Very lame to not be transparent about that.
There's no reason why Congress can make something like what Brazil has with Pix.
Having a public option for payment processing can do a tremendous amount of good.
What Substack provides for its users:
- Webpage
- CMS
- WYSIWYG editor
- Email newsletters / notifications
- Payment processing / Subscription handling
I'm going to go with yes.
It's the payment bit that's the key here.
If your newsletter is a side gig, sure, use Substack. But if it's your primary source of income, it's bad business to be subject to the whims of a platform you have no control over. Worse still when it's not a self-sustaining business whose primary obligations are to venture capitalist growthbros rather than paying customers.
Like, I know how to do that with Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages or S3 or spinning up an Nginx server, but none of that is intuitive, and it can be overwhelming to people who aren't familiar with Git or web hosting.
But if you’re clicking around in the DO control panel, you’ve already conquered a significant amount of technophobia.
You still need a domain, though.
Which makes me recall that many domain registrars have complementary web hosting.
Like most people, I tried most of these apps. It wasn't long before I uninstalled them in favour of the mobile website versions. Most "content" apps provide no value to the user in app form. "Get the app for a better experience" - yeah, better for them. Installing the app is a way for them to access your contacts list, microphone and camera, and use your home screen and notification center as a billboard.
With the growth of the "platform services" lock-in like app stores and wallets, the value drops to practically negative, as now you have to cover not just payment processing fees, but also the passed-down cost of the digital land baron's tariff for the privilege of transacting on their turf.
No thanks.
Like that's part of the reason that a lot of these platforms get popular. Most software engineers could write something to upload, transcode, and host videos in an afternoon or two, but that only gets you 10% of YouTube's value. The thing that keeps YouTube on top is it's hyper-addictive recommendation system.
I assume that Substack offers something like that? Again I don't actually use it so I'm kind of speaking out of my ass.
[1] No one read my blog anyway so there's no pretense of charging for it.
Discoverability should be happening on non-paid platforms like social media, message boards or channels independent of Substack itself. If customer acquisition is based on your presence on Substack, you will have to stay on it forever, paying whatever they charge, because migrating to a different platform will damage acquisition. Which of course is exactly what Substack's strategy is.
That seems like a big change.
Having to abide by Apple’s user-friendly subscription and cancellation policies is small potatoes, compared to vendor lock-in of the subscriptions.
Didn’t I affirm the author’s point that the increased vendor lock-in for creators was a big deal, implicitly agreeing that it was bad?
By “Apple’s user-friendly subscription and cancellation policies”, I mean e.g. the ability to unsubscribe without having to fight through the usual dark patterns. Having to offer that shouldn’t be onerous, although sadly some publishers see it that way.
I can accept that I may not have communicated my point as well as I might have, but “bad faith”, wtf?
anyone notice the seemingly big uptick in Substack submissions around here? Like ones reaching the front page, often submitted by newer-ish accounts. What's that about? Did (1) alot of bloggers switch to Substack recently? and (2) is there a concerted effort to take advantage of HN traffic bumps here?
</subtleconspiracykeepinganeyeon>
Anyone can create a blog host or a video hosting site.
Being able to pay creators who post on said platform is the key issue.
I'm really excited for ATProto as a way to build applications that let you have the benefits of substack (a unified network, recommendations, social features like comments, etc) without the eventual path to lock in.
It's particularly exciting because the incentive is actually there to build an application this way. Whether Bluesky is growing or not, there are currently 30M accounts that you can reach (with one of the best auth systems I've interacted with), AND atproto gives you the building blocks for others to build on your work. Both these things make the bootstrapping problem for any social application way down.
There's still a lot of stuff missing, payments being a big (and gnarly one), notification management being another, but both the bluesky team and the overall ecosystem has been moving at a solid pace, and things are getting more viable by the day.
(Not that I read their newsletter just was too lazy to cancel)
Creators should be happy they're passing the cost to customers. We know they didn't choose to write on substack out of altruism.
If someone thinks you are worth enough to pay 30% more they'll pay. That's always been the case.
I'm not saying that managing subscription billing has no value, but it's not like what Apple is doing has no comparison; PayPal offers similar subscription services and their cut is less than 10%.
The last paragraph is patently untrue, it's used as a clever gotcha for transactive capitalist interactions (assuming it can only be this way and no other), completely ignoring the human elements.
Honestly, I just can't see this as the little guy vs the corpo image this post is trying to make. Just two capitalistic ideas fighting one another. The people writing on here must have better paying jobs for their livelihood. The authors are treating their blogs as business which turns off the part of my brain with human emotional concerns.
Life isn't binary, but our choices often are.
worked as a hyperlink instead, same as clicking on the ad itself
not very "denk" imo
