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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.” […] The newsletter's logo is a swastika and it has pushed Holocaust denialism along with news and opinion content for the 'White Nationalist Community.' […] Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.
Your source is Taylor Lorenz, on her own Substack (with a custom domain). She apparently wasn't bothered enough to disassociate with the service. This is someone who makes claims like "Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric." (Something which Wikipedia editors would be tripping over each other to evidence if it were true, but their article says nothing about it.)
There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content, nor that they were ever "proud" of it. A cursory inspection shows that while the "facing" page for the group in question still loads, the underlying profile and content are all gone.
It is a known tactic of agitators to post objectionable (or even highly illegal) content on distribution networks (or in communities) they dislike and then try to get media attention attributing it to the network/community rather than themselves.
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.
I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter.
I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth.
Substack doesn't have an API for composing a newsletter, but their rich text editor DOES accept copy-pasted data - and copy-paste is the universal API.
At 66,000 messages/week, you’d actually be spending around $50-$80 monthly with SES and a VPS + database for handling bounces and unsubscribe requests.
... right, and then I'm responsible for maintaining that infrastructure, and I have to think about email deliverability as well.
Plus Substack discovery does carry some value - about 65% of my new subscribers come via the various Substack mechanisms, the rest are from my own site or "direct" (which I think means people landed on my substack directly and then chose to subscribe.)
It's sort of disgusting that inbox clutter from a publishing service is the dominant delivery paradigm as opposed to browsers natively checking bookmarked RSS feeds.
As a writer who has been on the web for a long time, I no longer write much for the sake of the web. My personal website I took down this year because I didn't like the idea of AI snarfing up everything I wrote. I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage. While I don't write only for money, I certainly write with the idea of needing a certain amount of money to keep on writing. The internet just doesn't offer that kind of environment anymore in my opinion.
I do like the Indie web, and to me, it is more just the way the internet was/has been/needs to be. What is missing are neutral kinds of payment layers/vendors that won't pull your funding if you say something someone somewhere doesn't like.
> I hate sites like Substack because they are a single point of failure that rely on partners like Stripe for any kind of financial linkage.
The real choke point is one step up the chain with payment processors, and since 9/11 and stricter KYC with banks, there's not a reliable, widely accepted path around those regulations. Cryptocurrency remains fringe. Running a self-hosted ghost or WordPress powered blog or newsletter will encounter the same bottleneck wherever money changes hands among average-Joes online.
Most internet providers I've seen around lately have clauses against hosting your own website on residential providers. That provides two choke points. I used to be a Monero fan before its Blockchain became the size of Cyberpunk 2077.
Same - I wrote on the web for 25 years (2000 to 2025). I can attribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of income to it. I no longer have any websites, as nothing came out of it for a couple years. ~90% of all my traffic ended up bots.
And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.
That’s exactly right. Finding ways to get paid for your work, and all the very complicated way taxes interact with it all, unless you’re going all-in on ads, is a messy problem that people will happily centralize for.
And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.
I follow a very prolific open-source/FOSS podcasting network.
All of their infrastructure from the very bottom to the very top is FOSS - except their membership program. It links to a third-party which processes payments compliantly.
They've attempted a pivot to funding the network via BTC/Lightning but clearly that's polarizing to a lot of people even though it better aligns with their philosophy.
I've been listening to the network for decades now and directly credit my IT career to the people who've been platformed on the various shows over the years. Lots of great content.
Whenever I see Substack or Medium URLs, I avoid clicking them. They are so spammy with their call to subscribe, that it's not even worth me visiting them. People recognize quality, and they don't need to be pressured to subscribe. The websites I visit every day never asked me to come back.
The linked article "What I learned from one year of Substack" [1] perfectly sums up my experience. I can't read the article because I only see a coercive demand to subscribe first. Perhaps that's the joke.
I recently started to write newsletters about Hamburg (https://alsterrunde.com). Before doing that I also considered Substack but seeing that I have to pay 50$ for just using my domain was a no-go. In the end, I ended up with my friend's hosted Ghost solution (https://www.synapsmedia.com).
