Medium and Substack are a plight on the web. Substack is better but it'll go the same way as Medium. They start out nice, but then become slow with trackers and what-have-you, and then start charging a commission to read: bait-and-walled-garden. I know not everyone is a programmer and not everyone can make their own website, but I've started to yearn for a livejournal or blogger site and wince when I find myself on a medium.com page
It's a shame as there are economies of scale to having a big platform too.
Like I can (and do) host a static blog, but I don't have much time to attend to it - so it's nice on the main platforms that they handle comments and so on.
Comments were the only annoying thing on my old site. I used disqus but then that was rather invasive and annoying.
A single SQLite3 table and a post, approve and delete end points would be about 100 lines of code and would cater for 90% of hobby/personal sites
Part of the reason the web is so soulless and drab is that people no longer have the skills to create simple functionality. I almost yearn for the days of PHP
The problem is that substack also solves for distribution.
Blogger doesn't but I don't think any VC backed version of this can succeed because ultimately our craving is to have a free space to read quality content and the incentive of these platforms is to maximise revenue which just don't go hand in hand.
So the result is this dissonance.
I hope one day we will see a platform that can both sustain (without the goal of going IPO)
>Substack’s main revenue source is that it keeps 10% of all revenue from paid subscriptions. That means they’re under constant pressure to increase the number of paid subscriptions, and the amount that people are paying for those subscriptions. Ghost, and most other newsletter platforms, charge volume-based usage fees. That means those platforms can let individual writers choose how and when to prompt readers to consider a paid subscription.
>It’s much easier to avoid the temptation to implement dark patterns if you have a sustainable business model in the first place.
I don't have a strong preference for Ghost vs. Substack, but I don't understand this reasoning. I'm not even sure which platform they're accusing of using dark patterns.
Both platforms are incentivized to earn revenue to fund the platform because a publishing platform can't survive if people aren't paying for it. I don't see why it's a dark pattern to make the funding a flat 10% of people who charge vs. allow platform publishers to do a freemium model.
Neither choice seems obviously more sustainable to me than the other.
With volume-based fees you only have one type of user. Costs and benefits are predictable, and it's clear who you're providing the service to (the writers) so the company's goals are better aligned with those of their clients: attract more people to the platform. It's the writer the one tasked with deciding how to monetize those subscribers.
On the other hand, taking revenue off paid subscriptions means they have two types of users, free and paying. Even inside paying customers they'll have classes, as not all subscriptions cost the same. This means that the company has an incentive to implement dark patterns that convert users from free to paid, or from lower tiers to higher tiers, even when that is not in the best interest of the writer.
But there are 3 parties here: writer, reader and platform, for want of a better word.
It needs to reward them all to a point it is sustainable.
I don't frequent Substack much so maybe it's not apparent to me, but given it's business model promoting paid should be expected surely? Is that a dark pattern? Certainly feels it's low down the spectrum when compared with most online marketplaces.
The difference is clear if you go to Ghost Pro's pricing page[1], which looks just like SquareSpace's or WordPress'[2]. The product is the software, support, and hosting. Ghost is focused on providing value directly to the writers. Substack doesn't have a pricing page and their incentives are much more murky. They want to attract writers and subscribers to the platform, but they don't really care if it is the best experience for either group. If they think of some feature that writers hate, but it increases the number of subscribers or some other metric, Substack is going to implement it.
>They want to attract writers and subscribers to the platform, but they don't really care if it is the best experience for either group. If they think of some feature that writers hate, but it increases the number of subscribers or some other metric, Substack is going to implement it.
Aren't both platforms vulnerable to this? Ghost charges more when publishers have more members (paid or free), so they similarly have an incentive to increase member signups even if it doesn't financially benefit the publisher.
To be clear, both Ghost's and Substack's funding models seem fine to me. It's hard to perfectly align the incentives of the platform, the publishers, and the readers, but both Ghost and Substack have what feels to me like sensible enough alignment.
The arguments against Substack feel like motivated reasoning for people who disagree with other aspects of Substack (VC funding, positions on free speech).
Ghost is intentionally built as a nonprofit with set caps on its growth: https://ghost.org/about/
It makes revenue, largely from its hosted service (which is more akin to WordPress than Substack), but it is intentionally built to not follow the VC model.
