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We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
374 points by internet_jockey on March 10, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 416 comments
Hi! This is Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the founders of Substack, with Sachin Monga, the head of product. Yesterday, we launched an iOS app for Substack, so you can read all your Substack subscriptions in one place, with no distractions.

Readers have been tweeting at us for years now to ask when we’d have an app. We’ve long wanted one too, and we suddenly got the manpower to be able to build a good one when we acquired Sachin’s company Cocoon (W19) last year.

Soon after starting Substack, we found it easiest to explain what we do as “We make it simple to start a paid newsletter.” Even then, a Substack was more than just an email newsletter: it was also a blog, and it could host embedded video and audio, and people could leave comments and participate in discussion threads. But the term “newsletter” was useful shorthand because everyone kind of got what that meant. All along, though, we’ve been quietly building the tools for what we call “personal media empires,” encompassing different media formats (natively) and community discussion (which we intend to make better and better).

By a similar token, right from the start we’ve been intending for the company to do more than just provide subscription publishing tools. We’re excited by the vision of Substack becoming a network, where writers and readers benefit from being part of a larger ecosystem. For writers, it means they can be discovered by readers who might not otherwise have found them. For readers, it means being able to connect directly with writers and other readers and to explore a universe of great work.

The app is a key part of the network vision. Nothing changes in terms of writers and readers being in control. The writers still own their mailing lists, content, and IP and can take it all with them anytime they want. Anyone who signs up to a Substack through the app still goes on to that mailing list. And readers still get to choose what appears in their “inbox,” with the power to subscribe and unsubscribe from whatever they want (you can also add any RSS feed into the app via reader.substack.com). But now we’ll have more and better ways to surface recommendations from writers and readers, to show people’s profiles, and to deliver notifications inside and outside of the app.

This is just a start for the Substack app. We want to keep improving it, so please give us feedback and ask us the hard questions. What do you think we’re doing wrong? What could be better? What could be great? What might we not have thought of?

We’re here for the next couple hours. Ask us anything.

https://on.substack.com/p/substackapp




Firstly - love love love Substack. It's so simple but it's so rapidly become a place where I do so much reading. I have a few questions (mostly not about the app though, I'll have to wait for Android support to try that).

1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. That doesn't feel particularly hard to put together, though maybe I totally underestimate that. So what's powering Substack's growth is that you were able to get guys like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander etc on board. How much of your growth do you think is product vs business/dealmaking?

2. You've been strong defenders of free speech, especially in the last two years where there's been a ton of censorship. Really, it's helped a lot, I've felt like Substack was one of the few places I could find rational and logical takes on things like lockdowns at a time when everyone else was losing their minds. Do you have some sort of strong philosophical take on this, or is it a sort of default because censorship takes specific effort and you're busy with growth?

3. Related to that, the pattern of tech firms being open access and supporters of free speech for some years and then later losing that as they hire more and more people (especially, new grads) seems to be a recurring one. Given you're based in San Francisco, do you have a plan to actually keep Substack the way it is, in the face of hiring employees who might demand you constantly cancel the witch-du-jour?

4. There's IMO a ton of potential for innovation with group discussions. To me, Slashdot was actually the peak of innovation in large scale anonymous forum discussions with many clever features, crowdsourced moderation, friends/foes, meta-mods etc. Do you plan to try new things with discussions, or stick to a conventional approach? Right now it's pretty basic.


Hello, I (Hamish) will answer question #1 and leave the rest to my colleagues.

I think what has driven our growth is a nice synthesis between the product, the business dev work (i.e. convincing writers to give it a shot), and the business model.

The model may be the underestimated part. It's compelling for many writers, partly because of its simplicity and transparency: you own the relationship with your audience, you publish stuff that gets sent to them, and then if you're doing good work some portion of that audience will choose to pay you to keep going. That's a good deal for writers, since:

a) It lets them do the work they believe is most important b) No one can mess with their audience c) There's a clear path to making money, which is the major thing absent from most other options for writing on the internet (or, increasingly, anywhere else).

These things make Substack a relatively easy "sell".

Of course, some writers are better poised to succeed with this model than others, so we have put in a sustained effort to identify those writers and let them know about their opportunity on Substack. In a small number of cases, that has meant we've offered a financial package to derisk the move for them (you can think of it as like startup funding to get them going; many don't have much financial buffer and may be reluctant to leave jobs even if they are unhappy in those jobs). But the vast majority of writers doing well on Substack have come to the platform of their own accord, without any kind of deal.


2: We do have a strong philosophical stance on this. We think taking a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press is both the right thing to do, and critical to the success of our broader mission. We've written about this a few times, e.g. https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati... and https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more

That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.

4. YES!


> We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.

I'm interested in hearing more, I recently had a Substack recruiter reach out to me and was curious about this because I work at a tech company w/ some internal "activists" (I don't consider them to be activists).

How would you talk about it with them while hiring? It seems like you might need to bring up uncomfortable (and potentially risky) things like politics (?) during an interview?

What to do if your employees start doing walkouts or what not? At the company I work for this happened. A lot of people don't feel comfortable standing up to the ones who are most vocal about cancel-culture (if you disagree with them you may be labeled and considered a "fascist" (ugh) or even worse a "nazi" and your career impacted), I find that most people just stay silent in the face of this and the organizers of these movements seem to rule the roost in the workplace.

Great job either way I'm a Substack supporter! :thumbsup:


Sounds like you need a new job with a more inclusive culture.


It was a well known company where the walkout made the news.

My main thing in stating this is just to say that at this point in time I'm looking for a Coinbase/37Signals style work environment where I don't have to take part in others activism or "be an ally" by doing as told.


This is happening the most "inclusive" workplaces, and it's spreading. Count yourself lucky if you haven't encountered it yet.


That philosophical stance is very common at the beginnings of a platform. E.g., Twitter being the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party". Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. But over time, tensions develop between the theory and the practice.

So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support?

From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that category. What about, say, open antisemitism? Will you host and help fund the American Nazi Party or the KKK? How about more borderline actors, like people who promote racist conspiracy theories and ethnic cleansing, but stop short of direct calls for violence?


> Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan.

4chan has never been about free speech, it had rules since the beginning which are constantly enforced.


If your definition of free speech requires that a platform have no rules whatsoever, then there has never been a free speech platform anywhere on the internet, because such a platform would have to accept illegal content and spam, and could never moderate anything.


But that's not my point, 4chan has clear rules that are not about illegal content: https://4chan.org/rules. There are moderators/janitors enforcing thoses rules and a report system. The first rule is:

"1. You will not upload, post, discuss, request, or link to anything that violates local or United States law."

But that's only the first rule. There are 17 global rules, and each board has a few.


Exactly. My point with Poole is that he started a platform that was much more accepting than competitor sites. Eventually he wasn't happy with how it turned out and walked away from it. Easy enough to do when it's a small operation. But with a larger operation like Twitter staff are invested enough that they won't just say "fuck it". So you see stronger TOSes build up over time.


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The CPUSA and SWP have been pretty irrelevant for the past couple decades. They're being left out because even hardcore leftist just aren't thinking about them at all. Modern leftists aren't flocking around the organizations that were the extreme left of the 20th Century.


The keyword here is "extremism". Doesn't matter whether the extremists label themselves as left or right.


Exactly. I read his response and said, "Wait, did I say anything about the far right?" No, I didn't.

In the US, right now violent extremists are almost all from the far right. At points in our history, we have had violent far-left extremists, so it's not impossible. It's not even inconceivable; given spiking wealth inequality, in some ways I'm surprised I haven't seen any anti-billionaire violence. Ditto climate-change and eco-terrorism. But it's definitely the case that extremist threats here are mostly from the right.

But I do think it's telling that he saw me pointing out the KKK and the American Nazi Party as examples of current violent extremism and thought, "How dare you attack the right!"


The CPUSA? You've got to be kidding me.


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Sorry, your comment doesn’t quite have enough Red Menace hysteria. Could you mind dialling it up a little? Ideally, extrapolating from zero people, since asserting “society has a problem” from the political leanings of exactly one person seems almost like rigourous thinking.

You’ve already nailed the misrepresentation of the composition and purpose of an advisory body, so you can leave that part alone; the overwrought hyperbole there is already evident after a cursory check of what SAGE is.


> So the idea that society doesn't have a problem with communist extremism is unfortunately not quite accurate. It's still out there.

It doesn't seem like communist extremism is the problem we are dealing with today. Unless you'd like to argue Putin's GRU lackeys are communists (which they're not, but either were and are nationalists). What you are doing here is essentially a whataboutism. What about the COMMUNIST extremists?! Yeah, well, what about them? They're irrelevant in the current playing field. The danger is coming from the right: alt-right. But either way, we can just call all of them extremists. Just don't pretend its 50/50 extreme left/right cause that's not the world we are living in. Not anymore, anyway.


How are they irrelevant? Maybe it feels that way in the USA but the UK just went through a period of time where the government was officially and formally manipulating the behaviour of the population on the say-so of an actual communist. That seems pretty damn relevant.

You also need to think a bit about this - why wasn't this extremist fired from her position? Well, not surprisingly, it's because a lot of her fellow academics are fellow travellers, as was often made clear by many of their comments. They aren't literally members of the communist party, but they are certainly sympathetic to that way of thinking. I've talked to them directly, the things they come out with are astonishing.

Meanwhile, nobody even remotely right wing has had any influence at all, especially not in recent years. The libertarian wing of the Conservative party, such that it is, was reduced to constantly voting against the government, which always failed because they were supported by Labour. The "opposition" primarily "opposed" the government by demanding it do whatever it was doing, but faster and harder.


You have to actually prove someone is an extremist beyond Communist Party membership. This isn't the 80's, the accepted argument isn't that one proceeds from the other anymore. It's rare that the same organization retains extremist character for generations, I'd expect modern extreme leftists to found new organizations, not join stodgy old Communist Parties.


This is ridiculous. It's like saying membership of a Nazi party wouldn't imply extremism. Of course being a card-carrying communist is an extreme position. Communists around the world have repeatedly established horrific dictatorships that murdered their own people in vast numbers, usually accompanied with mass manipulation of the population through propaganda. If a behavioural psychologist of all people thinks that's the type of government she wants to have, it is de facto proof of extremism, and says nothing good about the people around her who say nothing about it.

Consider how it'd look if she was a member of a Nazi Party. Nobody would accept that. There's no difference.


Believe whatever you want, but that's just not where the shared cultural assumption is anymore. It carries the same weight to someone born after the fall of the USSR as asserting someone must be royalty because of their purple jacket.

Convincing people requires that you work forward from the assumptions they hold toward your views. I'm not sure what asserting that other people actually do hold your assumptions when they keep telling you they don't accomplishes.


You're asserting that the "shared cultural assumptions" have changed, and I'm asserting:

1. No they haven't. Lots of people found Michie's associations unacceptable and astonishing.

2. Anyone who does think that communism is not any longer an extreme position, is simply not well informed. Communism itself hasn't changed. Go look at the state of Xinjiang to see this. It's supposedly full of concentration camps.


>1. No they haven't. Lots of people found Michie's associations unacceptable and astonishing.

Okay, and if you continue to communicate the way you are, those are the only people who will be interested in your ideas. You have to play the same game as your audience if you want to win.


(The alt-right is also irrelevant in the current playing field.)


Wishful thinking. The only people who are supporting Putin in The Netherlands, is the alt-right FvD and PVV. We had an alt-right president in USA, who tried to undermine NATO. Finally, it -along with nationalism- is on the rise in general throughout Europe as well as the world, including during the COVID pandemic.


I haven't heard of any communists being deplatformed for like 20 years. So although I hope Substack will treat them in the same principled way as anyone else, it's kind of irrelevant.


You forgot to mention Antifa.


Yeah a worker led economic theory vs a racist ideology. Your argument boils down to this: if any country based on a particular ideology did many horrible things, then that ideology should be rejected.

please go ahead and defend your capitalistic gov that exterminated people in vietnam, hired nazis, bombed black neighborhoods, destabilized and created brutal dictatorships in latin america, bombs kids in yemen, enables apartheid..and once you're done digesting that think about the. slave. trade.


This might be the most low effort whataboutism I’ve read in a while. I’m not sure if you even tried to be relevant with your examples. Please put more effort into your comments.


Why would these actors want to publish on Substack in the first place? They have their own platforms already. Alt-right content is highly "meme" based (e.g. the whole thing with frogs and 'Kekistan', or the Qanon LARPing), it doesn't do well on a platform focused on long-form texts with serious intellectual interest.


I'm not trying to promote their blog and am not a fan of it and won't link it, but I know of at least one Substack blog by one such actor who indeed makes their blog highly meme-based. The fact that you can insert arbitrary inline images in blog posts and write whatever text you want near them is pretty much all you need.


One obvious answer is revenue. Getting money in is a real struggle for extremists, who tend to get banned from traditional platforms. Think of it as like paying membership dues.


Thank you for #2, I never knew these points

> Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions.

I think I'm going to start subscribing to two writers in particular and see how that goes. This is a great model.


I just want to say thank you for allowing other views contrary to the mainstream narrative to flourish.


I enjoyed these articles, you really nailed it. I think if you ever add podcasts and videos you could be the next YouTube, without the click-maximizing algorithms.


I have a follow-up question to #3. Like the parent post I commend your stance on free speech, but recognise you host some controversial figures that other platforms have been happy to ban. The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower, and as Substack gets bigger it's naturally going to attract more attention, both from those who call for increased censorship, and from those who others might want to censor. The particularly controversial writers are naturally going to gravitate to Substack if it's the only place that will let them have an account.

So do you ever worry that you might end up like Parler? What happens if AWS, Cloudflare, payment processors etc. decide to kick you off the internet because of whom you publish? Right now it seems unlikely that they'd become that intolerant, but a lot of unlikely things have happened in tech in the last few years.

Are you worried about this eventuality, and are you preparing for it?


> The range of opinion that Big Tech deems permissible seems to be getting narrower and narrower

I'm not affiliated with Substack, but I'm having difficulty with your premise here. There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. What opinions is "Big Tech" "censoring" and why should one think there's any validity to your slippery slope argument?


Well, for starters Gab is banned from the App Store for their near-absolutist stance on free speech.

More than that is the general culture of suppression of the "wrong" view of reality. Most people who were merely to the right of center moderates in the 00's are now accused of being absolute evil if they voice any opinions. I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired & won't be able to feed their families. The suppression and censorship is very real.

One or two exceptional counterexamples do more to prove the rule than to disprove it.


> I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired

In fairness, there are multiple explanations that don’t involve this being objectively true, while also being how these people perceive their situation.


True, but as long as people are willing to self censor then it doesn't matter if they would be punished if they spoke out, because they won't. Perceived risk is indistinguishable from actual risk if that risk is avoided by total avoidance.

Aside from that, there are a lot of "cancellations" in the news, even if they're exceptional and only highlighted as a result of sensationalist reporting (or, more conspiratorially, behavioural control) the risk may still be actually too high. You only probably only have to be de-personed once for it to have a lifetime effect.


Yes, they're not persecuted. They're delluded. As Stalin would say.


The appearance of persecution has always been a tool of censorship. Chilling effects etc.

It's a lot easier to create the appearance of a threat than to actually persecute lots of people, especially in the current social media landscape.


>There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.

Well, touting the fact that the App Store, in its benevolence, allows an app by an ex-POTUS, like it's some sort of triumph of free speech speaks volumes, doesn't it?

The ability of an ex-president to have such reach would go without saying in the past. Now it's up to the whims of Big Tech - and Twitter and others had already cancelled them.


