But, I am genuinely curious why is it getting so popular and particularly here on Hacker News. Does it have some kind of a hidden feature that makes it very appealing?
My number one assumption would be that it uses a global userbase, so people who write on Substack can collect subscribers/readers much faster. Is that all there is to it?
I also know that Substack prefetches an email address (once you enter it on any Substack-based site) and then plasters it on all their other customer sites, which I _really_ hate about their platform.
But I can see the appeal in that, I guess.
(1) they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform"
(2) they let the writer own their audience / mailing list (so they can leave with their audience, if they want to)
(3) they advanced money to popular writers
These things with the addition of a simple writing/reading/subscription platform that isn't overrun with adverts gives writers confidence that substack is aligned with their interests and will make money while being on their side (this is true at least for now).
Additionally, the financial success of many writers on the platform has raised the status of creating a substack. I think this is an important secondary effect -- you can disparage this as "pseudo-intellectual" but there are people that are winning from it and doing well is always cool.
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*Edit*: Put another way, Substack's success is due to realism. They've made a realistic attempt to incentivize excellent writers to writing on their platform. They incentivize even those that are already very popular, by not locking them in and by giving them control of their audience. They have even gone as far as giving very significant upfront financial incentives to get the most famous writers on the internet onto their platform.
Other platforms try to own their writers and treat them like commodities producing SEO content. This was obviously not an attractive offer to talented or independent writers, let alone writers that have already grown huge audiences.
Substack has a different financial incentive structure that attracts writers away from alternatives such as Medium.com or hosted WordPress:
- monetization is easy to go from "free" to "paid newsletters". The pricing is set by the author and the revenue isn't shared with other writers
- for paid subscriptions, the writer has the subscribers' email addresses for a more direct relationship
In contrast, Medium does not reveal email addresses and does a revenue share of a flat $50 subscription price.
Looked at a certain way, Substack replaces MailChimp (an email audience relationship tool) more so than Medium.
The founder of Substack gave an interview and he said that Substack is a SaaS backoffice of Ben Thompson's "Stratechery" paid newsletter. Ben was one of the early pioneers of the paid email newsletters resurgence but since Substack didn't exist, he had to string together the payments and emails logistics himself. The later writers wanting to get paid for newsletters can just use Substack instead of reinventing Ben's tech stack.
Big picture: we believe that what you read matters, and that therefore great writing (and great intellectual culture in general) is valuable. In our view the great promise of the internet is that it can unlock a flourishing of culture, but the first phase was dominated by a land-grab for attention which gave us the current landscape of ad-driven platforms which optimize for the wrong things and don't serve great writing. Substack is an attempt to create an alternate universe on the internet, with different laws of physics, that fulfills the original promise. Where writers can make real money by earning and keeping the trust of an audience who deeply values their work. Where readers can take back their mind, and decide for themselves who to trust and how to spend their attention.
Practical terms: we try to focus really hard on serving the people that use Substack. The writers, obviously, by giving them something that genuinely works. I think of this as "we do everything for you except the hard part". Which means if you can write something great, the job of the product is to handle the rest. This means not just the right features, but smart defaults everywhere that help you succeed. For readers, we try to make the experience very clean and frictionless, and communicate right from the get-go that this is a place that respects you and your attention, to the point that it might be worth paying for. The things others have noted - smart defaults, fast loading, clean design, etc. etc. are expressions of this. We're focused serving people, and we're not shy about using 'boring' technology (like email, for example) to make it happen.
Putting this together, the magic of the Substack model is not that it gives writers a way to get paid for doing the thing they might have done elsewhere. It creates a system where the kind of thing you do to succeed is qualitatively different and better than what succeeds elsewhere. For writers, that can mean getting paid -- sometimes very handsomely -- to do the work you actually believe in. It can unlock this for people who weren't professional writers before. And for readers, it means a lot of the best writing to be found anywhere is on Substack.
That's the theory at least! We're hiring, by the way: https://substack.com/jobs
Take a look at someone like Freddie deBoer. He was a very popular blogger, had written for all the prestigious publications, and was about to accept a $15/hr manual labor job before substack offered him a contract. Now he's making 200k+ a year.
