing in concrete terms, not about merely knowing some abstract guiding principle like "you'll still want to do something you feel is best for you then".

>I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.

Even so, that's worth acting only if the pain of future corporation pulling some shit later on is bigger than the convenience you still get before that, or easier than what you'll lack going without its services.

Also if the cost of just dumping their ass then when they DO turn, and moving to another player, is big.

[autoexec]

> You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future?

You absolutely can know something about what someone will do in the future. You gain those insights by looking at their past and present behavior and the behavior of others in similar circumstances. Hackers tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can often see where things are heading. Enshittification is a pretty smart bet.

[skybrian]

You can do whatever research you like, but when you attempt to apply it to predicting the future, you're still speculating. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

[carlosjobim]

So your ex girlfriend cheated on you and now you reject all contact with women because you know that "sooner or later" she's going to cheat on you? In my ears it sounds the same when hackers say you can never buy anything or use any service, because "sooner or later" it will go to crap.

It's probably easy being a cynic, because you can always wait for decades (as another commenter argued) until you are right. In the meanwhile you have missed out on life - for no personal benefit at all.

[cwillu]

Allow me to translate: “It a near certainty that they will fuck you over eventually; the question is will it be next year, next decade, or will you win the lottery?”

[throw0101d]

> 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-...

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/

[Stratoscope]

> 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]

> Why? I want my writing to outlive me.

Donate to archive.org.

[Stratoscope]

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

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....

[zahlman]

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.

[wofo]

My blog used to be RSS only, because I thought email subscriptions were a plot of "content creators" and not something readers actually wanted... until one of my readers told me he really recommended adding email as an option. I did, and a surprising number of people subscribed since then.

[6510]

For a decade or~so I subscribe to newsletters and had skip inbox rules that archived them in a folder about the subject. Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them. Not sure if that means it works or not.

[Swizec]

> Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them

Most people don't read most newsletters. Some people read some.

This Saturday I sent an email. It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people. 780 people clicked on a link.

I tweeted the same email as a link and got pretty good engagement! 20 likes, 2 retweets – that's decent for me these days. It was seen 1400 times. 78 people clicked on a link.

I have roughly the same number of followers as I do email subscribers.

[wofo]

Hahaha it could well be that people are merely hoarding newsletter emails. I hope readers derive _some_ value from the emails, but since I'm not doing it to drive up "engagement metrics" I don't really mind.

[6510]

There was a time when google toolbar had a search gmail button. I would use it to open gmail using whatever query was inthere. It happened quite often that it found newsletters matching the query. It takes quite a bit of hoarding to accomplish.

Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:

    example.com?re=[e-mail]&article=1234

Then mail you the requested article. With RE: and the same title they will even be threaded.

[nickthegreek]

> 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/ to put them in my rss though.

[skippyfish]

> I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.

Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.

[hungryhobbit]

Pick Medium, it's great ... if you want a paywall to turn away half your visitors!

[nickthegreek]

The author has the option to enable that or not.

[hungryhobbit]

And (judging by the number of Medium articles I've been turned away from) 95% of all authors leave it on.

[nickthegreek]

Sure, but my comment was being given directly to a user who asked for a platform that allowed X, Y and Z. I was providing them with an answer that met their stated criteria. I don’t see how other people’s configuration is of any concern.

[benoliver999]

My RSS reader accepts email newsletters so I subscribe using that and funnel them all into feedbin

[goostavos]

...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.

[kelnos]

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.

[4ndrewl]

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)."

[eviks]

> 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.

[clickety_clack]

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).

[weird-eye-issue]

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.

[game_the0ry]

> You need a push mechanism to reach readers.

Ghost blog includes newsletter for push.

[coldtea]

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]

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.

[rambambram]

> So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web.

Please don't post sh1t like this as some expert conclusion. Young and gullible people might believe confident but wrong talk like this.

[Loxicon]

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.

[ValdikSS]

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/ for example.

[skippyfish]

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]

>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!

[ky-hy]

According to hacker news users you have to monetize every single thing you do in your spare time, otherwise it's a waste of time, be it blogging, pet projects that you need to convert to SAAS etc. And if you claim that you have "fun" and "hobbies" you are a liar (or at least you are lying to yourself that you don't want to make money out of those things).

[Topology1]

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]

I miss the days when I'd regularly get forwards from friends about stuff they found on the internet.

[brunoarueira]

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]

>"I don't know how you read so much content"

And then they spend hours every day doomscrolling and binge watching shit

[div3rs3]

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?

[tombert]

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.

[f311a]

> 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.

[cosmicgadget]

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

[bonestamp2]

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]

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]

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.

[rusk]

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.

[efilife]

It's addressed in the article

[cpill]

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]

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.

[BorisMelnik]

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.

[dmitrygr]

> 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

[coldtea]

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

There's a big audience for that that's actively search for such keywords.

Not the same with essays or fiction writing

[yrds96]

Fediverse. We need to push Fediverse