It’s an annoying trend that people extrgrate to make a point. Anything they don’t like is a dark pattern or scam or something.
It’s the sort of moral grandstanding that developers do about stupid small stuff that annoys me about working in tech. Like somehow it’s a bad thing for a newsletter platform to optimise to help their customers grow.
And really Substack doesn’t just fill up your subscriber counts it heavily filters out bad sign ups and whatnot. My subscriber count on my brand new newsletter is at 20 but looking at the traffic stats it’s blocked out 30-40 “subscribers” and from my experience on other newsletter those will be fake emails where people put in insults because they’re offended you asked them if they would like to subscribe.
> Like somehow it’s a bad thing for a newsletter platform to optimise to help their customers grow.
> where people put in insults because they’re offended you asked them if they would like to subscribe.
It's a bad thing because people don't like the resulting UX, as your experience indicates. Interesting that Substack is aggressive enough in pushing folks to subscribe that they need to build subscription blocking because people hate the nagging so much they submit insulting email addresses. You would think this would be an indication to both Substack and their customers that the UX needs significant work.
I think the complaint is that Substack is incentivized to make things worse for readers by constantly prompting them to subscribe, encouraging authors to paywall content and insert subscription ads into their articles, etc. They might be tempted to include dark patterns that make it hard to unsubscribe or something, because every paid subscriber is more money for them.
Since Ghost gets paid regardless of who subscribes, readers only feel this pressure if they author decides they want more subscribers. Free and paid subscribers count the same, so there's no temptation to obfuscate anything or make subscription management less straightforward.
That's my interpretation, I don't necessarily agree that one is more sustainable than the other but I think that's what they're talking about.
> Since Ghost gets paid regardless of who subscribe
This isn't true.
If you have over 500 subscribers, Ghost charges you more per month. When you go above 1,000 subscribers, there's another price tier. Then there's another tier at 10,000 subscribers.
I don't want to say they are exactly equivalent to Substack because they aren't. But Ghost gets more money if there are more subscribers.
Substack has to pay back its VC investors who expect a massive return. That alone is enough to ruin most of these services. But Substack’s revenue model incentivizes bad behavior on their part. Whereas Ghost apparently charges by usage. So, the incentives for providing good service are aligned with the goals of their customers, rather than their investors.
I like substack and write my newsletter on it. That being said, I agree with the author that random platform changes can be very annoying. The only true antitode of sanity is self-hosted, and Ghost self-hosted is an example of this.
That being said, I think the big problem with the internet is the very existence of these sorts of large-tech platforms. I wish such platforms didn't exist at all, and people just went to small websites. Following Ivan Illich, I wish there were a "speed/size limit" on the internet so that companies beyond a certain size like Google, Medium, Substack, etc. were precluded from existing.
I don't know how configurable Ghost is but I suspect you will still have some problems if they introduce features that you don't like. You may be able to lag for a few versions but eventually there will be security vulnerabilities discovered, ecosystem features like plugins will grow incompatible and other general bitrot. Self-hosting will definitely give you a thick insulating layer, but upstream direction will eventually work its way through.
What are some of the changes to substack that are annoying? The only thing I don't like is that banner to sign up but that's always been there.
I think a lot of people are overthinking it. Substack wants to continue to be a dominant platform for publishing. Sure they want revenue but if you were to ask leadership whether they would trade 50% of traffic for some marginal increase in revenue they would prob say no. Companies aren't naive profit maximizing.
If you never heard of fast food chains and believed all the worse things about free markets you would certainly assume McDonald's charges for ketchup. Its insane of them not to! Leaving money on the table, plus allowing abuse. But they don't because customers would just think it's dick, at least in the US. And you see other trends over the years like giving free cups of water which def loses them revenue. That's all to say companies have economic incentives but not this naive short term view that critics accuse them of
> the only thing I don't like is that banner to sign but that's always been there.
How about a popup that darkens the page and obscures the text to ask you to sign up? That's been on Substack for at least a year.
All these startups work the exact same way: promise to offer something better than the enshittified incumbent (Medium), then take on many of the same enshittified attributes because they can't juice their KPIs without a bothersome UX.
