I read a lot of hacker news, and I've noticed something: HN is a better judge of Substack quality than the Substack's subscriber count (even paid subscribers). To test this, I built MetaStack. It works as follows:

  1. Collect HN submissions that link to substack domains.
  2. Calculate the HN affinity of each Substack, i.e. "how much does HN like this compared to Substack users?"
  3. Using this HN affinity, create an implied HN score for all posts in the Substack (even those never posted to HN).
  4. From here, I manually trim down to substacks with a high signal-to-noise ratio, and send them to you as a weekly roundup.

This gives you a slice of the best independent writers, weighted towards what hackers find interesting.