I follow a bunch of people on substack. Things I've noticed as a reader:

- It's both an email newsletter and a very nicely designed, clean web page

- There's an easy-to-use payments system (I pitch in a few bucks to my favorite blogs). The writer can control on a per-post basis how much extra content paid subs get -- whole post, whole post but no ability to comment, or just a preview of the post.

- They've actively recruited excellent writers, offering them contracts with minimum $ guarantees.

There's nothing mind-blowing about it, but it's really well and tastefully done, which is more than you can say about 99% of the commericial web offerings.

> Why would I use this instead of my own domain and a website hosted for free on Netlify or GitHub Pages?

Email subscriptions made easy enough for a non-techie audience to subscribe.

some blogs that are available on domain etc have form with email subscription (for example by using Convertkit service). i did this on my blog website.

Substack is free for the author vs. Mailchimp etc. f

You'd go to Substack if the endgame was to develop a paying audience. Views alone don't pay writers' bills.

Ah ok, but when I talk about blogging in the sense we're talking here, I think of it mostly as a non-professional activity as it used to be... just people sharing their thoughts/knowledge.