I was just about to point out, there’s no great likelihood that all will survive the next election, either…


They're probably using Big Tech as a stand-in for Big Social Media Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).


Amazon AWS also deplatformed right leaning services.


Yes, but not because they were right leaning. According to them, it was due to the lack of moderation and dangerous content being hosted.


But they define dangerous content as anything right leaning, and lack of moderation as lack of deletion of said content.


I don't mind Parler being deplatformed as long as similar standards are held for others. Given that Facebook was also a major contributor to the organizing of January 6th I think it makes sense people were asking for their deplatforming as well. That never happened though, and goes unanswered w.r.t. the logic that you've shared.


Deplatform all of them, right? How about the telephone companies that transmitted their conversations? Or the hotels and AirBnb for housing them? And the restaurants that served them? And Uber and airlines that transported them? And the sporting goods store that supplied them? And …


I mean, I'd prefer deplatforming not being an option, but the momentum for it as a tool is far too strong. It's far more expedient that the folks that are championing that as an option also have to use it on institutions they're associated with or favor for similar actions.


The definition of “dangerous” has become rather flimsy these days.


Feels weird to have to say this, but Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.


> Trump is the leading candidate to become US president in 2024, not some fringe extremist.

He may be the leading candidate to be the republican nominee, but that's not the same as the leading candidate likely to win.

Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.


>Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.

You keep using this word, "fringe". I don't think it means what you think it means...


"Fringe" and "extremist" are relative terms.

By definition whoever wins the most votes is mainstream, not a fringe extremist.


Well, there are only 2 real candidates, so yes the likely republican nominee is a likely candidate to win. The polls all show democrats losing in a landslide in the midterms. That puts the republican nominee in very good position.


Aren't his favorables better than Biden's and Harris's? [1]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/02/18/...


Trump was always going to be the leading candidate. He could have won a second term if not for his fumbling over COVID and his meltdown over secret commies stealing his votes. No one was ever going to vote for Biden twice, the left only hates him less than they hate Trump and half the country never stopped drinking the Trump Kool-Aid. You can't beat a man who has a cult and started a revolution with... whatever the hell Biden has going for him. Once again the Democrats will probably snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.


Are you saying Trump could have won in 2020? I think the pandemic killed his presidency... it's like 1932 when Herbert Hoover got voted out because of the Great Depression, regardless of whose fault it was.

It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts.

It seems to me the Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in 2020. However in 2022... mathematically, they're almost guaranteed to cede the House and maybe the Senate as well, depending on how events in Europe and general economic trends play out.


> It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts.

I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird. Who actively wants their life to be worse?


>I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird.

Trump knew that mail-in votes would favor the Democrats, so he spread a conspiracy theory that mail-in voting was rampant with Democratic ballot fraud (it wasn't,) going so far as to attempt to defund the Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting altogether[0].

Of course, this meant Republicans avoided mail-in voting en masse, so when the (primarily Democratic) mail-in ballots came in after the initial numbers appeared to favor Trump, and the tide turned against him, the cries of fraud only became louder.

That's what Trump does, he poisons any well he can to harm his opponents, even if he has to drink from it afterwards. It's political because he made it political, the way he made masks and vaccination political because he thought COVID would distract from his narrative of a "roaring economy" and because he thought wearing a mask would make him look weak in front of the press, who he considered his enemy.

[0]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/24/why-trumps-...


> That's what Trump does, he poisons any well he can to harm his opponents

Not a fan of Trump either, but would things have been so much better with Hillary as President? Her actions are equally if not more heinous than Trump. She’s just not as obvious about it.


Yes, I said that if not for those events I think Trump could have won. Better leadership with COVID along with his (somewhat fictitious but still compelling) narrative of turning around the economy would probably have put him over Biden. Even though Biden won by a sizeable margin of popular votes - and as a candidate, he received more votes than any other candidate in history - he won with fewer electoral votes (the only votes that actually matter) than the 78,000 votes in three swing states which got Trump over in 2016.


> [Biden] won with fewer electoral votes [than] Trump over in 2016.

That's both not true and trivially checkable.


In 2016, Trump won by 77,744 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In 2020, Biden won by 42,844 votes in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.

I got my numbers here[0] so feel free to fact check me. I may have been imprecise in referring to electoral votes specifically, but I think I am correct about the margins of victory.

[0]https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/did-biden-wi...


But you say only the electoral votes matter? Why does this weird three swing states that aren't even all the same so have different populations accross the elections margin matter?


I think what GP is saying is that even with large, multi-million margins in the popular vote, the result can still be "close" because many of those votes count for nothing in the electoral college. Hillary Clinton could have received four million fewer votes in California 2016 and she would still have won that state while losing the electoral college. But if she had merely won an extra ~100,00 votes in a few crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, America might have had its first female president.

I haven't checked the numbers but I think GP is arguing that the Biden-Trump result was "closer" in this sense than the Clinton-Trump result was; i.e. the margin in the electoral college and nationwide popular vote may have been wider, but 2020 was still a closer call in the small number of swing states that might have actually changed the overall result.


Ah, you're talking about the fewest number of regular votes that would have to change so that the electoral college would flip. in that case I'd say 42k and 77k are essentially the same number, given the large number of voters we're talking about. But yes, Biden's victory was tighter than Trumps in that calculus.

Although, in the situation you propose, 2020 would actually be a 269-269 tie. Which means any unfaithful elector could refuse to vote for their candidate and throw it to the other party. And even if no one did, then Congress would break the tie in a pair votes that would presumably go for Trump and Pence if people voted on a party line.


"Electoral votes" appears to be a term you've created to mean "the smallest number of votes it would be possible to flip to change the result of the election, if allocated perfectly", rather than what most people would assume you mean -- electoral college votes. Given your definition, you are basically correct.

Trump won 306-232 in 2016. With faithless electors, this became 304-227. He lost the popular vote. As you note, 77,000 votes in the three closest states could have flipped the election.

Biden won 306-232 in 2020 (the same margin, or better if you allow for the faithless electors). If he lost 42,000 votes it'd have been 269-269, which would have led to the House of Representative contingency, which might have elected either Biden or Trump (or ended in a different outcome, frankly). It'd take another 33,000 votes to give Trump an unambiguous win by flipping Nevada.

This is an interesting curiosity -- but for Aunt Maria getting the flu, the election could have been different! But we're in increasingly silly hypotheticals. Knowing what we know now, it's clear Clinton would have done more to target the states she narrowly lost. But the problem is that state votes are correlated with one another and so the number of hypotheticals you need to sustain to "flip" exactly those votes without turning out any additional votes or affecting the campaign strategies is pretty weird.

Even if you take the prototypical version of this question "Did Ralph Nader 'cost' Gore the 2000 presidential election by 'taking' at least 500 of his votes in Florida?" it's sort of a rabbit hole of absurdities. The answer is surely yes to the question, because the answer to any hypothetical is yes when the margin is that close. But beyond that not super productive.

In general I think most people would, collectively, analyze Biden's victory over Trump as somewhat more decisive than Trump's over Clinton or Bush's over Gore, though less decisive than either of Obama's or Bush 2004.


Parler got booted from everywhere based on alleged connections to Jan 6th that, in my estimation, were very tenuous, no worse than what had been seen on more established platforms, and seemed to me to be little more than a convenient pretext to shut down an upstart competitor. Whatever your take on Parler, the episode was a sobering lesson in just how difficult the big players in this industry can make it to do business if they decide they really want to get rid of you.

Maybe the word "censorship" is too loaded, but the claim that big tech platforms permit a narrower range of expression than they used to is so uncontroversial that it's barely worth defending. That's not always a bad thing; many of the people who've been banned in recent years are noxious pricks whom I don't miss, but what happens when the people who've been banned from Twitter and YouTube, kicked off AWS, terminated by Cloudflare and blocked by Visa and MasterCard decide to start a Substack because its commitment to free speech means it's the only place that will host them? I won't name names but I can think of, for example, a couple of semi-prominent figures who have been banned from other platforms due to their, ahem, "heterodox" views on vaccines, who now write on Substack and reportedly make a very healthy income from doing so. And worse actors might join the platform if they haven't already.

Is it really such a conspiratorial "slippery slope" to suggest that if the people who've been banned from everywhere else grow a huge, lucrative audience on Substack, then Substack is going to come under increasing amounts of pressure to kick them off - pressure far greater than what it's received so far in the face of lesser controversies? What form might this pressure take?


A scenario much like what you describe has sometimes been discussed by someone who did wind up moving their writing efforts to Substack later on:

> HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

> There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.

> So while some small percent of Reddit’s average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit’s political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...


Also elaborated in the latter Neutral vs Conservative: The Eternal Struggle https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...


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> Substack is great because at least there are some voices out there getting heard. Alex Berenson and Glen Greenwald among the best.

I've mixed feelings about Greenwald, but he is smart and occasionally makes good observations. What good things can be said about Alex Berenson, who The Atlantic memorably called The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man [1]? He seems to depend on basic scientific illiteracy in his readers. Where Greenwald would respond to a substantive critique like the Atlantic's, Berenson seems to hope his readers remain unaware of the critique.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...


Berenson responds to that laughable description all the time. He loves nothing more than to call himself that when he gets proven right - again - often at the expense of writers in the Atlantic; I'd guess a quarter of his posts consist of "ha ha" type responses where he juxtaposes a tweet he made early in the pandemic alongside a government announcement or newly released scientific paper saying the same thing.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-pandemics-wrongest-m...

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/cdc-director-walensky-re...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pandemics+wrongest+man%22...

If you think he didn't respond to that then surely you don't actually read his blog.


I don't read his blog.

Neither of the two links you provide to his blog take any of the claims from the Atlantic piece and refute it. He mocks the title of the Atlantic piece but does not respond to its content. As far as I can see, it's bluster, pure rhetoric

Do you have any instances of Berenson actually attempting to refute specific claims made in the Atlantic piece?


If you don't read his blog then you probably shouldn't make claims about what he does or doesn't say in it, nor about the scientific literacy of his readers (much higher than average - they will happily peer review studies he posts and highlight in the comments when he's misinterpreted them or when the study is bad). So sure, he has responded to the Atlantic directly, many times.

The Atlantic on why Berenson was wrong: "[he is] arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can)."

The last three words are links to junk studies or articles of the sort that suddenly became fashionable after April 2020, after many years of studies saying there was no such evidence. But Berenson was and is correct. Mask mandates don't stop transmission or protect against COVID and this has been proven over and over again. Here's Berenson responding to this point by refuting it with another study, but this one is actually high powered and has a reasonable methodology (it isn't a dumb modelling study or lab experiment):

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/school-mask-mandates-use...

"On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed"

They were claimed to be 95% effective at stopping infection after two doses. Nobody has believed this for a long time, not even governments, which is why Israel is now up to 4 doses and it still isn't working. This claim was a correct reading of Israel's data.

Now, Berenson shoots from the hip. He likes to treat Substack as if it's Twitter and sometimes publishes stuff that turns out to be wrong. But he doesn't have to be right 100% of the time or even 50% of the time to beat the media outlets criticizing him. The Atlantic should especially pipe down because it's probably the Pandemic's Wrongest Publication:

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-oh-my/comme...

They've served up some great headlines in recent times. October: "Four measures that are helping Germany beat COVID" (Germany is currently one of the most restrictive countries in Europe). December: "We know enough about Omicron to know we're in trouble" followed by in February: "Open everything: the time to end the pandemic is now".

Anyone reading Berenson has been consistently about 6-12 months ahead of the "mainstream" journalism curve. Anyone reading the Atlantic would have been exposed to a whiplashing of overwrought nonsense that bears no reality to what actually happened.


This isn't the right thread to have this argument and I imagine dang will remove your post, but I just want to note: Trump and his supporters aren't merely alleging that there were some irregularities in the election (which may be true), or that the media was overwhelmingly biased towards Biden (which is definitely true.) They allege that there was enormous, widespread fraud that stole millions of votes and handed the election to Biden despite Trump being the rightful winner - and also that the evidence for this fraud is mounting and damning and there's a huge conspiracy by the media, big tech, etc to cover it up. That's a much stronger claim than anything you say and I'm yet to see good evidence for it.

I'm not sure why you're talking about COVID, Russia, oil prices etc because none of that was mentioned; I actually agree with most of what you wrote in your latter paragraphs. But this isn't the place to have this kind of flamewar.


There's always this effect of "X says there are lots of foo, incredible amounts. But we are good people, which is why we believe that there is practically no foo."

"What, you disagree that we should kick off people who claim that we're wrong to say that there's practically no foo? Let me round you to the X's, who claim there's lots of foo, which is crazy."

(Of course, this caricature is immediately picked up by the people who actually do believe there's lots of foo, and who very much appreciate either them passing as moderates, or the moderates being counted as them.)

And, of course, the reverse. In an outrage-based social media landscape, it is impossible to be a moderate: you will be rounded off to the extremists regardless of what you actually say.


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Voting machines are bad. Their use makes it easier to commit fraud. However, those claiming fraud in the 2020 elections claimed "absolute proof" of fraud (Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy's, words) when they were demonstrably bluffing.

It is both the case that voting machines can be compromised and that we know the most well-advertised claims of election fraud in the 2020 election are themselves fraudulent.

https://blog.erratasec.com/2021/11/example-forensicating-mes...


>> However, those claiming fraud in the 2020 elections claimed "absolute proof" of fraud (Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy's, words)

And the other side claimed absolute proof of no fraud?


If you're talking about experts in voting systems, no they didn't. Trump's CISA appointee to oversee election security, Chris Krebs, claimed the election was highly secure, which in a sense it was, because Trump had long been advertising concerns about the election which stimulated election security efforts. But in security you can never be completely sure the attacker doesn't have some trick you haven't thought of, so nobody competent claimed absolute proof of no fraud.


Well, the problem with your second point ("free speech") is that it tends to attract and retain a specific kind of writers: those who aren't accepted anywhere else.

Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term.

And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that typically bundles many different voices) also attracts readers that are ideological/obsessive.

That's a feedback loop that could end not well.


>Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term.

Probably very well, for the same reason that Joe Rogan's podcast is the most listened to podcast in the US: those views are widely accepted by about 50% of the population.

Despite your pejorative labelling you aren't actually finding extreme minority viewpoints on substack, you're finding modern-day mainstream conservative perspectives.

The readership potential is huge.


Well, to mention just one example, "The Abbey of Misrule" (https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com) pushes antivaxx rhetoric. I don't know if that represents "50% of the population" (let's hope not) but it's abhorrent in any case.


I don't find any of this offensive or extreme. Easily within the mainstream conservative spread. I think you need to broaden your news sources.


> Internment. Mandatory medication. Segregation of whole sections of society. Mass sackings. A drumbeat media consensus. The systematic censoring of dissent. The deliberate creation by the state and the press of a climate of fear and suspicion. What could possibly justify this? Perhaps the combination of a terrible pandemic which killed or maimed large percentages of those it infected, and the existence of a safe and reliable medicine which was proven to prevent its spread. This, of course, is what we are said to be living through. This is the Narrative.

> But it is clear enough by now that the Narrative is not true. Covid-19 is a nasty illness which should be taken seriously, especially by those who are especially vulnerable to it. But it is nowhere near dangerous enough - if anything could be - to justify the creation of a global police state. [1]

If you don't see the conspiracy theory in this, then I can't help you.

(Me, all I need is the capital N at "Narrative".)

[1] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-vaccine-moment-par...


It doesn't posit the existence of a conspiracy anywhere. "Narratives" can be emergent phenomena, just like religion is. It doesn't require cigarette smoking men in back rooms.

