Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

Re:Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance by monus on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @05:58AM (#23688434)

I’d be interested to see if the author will get as much exposure to new potential subscribers without a platform like Substack of Medium promoting it. IMO, it’s always been the community aspect of these platforms that keep the authors locked in rather than the technical difficulties of setting up your own website.

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Re:Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance by polote on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @07:09AM (#23688875)

Substack doesn't offer exposition, they barely have a discover page https://substack.com/discover which always show the same newsletters

And actually the effect can be negative as, Substack is known to make payment based newsletters, people could avoid those links

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Re:Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance by skohan on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @07:15AM (#23688911)

As a consumer, I actually think this approach is great. I think a lot of the issues platforms deal with in terms of making hard decisions around content standards comes down to the fact that they put things in front of the user, and therefore have some responsibility for what you see.

I think the only way you can really have a true "free speech" platform is to make it entirely self-serve. As soon as there is algorithmic content discovery, bad actors will attempt to game it to get their ideas in front of people.

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Re:Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance by csmiller on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @09:55AM (#23690008)

Yeah, whenever I see a submission with xyz.substack.com I get a little nervous about being upsold or “converted”

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Re:Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance by pier25 on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @10:20AM (#23690264)

When I was on Medium not much traffic came from Medium itself. Probably around 10-15%.

I had a couple of decently popular articles. The most popular had about 170k reads before I deleted my Medium account.

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Re:Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance by kevin_indig on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @10:54AM (#23690651)

What did you switch to?

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Re:Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance by pier25 on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @03:28PM (#23693837)

I moved some of the articles to my own static blog. This experience was actually the inspiration for the project I'm working on. See my profile for links.

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Re:Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance by alexmingoia on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @06:50AM (#23688773)

I’d imagine Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and HN would be a bigger top for the funnel than Medium or Substack.

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Re:Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance by andreilys on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @09:57AM (#23690027)

If you write for big medium publications you can get a lot of traction.

Often they do the promotion for you (newsletters, twitter, etc.).

That’s not to mention the medium algo that can pick up on your article and recommend it to others.

I’ve had one post reach 100k+ reads, unlikely that would happen on my own site.

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Re:Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance by kevin_indig on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @10:00AM (#23690057)

> If you write for big medium publications you can get a lot of traction.

If you leverage their algorithm cleverly, yes. But you still don't own your content or the platform. You're at the same mercy as on Facebook, Twitter, or Google.

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