Such a cap would have a whole slew of bad effects, many unforeseeable. It's not even possible to say if the world wide Internet would be possible with an arbitrary size or scope limit. Even worse if it did work; the imposition of such a control scheme would create a corporate of far more power (and likely worse tendencies) than any that currently exist.
I agree that a speed/size limit don't work, plus it will skyrocket the energy consumption of internet a lot by making some technologies infeasible or very inefficient.
Also, this is a "technological solution for a social problem", so it's infeasible to begin with.
OTOH, I have no answers for a solution to human greed, except self-control. But, this can't be applied universally either.
> I wish such platforms didn't exist at all, and people just went to small websites.
I wish it too but at this point this is basically pining for Usenet while everyone is on PhpBB-boards. The world has moved on and won’t be coming back.
UX-wise, what is the difference between Usenet and PhpBB? Both offer threaded topics, chronologically ordered. There are no "likes" or other gamification features. You can subscribe to topics via email and respond via email with both.
I highly recommend RSS, it still works great. I saw the single file Django post here yesterday and subscribed. This (older) post was in my feed, I liked it, and I shared it out. Because you are curating your feed, it has a great signal to noise ratio.
I personally like Mataroa and smol.pub a lot. No nonsense, absolutely minimal spaces to put your thoughts on. I'm not in it for the money, and Mataroa fills what I needs pretty nicely.
It stores my small image files, plus markdown files, and represent them as readable coherent block. It provides RSS and Newsletters (which I have disabled), and basic analytics.
It looks cool! But, can I fully self-host it and not just point it at my domain? I would support the project but as a sysadmin, I just have an urge to run what I can on my hardware.
> I wish there were a "speed/size limit" on the internet so that companies beyond a certain size
I assume you are aware that this is a natural tendency towards economies of scale? It’s not tenable to impose arbitrary limits with no grounded reason.
No, I keep a blog that is self-hosted. I find that self-hosted is the best for ultimate control but unfortunately it's much easier to reach larger audiences with platforms like Substack, Medium, YouTube, etc.
For what it’s worth, I have been running a conference on Substack for over a year and it’s performed much better than I expected. I’m able to quickly keep people informed of new developments, reliably with a high open rate (around 40%). It’s easily the most important communication channel for making things work.
In September I also launched a podcast for the conference and their platform has made it incredibly easy. I just upload the video and write the show notes. They handle extracting the audio version, generating the transcript and publishing to all of the various platforms while hosting the video too.
I personally haven’t seen any benefit or engagement from their attempt at social media though.
Carolina Code Conference and Carolina Code Cast if you’re curious.
I use Ghost for a while now and it's fantastic. The fact that it's open-source, self-hostable, super customizable (themes), has free/premium memberships and can be used both as a blog and newsletter is what makes me stick to it.
As we saw recently with Mastodon, for a very large section of users, views on "open-source, self-hostable and super customizable" will range from "don't care" at best to "that's too much hassle, pass" at worst.
People just want to write their article and have it come up at the top of Google search results, that's the hype.
Is anyone using Ghost and unhappy with it or moving away from it?
I recently set up a blog (a pretty private, small scale travel diary to share with close family as I don't use social media) and did some research before I chose something. With no desire for a newsletter or monetisation or SEO or any of those features I still found the experience of spinning up a Ghost containter[1] got me from 0 to a really good and featureful blog.
The composer works well out of the box on a phone, the defaults are fairly sane, and the selection of out of the box themes is pretty well thought out.
In the past I've used Hugo or other static generators for this kind of thing. That's been far more work for a less user friendly result and the mobile workflow for posting isn't very kind even on a tablet.
Something not really covered in the article is the SEO boost from using substack and an easier conversion if you ever decide to monetise your blog directly.
Yes, let's make everyone learn how to deploy static webpages just so they can write a blog or newsletter (◔_◔) (and I say this as someone that has used Jekyll for over a decade)
You know, I'm not sure why this is always put up as some kind of unreasonable expectation. But society has various expectations about skills needed to survive and thrive in the modern day - while not entirely universal, driving might be one of those expectations.
Would it be crazy to expect one of those skills to be basic computer & sysadmin knowledge? With that, I would expect most people could host a site on, say, GH pages or similar
It’s difficult to do. Not difficult for you or I, but Substack, Medium etc cater to a much wider audience than tech nerds and they have zero capacity for sysop work.
recent google algo changes seem to penalize domains with a low domain rank even more. if you want to be found through search it makes sense to use an established platform.