You seem to be particularly triggered by the word narrative - ignore that word if you like, or mentally replace it with "what governments tell us" and which part of what was said above is false?


That all sounds pretty accurate and reasonable to me. I guess we can't help each other.


I read all of the articles that are available for free by that author and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Well within the overton window.

Y'all really think that moderate conservative writing - it didn't stray in terms of emotion into what I would consider rhetoric - is abhorrent? Wow. That's some thick-walled bubble you're in.


We have different ordinaries.


Yeah.

You're the one calling this service - which has attracted a sizeable number of perfectly mainstream conservative writers - 'the perfect honeypot.'

We definitely do have different ordinaries.


Thanks for the rec! This looks like something I'll be adding to the list of Substacks I check regularly.


You're welcome! Substack is fast becoming a perfect honeypot.


"Antivaxx rethoric" is just more labeling to dismiss people for not complying with whatever the new authoritarian push is. Hell, all the labels get put together and people who opposed Lockdowns and hurtful covid policies got called racist far right anti vaxxers because it's easier than using actual data.

Much of the "anti lockdown/mask/covid vaccine mandates" was and is slowly vindicated day by day no matter how much money or power you throw into the mix to convince people otherwise.

The Pfizer publications https://youtu.be/7YOD9drZasM are definitely being ignored by most media but are just one more nugget that those you called anti vaxxers that wanted the right to make their own risk analysis were right and those who sold you a lie did it knowingly.

Abhorrent is your intolerance and the happiness with which much of the population pushed segregation and deshumanization.


Okay! ;-) There you go.

> the right to make their own risk analysis

I really wonder where this comes from though. Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?


You can talk to "these" people. It's a number of factors. As with anything in social media the more extreme views get amplified.

I mean everyone talks about their "bubbles" but very few acknowledge how cognitively hard it is to be open. For that it is best to talk person to person without outright throwing facts around.

I once talked to someone who really believed Hillary Clinton is at some center of some devilsh things eating babies and shit. Well, it turned out it to be a more desperate emotional expression (a personal thing), of course she didn't directly admit it, but it was nonetheless very interesting and insightful. I wouldn't have found that out if I didn't go through the first uncomfortable and awkwards moments of actually leaving my bubble. Someone could dismiss that as only emotionally unstable, I didn't.

So, when a POV seems extreme to you and is held by seemingly 50% of the population: there is really something rotten in the state of Denmark: Leave your bubble form time to time, dude.


I'm not in charge of the mental health of my fellow humans.

If someone I know and love believes that Hillary Clinton is eating babies, I will engage and try to find out more.

But if it's some random woman on the Internet, I'm really not interested.


> Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?

To push that analogy a little farther, consider how people would have reacted if, in 1905, months after the Wright Brother's successful flight tests, the United States had made air travel mandatory and suppressed discussion of its attendant risks.

I think the mRNA vaccines are a tremendous marvel and our best tool for defending ourselves from COVID. But they are not a panacea, and we cannot build trust in them by demanding it.


To start with, I agree with this:

  > I think the mRNA vaccines are a tremendous marvel and our best tool for defending ourselves from COVID. But they are not a panacea, and we cannot build trust in them by demanding it.
But I think the aviation analogy has to be pushed a lot farther for it to be relevant to COVID vaccines, and the analogy stops making sense well before that. The main differences would seem to be:

  - Unlike heavier-than-air powered aircraft in 1905, COVID vaccines in 2021/2022 are effective, and probably crucial at fighting a pandemic which has killed a very large number of people and otherwise impacted many more.
  - The mechanisms by which mRNA vaccines work are basically mRNA translation (making proteins) which has been known about for 50 years or so and is well understood (I think, though I'm not an expert), and protein subunit vaccination, which is also well understood, and in fact already in widespread use.
  - Vaccination is (if I understand correctly), not only useful for an individual, but also useful for the population if vaccination rates are sufficiently high. There is therefore a valid public health reason to encourage high vaccination rates.
  - The United States government has not made vaccination mandatory in general, it has made it mandatory in certain (admitedly quite broad) circumstances. More importantly perhaps, mRNA vaccination in particular has never been mandated (as far as I know), so people who would rather get a different type of vaccine (e.g. an adenovirus vector vaccine) can do so, to the extent that supplies are available.
  - I don't believe that the US government has suppressed discussion of the risks of mRNA vaccination (which are pretty clearly much lower than the risks of not being vaccinated in nearly all cases). Depending on which online/social echo chambers one prefers to inhabit, there has likely been some suppression of discussion due to groupthink or something similar.
I don't believe that there is an analogy with aviation that captures all of these, or even just the important ones, but it seems pretty clear that using airplane airworthiness as en example of how most people are happy to outsource most risk analysis to experts most of the time is reasonable, but using early aviation technology as a detailed analogy to mRNA vaccine development and application in response to COVID is not likely to be useful.


Depends which country and which airline, right, along with a whole pile of context.

Trust is earned. The airline industry has earned a lot of trust by having, amongst other things, extremely thorough accident investigations and extremely high safety standards. They also introduce new technology slowly and conservatively. People don't have to take the word of random 'experts' for this, because they can see with their own eyes that plane crashes are extremely rare. In the even rarer case where it's discovered to be due to genuine negligence or malign behaviour (see: Boeing 737 MAX fiasco), that is very widely discussed and executives are held to account via legal liability frameworks.

The COVID vaccine industry has not earned this trust:

1. Vaccine makers insist on blanket exemptions from legal liability of any kind in order to sell vaccines to a country, even if it is shown in a court that they were negligent. Check the leaked Pfizer contracts if you don't believe me. Governments have changed their laws in some cases to enable this (liability exemption pre-dates COVID).

2. People can see, with their own eyes, that vaccines have side effects they weren't told were possible. Now the law courts are forcing documents out of the FDA we can see that Pfizer knew about these side effects but didn't tell people about them (probably others too).

3. When something goes wrong and someone is injured by a vaccine, there is no crash-style investigation process. Instead it's swept under the rug, e.g. doctors will happily deny there's any connection between a vaccine and a severe reaction that happens just hours later.

And so on, and so on.

The problem with people who hate "anti-vaxxers" (they usually aren't actually anti-vaxx in general), is that they don't seem able to handle nuance or complexity. Even the derogatory label anti-vaxxer is like this, it strips all the complexity from people's positions. Comparisons between airlines (massively trusted, earned) and Pfizer (recipient of the biggest corporate fine in history, not massively trusted, earned) are in no way useful because not all institutions are the same.


> The Pfizer publications https://youtu.be/7YOD9drZasM are definitely being ignored by most media but are just one more nugget that those you called anti vaxxers that wanted the right to make their own risk analysis were right and those who sold you a lie did it knowingly.

Nobody doesn't have the right to make their own risk analysis. That's assuming they're capable of it and we both know that's not the case.

It really serves no purpose to link to these kind of videos, the ones with an official sounding title and authored by "a retired nurse teacher" who nonetheless calls himself "doctor".

If people don't waste 20+ min of their day sitting through the entire video and then picking it apart to have an endless back and forth of "ok but what about this other 90 page garbage pdf report I found" then it's like you've won the argument that nobody wants to have in the first place. This kind of stuff is rotting the internet from within like there's no tomorrow.


>Nobody doesn't have the right to make their own risk analysis. That's assuming they're capable of it and we both know that's not the case.

You start out by saying that people have the right to make their own risk analysis, suddenly add on a condition (if they're capable of it), determine (by yourself?) that they're not capable of it, invalidate your initial conclusion and end up saying (without saying) that people actually don't have the right to make their own risk analysis.

Now that's abhorrent.


I can't edit the above comment anymore, but I would like to add this: my point isn't really about Substack specifically; it's about the fact that it's difficult (impossible?) to be "content neutral", and pretending otherwise is a fallacy.

(And how is porn not speech? If you ban porn then you're not defending free speech in any meaningful manner.)


This can be defended in two ways:

1. Practical. Porn is banned because Stripe doesn't allow payment for porn. In turn Stripe doesn't allow that because the chargeback rate on such payments is very high, supposedly due to the number of people who buy porn because they want it and then get caught by their spouses and claim their card must have been stolen. At any rate, a blogging/newsletter platform is not exactly optimized for porn anyway. The people who want to buy and sell that are better served by other platforms.

2. Theoretical. Porn is not "speech" because speech encodes ideas or viewpoints. The reason freedom of speech is important is because ideas and viewpoints are important, as it's only through the competition of ideas that progress occurs. Defending free speech takes a lot of work, but can be justified by the benefits. Defending porn would take even more work, but wouldn't yield the same social benefits.


Substack links go to the bottom of the reading pile for exactly this reason. It’s a dumpster fire of extremist ranting, and I don’t have the time or energy to sift it. I can’t imagine ever wanting to share a platform with their authors.


> Firstly - love love love Substack

It's fascinating that the top-level comment telling us how they "love" Substack is from someone who apparently thinks the fight against Covid is equivalent to modern-day Stalinism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30637571 further in this thread).

Whoops.


No more fascinating than observing that the person with the biggest problem with Substack in this thread is someone who thinks industries and regulators are all perfect, all the time, and sees conspiracy theories everywhere, even where none are being proposed.


A popular sentiment on HN is "don't make an app when you can just have a web page". Reading articles is an an almost perfect fit for the web. What are your reasons for having an app?


Reading articles may be an almost perfect fit for web, but we see a really clear pattern among the 70% of our users that read in mobile: they discover stuff to read on the web through links that get shared, but once they sign up they overwhelmingly read in their email client.

Email is actually pretty great for this, and email is especially powerful for giving writers direct connection to their readers. But there are limits to what you can do there, and stuff like community discussion, audio and video, and even 'not accidentally going to the promotions tab' can get a big upgrade.

Somewhat related: developing for email is still a pretty big pain. It's kinda like the bad old days when you had to support IE6 - lots of people still use old versions of outlook or whatever.


> developing for email is still a pretty big pain.

I hear you, it's a shit show! I'm gonna have to do that myself soon and I don't look forward to it.

> But there are limits to what you can do [in email]

But email will still be a very common entry point for readers (unless you expect to change the behavior of your users), so you still need to link to the app or website from the email.

As a user I don't mind an app from a technical perspective. It gives me more options! But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot?


> But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot?

As a subscriber to many Substack newsletters with different publishing schedules, I've found it to be a bit tedious and distracting to have my email inbox be inundated with new posts. I'd rather go to a reader app that has all the newsletters I've subscribed to in one place for when I have the time and the interest to spend a couple of hours reading. I'd like for the app to just send me a reminder once a week with who published what so that I can decide if I want to go to the reader app and peruse at my leisure.

As a writer on Substack I've found that readers like to reply directly to the emails they receive instead of leaving a comment on the web version so that others could see it and perhaps react/interact with it. If the app could help harness a community for the writers by making it more comfortable for readers to like and leave comments, then that would be beneficial in building a brand. Additionally, if the app has a mechanism to recommend Substack newsletters that are similar to the one a particular reader is reading then that would help expand the reach/discoverability of lesser known writers.


Sounds like you need to set up a quick filter that moves these interesting but low urgency items into a "Read it Later" folder.

This is one of my favourite thins about email, it is a way to deliver something to me, but imposes no limitations on my workflow. I can customize however I want.

This is one reason I would never use a substack app. I don't want a different app for substack, medium, WordPress, blogger and have to check them all and learn their imposed workflows. I just want everything sent to my email then I can use the workflow that I want for all of the content.


So you want an aggregate newsletter with the top posts of the last X days in your email and then a link to substack? What part of that experience isn't possible on the web?


Yes, I'd like an aggregate email notification, sent no more than once a week, containing only the titles of recent posts of all the newsletters I subscribe to that will allow me to go to one place, like an app, where I can read all these articles at once rather than piecemeal. Prior to the app, the only way to get notified of a new post was to get an email from the newsletter, which as I mentioned can start to become pretty tedious because of the constant stream of emails. Alternatively, one could bookmark all the newsletters one subscribes to on a web browser and keep checking them, which is also quite tedious. A reader app is a better solution.


> As a user I don't mind an app from a technical perspective. It gives me more options! But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot?

A simple but important one: being able to get a notification on your phone when a new post lands in your inbox. There are lots of subtle little things around readability, scroll performance, etc. too. There are also a decent number of Podcasts on Substack now, and listening in a web player (on mobile) is a pretty sub-par experience.


App notifications are not a feature but a detrimental annoyance.

Also useless, because it is very likely you cannot read the article at the moment you receive the notification, because you are busy.

I don't know what Substack is, but it seems similar to Medium, and as such an app is unnecessary. You don't need apps to display and read text, I already have a web browser. Distraction-free reading? Just make sure your pages are compatible with Reader View, or better yet, make a distraction free design in the first place.


Some people like notifications. If you don’t want them, they are easy to turn off.


Can you elaborate on what “scroll performance” means? The only time I’ve had trouble with scrolling when I’m reading something on my phone is when an app or website thinks they know how to scroll better than the OS does.


I'm not sure how they meant it in this particular context but IMO good scroll performance with a lot of media on the page can be quite tricky to do on the web and a bit easier on iOS. This might be better these days than it was when I last did web dev (3+ years ago).


How is this different from getting a notification in gmail?


That would be for any and all emails?

I turn off gmail notifications. I suppose some of their readers might want to know when the Substacks they subscribe to have new content but don't want to know when they're getting new spam.


It has a different logo on it, for.. uhh... a better experience? >_<


Here's hoping the emails don't become "There's a new article from $NEWSLETTER! Click here to read it!"


By "read in their email client" (presumably on mobile) I will assume that people view but do not read. Attention spans on mobile are atrocious (notably, the fulcrum is screen size having a neurological impact on ability to pay attention - this is a biological fact) – very little real reading takes place.

I can imagine Substack is more of an "aspires to read X" platform than a place for actually reading X. This argument is anecdotally supported by the sensationalism of popular pieces I see go viral, the payment system (it is always easier to quickly monetize aspiration than behavior), and its reliance on growth through virtue-signaling (eg twitter).


This is a huge assumption. I do almost all of my reading in my email client (mostly RSS to email that gets sorted into a Reading folder). Whenever I have some downtime I slowly read through the articles that have accumulated. I have no problem finishing long articles or anything else.


> Attention spans on mobile are atrocious (notably, the fulcrum is screen size having a neurological impact on ability to pay attention - this is a biological fact) – very little real reading takes place.

If you have any further reading on this please share.

n=1 with exception for scientific papers I do essentially all my reading on my phone and I do not experience any attention difference. I also have my phone on perpetual DnD so notifications and other distractions are not a thing.


Not affiliated with Substack, but this doesn’t feel like a fair assessment. For me, email is the best way to consume curated content that I don’t get distracted. Often, like with Matt Levine, it’s a way around a paywall and obnoxious sites.


> " aspires to read X platform then a place for actually reading X "

This assumes this is goal for Substack founders and leadership. The null hypothesis absence of other evidence, is that the goal is active reader/subscriber growth


If it was aspirational reading people wouldn't pay so much for it.


What do you think of readers like feedbin that some folks are outsourcing their email inbox to?


Yeah, the app is great - I loved the email newsletters and read them in my client, but filtering quickly becomes a hassle.

Being able to open the app to read when I want to will be much nicer.


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Even if you're right (not a point I'm conceding) you're being unnecessarily hostile about it.


(I'm just a random person)

While I agree with the overall message of web over app (and have bugged some of my colleagues for going "App First", locking themselves into particular ecosystems before gaining audience), for consuming content, there are benefits to Apps, when done properly .

Most pertinently, offline content - I will always use Prime/Netflix/Disney in app form rather than Web form.

Offering an app as an option is a brilliant way to meet everybody's needs.