Once enough popular writers were on the platform, and with some help from twitter controversies, the network effect took over.
I love it because it's fast and minimalist. No ads, no nonsense, just the text.
1. Substack pages load quickly and cleanly. You don't have to watch your browser have a seizure as it brings in a long tail of weird ad/tracking crap.
2. The page is very low-distraction. The writing is given pride of place.
3. I hit paywalls and login walls on Medium much more often than on Substack.
4. I know many interesting writers on Substack. I don't know any interesting writers on Medium.
I used Medium before. Medium treats your data as its a generic post about some topic. If I wrote an article on AI, it would recommend other articles about AI from various authors. That's fine for some purposes, but as a writer trying to build an audience, I'd like to think people come to my post because they like something I have to say and would prefer a recommender system to recommend other posts by me.
Medium's monetization model is to get people to pay for Medium articles, not those of the author.
Another gross example of this is that you cannot easily see a publications from a publication. On a site, you see a tiny link called "archive" to see a writer's historical posts. There you can filter on month but can't see a dump of everything the person has written. They don't even offer "load more posts" or a calendar view. It's very hostile to the writer.
I had around 1k followers on Medium but if I posted something and didn't publish it on social media, I would get maybe a few dozen readers. Whereas Substack I consistently get around 20-25% of people that are subscribed open my publication.
Is there something between Medium and Substack? Probably, but I don't really care to look around. Substack offers you a chance to build a reader base, gives you access to emails and lets you easily monetize directly without being part of the global pool of generic low quality articles like Medium does.
I wrote more about it here.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/migrating-from-medium-to...
https://future.a16z.com/passion-economy/
I'd wager it's also popular on HN because of the current debate about free speech online and 'cancel culture'. Substack is the upstart here against the stodgy big media status quo, so that will always pull in some level of ideological support.
I don't think that's a question to be asked of Hacker News readers in general, as presumably most of us aren't Substack writers, just readers.
To be honest, I don't like Substack as an application. Their commenting defaults are terrible. I'm not a fan of the push model of newsletters in general and prefer the pull model of going to the site whenever you feel like being updated on your own schedule. But I like the writers, so I go there anyway.
* It's free. Mailchimp gets surprisingly expensive pretty quick as your audience grows, with no path for revenue.
* It's easy to start. Very easy to move over to it from mailchimp and set it all up. Even after two years of additional features, it's quite streamlined.
* It's simple. The feature set is pretty minimalist in a good way, puts composing and putting out content first in a way that makes it pretty frictionless to use.
* It's monetizable. Kinda obvious, but I was surprised by how many people are willing to be paying subscribers tbh.
I do have some gripes: like Medium it provides very few options for customization, and it is very much designed with the assumption the newsletter is stand-alone (meaning no associated website for which the newsletter serves to provides updates). Still, on the whole it's quite nice.
From a reader perspective, I would assume it's popular because a lot of good writers/newsletters have been started with it lately due to the above reasons.
2. They basically solve the business model issue for writers, so you really can focus on the writing. At least, more so than the alternatives.
3. Their design is actually pretty nice, and focused on just two things: list building and content.
4. The defaults make sense, and solve real problems for people who want to make money with their writing.
I'm happy to pay $50/year to support these independent voices.
So they are a proven-successful platform, and that attracts other writers.
The get paid part is important. You like one writer on substack, you give em 5 bucks a month. You like someone else, it's exactly the same process to give 5 bucks.
It's the same as Twitch (for gamers) - where people give 5$/month to people who just stream themselves playing computer games. It's because it's a single click and it's the same click for all other streamers.
The barrier substack has broken, is the shitshow that is payments online - they did it for journalists, twitch did it for gamers, onlyfans did it for chicks showing their body parts, etc.
Of course the problem that'll destroy Substack is when they will inevitably raise their fees, piss off their writers and in 10 years, some other Substack like thing will pop up, that'll do the same thing and so the cycle continues.
I’m not going to spend $100/month to follow my ten favorite bloggers.