Readit News
Like I can (and do) host a static blog, but I don't have much time to attend to it - so it's nice on the main platforms that they handle comments and so on.
[1] https://grahammacphee.com/writing/mastodon-blog-comments
[2] https://github.com/giscus/giscus
A single SQLite3 table and a post, approve and delete end points would be about 100 lines of code and would cater for 90% of hobby/personal sites
Part of the reason the web is so soulless and drab is that people no longer have the skills to create simple functionality. I almost yearn for the days of PHP
Blogger doesn't but I don't think any VC backed version of this can succeed because ultimately our craving is to have a free space to read quality content and the incentive of these platforms is to maximise revenue which just don't go hand in hand.
So the result is this dissonance.
I hope one day we will see a platform that can both sustain (without the goal of going IPO)
We need bootstrapped Medium in a way.
>It’s much easier to avoid the temptation to implement dark patterns if you have a sustainable business model in the first place.
I don't have a strong preference for Ghost vs. Substack, but I don't understand this reasoning. I'm not even sure which platform they're accusing of using dark patterns.
Both platforms are incentivized to earn revenue to fund the platform because a publishing platform can't survive if people aren't paying for it. I don't see why it's a dark pattern to make the funding a flat 10% of people who charge vs. allow platform publishers to do a freemium model.
Neither choice seems obviously more sustainable to me than the other.
On the other hand, taking revenue off paid subscriptions means they have two types of users, free and paying. Even inside paying customers they'll have classes, as not all subscriptions cost the same. This means that the company has an incentive to implement dark patterns that convert users from free to paid, or from lower tiers to higher tiers, even when that is not in the best interest of the writer.
It needs to reward them all to a point it is sustainable.
I don't frequent Substack much so maybe it's not apparent to me, but given it's business model promoting paid should be expected surely? Is that a dark pattern? Certainly feels it's low down the spectrum when compared with most online marketplaces.
1. https://ghost.org/pricing/ 2. https://wordpress.com/pricing/
I agree that Substack doesn't have pricing page per se, but they have this, which seems pretty transparent to me:
https://substack.com/going-paid
>They want to attract writers and subscribers to the platform, but they don't really care if it is the best experience for either group. If they think of some feature that writers hate, but it increases the number of subscribers or some other metric, Substack is going to implement it.
Aren't both platforms vulnerable to this? Ghost charges more when publishers have more members (paid or free), so they similarly have an incentive to increase member signups even if it doesn't financially benefit the publisher.
To be clear, both Ghost's and Substack's funding models seem fine to me. It's hard to perfectly align the incentives of the platform, the publishers, and the readers, but both Ghost and Substack have what feels to me like sensible enough alignment.
The arguments against Substack feel like motivated reasoning for people who disagree with other aspects of Substack (VC funding, positions on free speech).
It makes revenue, largely from its hosted service (which is more akin to WordPress than Substack), but it is intentionally built to not follow the VC model.
+ must have a board + give away 30%+ of earnings (easily done by attaching a value to the OSS free installs & handling issues w/o billing)
It’s the sort of moral grandstanding that developers do about stupid small stuff that annoys me about working in tech. Like somehow it’s a bad thing for a newsletter platform to optimise to help their customers grow.
And really Substack doesn’t just fill up your subscriber counts it heavily filters out bad sign ups and whatnot. My subscriber count on my brand new newsletter is at 20 but looking at the traffic stats it’s blocked out 30-40 “subscribers” and from my experience on other newsletter those will be fake emails where people put in insults because they’re offended you asked them if they would like to subscribe.
> where people put in insults because they’re offended you asked them if they would like to subscribe.
It's a bad thing because people don't like the resulting UX, as your experience indicates. Interesting that Substack is aggressive enough in pushing folks to subscribe that they need to build subscription blocking because people hate the nagging so much they submit insulting email addresses. You would think this would be an indication to both Substack and their customers that the UX needs significant work.
OTOH, some models really are friendlier to customers and can lead to better experiences.
Since Ghost gets paid regardless of who subscribes, readers only feel this pressure if they author decides they want more subscribers. Free and paid subscribers count the same, so there's no temptation to obfuscate anything or make subscription management less straightforward.