(nagging/pushing an app and deprecating web, however, is devil's work:)


"Popular on HN" and "Conducive to a profitable business" are nearly disjoint sets.

One of the main products at my job is a new site that we've spent a lot of time making performant and readable but we're still building an app experience because we want to meet our users (particularly affluent users) where they are.


> A popular sentiment on HN is "don't make an app when you can just have a web page".

I have yet to hear a user data analytics team say that.


To clarify, for the good of the user or for their own purposes?


definitely their own purposes; show me a company that makes an app that tracks users less than the web alternative


There are actually quite a few, namely companion apps that are purpose built.


Not OP, but of course it is for their own purposes.


Yes, for their own purposes


haha


I am a subscriber to 4 paid and a few other free substacks. One thing I like about the app is that often gmail was forwarding the Substack emails to promotion or spam folder. Having an app is better with push notifications.


I've stopped clicking on reddit links because it pushes its app so hard.


I think there are browser extensions (including for iOS, since it now supports them) that will redirect all reddit links to avoid these annoying nag bars


Inevitably, the day will come when Apple will demand that you censor some content on your platform, or your app is banned from app store. This happened before [1], and will happen again.

What will you do when this happens?

[1] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/09/18/telegram-messenger...


Related to Apple: is there a different haircut if someone subscribes to a newsletter from the app vs. from the website?


Will there ever be bundles? Or some kind of bulk discount? Pay-per-article?

I'm a paid subscriber to a number of Substack writers, and I'd like to subscribe to more, but it can rapidly run into the hundreds of dollars per month - so I really have to pick and choose.

I can imagine bundles aren't really your model, and maybe aren't in your authors interest either. But I'd love to get like an Economics bundle and a New Zealand journalism bundle (shout-out to Bernard Hickey here, doing great work with his The Kaka Substack).

Or even a pay-per-article model - some of the free newsletters I'm on publish paywalled things I'm interested in, but I don't want to subscribe to the full deal. But I'd pre-load my account with $50 and pay a couple of dollars for a single article.

In a similar vein, LWN used to have a thing where people could pay to make the article free. There are sometimes paywalled articles I'd love to share around, but I don't want to deprive the author of revenue. If I could pay for a link that can be shared X number of times, or could chip-in to a "if enough people pay this article becomes free" fund, I would.


Thank you for subscribing!

The bundle question is interesting.

The model right now is really an unbundling. The direct relationship between writers and readers is what makes Substack work: as a writer, your incentive is to earn and keep the trust of the audience who deeply values your work. That's not just a good way to get paid for work you're already doing. It's a model that allows and rewards a fundamentally different and better kind of work that the work you would have to do if you were e.g. trying to please something like the Spotify algorithm.

That said, bundle economics are real. And so while we wouldn't and couldn't do some top down bundle, if there were a way to do bundling that maintained the direct connection, and put writers and readers in charge (e.g. writer self federation, or readers buying several subscriptions at once) that could be very interesting in the future.


I just want to get this prediction down in writing in as many venues as possible: Substack will eventually offer (opt-in) bundling for authors, where the customer pays $x per month and Substack distributes that to the authors in the bundle.

This will offer some genuine benefits to readers (one monthly payment, maybe a discount) and to writers (lower transaction fees, since Stripe has a fixed cost that eats into small payments), but it will also sever the thing that currently makes it possible for authors to leave Substack and take 100% of their paid subscribers with them: every single reader has a unique subscription object in each individual publisher's Stripe account, which can then be ported to any other platform using Stripe. So when writers leave Substack they won't be able to take with them any subscribers who arrived through a bundle.

I think writers won't realise the danger here, and that Substack will therefore be able to lock in writers, against their original promise.

I would be delighted if this didn't happen, and happy to retract this if Chris could just promise that Substack will never do this kind of bundling, even if it's opt-in for publishers.


I just thought about writers being able to share things they find interesting from other writers with their audience as an interesting lead.

Also an emergence of a "curator" class, people who could assemble "newspapers" out of the newsletters could be interesting, too.


This!


Chris can we get a promise in writing from you that you will never implement bundles in such a way that writers couldn't leave your platform and take 100% of their paying subscribers with them?


++ The Kaka https://thekaka.substack.com/

Also The Pragmatic Engineer: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/


+++ to Bernard/The Kaka, and go Kiwis.


Oh also Webworm by David Farrier is really good too https://www.webworm.co/

Better for international audiences, if you like Dax Shepard's podcast with him, you'll love his Webworm content.


> Or even a pay-per-article model - some of the free newsletters I'm on publish paywalled things I'm interested in, but I don't want to subscribe to the full deal. But I'd pre-load my account with $50 and pay a couple of dollars for a single article.

This is an excellent idea! Tracking individual articles for payment, rather than the whole publication/newsletter, would allow for bundling in a way that respects Substack's intentions of preserving/respecting the author and reader relationship.


I have seen tens of attempts to do this in a past decade, and it never seems to work.

People say they want this, but in reality almost no article seems to be worthy of eg. $5, even though you would be absolutely ok subscribing for $5 to a newsletter with 2 posts per month, one of which you won't read ...


Are there any plans to allow readers/subscribers to decouple identities between different newsletters? Or, asked a different way, will the app allow you to "subscribe" to newsletters anonymously?

I find myself very reluctant to sign up for new newsletters on Substack now because my identity is shared across all newsletters, so I feel I can no longer keep my interests separated. To be clear: after commenting on one newsletter, it becomes impossible to comment on any other newsletter without compromising my privacy. I am not certain because I do not publish myself, but I worry that writers might have an insight into other newsletters I have subscribed to as well. I would really like to have an anonymous reading (if not commenting) mode, without having to manually open an in-private tab and only be able to view the public posts of whoever's newsletter I am trying to read.


Honestly, I hope this doesn't change. As an author, I think the reason why the comments section of my newsletter is such a positive place is because all of the commenters are doxed and have a profile. In addition, that's how I find other writers to follow—you can see who follows what and follow that thread which is nice.


I don't think people being "doxed" is the secret to creating positive interactions. See Facebook, for example. Even LinkedIn has a surprising amount of toxic threads, considering people's professional reputations are at stake.

The issue I have with Substack in particular is that it was essentially founded around political newsletters. I'm not sure, but I think Bill Bishop might've been their very first newsletter... and he writes about Chinese politics. Of all topics, that is one where people might have good reason to want to be able to preserve their anonymity. Of course, you could get around this by signing up for different newsletters with different email addresses, but that makes it unnecessarily difficult to read paid subscriber-only posts. I feel like the company took a wrong turn in adding social network features instead of keeping the focus on individual writers and their individual audiences.


I think it's a helpful but not sufficient condition


I would suggest that, as an example, letting people be able to have separate 'technical subscriptions' and 'political subscriptions' identities might still have the positive effects you describe and if anything more so.

Also consider somebody who wants to engage honestly and openly with mental health related content without risking that being dragged in to conversations elsewhere via somebody reading a unified profile.


https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...


Are commenters doxed? You can signup with a throwaway email.


> after commenting on one newsletter, it becomes impossible to comment on any other newsletter without compromising my privacy.

We tried to build reader profiles in a way that can handle this nicely - you can choose on a per-subscription basis which publications to display on your profile and which you'd like to keep hidden. This is almost like an anonymous subscription although it doesn't quite support a fully anonymous commenting use case, since theoretically someone could recognize you from different comment sections.

One thing I could see us trying in the future is giving writers more control over who can comment and how, on their particular publications. Already, writers can choose whether to allow comments from all subscribers, only paid subscribers, or to turn off comments entirely. Allowing writers to choose to support anonymous commenting doesn't seem out of the question.


Thanks for the response. Your example of someone recognizing you from different comment sections is exactly the thing that concerns me.

I do think giving writers the choice to enable anonymous commenting would help to improve things, although it's a little bit closing the barn door after the horse bolted, since we can't go back and anonymize comments that we already made. If allowing different pseudonyms (including avatar) for different newsletters isn't on the cards, I think the idea mentioned elsewhere of allowing the app to compile multiple logins into a single client-side feed could make the existing workaround of creating multiple accounts a bit less painful.

Either way, despite my frustrations with the identity behavior, I do appreciate the platform you have built, and how it seems to have revitalized the blogosphere. I also very much like the focus on email, since it allows me to read whenever I want instead of just when my device is online. So thanks for helping shift the culture of online writing in this way.


Hey guys, big fans of Substack (writer/reader since 2019.)

My favorite part of Substack was how it built on top of email, an (actual) distributed protocol. I'm able to access my Substack writers alongside other writers/publication, since everybody integrates into email.

I like the reader experience of the new app and the recommendations, but I'm worried it will become another walled garden like Medium. How do you plan on protecting against that?

FWIW, Matter (https://hq.getmatter.app/) has a workaround (albiet complicated) for getting all emails forwarded to app, is that on the roadmap?


Thanks!

Our goal with the app is to give a seamless upgrade to the email experience -- which is why the home page works just like an inbox -- while having writers retain ownership of their list (which therefore gives them exit rights.)

We don't want to be a walled garden. We want to make a great reading experience, with porous boundaries. If you publish on Substack, it goes everywhere - email, the web, other networks, but as the writer you can pull your most valuable audience to the place that you own and can get paid from. If you read on Substack, you can read things on Substack, and then maybe things from other places, like RSS etc. I like the idea of having emails that you can get stuff delivered to.


> maybe things from other places, like RSS etc

This is exciting to hear. When I saw the announcement, but my first thought was "They're making an RSS reader that only reads from Substack". If you're actually building a _better reader_ that's bigger than Substack (and doesn't push Substack content too hard) then you've got my support!


Yes we're keen on this. In fact, although you can't add RSS in the app (yet), you can add it on the web at https://reader.substack.com/inbox and it will show up in the app

However, I can't promise that we won't push Substack content. We will :)


> “We make it simple to start a paid newsletter.”

> We don't want to be a walled garden.

Is it just me, or do those not align completely?

A paid newsletter, as in you get access if you pay, is by definition a walled garden.

I understand that because Substack and its writers both benefit from publicly available material, since it draws organic traffic. But it seems that that's not at odds with also wanting a walled garden. The difference may be the size and shape of the garden fence door. Medium is annoying by tricking you into clicking stuff that you can't read unless you sign up. Building an app seems like it could lead there. Not because you want to, but because of thinking centralised rather than decentralised.

My favourite newsletter, Haskell Weekly, distributes an article list with a summary by email, but the links go to anywhere on the web, usually personal blogs. Maybe some people like to have an app as it then functions as a browser dedicated to particular reading purpose(s). I'd personally prefer browser links. That's where I read everything and sync tabs/bookmarks between phone and computer. I hope you don't get those annoying pop-ups that keep encouraging people to install the app even though they clicked no thanks. Like Reddit. Just because the fence is mostly see-through, it still counts like a wall. :-D


> A paid newsletter, as in you get access if you pay, is by definition a walled garden.

The content is paywalled, but the medium of exchange is open. That's the big distinction here.


If any of you guys at Substack can answer this, it would be great: I'm a huge fan and proponent of Substack as a professional space writer and "blogger" from the days of the old. But if there's one thing I think Substack does wrong it's the "Welcome page". Can we please get an option to disable showing the Welcome page" to people who haven't subscribed? I don't want to shove the email form in people's faces before they've read or browsed anything. I've personally seen the welcome page also being confusing to many readers, and it deters them from browsing at all—"Let me read first" isn't intuitive. It's also really annoying for people who choose to browse my articles from the Web and just don't prefer email.

The welcome page is my single biggest gripe with Substack. Sending people to the /about or /archive pages directly doesn't help because the moment people click on the logo or title to visit the homepage, the email form is shown again. If Substack is marketing the platform as being designed for "Bloggers" too (https://substack.com/for-bloggers), then you shouldn't treat publications as merely being newsletters with an email form. You acknowledge it yourself in this HN post intro that Substack is much more than a newsletter! And I agree, except it doesn't feel like it.

The new Substack app allows people to read and discover Substacks without being shown the welcome form, it only makes sense to have the Web version behave the same too. While I would understand not changing it by default but why not at least have it as an option for writers? Substack already lets writers toggle a bunch of major and minor settings to tweak their publication, why not this too?


I think there's a way to skip that with a URL parameter, I just unfortunately can't remember what it is -- something like /about?welcome=false or whatever. (I realise that's a hacky workaround and only solves part of the problem, but at least you can save some readers from the welcome screen)


My personal experience with consuming content on Substack is that it’s been mostly fringe opinion content with a biased agenda.

For someone like me that feels wary every time I see a Substack URL, are there some quality independent journalists covering current events that don’t participate in conspiracy theories and partisan echo chambers that I can discover?


There's a giant universe of voices on Substack and I'm sure you'll find many who fit that description. A couple of ways to do so:

Peruse the leaderboards at substack.com and in the new app (in the Discover tab).

Check out the profiles of the writers and readers you most respect (just click on their faces). You'll find lists of Substacks they're subscribed to, which may lead you to some interesting places and new writers to respect.


astralcodexten.substack.com isn’t a journalist (he’s a psychiatrist) but covers current events quite well, probably has as little bias as you can as a person, and is popular on HN.


> probably has as little bias as you can as a person

Yesterday he wrote an article about being “anti-woke” on a college campus. It included recommendations such as what he called the “berserker strategy” which was to pick as many fights as possible on every social justice topic.

Scott is anything but unbiased. He writes with flowery language that elicits a sense of faux humbleness and “both sides” journalism while subtlety pushing the reader to his desired conclusions on things like race and IQ.

He’s famous for leaked e-mails where he admitted writing a lot about neoreactionaries because it gets more clicks, which has made him somewhat of a hero among those circles. He also admitted that he believes in “HBD” which is an alt-right euphemism for racist views on IQ.

He may feel unbiased and objective due to his writing style, but he’s far from it if you’ve been following him and reading closely.


"He also admitted that he believes in “HBD” which is an alt-right euphemism for racist views on IQ."

Good to see an unbiased take such as this.

Let's look up what that means. First hit on google: "HBD IQ" (For me)(https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jttfuxoQpYsnNEAqG/suppose-hb...)

"Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population"

I mean I'm sure racists love the idea, but it doesn't exactly strike me as obviously 100% untrue.


> but it doesn't exactly strike me as obviously 100% untrue.

This is the wedge used to hoist their more radical ideas into the mainstream.

The HBD crowd uses a common writing trick: They start with a low-risk scientific fact (genes influence traits) and then inflate it into misleading conclusions (race equals IQ). Depending on their audience and how much pushback they're receiving, they'll retreat further and further toward the kernel of truth they started with.

That's how they end up hooking people with thoughts such as "not obviously 100% untrue". The problem with HBD isn't the idea that genes can influence traits such as intelligence. The problem is their weird obsession with race. If they want to talk about genes and genetics, that's fine. However, for some reason much of their writing is about race with the implication that all people of the race share the same intelligence-related genes, which is patently false. Yet that's all they want to talk about.

They also greatly exaggerate, or more likely completely misunderstand, the significance of the genetics-intelligence correlations. Outside of genetic disorders, individual genes are only loosely correlated with intelligence. The correlations are vanishingly small, yet the HBD people talk about it as if it's some sort of 1:1 switch that determines who has high IQ and who has low IQ.

There are even more unsavory parts of the movement, but I'll caution you against getting hooked by their bait-and-switch arguments.


You’re misconstruing what he thinks. He has literally told everyone openly (not what you claim is open via Kolmogorov Complicity).

“ This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

(Hopefully I’ve given people enough ammunition against me that they won’t have to use hallucinatory ammunition in the future.)”


