[HN Gopher] On Substack Centralization
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On Substack Centralization
Author : rpgbr
Score : 6 points
Date : 2022-11-15 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (notes.ghed.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (notes.ghed.in)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's the other way around. Substack gets almost all of their
| revenue from two handfuls of creators. If those creators aren't
| 110% satisfied they can jump ship.
|
| If it's just a matter of email newsletters, Substack is almost
| trivial to reproduce. Last time I wrote an email newsletter
| script it took an afternoon to set up in AWS. Adding a payment
| gateway to that would not be hard. If somebody is making $100,000
| a year on Substack it would be very practical for them to go off
| on their own.
|
| Substack wants to be "more than an email newsletter company" and
| offer podcasts, and camgirl rooms video chat, etc. Those look a
| little harder to me but maybe that's just because I haven't built
| media delivery systems. They don't have any of the two-sided
| markets that make social media platforms so hard to overthrow.
|
| A thought experiment: many of Substack's best authors are right-
| wing. Suppose substack got caught up in the culture wars. A
| right-winger could create a Substack clone that is a "safe space"
| for them and creators could switch to that with a business model
| that works from day one. No pesky advertisers, content moderation
| or the other problems that make something like _Truth Social_ so
| hard to get off the ground.
|
| Substack's business is not as bad as Uber's but they have no
| moat.
| rpgbr wrote:
| Yeap. Sendy[1] costs USD 69 (one-payment purchase) and sending
| messages via AWS is peanuts. It's a far cry from Substack's
| polish, but it works great with some HTML/CSS knowledge.
|
| The problem will arise when those two handfuls of creators
| leave or aren't enough.
| jacobobryant wrote:
| The biggest immediate downside for writers of Substack's
| centralization IMO is that they've started introducing some
| subtle lock-in with their reader app. Substack is quick to say
| that you can always export your email list and move to a
| different newsletter provider. But if your readers have built a
| habit of reading things in the Substack app instead of their
| email inbox, then moving your email list somewhere else means
| your readers will be less likely to engage with your newsletter.
|
| If Substack actually cares about preserving writers'
| independence, they should provide a way for writers who switch
| platforms to continue delivering their newsletters to the app.
| Switching platforms should not force behavioral changes on
| readers. For example, they could give app users an
| @inbox.substack.com (or whatever) address. Anything sent to that
| address will show up in the app. When you export your list of
| Substack subscribers, you get both their regular address and the
| @inbox.substack.com address, so you can continue delivering to
| both their email inbox and the Substack app.
|
| Until they do that, I'll continue to view their claims of putting
| writers in charge with a measure of wariness. I do think
| Substack/Substack's founders are sincere, actually. I don't think
| they're twirling their mustaches, thinking "How can we lock
| people into our platform?" They're just way too confident in the
| righteousness of their cause, and as a result I don't think they
| look inward enough in situations where the interests of Substack,
| writers, and readers conflict.[1]
|
| (And no, using a paid subscription model instead of ads doesn't
| magically make all incentive alignment problems go away.)
|
| [1] For example:
| https://twitter.com/bmorrissey/status/1501568928799244290. When
| the app was launched, by default they stopped sending emails to
| people who installed the app, which would hasten the
| inbox->Substack app behavioral shift I discussed above,
| strengthening lock-in. They switched it to opt-in after backlash
| from writers.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| Think it's wiser for writers to use ghost.org instead (can be
| self-hosted, extensible, open source, MIT license)
| rpgbr wrote:
| It's a tricky problem indeed, this one regarding their app,
| although not a surprising one. Last month, Hamish McKenzie
| (cofounder) wrote[1] that "the trend that Substack is part of
| is not a newsletter trend, or even the much-hyped creator
| economy". So, an app that distance subscribers from e-mail was
| expected.
|
| Btw, giving a special address would increase the lock-in, IMHO.
| The newsletter owner would be dependent of Substacks
| benevolence forever.
|
| As I wrote, I recognize Substack as a force for good, but there
| are cracks in their promise and considering it's a VC-backed
| startup, things only tend to get worse in the long run.
|
| [1] https://on.substack.com/p/please-stop-calling-it-the-
| newslet...
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