Please don't post sh1t like this as some expert conclusion. Young and gullible people might believe confident but wrong talk like this.
How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future? That's the path basically every other platform has gone down.
So if they stop doing the "email my subscribers whenever I post" step, another service will fill the gap pretty quick.
Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
I can hear Substack marketing saying that “We don’t have any intention to put you into a vendor-lock.”
I had a lot of discussions with companies about their marketing.
Why do you upload your events’ photos to FB instead of your site?
Why do you have news on LI feed and don’t make it a post on your site as well?
Do you think they can hear it? :)
Substack is going to become a similar service as FB, LI are… no possibility to export your data easily or not at all.
You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?
Thus they argue that you should not trust your things to other people but do it yourself, because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Nope. At best you merely know what your current self intends to do in the future. Whether you'll do them then, or whether you'll even still want to do them then, or be able to do them then, or have regretted ever wanting to do them, and many other such things, we don't know.
>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Furthermore the phrase "some things" does not actually mean all things.
So again, trying to put it another way to clarify anything that may have been unclear:
You can be reasonably certain at the time that you need to make a decision that you will try to do what you believe is the best for you. I will now not go on to make an exhaustive list showing every way that you in the future may not do what is right for you because it is normally understood that there are numerous ways in which the reasonable expectations of people can be countered but nonetheless, the reasonable expectations will still tend to hold more than any of the countering scenarios. This is why they are the reasonable expectations, while the countering scenarios are the notable exceptions that often show up in sensational news reports and fiction.
And finally I should note this comes down to the principle, which I would have thought was clear from my previous post but evidently not, that if you can reasonably expect that future you will try to do what future you thinks is best for them, you can just as reasonably expect that the future corporation you are buying a service from will try to what the future corporation thinks is best for them, without giving much consideration for what is best for you.
I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
You absolutely can know something about what someone will do in the future. You gain those insights by looking at their past and present behavior and the behavior of others in similar circumstances. Hackers tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can often see where things are heading. Enshittification is a pretty smart bet.
"The biggest pushback I hear from writers is: “But my website doesn’t have an audience! Substack does.”
But you don’t have to completely abandon social media or platforms like Substack to protect your autonomy (personally, I prefer the word sovereignty but it does sound a tad dramatic)."
I think that one should at least have one's own domain instead of example.substack.com. Substack allows for exporting posts (which would be good to do regularly just for backups in case of (account) compromise):
* https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037466012-...
so if you ever feel like the company is acting questionably, you can take that file and bring it in elsewhere, e.g.
I thought about this question when I recently started writing a few articles on Substack.
I chose not to use my own domain, even though I have a few.
Why? I want my writing to outlive me.
When I am no longer able to pay for domain renewals, my own domains will expire. Hopefully {my-hn-username}.substack.com will still be around.
Time will tell.
Donate to archive.org.
What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.
Most people don't read most newsletters. Some people read some.
This Saturday I sent an email. It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people. 780 people clicked on a link.
I tweeted the same email as a link and got pretty good engagement! 20 likes, 2 retweets – that's decent for me these days. It was seen 1400 times. 78 people clicked on a link.
I have roughly the same number of followers as I do email subscribers.
Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:
example.com?re=you@yourwebsite.com&article=1234
Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web.
> What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts?
On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.
Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.
I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.
Ghost blog includes newsletter for push.
But if you're writing for yourself, articles with multimedia, or want to use advanced features, no platform provides anything close to what you can do on your website.
Take a look at https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ for example.
I promise you that Bartosz would be bummed out if he had an audience of one. And while relying on HN to accidentally discover you can work, it's not a sustainable model for anything.
Every time I see posts like this one and go into comments, everyone in the comments treat writing as a hobby which they would like to turn into work and earn money from, more or less. And I suppose the words "writing" and "blogging" associate with the community around themselves in their minds, not with the text information per se.
I'm writing technical articles (blog posts) my whole life most of the time as a result of me learning something new, to structure the information on some topic for myself and others.
If it's a research, I make a post with all the information and final result of it in public, primarily for myself and sometimes for others, because 95% of the time it's not secret and there's no point to store it privately.
If it's a helpful information (software: unofficial bugfix, hacky workaround, poorly documented feature somewhere, etc), I want it to be searchable/indexed, only that.