Are you an expert on the topic of genetics?

If not why would you expect any claim revolving genetics to be "obviously 100% untrue" to you?


You don't have to be an expert on a topic to see that something is either extremely unlikely or plausible. (Anyone can still be wrong in there conclusion mind you.)

"There's a group of human's that can breath fire like a dragon"

Just using some basic knowledge of evolution and genetics, that seems pretty unlikely. What would the evolutionary pressure be ? Would there be enough time for that development? No parallel's in other mammals etc.

You can do the same to see if something is plausible. For this discussion specifically. We know there are physical difference's between populations (Height, drug tolerance, skin colour)

These observable differences are caused by different genes. What are the chances that none of these differences in genes are in the brain ? Basically zero.

So it's very plausible you'd find some differences. Just using some simple reasoning. (Reading a little bit about it, Sam Harris basically makes this exact point. It really is basic logic)


The history of philosophy shows that what sounds logical tells us little about how the world physically works. There's nothing logical about time dilation or quantum physics.

I mean, if the community around Astro Codex said upfront "We don't care about empiricism, we make things up based on what sounds logical to us" I would at least give them points for honesty.

The guy who runs Astro Codex blog claims he is an empiricist.


It's nuanced. We are evolved creatures, with certain intuitions about things.

You can point to domains about where it fails completely. (For understandable reasons)

But that doesn't mean intuition is useless, in fact I'd say it's rather underused for how valuable it actually is. Parachutes and RCT's come to mind.

Being empirical is really hard and rather un-natural for humans. It's a best effort thing. Current institution don't help as much as I'd like, it still takes many decades for information to propagate (And even longer for corrections where the consensus was wrong)


> subtlety pushing the reader to his desired conclusions on things like race and IQ.

Pushing people towards believing the truth? The horror!


"As little bias as you can," huh.

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-kni...

He's a neoreactionary apologist and self-admitted scientific racist. Not...exactly a bastion of unbiased opinion.

(And that's without getting into the deeply problematic nature of the capital-R Rationalists' horrible abuse of Bayesian reasoning as a replacement for actual expertise or scientific inquiry. Assigning arbitrary likelihoods to your opinions about the world does not make you unbiased!)


Ironically, a brief passage by Scott Alexander (from the hit piece targeting him linked above) describes a very good reason to read content you disagree with, almost making the parent comment germane to the overall discussion.

> Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn’t work. Even things of theirs I didn’t know – let’s say some particular study proving homeopathy doesn’t work that I had never read before – doesn’t provide me with real value, since they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new ...

> The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them ... The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.


For more context, look up the leaked e-mails where Scott is caught admitting that he writes about neoreactionaries because it drives more clicks.

Writing about it once or twice could have been interesting, but constantly returning to neoreactionary content over and over again to mine what he calls “nuggets of absolute gold” starts to become an endorsement.

Scott’s entire writing style is based on tricks like faux-humbleness and pretending to present an unbiased “both sides” overview of a topic while planting seeds that lead the reader to a specific conclusion.

To understand it, re-read his “Kolmogorov Complicity” essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...

He’s been telegraphing his intentions and strategies out in the open for anyone who’s been paying attention.


Said emails are in the link I posted above! It is, hilariously enough, literally someone trying to defend Scott by just reposting his emails in their entirety -- "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" indeed. If it's a hit piece, it's Scott writing a hit piece on himself.


Thank you for pointing that out, I didn't even realize that was Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's blog, I thought you had linked Topher Brennan's piece directly.


Adam Tooze is a history professor at Columbia University so definitely doesn't participate in conspiracy theories. His writing is mostly on current affairs but with history as context.

I don't agree with 100% of what he writes but it is always stimulating and challenging. Very strongly recommended.

https://adamtooze.substack.com


Yascha Mounk and Persuasion is really great. I tend to like writers that have more of a scout mindset.

Bari Weiss’ Common Sense, Scott Alexander (the comments here trashing him are wrong, easy to tell by reading him), The Diff by Byrne Hobart is one of the best finance blogs online, Noahpinion by Noah Smith, Zvi Mowshowitz has had good writing about Covid.

Andrew Sullivan’s the weekly dish has different politics than I do, but he’s also a good writer with a scout mindset imo.

Outside of substack, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Sam Harris, Ben Thompson of Stratechery, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Julia Galef are all great.

Sam Harris in particular is a really good, smart, interviewer.


Yes: Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.

Dr. Robert Malone is not a journalist but a scientist. The analysis of recent medical studies shunned by the mainstream media is worth the time investment.


Greenwald and Taibbi are great examples of writers I see producing ideological opinion pieces that I don’t find useful, but are promoted and prevalent on Substack.

I’m trying to get away from folks that make broad, sweeping judgements without much data / firsthand knowledge or dangle open ended conspiracy theory questions about subjects they have little to no expertise in.


I don't do that much on current events anymore but you might find my substack interesting: https://atis.substack.com


+1 yeah greenwald would be someone I’d pick as an example of a bad substack in the class you were describing.


Maybe harkening back to the old-school days of HN, but I'd be keen to hear about the tech stack you decided to use in building the app, what your considerations are for multi-platform, and advice for start-ups getting ready to launch their own apps.


John here, one of the app engineers at Substack. Our team has lots of experience with Swift and values the level of polish you can achieve natively, so went with that. We try to avoid third-party dependencies so native implementation and customization of UIKit, URLSession, and CoreData are important to us.

Cross platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, etc are super interesting but in our experience can hold an app back long term. As you're able to dedicate more resources to the product, it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs. It's a tough decision to make for early stage start-ups but we also went with native at Cocoon (our last startup which was acquired by Substack). I think some important factors that should go into the decision are 1) how important you think both Android and iOS support are out of the gate 2) how soon you'd expect to be able to hire native engineers for both platforms 3) your long term vision for the product and its desired complexity. We love Android (I've got some Kotlin experience myself) and will have it out ASAP, but with the existing email/web product there is less pressure for cross platform in our case.


Yeah, we've started looking at Kotlin Multi-platform Mobile to keep our business logic cross-platform, but then native UI. The discussion we're having is if it is mature enough for our needs now, or if we write in Flutter with the expectation we throw it all way in the near future.

We all use Android while our users are mostly in single platform approach won't work for us. We're also a hardware company, so need BLE and WebBle support isn't good enough for us.

Thanks for your answer


I'm curious as I think I'll be making this decision in the near future.

> it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs.

Besides the custom UI stuff, as I think React Native has some decent animation support nowadays, what specific native APIs were needed in Substack's case that made React Native an ineligible choice?

As text being the main content for Substack, Its hard for me to imagine why React Native wouldn't be sufficient for a relatively simple app.

Discord, undoubtedly, has more complex UI needs compared to Substack, however it's humming along just fine with React Native.

What makes React Native capable for Discord, but incapable for your needs?


Note that Discord's main conversation view is native UITableView for performance.


this article suggests otherwise.

https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-achieves-native-ios-per...

> At first, we felt that maybe doing it purely in JavaScript was futile. We spent some time trying to glue together UITableView with React Native, and while we made meaningful progress, it started feeling overly complicated. After stepping back and thinking about what else we could do — it hit us. We already solved this problem once before on the web! We already had an internal List component that virtualizes its children. There is no way we could just drop it into React Native right?

I'm also curious why it took them so many pain points to reach list virtualization as their solution. That would've been my first thought.


> We’ve actually implemented our core chat view natively because lists don’t perform well for many dynamic rows.


That was their initial problem. Upon further reading, you will find that they found a solution in dealing with Lists with React Native. My initial comment had the answer - they brought in a component that visualizes lists from their web platform, and it worked seamlessly in React Native.

So no, while they initially implemented their core chat view natively, they are using full blown react native as of right now.


No, they aren’t. I would know, as I have a debugger attached to the process right now.


>The result was a new component we called <FastList>. The team intends to merge these together for cross-platform use and open source it for the community. With that we removed a lot of memory allocations and were down another 70-90ms of render time. We could now scroll the channel members list as fast as we wanted and it kept up admirably.

https://gist.github.com/vishnevskiy/f4ba74adf5cf1d269b860fab...

This is FastList Code. it's 100% javascript, and only imports are lodash, react, and react-native


Thanks for building a native app!


We'll get you a real answer about how the tech stack is today.

But for now I can tell a war story that might be fun. I'm one of the founders, and am in a very much non-technical role now as CEO, I did write a bunch of the very early code (some of which people curse my name for to this day.)

When we were starting, I was limited by how many new languages/frameworks I could learn at once. I started writing the backend in python, because I knew it a bit. But our first writer often needed to use Chinese characters, and in python 2.X I could never get unicode strings to work properly. I couldn't upgrade to python 3, because on google cloud I would have had to learn Docker and I was already learning too many things at once.

Eventually I got so frustrated I threw out several days work and started the whole backend over, with node + Postgres hosted in Heroku. This ended up defining much of the stack we use to this day, which might be good or bad depending who you ask. At least unicode works though :)


A few (but not too many) years ago I inherited a custom compilation of python2.x to make unicode strings work properly. You made the right call, lol.


I’m curious: what was the issue? I’ve used python 2.7 with Unicode pretty extensively, in a wide range of languages, and have never had problems that weren’t my own fault.


I have memories of the Python compatibility issues causing huge headaches. We're back to using Python due to ML requirements now, but it kept me away for years.


I tagged in one of our lead engineers to talk about the tech stack, but can chime in re: considerations for multi-platform.

We are sprinting as fast as we can to get an Android app out the door. We're also planning on investing more in the reader experience on web. Some time ago, we launched a web reader (reader.substack.com) in beta and have some exciting ideas in the works to evolve that surface.

Beyond Android, when it smaller platforms like iPad / Desktop apps, it's mostly a matter of looking at the data and listening to users. With a small team, we have to be judicious with prioritization, and as we increase the surface area for readers it's important that the experience for writers remains clear (right now their readers can already read on email, web, and mobile).


Substack is a pyramid scheme in terms of "payments" - I am sure they will start up a "search" for the newsletters and then paid advertisements.

To all the HN regulars here - own your medium instead. Own your content. There's no need to stick to yet another VC funded "writing experience". Many potential readers will eventually hit a subscription fatigue. There are several proven strategies to monetise your content (and Substack isn't one of them).

Data export, mailing lists, billing information all belong to a third party who charges you commission to "facilitate". I am sure that commission will increase down the line, and the net effect will be less and less.

Think before you leap into this.


I 100% agree with this take.

I've got an email newsletter that 874 people pay me $5/m to read (The Sizzle - https://thesizzle.com.au). I set it up outside of Substack a few years ago, then migrated when Substack launched with the hope their platform would bring in new readers and make my life easier.

This turned out to be a massive waste of over a year, as not only did the newsletter stop growing, it lost subscribers. There was no platform effect by being on Substack, so I left it, setup my homebrew solution (where all the bits, like billing, email sending, customer info are interchangeable) and growth has resumed and I'm doing better than ever - all without giving Substack a 10% cut and further locking myself into their ecosystem.

Here's a blog post explaining in more detail why I chose to remove myself from Substack if anyone is interested: https://blog.decryption.net.au/t/why-i-use-a-mishmash-of-ser...


>What I put out there every day is worth the measly $5 a month I charge for it. What worked well for me in the past was giving out a no strings attached free trial of The Sizzle for two weeks then asking people to pay if they want it to continue. Substack’s business model however is freemium content. You give away the bulk of your content to build an audience then upsell that audience with paid subscriber only content. [...] I could add a 14-day free trial to the paid subscription, but Substack doesn’t do free trials without also adding a credit card and automatically charging that card when the trial is over. Most people hate this (me included) as they’re scared they’ll forget to cancel before the trial ends and get charged for something they don’t want, so they just don’t take the risk.

Your model sounds better for professional writers, or already established writers. But the benefit of Substack for emerging writers is that it gives them a platform to establish a brand presence with the hope that it will develop into a large enough audience to get enthusiastic readers who will convert into paid subscribers. There is also no easy way for new writers to try to start a writing career while also trying to figure out different technologies to send out a newsletter. Substack makes it completely easy, and it's fair that they charge some percentage once a writer starts earning money while using their platform.


I think you're wrong (I'm ignoring the inflammatory rhetoric and taking the core of your argument in good faith).

The good thing about substack compared to most centralized apps is that writers maintain control over their audience address list. This aligns incentives since leaving is possible. It makes them more of an actual software platform for their writers which is a good thing imo. As long as this remains true, the risk is low.

It’s probably the best outcome you can realistically get on the non-urbit web outside of niche providers like ghost which have their own trade-offs.

I suspect the hardest thing for substack will be the moderation position they find themselves in. If they do anything to try to help increase readership (even if they don't) they will eventually find themselves in the same difficult situations as every other platform, this is just an unavoidable fact of being a centralized service with this power and capability (and choosing who you will not allow as customers is a form of substack's speech). Having this responsibility is not easy and with continued success and scale becomes messy.

This (imo) just isn't something that can be solved by a centralized system effectively, even though it sounds like they'll do the best the can: https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati...


Can you elaborate on that? How is it a pyramid scheme? Do new subscribers have to recruit their friends in order to make money?


If it involves money and it's something you don't like, you call it a pyramid scheme. Twitter discourse 101!


This take doesn’t make sense. Creators still own their mailing list and could move away from the platform if it isn’t suitable for them.


This is a good post and its hilarious to watch people explain to you that they downvoted you because you're rude. I've been here over 13 years and can confirm this is most definitely in the spirit of Hacker News.


My question is who is starting the Signal equivalent of Substack? You know, for when these guys stop loss-leading, fuck everyone over and start monetizing.


How about ConvertKit? It focuses on handling the nuts and bolts of email subscriptions, instead of the faux-social platform / walled-garden audience that Substack is trying to build.


Is that what Ghost.org is?


I don't know how the fees stack up (no pun intended), but I assume Substack charges some amount more than if you used Stripe or some other payment processor to manage subscription/donations. In exchange, you get (1) some amount of discoverability and (2) marginally lower friction for users to signup (people aren't as worried that you're going to defraud them if they enter their CC details, and if they already have an account they just click subscribe). I think they also help defend authors WRT free speech and other legal issues, but I don't know the status of this.

It seems like this would be a cost-benefit analysis for each writer. For technical writers who can spin up their own blog and add Stripe subscription billing, it might not make sense. But for writers who are technically not savvy, or who write things that could benefit from journalistic legal protections, it might make more sense. I don't get the sense that the amount they charge is so high that it wouldn't be a reasonable option for anyone.


they provide:

hosting platform, promotion, backend, frontend, spam control, whitelisted mail server with high inbox rate

not a bad deal for having to pay 10%


> There are several proven strategies to monetise your content (and Substack isn't one of them).

Surely Substack is no less proven than any other content monetization strategy for individual authors. Most people simply can't make a living from writing, regardless of their monetization strategy. And at a minimum, Substack at least has proof points [1] that their platform has been working for someone.

[1] https://reader.substack.com/discover


The problem here is that for typical writers "implement Substack equivalent" is not viable solution.

Also, "pyramid scheme" has specific meaning and is not matching Substack at all.


Is there a question here?


Just seemed like good advice to me. Did you interpret it as a question? What caused you to interpret it that way?


The top comment in an "Ask Us Anything" post would usually be a question. (I personally don't have any problem with the top comment being something else, but that's the answer to your question.)


this makes no sense, ppl are paying to suport creators, like patreon


It absolutely makes sense to have those peoples money go to the creator instead of some to substack, some to the creator. Its a glorifed blog hosting service.


substack only takes a small amount


And they’re wildly unprofitable. Wonder how that will resolve?


