Everyone knows it is trivial to host a read-only static website with the traffic of Substack.

It’s the read/write part that gets you.

Doubt you could do that in a way where you'd attract users at the level of Substack.

You could if you gave people $400-500k to move over.

They only pay $3500 and it comes with a big NDA.

They were fronting people 250k+ for their first year. IIRC

If my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bike.

Umm maybe it’s the fact substack is outright paying for traffic and lying about it? It’s just their own paid influencers who use it.

Where are they lying about it? They openly admit to paying writers. And no, it's not "just" their influencers using it.

Perhaps I'm a bit old-fashioned, but paying writers to write doesn't seem like a particularly nefarious activity to me. I mean, I believe the NYT does it too, and a few other organizations.