As a platform it's host to a lot of the kinds of semi-philosophical writing of the sort that the hacker news audience tends to rate highly, which is why you'll see it pop up a lot here. The "pro-freedom-of-speech" or "anti-censorship" stuff you'll probably see in the responses is a little overblown generally – but since it's an individual publishing platform for writers (rather than a distinct media presence in its own right) you're more likely to see views that more mainstream publications don't want to promote. Again, something that the HN crowd is pretty hot on.
(I will say generally that a Hacker News post from a Substack domain at this point has become a bit of a negative signal for me in the same way that Medium has – except instead of suffering through a terrible React tutorial you'll be sitting through a contrarian middlebrow essay. But of course exceptions abound and YMMV).
Substack crunched the numbers, figured out how much people were willing to pay for certain bloggers' materials. Then they found some very prominent bloggers and paid them huge advances to join the platform. It was very risky but it clearly worked.
And now we are seeing the downstream market adapting in kind.
An example of a product that's JOYOUS to use is Substack. It feels beautiful to write and format. There aren't tons of distracting non-features. The product team seems to consistently look for how people are using it and make sure they can use it in those ways better.
It's especially incredible in a world where Blogger and WordPress both languished for years, never bothering to simply make the authoring process pleasant. Medium was able to do this, and had a good start because of it, then (inexplicably) found 5000 ways to drop the ball.
thread: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1514400886365302784
(1) A modern "minimalist" themed blog focused on written content (2) An email newsletter with the same content (3) Optionally allow paid subscribers
I've tried everything in the blog world, and most are a headache to maintain. The closest would be Ghost, but they haven't done as well on the GTM side. Substack has set itself apart by landing "tech twitter" influencers who philosophize... which is probably why you're seeing it bleed into the HN world.
- No ads, popups, random paywalls.
- Authors looking for paid subs offer quite a bit of free content.
- Substack feels like it loads faster than Medium. Very snappy.
- Simple email sub/unsub.
- Substack doesn't treat me like a child & decide some ideas are too dangerous for me to read about.
- I don't worry that an article/newsletter I like (or dislike!) will suddenly disappear off the internet.As I understand it, when Substack first started it did a funny one: it paid some successful bloggers to jump ship to substack and convinced them of a secure and promising subscription-based income. My favorite example being Scott Alexander Siskind.
I have no concern about what medium the content I want is presented in (so long as they don't use low contrast or silly fonts), I will just go wherever I can find Scott. And Scott now happens to be in substack so I go to substack.
One thing I think is powerful is that they let you own your audience. If they ever fuck up, writers can just bounce. It means substack should focus on tools writers want, rather than building an indentured trap by holding their audience ransom like most other publishing platforms do. The platform's politics don't matter if they can't deplatform you.
A key part of the value I get out of other subscriptions is aggregation.
I've backed lots of projects via Kickstarter etc - I'm down for supporting things and people that tick my boxes. Maybe I'm just allergic to the idea of paying for emails. I didn't sign up when the NYTimes tried to productize their newsletters either.
A free service for running a mailing list and podcast with the ability to jump ship at any time (you can export your list from there) and the ability to flip a switch and start making money directly from your audience at a reasonable cost is all fantastic.
In such a subtle way it covers much of what substack is doing well and twitter isn't doing well.
>Does it have some kind of a hidden feature that makes it very appealing?
Really just a lack of certain hidden features. Ones that twitter excels at.
TLDR - First off yeah employees are posting here duh. But HN people want writers/journalism, and Substack is "getting paid to write". Or, it's Patreon before Patreon started blatantly censoring views they disagreed with politically. But I'm not even blaming Patreon per se, I mean larger world forces cutting off many forms of expression. If you haven't followed, look up how the United States government has attempted to freeze the porn industry from being able to accept credit cards or keep bank accounts (including the Obama admin just so you know the left does it too).
Credentials: Divorced from a journalism major who turned advertising and works c-level of an international company. I work as a programmer in ecommerce where I work very closely with marketers, and have seen this experience repeated.