I do not know enough about substack to comment here but to claim medium is some vestige of virtue in the space is laughable

if you want to "own your content" self host, do not use any of these platforms.


I think you'll find you misread the post you're replying to and you're in agreement on owning your content.


You are correct, I read that as "Medium" the blogging platform that is a competitor to substack...


Really illustrates the brilliance of choosing the name. Obfuscating normal conversation.


So uhh... Care to elaborate rather than just flaming in the founders thread?

What is the question you're asking here?

I downvoted you for being rude.


I noticed some of the magic of Cocoon when I started up the Substack app. While I hate to see Cocoon get neglected (please keep it alive!), I do love to see the Substack app so well designed. It's a pleasure to use. Well done!

Have you ever considered offering subscription packages? I find it hard to justify making multiple paid subscriptions (they add up fast), but would love to be able to build a package of newsletters that I could subscribe to at a bundled rate of some sort. Something like a cable tv plan for Substack newsletters?


Aww, thank you for the kind words. It was fun to get to sneak in some of the Cocoon design patterns here and there throughout the Substack app :)

Bundles of some kind are an often-requested feature by both writers and readers. Something we're really mindful of: the direct connection between reader and writer is the magic that makes the whole Substack model work. So we would be very wary of a bundle product that abstracted that connection. However, I do think there are ways to do a bundle that keep that direct connection front and center, keeping the reader in control, and maintaining the writer's ownership of their audience. It's an interesting problem to think about!


serious question: how is this any harder than just "subscribe to n subscriptions for an x% discount"?


Just a thing on the sign up in the app: let me use apples private email thingy, or even better: add a “sign up with apple” button and drop the confirmation link via email. Entering my email, and then having to switch apps to press on the confirmation link and then switching back is just annoying.


I definitely hear this, but there is some tension here for us. One of the big values of Substack for writers is that it is the place where you can build your most valuable audience, which means:

1. When folks opt in, you can reach them whenever you want, unmediated by an algorithm 2. They can pay to subscribe, and you keep 90% of the economics and 3. You own your email list. You can leave Substack and take them with you.

These things create the incentive structure that allows great work to get done on Substack. But doing the secret email thing breaks #3. Part of the bargain as a reader on Substack is that you're giving your email.

Definitely hear you on the confirmation link thing.


Consider that if one does a "sign up" from the webpage on a Mac using Safari, you get the option to use an Apple generated hidden email address.

https://imgur.com/a/PTwWor3

Adding that to the phone app would only be exposing it on the phone app - not hiding it from functionality for anyone who wanted to do it.


Not a Substack employee, but that would be tacitly endorsing users bypassing #3 — even if Substack doesn’t mind, their writers might. Safari is one thing, where it can’t be disabled. But going out of their way to add support for it in the app is probably a step too far.


To what extent did you expect to see the magnitude of recent defections from major media outlets, which have proven to be a boon for your business? If substack hadn’t existed, do you think people would have defected in similar numbers, but just gone elsewhere?

Congratulations on all of your successes!


We were not totally surprised.

One of the good things Substack can do is put competitive pressure on traditional outlets. If people want to go independent, having a good way to do so helps them. But also that possibility creates pressure on existing institutions to give writers more freedom, pay them better, etc. etc. I don't think it's a coincidence that you see more legacy publishers starting "newsletter" divisions that give writers more leeway. All of this is good for writers in our minds and we're happy for it.


If you had launched as a mobile app/website with written content, you would not have been as differentiated as you were as a newsletter-focused organization. You've always had a website, and now you're building mobile apps.

Do you think that in a few years, people will look at the the early days, in which you were thought of as a newsletter-based company, as analogous to Netflix's early days, where they were thought of as a DVD-by-mail company? I notice that like Netflix, you didn't pick a name that is tied to your first incarnation.


Substack has the unfriendliest login process of any service I use. And I’m disappointed to see no improvement in the app. When the app is first installed, why can’t I just login with an email and password? Why is “we’ll send you an email with a login link” considered a better option (by you) than giving the user a choice to enter a password?


I found this helpful to understand when this when I started to see the trend:. https://magic.link/docs/introduction/security

Also, you wouldn't believe how much time goes into customer support password issues.


Second this question. I used to have a $5/month journalist subscription. I was subscribed for a few months. But substack's login process is so cryptic to me -- I still don't understand it to this day -- I never really got to derive anything out of it. So recently stopped the subscription.


Hi!

I love substack, and have been writing a weekly blog on it for over a year now!

Do you have any plans to give more granular data on traffic/emails? Stuff like being able to see specific posts views over time, etc... What's currently available is ok, but I'd really like to be able to get as much data as possible and then export it into a BI tool.

Also, for a "quick win", have you considered adding the ability for authors to generate unique URLs for sharing posts? Ideally with separated analytics.

A forward/backward button at the bottom of a post that would lead to the next/previous post would also be great


> Also, for a "quick win", have you considered adding the ability for authors to generate unique URLs for sharing posts? Ideally with separated analytics.

That's a cool idea! Is your intended use case being able to easily spin up different URLs so that you could share them in different places and see which ones drive the most traffic / subscriptions?


That's right, the current origin system just isn't as granular as I'd like it to be. IE: it tells me I got X views from reddit, but if shared it in 3 subreddits, I don't know which ones were more effective.

Being able to share it with a single person and know if they actually opened it or not would be another use case.


Also, seeing the stats for the last 7 days and the last 24 hours (source, subscriptions, etc.) would allow writers to get a sense of what they recently did in terms of marketing that may be working best. 30 days is too long to be able to see if a particular action had any impact.


Just downloaded the app last night. It was the first time I realized how many great Substacks I’m subscribed to, and this is definitely going to be my preferred method of consumption. Looking forward to seeing the future of Substack.


Thanks! I definitely had that realization too when I first downloaded the app, and it's been a not uncommon experience.


I’m sure that you probably know my opinion on all this already (given my general loudness about newsletter things in general, as the editor of Tedium), but I’d love to see you offer options to create ecosystem options that don’t rely on having to publish on Substack proper.

It seems like creators could use the support of something like Substack without being tied to the publishing platform itself. That seems like a real opportunity.

I really don’t like the idea of newsletter platforms expanding beyond email, because the reasons why we’re using email in the first place is because it’s platform-agnostic. So your company launching an app really gives me pause. But creators I’ve talked to over the past day or so are in more of a wait-and-see mode.

I realize I’m not the target audience for your service as-is. I prefer self-hosting things like my website, I want to code my template myself, and don’t want to charge my readers a subscription fee. But I think some of the services you offer do not need the publishing platform you’ve created for it.

It could be a way to help the newsletter ecosystem without making it dependent on the URL and how we choose to publish.


Ghost[0] Seems like it more or less fits what you're describing. I first heard about it on an episode of Indie Hackers.[1] It was an especially interesting and unusual episode. I remember him talking about positioning with open source and also him going on these crazy international sailing trips while running the company.

Also I can't comment on a post about substack without mentioning my favorite substack post of all time![2]

[0] https://ghost.org/

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-john-onolan-grew-...

[2] https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-brok...


I addressed this in the answer to Chris, but I think the secret is really that they’ve invested a lot in resources in a way other platforms have not, and those resources are probably useful to non-Substackers as well.

Ghost is a good platform. I don’t use it these days, but I’m a bit of a maverick—case in point, I used Ghost to build my newsletter before it had any newsletter functionality! (I currently use Craft CMS, which has a dedicated view that can spit out a completed newsletter template, with custom ads, in a matter of seconds.)


Thank you this is an interesting perspective. Substack today is definitely targeted at people who want a full stack thing and don't want to worry about coding one's own template etc.

As someone who does want to self host, which Substack services would be valuable to you? What do you feel like we could offer you?


Google Reader, which y'all claim to love, supported reading any blog, not just Google's owned Blogger.

You could have done the same thing and built a generalized newsletter app.

But instead you built a reader just for Substack, which is clearly built to lock in an open ecosystem, just as medium tried with blogging and Spotify is trying with podcasts.


You can add any RSS feed to the app via reader.substack.com. As long as other newsletter providers support RSS, this should be no problem.


I think your company has done a lot of work around building resources for up-and-coming writers—legal services, health insurance—as well as educational offerings. Most of those have requirements tied to Substack usage or revenue. If you offered a package that made these accessible to non-Substackers, that would be a useful contribution to the space in general.

I think promotional options within the ecosystem would be nice for newsletter creators outside of Substack, but at the same time, I think the work that you’ve put into building significant resources is a unique offering in the sector that nobody else is doing to the same degree.

A good model to compare this to, in my mind, would be the Freelancers Union (https://www.freelancersunion.org), which offers a lot of services to people who freelance. That I think could be of interest even to people who don’t publish with you.

I’ve been around the block for a bit, and I think a big part of the reason the blogging ecosystem died is because there weren’t any nets. You have done a good job of creating a net for your audience. There’s no reason that net has to be for Substack users alone.


I have no useful questions to ask, just want to say that I really appreciate you guys and your product.

Cheers and thank you!


Oh thanks! I've grown to expect a lot of intelligent skepticism on HN, so this was a nice surprise :)


That is very kind of you. Thank you.


Lol, not a question, but I love that the first release notes are “minor fixes and improvements”


Technically that was the 2nd release ;)

We submitted v1.0.1 the moment that v1.0 was released and shipped it on launch day as soon as it was approved by Apple.


I'd love to use substack if I could turn the tracking _completely_ off for my subscribers. Do you plan to change that?


Hi Chris, Hamish, Jairaj, and Sachin!

I'm a huge fan of your platform, and love that its empowered some of my favorite journalists and other others to write freely while continuing to be able to provide for themselves.

One question I have is as a small time blogger, I currently use Medium as my platform. The reason I do so is because it has an audience baked in, so I'm easily(-ish) able to attract new readers to my blog and grow the list of people who follow what I write.

What does Substack have or is planning to have product feature-wise that might allow for smaller writers to get the word out and have a social network-like following to help grow their own readership?

I would love to switch to support your product, this is the one thing holding me back.


Thanks for the kind words!

The nice thing about "network-first" products like Medium and Twitter is that there's a large audience baked in (as you mention) that you can tap into is a small time writer. But the trade-off is that you don't own your audience - you can build up followers, but you don't have a direct connection to them outside of that product. You typically don't get their email addresses, and you can't take your audience with you if you choose to leave.

You also don't necessarily own your work! I was a huge fan of Medium when it launched, and an early active writer. One day, my best performing post got added to someone else's collection, and now it "lives" in some random space that I have nothing to do with (https://medium.com/p/3eadcdc56ff2). This was a pretty frustrating experience.

We think there's a way to have your cake and eat it too: own your own audience, and be in full control. But also get access to a network of readers that grows over time. We're trying to take a deliberate and thoughtful approach to growing the destination for readers, and the app is a major step.


>The reason I do so is because it has an audience baked in

Does it? Do people browse medium looking for things to read? Where does the 'baked in' audience come from?

My personal opinion of medium is very different - I usually see it as blogspam.


To answer your question a bit more specifically, one thing that's starting to work as a nice discovery loop in the app is being able to tap on a commenter's profile and see what other Substacks that person is subscribed to. Reader profiles existed before the app, but since comments don't render in emails (but do in the app), this discovery loop was pretty constrained.

We have some other exciting ideas in the works for helping readers discover more writers through the lens of the writers they already trust, that the app will provide a nice canvas for.


Yes exactly. There's this red thread you can follow through the platform. My favorite kind of discovery!


How are you going to prevent yourself from becoming whatever Apple demands you to become? Apple was forcing Gab to comply with Apple's content policy for user-generated content. You are now essentially subservient to Apple for content moderation.


How does the Substack App fit into the picture with apps like Matter and Instapaper (and their integrations with programs like Readwise?) Is this for the more casual / sane reader, and is meant to coexist alongside the more power-user apps like Matter?


Our ambition is to make the Substack app a great place to read, and as a writer a great way to have a direct connection with your audience. We have a lot of respect for apps like Matter (and Google Reader back in the day).

For now it's probably most compelling for folks who already do a lot of reading powered by Substack, but we're interested in adding more support for reading non-Substack things (and we already have some basic support for reading Substack stuff in other RSS readers.)


First of all, I have been reading a lot of publications on Substack, thank you. I have been using your app for a few days, and have a few feature requests:

1. Can you please support signing in to multiple accounts? Ideally, you would merge the subscriptions together into one view, but even if not, easy account switching is good enough.

2. Can you gray out the read posts? The "inbox" doesn't distinguish between read and unread, archiving is the only option. But sometimes I might want to refer back, and don't want to archive it yet. (EDIT: I just found the orange dot, but it's not very visible)

3. When you know that I have read the post via email (from the tracking pixels), can you show them as read in the app?


1. Account switching and/or being able to merge accounts is a totally reasonable idea. Right now you can theoretically sign out / sign in with a different email address but I know that's a pain

2. Good feedback re: the orange dot! I'll pass that along to our Designer.

3. This is also a good idea, but unfortunately a little less straightforward to get right 100% of the time as email clients increasingly start to get in the way of tracking pixels visibility.


About fuckin' time!

I've been a subscriber and spend about $2K/yr on Substack subscriptions thanks to a generous Enterprise educational budget/policy (and then cheat/steal all my other media/news content).

This is great news.


Thank you for your business!


If you support subscribing to RSS feeds maybe you'd want to also support ActivityPub? Let your users follow Mastodon accounts and vice versa, become part of the growing fediverse.


This probably isn't the venue for it, but your refusal to engage in the sort of content moderation the entire rest of the industry has determined "necessary" cannot be commended enough

Societal pressure on this has been intense, and your team's tweets in support of individual expression have been absolutely landmark tweets, and I am a paying customer because of it

Sincerely, thank you


Thanks, this means a lot.


Hey Substack team, I am excited to see the app published and try it out!

I’m curious - what are some of your goals with the app in terms of reach, retention, engagement and activation of users?

I’m also wondering - does this new channel set up yourselves (and writers) to be at the whim of Apple?

For example, if the app begins to drive any of the metrics above, and Apple someday comes to see it as untenable, would you be comfortable sacrificing it?


It looks like the app supports Apple's Dynamic Type, which adjusts the text size based on the users' iOS-level setting. That's good for accessibility and usability more generally.

Do you consider letting users customize other readability-related features, such as column width, line spacing, etc.? Like text size, this is good for both usability and accessibility.

Glad to see Dynamic Type supported in your v1.0!


Yes! Very excited to build more readability features and customization.


I have a Substack account and when I entered my email address in the app it said it was sending an email but it didn't show up until hours later.

By then, I had entered a different email address (I wasn't sure if I was incorrectly remembering which address I used), and it created a new account for me with that address. The authentication email for the second address arrived very quickly.

When the email for the first account finally showed up, I tried clicking it so I could log into my previously-existing account. It didn't work because I was already logged in with the new empty account. And when I logged out of the account and tried again, it didn't work because (I think) the link can only be used once.

I've tried entering the correct email address again and am now waiting for the email to arrive. Just some feedback on how this process has worked for me! The email address that had problems is a yahoo address, and the one that didn't have problems is gmail, in case that matters.


Ahh, sorry about that poor experience! And thanks for sharing the domains - will pass this along. If you get stuck in the auth loop again, our support team is very responsive.


https://on.substack.com/p/substackapp

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/substack-reader/id1581650857?l...


I subscribe to two paid blogs on substack and read and comment on them regularly. The comment sections get pretty lively at times. 98% of the commenters are sincere and post interesting opinions, sometimes quite informative in their own right; that's the benefit of the $50 or $60 a year filter, I suppose.