If you already have a Substack, you can also easily migrate to Ghost. Since it is open source, you can also host it on Hetzner, if you want to manage it yourself.
Substack gives a really nice exposure though, unlike medium and other platforms.
It's very hard to gain readers now on independent websites. Google search is dead (very few people now search for tech content), social media platforms penalize you for posting links and so on.
You can get a few thousand subscribers on Substack just by being consistent and interacting with other people. Now try gaining 1000 subscribers to an e-mail newsletter or RSS from your personal blog. People who tried it know that 5,000 views on your blog can convert to a few subscribers, and you need to get those 5000 somehow first.
A lot of people just repost their articles to substack for a reason. It's not forbidden. You can repost them from your personal blog.
I think from a technical perspective, newsletters are a solved problems with lots of options as you've mentioned.
Substack thrives because it's built a reputation for having well-reasoned or engaging voices in a newsletter format. They pushed a big campaign to onboard writers like Bill Bishop (Sinocism) onto the platform early on. Because of that, newer writers are likely seeking to tap into the network effects/discovery systems that comes with having big names on the platform.
People log onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, etc. because the people they're interested are already on the platform, and the platform provides a recommendation system that allows newer "creators" to tap into an existing audience for others in their niche.
I get that we all want people to be on open platforms but I feel like the really staunch part of the open platforms only crowd is not taking the time to understand why people like platforms like substack.
I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but like ‘oh great now I gotta deal with this’. So that’s why Medium in the past and now Substack etc end up as fallbacks
given that wordpress.com is just managed hosting i wonder if other providers can bring that cost down. installing it yourself is trivial though because of Softaculous, and web hosting is much cheaper.
Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess.
But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it.
Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0.
If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.
I am quite sad that Kagi Smallweb excludes Substack. I understand that less technical writers have started moving to Substack both to build an audience and have access to effective publishing tools, but it feels like I'm missing out on some really interesting new perspectives, similar to early Medium.
For what it's worth, I have a markdown-based website with a domain I own, and I stubbornly link to that website only, treating substack as just a temporary distribution channel.[^1] And I am constantly, endlessly asking myself if all the extra friction I've added to my life is worth it.
[^1]: I can't stand how slow and tracking-heavy substack is, but the problem of "send email and not get filtered as spam" is non-trivial.
Yeah, even if the website itself gets less traffic than the places you syndicate the content to, it's at least a stable home base that's there if those platforms fall apart. Are you posting something that corporations or celebrities don't like/want to see shared? Then posting it on your own site means that the buck stops with you, and they'll have to force you to take it down in court rather than relying on advertiser pressure/'encouraging' the platform to ignore fair use. Did you do something controversial that means platforms don't want to deal with you or individuals want to ruin your life? Having your own site means you can generally tell them to pound sand. And there's no worries regarding things like forced logins, forced ads, obnoxious cookie banners (especially if you don't need to collect personal info anyway), age verification restrictions, etc.
Plus there's just a level of control over the design and features that you can't get elsewhere. Want to make the site look completely unlike any other? It's 100% doable, as plenty of blogs posted here show very well. Want to add a new feature like polls or surveys or quizzes or interactive infographics or what not? You don't need a third party service or some premium account, you just add it yourself.
Running a website is like owning a home rather than renting one. You decide what furniture, what colours, what utilities and service providers, whether you want pets, etc.
Frankly, if writing is becoming a serious business for you, it's probably better to work across ALL of Substack/personal site/X/etc. They're all worthwhile distribution and monetization channels and can serve different purposes.
There are guides but it amounts to "use popular services to link to your website". Post snippets on the bird apps, social media hellscapes, and aggregators like this one. Duplicate your content on the blogging services. Have an RSS feed and submit it to discovery engines and web directories/rings. And send me a link so I can index you.
Depending on how often you write copy and paste to “elsewhere” is the easy answer.
Substack really wants you to use them as a primary publisher so they don’t make it easy to programmatically put content up. Other platforms have varying levels of ease around this.
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.
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.
So if they stop doing the "email my subscribers whenever I post" step, another service will fill the gap pretty quick.
Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
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?
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.
Ghost blog includes newsletter for push.
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.
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.
Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.
I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
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.
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.
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.
> Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.” […] The newsletter's logo is a swastika and it has pushed Holocaust denialism along with news and opinion content for the 'White Nationalist Community.' […] Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.
There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content, nor that they were ever "proud" of it. A cursory inspection shows that while the "facing" page for the group in question still loads, the underlying profile and content are all gone.
It is a known tactic of agitators to post objectionable (or even highly illegal) content on distribution networks (or in communities) they dislike and then try to get media attention attributing it to the network/community rather than themselves.
I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth.
Here's the tool I use for the copy-pasting: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blog-to-newsletter
Substack doesn't have an API for composing a newsletter, but their rich text editor DOES accept copy-pasted data - and copy-paste is the universal API.
Plus Substack discovery does carry some value - about 65% of my new subscribers come via the various Substack mechanisms, the rest are from my own site or "direct" (which I think means people landed on my substack directly and then chose to subscribe.)
I do like the Indie web, and to me, it is more just the way the internet was/has been/needs to be. What is missing are neutral kinds of payment layers/vendors that won't pull your funding if you say something someone somewhere doesn't like.
The real choke point is one step up the chain with payment processors, and since 9/11 and stricter KYC with banks, there's not a reliable, widely accepted path around those regulations. Cryptocurrency remains fringe. Running a self-hosted ghost or WordPress powered blog or newsletter will encounter the same bottleneck wherever money changes hands among average-Joes online.
And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.
And for the less technical people, we have 30+ years of solving this problem with different websites that each went in and out of vogue, from groceries and MySpace, through Facebook and now Medium and Substack.
All of their infrastructure from the very bottom to the very top is FOSS - except their membership program. It links to a third-party which processes payments compliantly.
They've attempted a pivot to funding the network via BTC/Lightning but clearly that's polarizing to a lot of people even though it better aligns with their philosophy.
I've been listening to the network for decades now and directly credit my IT career to the people who've been platformed on the various shows over the years. Lots of great content.
[1] https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-...
If you already have a Substack, you can also easily migrate to Ghost. Since it is open source, you can also host it on Hetzner, if you want to manage it yourself.
It's very hard to gain readers now on independent websites. Google search is dead (very few people now search for tech content), social media platforms penalize you for posting links and so on.
You can get a few thousand subscribers on Substack just by being consistent and interacting with other people. Now try gaining 1000 subscribers to an e-mail newsletter or RSS from your personal blog. People who tried it know that 5,000 views on your blog can convert to a few subscribers, and you need to get those 5000 somehow first.
A lot of people just repost their articles to substack for a reason. It's not forbidden. You can repost them from your personal blog.
Substack thrives because it's built a reputation for having well-reasoned or engaging voices in a newsletter format. They pushed a big campaign to onboard writers like Bill Bishop (Sinocism) onto the platform early on. Because of that, newer writers are likely seeking to tap into the network effects/discovery systems that comes with having big names on the platform.
People log onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, etc. because the people they're interested are already on the platform, and the platform provides a recommendation system that allows newer "creators" to tap into an existing audience for others in their niche.
But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it.
Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0.
If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.
https://upubli.sh/
[^1]: I can't stand how slow and tracking-heavy substack is, but the problem of "send email and not get filtered as spam" is non-trivial.
Plus there's just a level of control over the design and features that you can't get elsewhere. Want to make the site look completely unlike any other? It's 100% doable, as plenty of blogs posted here show very well. Want to add a new feature like polls or surveys or quizzes or interactive infographics or what not? You don't need a third party service or some premium account, you just add it yourself.
Running a website is like owning a home rather than renting one. You decide what furniture, what colours, what utilities and service providers, whether you want pets, etc.
Frankly, if writing is becoming a serious business for you, it's probably better to work across ALL of Substack/personal site/X/etc. They're all worthwhile distribution and monetization channels and can serve different purposes.
For the HN audience, the first part is trivially easy (getting a domain, publishing on it) but the second probably isn’t obvious.
Stickers are neat too.
Substack really wants you to use them as a primary publisher so they don’t make it easy to programmatically put content up. Other platforms have varying levels of ease around this.