Journalism is about as useful of a degree as Gender Studies, which given the political undertones is a good comparison as there is a ton of crossover. Journalism as a field - in America, across most types of employment - is an insanely incestuous clique of mostly liberal East Coast elitists. I mean that very literally, as in people who think either Boston or New York City are the be-all end-all of the world and how could you possibly live anywhere else. (well, pre-pandemic.)
So my ex went to an Elite East Coast College. What happens after you rack up five or six figures of student debt is that you go to a Mad Men sweatshop. Some sort of agency generating copy for newspapers or ads or whatever. You're worked 80+ hours a week for minimum-ish wage (certainly too little given the stress). You'll walk into work and get told you need to crank out something absolutely absurd. Just for fun let's say it's 20 articles of 800 words by end of day for a field you've never even written before so you don't even know the jargon. So you may end up working from 8am to 11pm, and only being paid crap wages for 8 hours that day because it's not their fault you can't make quota. You're just madly copying and pasting garbage to make requirements and hit SEO targets. That's how vast amounts of the Internet is generated. All the mommy blogs and recipe sites that seem like a word salad. "Recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies. I recall fondly my mother used to make chocolate chip cookies..." (page length requirements, reader time on site requirements, keywords...)
So you racked up near to six figures of debt, as far as you're concerned a 40-hour week for fair pay is a myth capitalists make up to torture you, and you've spent the first 20-ish years of your life building up little more than a damaged liver.
So who's left in journalism? AKA who can Substack target?
0) Bright-eyed college kids who don't know any better. Keep in mind that if someone tells them they'd make more money at Substack, then Buzzfeed calls that an "alt-right dogwhistle" from a "controversial figure" to keep the peons in line. When a Buzzfeed goes bust as their employees finally figure out the Ponzi scheme, they all end up on other platforms anyway. No need to invest here.
1) True die-hards who stuck with it, which I'd say is people like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenewald. You'll notice both of these people are in hot water with the political left for various offenses, and are desperately looking for a better revenue model to keep journalism alive. Substack does that for them, like Patreon but less censorship. As people posted - they're helping censored Russians of all walks of life to be able to publish after sites like Patreon have axed those people because mumble mumble oligarchs? True free speech stuff, even if you disagree with their other views, these people are net positives on the world. They're already hungry for Substack.
2) People who have other funding, like the marketers, who were probably paid to join. People like Chuck Palahniuk didn't really need Substack, but it's hot, and it's like Patreon except he presumably gets a better kickback. So why not. I know comparitively few people in this camp unless it's terribly obvious they had the following to get paid.
So Substack did the right thing in every regard. The site gets people paid, it's fairly easy to use. They went after category 1, they paid off some people in 2, and I'm sure they keep an ear to the ground and drop some timely social media posts when a 0 event happens. And yeah, look around. They're posting right here, right now, where it's effective.
They're the right tool, at the right time.
They took great advantage of that trend by directly paying newspaper writers to make it even more popular. The writers brought their existing audiences from whatever platform they were coming from, and wrote a lot about the process of switching to substack.
and then they leveraged the popularity among newspaper writers to sell an image of "make a substack and you too can be a popular and successful writer", which brought in the mass market.
Look around you.. any platform that does this is also successful.
It’s not about censorship, Privacy, the ability to switch or “on the side of writers” etc.
They’ve made it easy for writers to collect money. Period.
The article also touches upon factors of Substack's success:
> [...] the platform portrayed itself as a haven for independent writers with fewer resources while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men. The hands-off content moderation policy [...]
As other have mentioned the lack of Paywall is nice tho. Medium had one of the most frustrating iirc.
It's clearer which writer is getting paid for what. On many news sites, you don't know if the money is going to the company and which writer is getting compensated. The focus is to pay writers you like to write more, and is not centered on the writing that gets enough payment from advertisers. You also don't get much in terms of ads from the writers too.
You know what your paying for, what you're getting, and from whom. You know that what you are reading will stay available to you because it is in your email, which cannot be paywalled or taken off the internet because something happened to the business model or to the website. You own the right to read the content you paid to get, and it will always be available as long as you have your emails saved and accessible.
The business model is also distinct in which domain experts are incentivized to create quality content due to their income directly tied to specialized niche subscribers.