Nonetheless it would be nice to provide a mute/block feature, to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. There are a couple of commenters who are rather insufferable, and there's no way to downvote them or put them on ignore. I guess it's a relatively tangential use of substack, which is presented as a blogging platform first and foremost, and it certainly succeeds in that. But a bit of user control over their comment stream would be a nice-to-have.


Chris here, one of the founders. Hi HN, thrill to be here.


Is it viable to launch an app only for one major platform (iOS), excluding Android with it's payment system entirely? Another question, since I cannot check it - are you collecting payments for subscriptions through the App Store with it's 30% mark? Or are you exempt?


It's definitely not optimal, I'll be the first to admit. With limited resources, it really comes down to sequencing. We could have sat on the iPhone app until the Android app was ready to launch, but shipping on one platform ASAP allows us to start learning what's working / what's not working and ultimately improve the product that goes out the door on day 1 on Android.

In the iOS app, we don't support in-app-purchases (subscribers can upgrade to paid via email/web) so there's no 30% take from Apple.


Is that even allowed by Apple to collect subscriptions outside of the App Store? There have been many battles about it and Fortnite or some paid email services are at odds with Apple.

Regarding a cross-platform launch, I think launching at the same time considerable increases odds of reaching a critical mass of people joining the hype generated by a launch. In my experience users rarely come back to a place when app was released to a platform they don't have - disappointment factor plays a role - unless they really need it.


Readability has improved with the latest typography updates. App looks nice. I mostly read emails but find some newsletters get annoying with too many low-quality updates. I wonder if you could test throttling email notifications for newsletters with low open rates, etc.


Are there any plans to help writers with discovery? It seems the only way to to build an audience is to already have an audience of some sort. This is one of the things that I like about Medium. They will recommend articles based on interests and have great SEO.


Definitely. The current Discover tab in the app is admittedly pretty basic - just search, the same featured publications from the homepage on substack.com, and categories. We have a lot of ideas for how to improve this tab, as well as other discover mechanisms throughout the app.

One area I'm especially excited about: discovery through the lens of the writers you trust. What are those writers reading themselves? What else are their readers (whose taste you ostensibly share) reading? We have a light version of this already with reader profiles in the app (and on web) - when you subscribe to a publication, you can choose whether to display it on your profile. Lots more we could do though.


Discoverability based on more specific categories, like "humor/comedy" "movies" "advice" would be more helpful than trying to triangulate between what a writer/author reads and what a new reader is reading. Writers who are more open-minded subscribe to newsletters that have nothing to do with the content they write about. If a reader is interested in more "humor" writing, for example, it doesn't make any sense to suggest a travel newsletter simply because the author of the article they are looking at reads it, and you are deeming it higher quality because of that when it may not really be better than other newsletters in the same category but rather a reflection of a personal relationship the author has with another author. To a lesser extent the same goes for the readers of a publication. People have eclectic tastes and are not monolithic. But as a reader if I'm enjoying an article under the category "movies" then I would appreciate seeing articles that are tagged with related terms like "film" "cinema" "movie recommendations" "movie reviews." The lack of tagging or more nuance in the categories Substack offers really limits discoverability.


You continued taking your cut from my subscriptions after I'd left your platform (I think because you didn't really understand how Stripe Connect works) and just refused to pay the money back for over a year. What was the deal with that? It struck me as both deeply dishonourable and not even sensible as a business move. Why did you do that, and what does it say about Substack as a company that you did it?


I might attribute this to Hanlon's Razor. On the other hand, that's not very flattering to them either.


ha! Yes I definitely think the original overbilling was incompetence not malice, but not just saying "we're so sorry we overbilled you, we're not sure how much we took exactly but please let us give you $x to definitely cover it" was more like malice than incompetence (in practice my guess is something closer to pridefulness than malice, but I can't pretend to understand what's in their hearts etc)


It’s obviously undesirable, but it makes sense to me that a busy company that doesn’t understand Stripe Connect would struggle to research and rectify this. That’s assuming you identified the technical issue correctly, of course.


Hello Uri. Love the browser! Did you get this sorted in the end and have you heard of others having this issue?


Oh thanks that means a lot to me!

I would say it was partially sorted -- I eventually dm'ed their PR person (once they hired one) and somehow she pretty quickly figured out how to pay back part of the money, but refused to send any documentation of what she was paying back or answer questions about various discrepancies, which made it a big hassle on the bookkeeping side. And I never got an explanation or apology from the Substack guys, or any thanks from them for giving them a chance to make it right for more than a year. Truly one of the weirdest life experiences to me -- aside from the moral aspect, I would have thought screwing over one of your biggest customers for no obvious reason is bad for business. But it seems to be working out for them so far, so, what do I know!


Greetings and Salutations:

I am looking for an overlay on your code to enable respondents (think contributors) to find each other within multiple threads , by their pseudonym / "handle" , or pen name if you will , including a by date listing of any contributor , such that search for a contributor will produce all of his / her remarks which I call contributions.

Is anyone there now, to whom I may speak ? time is important.

Your platform and business model superb. That said, if newsletter members do not have to search multiple threads , to find an historical contribution, sub-nets may be formed , to reduce time and increase focus.

My name is Jeffrey Sweet.


First impressions:

Will it be easy to switch between accounts? I have my own / and then I have a company account where I follow the students and leave comments with that. So far, looks like I can only sign-out / and then sign back in.

What if I want to follow that crazy political ranter guy in my email... but I don't want it in my feed in the app? It looks like there isn't a way to filter that besides unsubscribing - which will likely lead me to unsubscribe from people - that I normally wouldn't - to keep the app feed tidy.

What if I want notifications, but only for some of my favorite publications? Looks like it's just over-all so far.

Will I be able to edit a typo of mine / in the app? Doesn't look like it.

Will I have to add this app address to my Vimeo privacy/sharing so that my included videos can be embedded in it?

S the small box of files icon an archive button? As in / "here's your box of old files" - or as in "this will archive some amount of things when you press it." It's archive all. What is this bell - probably notification settings? No. It's "Activity" - of which I have none / and I do not understand. Seems like my inbox is the activity. So, maybe comments on my publication?

Again - already wishing for a filter because my inbox is showing the exact 3 publications I don't want to see on the app and nothing more.

What will pushing the substack icon do. Nothing? Seems like it should take me "home" - to what I would presume to be my inbox. Nope. But there is an icon of an incoming mail office box thing. That's the inbox. OK. Library icon - is not good. Doesn't read as a book at all. (to me) and - my list of publications - is not a "book." So - it's not a great icon to begin with / and it looks like spit pane anyway.

Still searching for a way to flip between my own accounts.

But overall - on part with Substack - and a positive move forward. However, I would have preferred to have a better signup module that we could style to match our sites / and other added features / over an iOS app.


Are you going to pay Tim Dillon his 20 milly?


Our strategy with Dillon is to keep sending him coffee mugs until he relents.


Hi Hamish -- how much of your success do you attribute to the secret benefits you offer certain writers to prevent them from leaving? And is it sustainable in the long run (or does that not really matter to you?)


> the secret benefits you offer certain writers to prevent them from leaving

Can you elaborate? I know some people were paid big $ up front to make the move, but it didn't seem very secret -- the ones I'm thinking of were pretty open about the deals they'd taken, so presumably Substack wasn't pressuring them to keep quiet. And as far as I know they were paid up front for the first year, before moving to an ordinary revenue split and being free to leave.


Yeah I'm not talking about the advances, although way more writers than people realise have been given advances. Basically Substack has been forced to offer pretty hefty benefits to (try) to stop writers from leaving, there's a ton of "special programs" with various kinds of disguised cash that they offer to writers they want to keep (To my knowledge they've never given discounts on the 10% fee, but they give in-kind benefits to skirt around that). Hamish knows exactly what I'm talking about, if he wants to chime in!


Is this a guess? Do you have any evidence of “secret offers”?


There are a number of writers who have disclosed their “offers too good to refuse” from substack, including their first big name who they paid well into six figures to jump platforms.


ubac framed the question in a hostile way which is probably why he was ignored.

What you're describing sounds like a cash advance/guarantee which Hamish mentioned about 'de-risking' offers.

If you have good data that a writer could make X money, but they're afraid to leave their day job - it's easy to just say to them "we'll pay you your day job salary to de-risk this jump for you" if you know they'll make way more than that. You can even offer more.

That's not a 'secret benefit' to prevent them from leaving - it's a smart economic move to help people anxious about perceived risk.


hey! Sorry, there's a lot of history here, Hamish has been very unpleasant to me and many writers I love, as well as wrongly continuing to bill me after I left his platform -- I realise otherwise I might have sounded unduly hostile, sorry for that.

The benefits I'm talking about are not the advances or guarantees, there's basically a ton of secret programmes at Substack where they give favored publishers special in-kind benefits to effectively pay back some of the 10% fee. Hamish knows what I'm talking about, but can't mention it publicly because their business model is reliant on a pretense that every publisher is paying 10% and not a hodgpodge of subsidies and kickbacks. Does that make sense?


Sure, I didn’t know this but I’m also not surprised big fish that bring in massive revenue and readership get better negotiated rates (or some value equivalent) that are not publicized. They provide more value and have more negotiation leverage. Their use of the platform is basically marketing for substack.

It’s also possible to directly discuss this openly/honestly like you did in this reply (thanks for clarification) vs. indirectly via disingenuous hostile snark in your first comment.

Also looks like there might be some sort of conflict of interest based on the work you do in your bio which could be having a possibly unintended influence.


I'll never understand why Steven Sinofsky, who must have retired from Microsoft with hundreds of millions in the bank, feels the need to ask for a few bucks to read his writing on Substack.


Perhaps it keeps out the people who don't value it...


Thanks for doing this!

What would be your advice to new platforms that want to take a free speech approach, while attracting users across the entire political spectrum? (to avoid the fate of Parlor and Rumble)


I have accounts on Medium and Substack.

In the beginning, I posted blogs on Medium, and I sent out newsletters on Substack.

Then Medium started to provide email subscriptions.

Now Substack has a mobile app.

I need to rethink my content strategy going forward...


Have you considered selling an $80/year membership where users could subscribe to up to say 20 blogs and the fee gets distributed to those creators?

Or even have an unlimited package.


I would guess the writers would have to opt-in to that. Some newsletters charge $80 each month.


I think you’re right. That’s the tricky part but they might actually make more money on higher volume.


Specifically and precisely how did you decide what data you are going to collect and keep on your users with the app? Of that, how much of it is only accessible with an app rather than providing the same thing through a web-browser?

edit: I think this is a very reasonable question to ask. I'm sorry it's making some uncomfortable but that discomfort really doesn't change the economic realities of competitive space in the industry.


love love love substack. I'm fully hooked and spend over 1 hour a day reading on it. The app looks good, I've been waiting for something like this!

A few comments;

- The font looks quite small (on iPad). Have you considered adding the ability to change font and size?

- Now that all my subs are in here, I don't really need to bombard my inbox. Is there a way so that I can mute sending to my email inbox?

- I love to read when flying. Will my inbox be downloaded for offline reading?


Thanks!

- The iPad experience is admittedly not as amazing as it could be, and something I'm excited to improve big time down the road. For now, the app should respect your dynamic type settings (in case you have your font set larger at the iOS level)

- Yep, there's a toggle you can access from your Profile Tab > Notifications

- Right now the offline experience is so-so but not perfectly optimized. If you refresh your Inbox right before a flight your recent posts should be cached nicely and readable while offline.


Having this text mode would be a game changer! https://bionic-reading.com/


Dynamic Type is nice, but sometimes it results in surprisingly large differences between apps.

Apple realized this and in iOS 15 there's now a way to adjust the text sizing on a per-app basis, using Control Center. Full instructions here: https://www.theverge.com/22580423/ios-15-iphone-text-size-ho...


Thanks!!


Wish I'd found this earlier. I'm trying to decide whether to build out my newsletter on Substack or move it to a platform with more accessible tech support since I've been trying to correct a typo in the URL for three weeks and no one responds to my tech support requests. This may end up being a deal breaker for me since I don't want an "Uber" type experience with my newsletter community


Any plans for a native macOS app for Substack?


Sachin here (from Substack). I for one would be stoked about a MacOS app, although it's probably not the highest priority thing right now :)

Our next step within the Apple universe will most likely be to build an amazing iPad optimized experience. Right now the app works on iPad, but it's definitely not as great as it could be. A better iPad app would also be a good starting foundation for MacOS (and work on Silicon macs out the gate).


What will make the optimized experience on iPad amazing as opposed to just opening a tab in Safari?


Found Substack to be a great place to learn from different voices. Wonder if there are plans to offer a weekly or monthly top 10 list by country? (For instance, Netflix has something like this: https://top10.netflix.com/)


When are you implementing a login wall like medium.com? I believe any user generated content must not be hidden behind a login wall, unless (of course) the user wants. Unfortunately, I believe that is what you will be doing soon, just because all other companies have done the same.


Authors can already make whichever posts subscriber-only they want. Also, sometimes comments are subscriber-only.


Thats not the point of my question. Substack can say something like medium does. "You can view five posts for free and then you should login to read more"


Please include an option to increase the font size. I love Substack. I typically read articles through the web in Safari's reader view which allows you to increase the font size. The app looks great. Love the dark theme. Just a larger font would be more comfortable to read.


In iOS 15, Apple made it possible to adjust the text size for any app that uses Dynamic Type (like Substack does). Instructions here: https://www.theverge.com/22580423/ios-15-iphone-text-size-ho...


Thanks! Curious if you use dynamic type on your phone? Right now those settings should be respected by the app. In-app settings are on the roadmap too (themes, font selection, type size) but in the mean time maybe that's a helpful stopgap.


John from the app team here. We're currently respecting iOS font size settings, so if you increase that it will be reflected in the app. We have app specific font sizing on our roadmap though and it is coming soon!


When am I going to be able to add strikethrough text, superscripts and subscripts to my Substack posts?


We do have strikethrough! It's the little S with the line through it in the editor bar (or Cmd+shft+X)

Good thought on subscripts.


Dear Chris, Hamish, Jairaj, and Sachin - Thank you for the platform. I'd LOVE to do some aggregate analysis of substack metadata (not the actual content.) Do you have an internal division that works with partners who can help magnify your content? Thanks


What is the story behind the name of your product? Why did you decide to call it Substack?


I run an email newsletter with 150,000 email subscribers, and monetize it by selling educational courses, as well as some ad revenue. Any considerations, in terms of deciding whether or not to use Substack for my business?


any advice for someone looking to do the same? greatly appreciated.


A consistent source of website visitors is the best learning tool you can have.


What went wrong with Medium?


Do you have plans for a web-based reader app, for use on desktop computers?

Context: I'm a happy user of NewsBlur and find being able to go back and forth between Android, iOS, and desktop to be quite useful.


I’m a Chinese writer, I write about Chinese podcasts on Substack. I want to know how many Chinese newsletters on your platform? Could you help Chinese writer meet each other virtually?


Simple question: what’s the tech stack, driving the App?

I see that you have an Android app, coming soon, so this makes me think that you are using some form of hybrid tech (as opposed to native).


AUa*A?

*almost


For publications I subscribe to, how do I get them in my RSS reader? (And if I can't yet do that, when will it be available?)


If you're talking about getting Substack publications into your RSS reader, you can add /feed to the end of the relevant URL and then add that into your reader (e.g. https://sinocism.com/feed).

For adding non-Substack publications into the Substack app via RSS, go to reader.substack.com (make sure you're logged in) and click on "Add RSS feed" in the left sidebar.


Thanks, I'm asking about the former.

