alt Hacker NewsSubstack writers, you need a website
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I was reading and reading and thinking that's the ages old advise POSSE, and then they even mention the Indieweb, nice.
If you ever need a home. I built it mainly for me and all the stuff that I work on.
I kind of agree with the author, but having such places is very convenient for most people considering most people do not know how to make websites. Yes, it is easy nowadays, but it is still a hurdle for many.
Specifically on Substack though: I immediately close if a link I clicked is Substack. Many reasons for that. I find it very unpleasant to read stuff there, because of that banners and general design of the website. It all look generic and I hate generic. Second reason and even more important for me is that Substack platforms Nazis and white supremacists and they have apparently no problem about it.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
Substack fails to deliver the single thing it supposed to do - great reading experience.
The website itself is slow, it cannot render the whole comments section, it constantly nags readers with subscribe forms.
It can not handle single account across my subscriptions.
Its just crap.
Substack writers, you need to move to Ghost.
Honestly, I shut down my webiste and Medium, then moved to Substack because they solved the "get paid for my writing" problem.
In 2022, Medium was defacto blogging platform and getting into their paid program was close to impossible.
In the first 2 days of setting up Subtack I got a 5 dollar deposit from my first paying reader. I couldn't have done that on either Medium or my personal blog.
Substack is unreadable for anyone in Australia, as it forces you unnecessarily through age verification.
Wake up. The ad revenue model of websites is dying.
I think https://indieweb.org/POSSE is generally a good compromise.
Frankly, if writing is becoming a serious business for you, it's probably better to work across ALL of Substack/personal site/X/etc. They're all worthwhile distribution and monetization channels and can serve different purposes.
Another reason for having a designed website instead of just a Substack is marketing. When I visit a site and see that it’s a Substack I don’t want to stay and explore. It feels generic and that hurts the writing. Making a custom site isn’t much trouble, especially these days so defaulting to Substack feels a little unconsidered
Amen to that
My biggest grievance with Substack is that the font treatment (kerning is way off), coloring, spacing, etc of all of the posts is difficult to read. I can't read anything on Substack without a 3rd party reader tool. This is ironic because the core competency of a publishing tool is ensuring that your audience can read the content.
so true ! since 1995 !
Isn't Substack's whole premise that you get raw cash for you priceless writing, not worrying about SEO and other crap?
Those without an actual domain are sure very exposed.
The age of the individual is over...
If you have a substack you probably do not need a website. You probably need a personal diary.
Thank you for saying this.
Every time I see a substack article I simply do not open it, because if I do, especially on mobile, 90% of the screen will be covered for popups banners and what not
Did we really learn nothing from Medium's situation?
Did Wordpress write this?
The page is AI slop, don't waste your time
I run an independent technical homepage. The monthly cost is about $65 USD. Of course, it's money I can spend on a hobby, but it's still quite a lot. The only reason I can manage it is because I'm a programmer—I can handle things like caching strategies and various other tedious tasks. I get about 600 visitors a day.(The site could be hosted much more cheaply. I deliberately run a more involved architecture because part of its purpose is to serve as an operational portfolio. I needed public evidence that I could design, deploy, monitor, and operate a real system over time. Generally, for a site of about my size, around $40 a month should be enough.)
Writing itself takes a lot of effort.
First:
1.You have to define your target audience.
2.You have to choose topics they'll find interesting.
3.You need to collect materials.
4.You read through the materials, build the structure, and go through multiple drafts and revisions.
Even a short post usually takes about a week. And even after all that, will people actually read it? Not really. So I have to promote it on external sites like HN and Reddit, and keep updating the sitemap until my site starts showing up in Google search results.
The problem is that most people want to make money through writing. That's completely understandable. With the economy getting tougher, even hobbies cost money.
The issue is that once you step away from platforms like Substack and Medium, it becomes much harder for people to find your content, and you lose the community itself. In fact, that's the real strength of Substack and Medium—people are already there to spend money because they're earning from the same ecosystem. But if you move to an independent site, even putting up ads can cause strong backlash (especially since Google often shows low-quality ads—like porn ads—to people who don't share their personal data).
In my case, I created my site because I needed a portfolio that made me look professional. Since I don't have experience at prestigious companies or universities, and I've mostly moved between small contractors, I needed something to show that I know certain things, have relevant experience, and have built actual products. (In the Korean market, the only work available to programmers without capital is small NDA-bound jobs.)
On the other hand, people with good careers don't need to take this risk—their reputation comes from successful products they've worked on in the market.
So I needed a metric like 'I run my own site, it uses MSA, and I have experience running it stably over the long term.' Of course, I could list the projects I've worked on, but most of them don't have a strong track record of market success. So I think that unless you're in a special situation, it's better to stay within existing writing communities.
Obligatory:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...
Archive link: https://archive.ph/rfnc5
Yet another walled garden leveraging network effects
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TLDR: POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
Technically you do not own domain. You just rent it from registrar for yearly fee.