> Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read.

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.

> Counterpoint from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that. You need a push mechanism to reach readers.

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.

* https://wordpress.com/support/import-from-substack/

What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?

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.

It's not really a counterpoint when it's addressed in the article.

"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'm outside the loop so please forgive me, but what is different between substack and a self managed mailing list?

I've been subscribed to a few website/blogs newsletters for years and they appear to work fine, and I think the owners are not particularly technical, there's WordPress plugins.

oh I can tell you that lately, hundreds of bots are very much visiting my website every day in volumes that I have never seen in the past... Unsure that's a good news though

I think you're conflating two things. You can absolutely have your own website, and still use Substack. Then if you do have to move off Substack, you aren't "moving" in the sense that your URLs remain the same.

Getting a list of your existing subscribers' emails from Substack in order to migrate notifications to your new platform (hosted behind the same domain name you own) is of course an important part of moving, though.

The argument from the article is that you should be hosting your writing on blog.mywebsite.com, not mywebsite.substack.com, even if those two pages are identical and are both hosted by Substack. That's the entire point it's trying to make.

Whether or not your readers visit your website or consume your content entirely through email notifications isn't relevant to the point the author was trying to make. Because despite your absolutist "no one", some people will visit your website, and having a stable location that you control yourself is important. (Also please consider that while you may have been publishing on the internet for decades, your experience may not be universal.)

It is absolutely crazy to me that anyone with a serious web presence doesn't have their own domain name, even if that website is backed by someone else's hosted platform.

The lift to make your own website is so low now, and the benefits of future-proofing are so great that it's just the right decision to make. You don’t even have to drive all your readers there, you’ll just have it available for everyone if the audience ever decides to gradually move on from substack (which seems to happen pretty much every social media platform).

you said: "...from someone who's been publishing on the internet for decades: no one will visit your website"

This is false.

It's more accurate to say that "no one will visit your website if you do not properly setup a distribution ecosystem".

It's hard work. But it works. All of my companies have been built by writing online --> distribution --> people finding my/our stuff.

Your experience of 'doing it for decades' reveals that publishing, in of itself, does nothing. And if all people do is publish (without the distribution engine), then, I agree it's a waste of time.

I write 1 hour per day. I spend about 2 hours working on distribution. Sometimes, I spend 4 hours on distribution.

> You need a push mechanism to reach readers.

Ghost blog includes newsletter for push.

If you write news, posts that needs discussion, information that relatively quickly becomes obsolete, then probably yes, you won't want a website because few people will search for it deliberately.

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.

Yeah so I guess the hundreds of billions of page views from organic search every single month is just a total myth?

As somebody who has made a lot of money publishing on the internet you absolutely can get people to read your website organically but it takes specific strategies and you can't just write about whatever you want however you want and expect traffic.

I feel like the transition from substack to website + newsletter wouldn't be terrible, although I'm sure your traffic would decrease after making the switch.

> so that you can move somewhere else down the line

And potentiality lose all your precious posts and reader discussions in the process? That's part of the special value of having a website.

How do people get to your Substack? Does it have a recommendations system like social media?

Agreed.

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.

You mention RSS, but Substack is about paid subscribers, is it not? What do you think converts a Substack user to a subscriber; is it just a numbers game?

> no one will visit your website.

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.

Why not do all automatically? My concern with substack is that it's a single point of truth. If they decide to blanket paywall everything after they sell to private equity for example. Or start to force all users to pay to be visible at all including old content. You're at the mercy of whatever they decide.

We've seen it so often.

I mean, can't you accomplish the same thing with "enter your email/social handle to be notified when I post something"?

I actively skip stuff that’s on substack just like I do medium and blogger. Maybe there’s good stuff on there but it’s usually a by-word for slop. I figure if anyone has anything that interesting to say they’d make the effort and put it up on something more serious looking.

It's addressed in the article

the point is that they are not mutually exclusive. you can have both. just don't put all your eggs in the corporate basket

Yes, I think people who move away from Substack already need to have a brand and a number of followers to drive people to their personal websites, even if they use Ghost. And I do get the concerns that Substack has some super bizarre and awful content in the mix. Their feed shows me stuff every once in a while, from uber-conservative right wing Christians to conspiracy theory nonsense. But my dumb soccer blog/podcast putters along and grows slowly, in some cases, not even from social media posts. It's an interesting platform.

> So no, there's no special value to having a website or syndicating across the web.

Please don't post sh1t like this as some expert conclusion. Young and gullible people might believe confident but wrong talk like this.

Substack also comes with a brand, and having a substack is a social cue that you are a higher status person, it goes with the beefed up LinkedIn profile, playing tennis and conspicuous consumption.

Having a substack shows that you are time rich, yet at the same time, it does not come with overtones of vanity. Serious discourse allegedly goes on with substack, if you are writing there, then you are rolling it with the pros.

Yet every platform goes through phases, ending with the inevitable 'enshittification'. Soon the reader will see substack as a byword for best avoided, much like having to download a PDF or open an inevitably paywalled mainstream media news article, not worth the click.

With one's own website you are outside of the loop, and the theory still holds that, if you have anything worth seeing, they will come. However, most people will stay on platforms until there is something to actually buy.

Recently I was doom scrolling until I came across this vacuum cleaner for cats, that enables you to harvest the fur. I want this as a joke present for a cat I know, so I was prepared to escape the platform to buy the product. If it was a lengthy essay on how to make felt clothing from cat fur on substack, then I probably would not have clicked. Yes I am that shallow!

Hence, if you have something to sell, then an independent website is what you want, and a sales funnel to get people there. This does mean social media, the newsletter, SEO, the substack and even paid advertising.

Not everyone has something to sell though.

this tide will turn, and the day of reckoning is coming for AI slop and large domains owning the search results. small publishers are going to have their time very soon.

> no one will visit your website. It's as simple as that.

I am not convinced. My traffic counter spins quite rapidly, and I only publish on http://dmitry.gr

Fediverse. We need to push Fediverse