Does that work even for paid subscriptions? I was thinking it would require some sort of separate URL.


I'm obviously not who you're replying to, but I exclusively read substack articles through RSS readers like inoreader - typically every article (both paid and unpaid) will show up in the feed; the paid articles are just paywalled after the title/image/short paragraph preview. Hope that helps.


Good to know, thanks! In that case, my question for the Substack folks is:

For Substack authors that I subscribe to, will you be making a full-content feed available? I'm quite happy with my current feed reader, and would just like to get my substack subscriptions in there like my other full-content subscriptions.


It would be ideal to have a "private" RSS feed for paid sub, I agree.

For now I use feedbin, which lets you subscribe to newsletters with a custom feedbin email. Other readers also do this.

The downside is that your substack login address has to be a feedbin address.


Congratulations Substack is an awesome app and product.

I am an iOS developer, would love to work on it. Do you have any openings on the team?


What does Substack look like to you in 2027?


What were some of the surprising technical challenges you faced developing the app?


John from the app team here, thanks for the question! I'd say most of the unexpected challenges came from building an app on top of a system that was primarily designed for emails and web. There's lots of tools in the publish email pipeline (queues, delays, retries, etc) that we don't really need to worry about with an app where we're directly querying for the posts for a user. Conversely there are functions like push notifications that apply to the app but not email. This led to plenty of refactors and some parallel backend code, although for the most part we were able to take advantage of the rest of the company's work.

Separately there's been some interesting challenges on the client side around caching posts, serving post content offline, and purging spam/copyright infringing content.


What’s the general breakdown of use between UIKit and SwiftUI?


John here, one of the iOS engineers. We're 100% UIKit but keeping a close eye on SwiftUI. It's certainly beautiful


As an iOS developer, I scrolled down to find if there was any mention of tech and I am glad to find it! I have to say, I was taken by surprise by the launch because as a huge fan of Substack I was always watching the career boards and never saw anything except web and backend engineers. Can you talk about the size of your team or is it just you?

One feature request: would love to be able to collapse comments/replies like you can do on the web.

Thanks for the great app!


When will you make it easy for Substack authors to sell ads?


We're 100% focused on subscriptions, so we're unlikely to do this any time soon (or at all).


Big fan of Substack - thanks for making a great product!


Substack is a player in the increasing tendency of our fracturing media landscape - for the better or the worse. I believe, by enabling more and more unedited and unlimited speech increasingly diverse voices can become more prominent.

The hope is of course, that we have an unskewed distribution of voices, however, our increasing challenges with misinformation or maybe rather information warfare show that this _might_ not be the case.

In the old media world, this was to a degree ameliorated by a powerful elite of editors and publishers who controlled and cut off the extremes (bad for business if you have no targeting).

What does Substack think about missing editorial oversight?


Please add my vote for an Android version. :D


Any tips on hiring world-class iOS engineers?


Whats the tech stack for the iOS app?


And in particular, what app architecture is it in?


i started a substack about a year ago and haven't used it. i plan to change that.


Did you look into a PWA instead of an app? Especially since substack doesn't have device locked features.


What is substack


First, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. There's a VERY strong censorious zeitgeist sweeping the country, and we liberals seem to have no defense against attacks from our left. The unpersoning and deplatforming mob hysterics, often in the name of race essentialism or systemic oppression, are terrifying for any student of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the rise of Soviet thought policing.

If liberalism means anything, it's the ability of the individual to speak truth even when the mob or the government demands that they remain silent. Substack is one of the only platforms available that hasn't bent the knee to the hysterical mob, and I can't tell you how grateful I am for your spine.

Regarding the app, it's very welcome. I've been using the Safari bookmark in the meantime, and the app is FAR better -- the ability to interact more smoothly, save position, etc. A couple issues:

1) Unarchiving? I experimented with archiving an article. While I'm able to find it in the archived section, I don't see any option to unarchive it.

2) Themes? My theme is set to dark, which is great, but I also enjoy sepia in daylight. I don't see any option to change the color scheme.

3) Podcasts? Podcasts in Substack sound like a great idea, but I've had nothing but problems trying to add certain podcasts (e.g. Late Republic Nonsense) to my PocketCasts app. The only way seems to be having Substack email me a personalized podcast subscription URL rather than an open feed I can just search for in PocketCasts. Partnering with Callin might be an interesting idea, since they seem to have adopted the "Substack but for podcasts" model -- often even recruiting Substack talent.

4) Discovery? I'm really glad to see a discovery tab, and I'd love to see suggestions ("if you like Glenn Greenwald, you might also like...").

5) Pricing? Substack has a great model of direct payments, with writers I want to read, but it gets steep very quickly. Rather than dropping $100/year each for five different writers I want to follow, could you explore bundling? Superstars like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi will probably want to remain independent, but there are lots of smaller names who might benefit from exposure through bundling several smaller newsletters under a single price; or simply from more flexible pricing entirely. I don't think I've seen a single newsletter that offers an annual subscription for under $50-60.

I have a subscription to Apple News almost exclusively for the WSJ, but they also have a lot of other inferior magazines -- The Atlantic, New Yorker, etc. As dramatically as they've fallen in quality, it's still a compelling bundle for $10/month, with my payments allocated across publications based on the articles I read. Have you considered a similar bundle, or allowing writers to form their own bundles?

6) Saving articles? I can save articles to a bookmark and store them in a bookmark folder, which works fine, but it would be convenient to save my favorite articles in Substack that allows me to revisit them.

7) Improving comments? The comments section isn't bad, but they could also become crucial draws. Reddit and HN are draws generally for the quality of their comment sections. Substack currently has an unusually excellent audience -- generally intelligent people interested in deep dives into controversial subjects in order to find the truth. There must be some way to liberalize and interweave comment sections in order to draw on audience expertise and perspective.


Isn't this post abusing Show HN? Since it's essentially just a marketing post and is void of all technical detail? I understand there's an essence of Show HN posts that are marketing but at least most are technically oriented in some way...


I don't think it's abusing Show HN, because they made an app and are sharing it. Actually I told them to make the post say Show HN in the first place.

However, it's true that the /show page is mostly side projects, new companies, and so on. I don't think we need to push the point, so I took Show HN out of the title now.


They have a live free app that you can download, play with, and give feedback on. So far so good.

However, it appears you have to create an account to interact with the app at all, which is not in the spirit of Show HN.

If a new startup posted a Show HN that required giving a live email address, they would be criticized for it (and most people probably wouldn’t go any further).

EDIT: it would be great if one of the founders could create a dummy account that we could log in with. That's something other founders have done in the past, and it would be more in the spirit of Show HNs:"Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.


Yeah I kind of agree. I’m used to Show HN posts being new startups, technically interesting small projects etc, not established companies that just happen to have launched an app. Most Show HNs have an element of marketing of course but this feels like pure marketing. At least tell us something about what inspired the technical choices behind what is, let’s face it, a pretty straightforward app.


Wouldn't the title make more sense as "AUA" instead of "AMA"?


This is completely correct and me is duly chastened.


Changed above. Thanks!


Request a refund for this App name "Aua"!

https://en.langenscheidt.com/german-english/aua


>This is Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the founders of Substack, with Sachin Monga, the head of product.

Are there any female top brass at Substack?


Yes. VP of Partnerships, VP of Communications, Head of Talent are all women at the top table.


Thanks for the quick response! Hopefully that trend continues and we can see some of that diversity move beyond the VP-level and on into the C-suite. :)


Yes! So far we have only three Cs and it's the three people who founded the company, so there's certainly room to move...


You have held firm so far on not acquiescing to cancel culture. But I imagine Apple will start demanding you censor content available through the Substack app, like they have with Parler and others. What will you do in response?


We definitely care a lot about about freedom of the press, and have written a bunch about it at e.g. https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more

I think the Substack model gives us a bunch of advantages here: readers are choosing to subscribe to writers they trust, and who they then have a direct relationship with. I don't think that Apple is likely to try to police that too heavily, and if they do there is always web and email that exists as a fallback.


> I don't think that Apple is likely to try to police that too heavily

As someone who uses and loves substack precisely because of its censorship resistance, this sounds like wishful thinking at best. Even if substack is primarily web based, introducing a dependency on the ever-changing Apple content policing system is a potential conflict of interest.

A cynical take is that smaller platforms compete early by allowing more speech, only to close it down when they become bigger and tied up in corporate relationships.

How do you remain independent as you grow?


[flagged]


Please don't do this on HN. Thoughtful critique is welcome, but we're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture, and also the cross-examination/flaming style of forum comments. They just tend to have a dumbing-down effect on threads. We want curious conversation here and I'm sure you can make your substantive points in that way if you want to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Censorship happens when a writer is de-platformed, and has nowhere to turn to re-platform themselves. People on HN then give snarky, insincere advice about creating your own web hosting company or whatever. On the other hand, there are lots of platforms catering to nudity and sexual content, so I don't think this is going to be a problem there.

In a society where the government isn't allowed to censor, the greatest fear is that speech platforms will become few enough, or homogeneous enough, that particular kinds of legal speech have nowhere to go. Substack provides a home for some speakers who had nowhere else to go, and is therefore decreasing the total amount of censorship that happens in the US.

Some of your "racists and abusers" may be people that others want to read. If you don't like what they're saying, don't read them. If you're going to try to stop me from reading people I want to read, I'll financially support companies that don't let you do that.


You're only saying that censorship isn't a problem for content that you personally judge to be unimportant. Many don't see it that way - they see policies like this as evidence of Substack appeasing Christian moralist values that have "cancelled" the expression of sexuality and sexual identity outside of a set of norms acceptable to them. Worse, these "blanket" policies often only end up enforced against LGBTQ people in practice. I don't know if that's the case with Substack, but they are absolutely censoring content for political reasons when they ban the arbitrarily defined category of "pornography".

Likewise, one could trivially dismiss your position by saying that there are plenty of ways to get anti-vaccine messages (or whatever other "forbidden" political knowledge) - they are published all over the web! In the op ed section of every major newspaper, for example. Far more widely with regard to readership than sexual content is published.


> ... but they are absolutely censoring content for political reasons when they ban the arbitrarily defined category of "pornography".

Have they said in plaintext that this is politically motivated or motivated by their "values"?

A lot of platforms that censor sexual content don't do so out of their own wants or desires. I mean, what user generated content platform wants less users? Instead, they're pressured by VC's who have "morals" of their own or financial institutions who have heavy handed policies that could severely impact a fledgling company.

There's also a big difference between "sex workers" and "pornography". Would Substack censor an escort for talking about detailed aspects of escorting? That's very different from censoring someone for posting pornographic images or videos which could potentially fall into the following very harmful, hard to moderate, and litigious categories like age and consent.


Sure, but that equally applies to companies following the money when they de-platform somebody over public or internal outrage at being associated with or enriching them. The point is that Substack's market position as "place where you can tell your truth after you get cancelled" is inconsistent with the purported motivation of a higher, abstract ideal or value of free speech. It's consistent with wanting to make money, and it turns out that the stuff that might get you banned on twitter can make a lot of money elsewhere. When the ideal of free speech (can I post porn there?) clashes with the ideal of making money (what if corporate firewalls ban us and our emails go to spam?), the money is preferred. There is no reason to believe the content currently protected there today would remain protected if the financial motivation shifted.


I think it's beneficial to be specific about what you're advocating for and what the problem is. What you expressed is that they are actively censoring sex workers for just being sex workers. If they've taken a moral position on that, but not other things then you're right - they're guilty of selective morality and their statement is moot. If on the other hand, they're censoring images and videos but not stories or identities then that's a different ballgame. In that case, the problem doesn't lie with Substack it lies with other institutions that likely have a lot of influence over Substack and may take time and strategy to overcome. As a long time champion of privacy and anti-censorship, advocacy is not some zero-sum game rife with pots of reductions to strong arm people and institutions into what you want. It's about understanding the root of the problem, which likely was formulated in good faith at some time, and trying to course adjust it to fit our world today.


I guess you're right that I'm less upset about pornography because I'm not a consumer of it. But let me give you my best attempt at a principled answer, too..

I'd say that porn producers have lots of places to go that will cater to them, and that will connect them to porn consumers. As I recall, reddit's r/gonewild is huge, and lots of producers are using it to pull people to their OnlyFans accounts. Someone who is "canceled" for porn at Substack could just go there, and they'd probably be better off because they'd be in a community of people who want to consume porn.

On the other hand, an anti-vax writer (or someone who was publishing accurate concerns about the covid vaccines and was labeled "anti-vax") couldn't just go get a job at Fox to continue their activities after Facebook banned them and their web host stopped hosting them, etc.

Bottom line, I think it's reasonable for a "free speech" platform to specialize in certain kinds of unpopular speech so that they don't have to fight every censor-happy asshole at once. One might say "we specialize in hosting porn and fighting Christian censors" and another might say "we specialize in hosting Trumpers and anti-vaxxers and fighting woke censors" and that's perfectly fine. Ideally, there would be enough such platforms in existence that a writer could choose the proper one for the kind of content they plan to create.


Your original comment said:

>Censorship happens when a writer is de-platformed, and has nowhere to turn to re-platform themselves. People on HN then give snarky, insincere advice about creating your own web hosting company or whatever.

Substack would be a place for profiling what's happening in the sex worker community, providing news and insight and addressing issues important to individuals within the community. r/GoneWild and OnlyFans don't cater to that; they only want you to post your nude content.

So in your follow up example, there is no other platform that would offer the same kind of service and target audience for sex workers that Substack does.


I agree, and my reading of Substack's content guidelines is that this would be allowed. A sex worker could write on Substack about issues important to their community, and then link to their Onlyfans for the porn. That means people who want to avoid the porn could easily do so, and those who want to see it know exactly where to go.


Given your comments about deplatforming, how do you feel about OP's point about how Substack doesn't take too kindly to sex workers and similar content on it's platform? You seem to have missed that point and took, IMO probably too much, umbrage around the phrase "racists and abusers".


This follow-up question is being down voted for the personal attack at the end, and rightly so, but I would still be curious to see a response to the larger point about that kind of content from someone at Substack.


Parler has a much stronger association with socio-political subcultures that like to say things that are, speaking with a generosity that borders on divinity, "controversial". Substack has cultivated a much less culturally biased/extremist writerbase, to my observation. They seem to have successfully targeted writers who just want to write, and not writers who are specifically the angry and disaffected from one side of one part of the world's political binary.

I.e. I think Substack's content is less likely to violate any rules (though I can only speak with so much confidence, having not read every article on Substack).


Harmful and illegal activities

We don’t allow content that promotes harmful or illegal activities, including material that advocates, threatens, or shows you causing harm to yourself, other people, or animals.

...

Nudity, porn, erotica

We don’t allow porn or sexually exploitative content on Substack. We do allow depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature. However, we may hide this content from Substack’s discovery features, including search and on Substack.com.

Plenty of censorship in those paragraphs to any free speech absolutist who strives for ideological consistency. They're "cancelling" enormous amounts of what many consider free expression.


I think we can make a meaningful distinction between not carrying smut and engaging in viewpoint discrimination. When it comes to government censorship,, First Amendment doctrine easily distinguishes between content neutrality and viewpoint neutrality. Content neutrality is the broader concept but applies in less circumstances than viewpoint neutrality, which pretty much applies anywhere. So there's plenty of venues where the government can ban nudity and pornography and such, but can't ban opposing viewpoints from being expressed.


I hope the app is using Ionic/capacitor so that it can reuse parts of the web frontend code.


The app is written in Swift, they could pretty easily use a webview to reuse some of their existing frontend without bringing in a framework.


Pure marketing post, will never use your app or service. This is hackernews not facebook




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