That's my interpretation, I don't necessarily agree that one is more sustainable than the other but I think that's what they're talking about.
This isn't true.
If you have over 500 subscribers, Ghost charges you more per month. When you go above 1,000 subscribers, there's another price tier. Then there's another tier at 10,000 subscribers.
I don't want to say they are exactly equivalent to Substack because they aren't. But Ghost gets more money if there are more subscribers.
That being said, I think the big problem with the internet is the very existence of these sorts of large-tech platforms. I wish such platforms didn't exist at all, and people just went to small websites. Following Ivan Illich, I wish there were a "speed/size limit" on the internet so that companies beyond a certain size like Google, Medium, Substack, etc. were precluded from existing.
I don't know how configurable Ghost is but I suspect you will still have some problems if they introduce features that you don't like. You may be able to lag for a few versions but eventually there will be security vulnerabilities discovered, ecosystem features like plugins will grow incompatible and other general bitrot. Self-hosting will definitely give you a thick insulating layer, but upstream direction will eventually work its way through.
Front and center concern, given the stack Ghost is built on
I think a lot of people are overthinking it. Substack wants to continue to be a dominant platform for publishing. Sure they want revenue but if you were to ask leadership whether they would trade 50% of traffic for some marginal increase in revenue they would prob say no. Companies aren't naive profit maximizing.
If you never heard of fast food chains and believed all the worse things about free markets you would certainly assume McDonald's charges for ketchup. Its insane of them not to! Leaving money on the table, plus allowing abuse. But they don't because customers would just think it's dick, at least in the US. And you see other trends over the years like giving free cups of water which def loses them revenue. That's all to say companies have economic incentives but not this naive short term view that critics accuse them of
How about a popup that darkens the page and obscures the text to ask you to sign up? That's been on Substack for at least a year.
All these startups work the exact same way: promise to offer something better than the enshittified incumbent (Medium), then take on many of the same enshittified attributes because they can't juice their KPIs without a bothersome UX.
Also, this is a "technological solution for a social problem", so it's infeasible to begin with.
OTOH, I have no answers for a solution to human greed, except self-control. But, this can't be applied universally either.
I wish it too but at this point this is basically pining for Usenet while everyone is on PhpBB-boards. The world has moved on and won’t be coming back.
We used to have a solution called RSS Feeds. At one point every site had them then Google decided we can't have nice things.
It stores my small image files, plus markdown files, and represent them as readable coherent block. It provides RSS and Newsletters (which I have disabled), and basic analytics.
If you want to see, it's at https://blog.bayindirh.io
I assume you are aware that this is a natural tendency towards economies of scale? It’s not tenable to impose arbitrary limits with no grounded reason.
In September I also launched a podcast for the conference and their platform has made it incredibly easy. I just upload the video and write the show notes. They handle extracting the audio version, generating the transcript and publishing to all of the various platforms while hosting the video too.
I personally haven’t seen any benefit or engagement from their attempt at social media though.
Carolina Code Conference and Carolina Code Cast if you’re curious.
I use Ghost for a while now and it's fantastic. The fact that it's open-source, self-hostable, super customizable (themes), has free/premium memberships and can be used both as a blog and newsletter is what makes me stick to it.
Ghost is $9/month to start, even if only your mom is reading it to start. (And you don't get customisable themes at that tier.)
Not hard to see why one is much more popular than the other.
People just want to write their article and have it come up at the top of Google search results, that's the hype.
I recently set up a blog (a pretty private, small scale travel diary to share with close family as I don't use social media) and did some research before I chose something. With no desire for a newsletter or monetisation or SEO or any of those features I still found the experience of spinning up a Ghost containter[1] got me from 0 to a really good and featureful blog.
The composer works well out of the box on a phone, the defaults are fairly sane, and the selection of out of the box themes is pretty well thought out.
In the past I've used Hugo or other static generators for this kind of thing. That's been far more work for a less user friendly result and the mobile workflow for posting isn't very kind even on a tablet.
[1] https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost/
Would it be crazy to expect one of those skills to be basic computer & sysadmin knowledge? With that, I would expect most people could host a site on, say, GH pages or similar
No comment.
I wasn't getting many comments on the Wordpress one neither, so that's actually fine for me, but if I was getting many, it would matter a lot.