I don't care about attribution, about who reads my writing (be it me, my friends, people I don't know, or AI), I have no incentive to push (as in post here or on social networks) or promote these articles in any way. I don't want people to get back to my site, to subscribe to it, or to build a community around it.
If the user types "How do I solve issue X" and by a mere coincidence I solved and documented it, I don't care if the user gets the solution from my website, from the scrape & repost websites, or from AI agent which scraped the site. If this helps the user to fix the issue or to learn something new, every way is fine for me!
And then they spend hours every day doomscrolling and binge watching shit
I have a blog, I don't really promote it, and no one reads it.
Now, there is an argument that there's nothing on my blog worth reading, and yeah there might be truth to that, but regardless my traffic is on the order like 100 unique views per month, and I don't know what percentage of that is just scraping bots.
I'm fine with this, I had no delusions of becoming a famous writer or making any money from it or anything, my blog is basically just a dumping ground for thoughts that I think are interesting, but if I actually did care about people visiting my blog I would probably use Substack or something similar.
Yep, let's suppose an average HN user reads 30-100 articles a month on independent websites (personal domains) posted on HN. Out of 100, he probably subscribes to 0-2 at best (via RSS/e-mail). Now, imagine how many times you need to appear on HN to get your own audience. There is too much friction for a user to subscribe.
Substack is similar to a social platform. People open it to read new articles in a similar way to HN, and they can subscribe to anyone by pressing a single button. There is a recommendation feed as well.
Since Google search for tech content is dead, getting views on independent blogs is extremely hard.
Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.
> Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.” […] The newsletter's logo is a swastika and it has pushed Holocaust denialism along with news and opinion content for the 'White Nationalist Community.' […] Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.
There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content, nor that they were ever "proud" of it. A cursory inspection shows that while the "facing" page for the group in question still loads, the underlying profile and content are all gone.
It is a known tactic of agitators to post objectionable (or even highly illegal) content on distribution networks (or in communities) they dislike and then try to get media attention attributing it to the network/community rather than themselves.
One of the first newsy types to report this particular issue, but certainly not the only one. See https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p..., which quotes a press release from Substack. Arguably, my source is therefore Substack themselves, via Ars Technica.
> Something which Wikipedia editors would be tripping over each other to evidence if it were true, but their article says nothing about it.
Actually, this information is on Wikipedia. There's one NYT link on the Andreessen Horowitz article, and several paragraphs on Marc Andreessen's. I don't know enough about US politics to know whether all this adds up to "extreme far right rhetoric" (and I'd rather not debate that here), but there's definitely extreme, and right-wing, political advocacy described in Marc Andreessen's article. I have not confirmed whether the claims in the Wikipedia article are correct; if you dispute them, then please let me know as a courtesy (I like having accurate knowledge), then take it up with the Wikipedia editors.
> There is nothing to demonstrate the claim that Substack "continues, proudly" to host such content,
But they do continue to host it. This has been a problem for years (see e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e..., https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...). Do you need an article from last month? Or do I need to link you to a Nazi blog directly? They are not very hard to find: just type "site:substack.com" followed by some keywords. It took me 20 seconds to find one called "White Free Press", with such wonderful articles as "David Lane and the Foundations of His Racial Ideology", "The Contemporary Conceptual Framework of the White Ethnostate", and "The Immutable Animosity: blacts [sic] hate White People, and Nothing Can Change It".
> It is a known tactic of agitators […]
Quoting the Ars Technica article:
> Of those accounts created in February, only the Substack account is still online, which Fisher-Birch suggested likely sends a message to Nazi groups that their Substack content is “less likely to be removed than other platforms.” At least one Terrorgram-adjacent white supremacist account that Fisher-Birch found in March 2024 confirmed that Substack was viewed as a back-up to Telegram because it was that much more reliable to post content there.
> “Groups that want to recruit members or build a neo-fascist counter-culture see Substack as a way to get their message out,” Fisher-Birch told Ars.
I don't think "this is all some kind of contrived false flag operation" is a particularly likely explanation.
I am not convinced. My traffic counter spins quite rapidly, and I only publish on http://dmitry.gr
There's a big audience for that that's actively search for such keywords.
Not the same with essays or fiction writing