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.

1. https://ghost.org/pricing/ 2. https://wordpress.com/pricing/

>Substack doesn't have a pricing page and their incentives are much more murky.

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).

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.

That's true, but that's different from the argument in the article that I was responding to.

“It’s much easier to avoid the temptation to implement dark patterns if you have a sustainable business model in the first place.” I mean, one company is incentivized to constantly grow, and the other grows at its own pace. The latter is naturally going to be more sustainable and consumer friendly, provided there’s no funny business going on.

"Non profit" in USA are still very much profit-driven; only stipulations are:

+ 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)

I spent a decade working as a journalist covering the nonprofit space, please tell me more.

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.

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.

Yes sorry it's confusing terminology, what I meant is they get paid regardless of your number of paid subscribers. The price tiers apply to both free and paid readers, so if you pass 1000 free subscribers you move up to the next tier. There's no major incentive for them to encourage readers to pay authors, that's up to the author.

See the FAQ (https://ghost.org/pricing/): "Every user with an active account to subscribe to emails or login to your site counted as a member, whether free or paid."

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.

Not really, considering my example of insults and stuff come from different platforms. But fake sign ups is a problem for any platform. Why do you think every sign up system confirms your email? People are assholes.

>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.

OTOH, some models really are friendlier to customers and can lead to better experiences.

Optimising your landing page, changing button colours, etc are not dark patterns. It's called good business.

Not what people are referring to as dark patterns.

It is in this case.

Where? Don't see it.

Maybe read the article then?

I did. Nothing about buttons or landing pages. Maybe you read the wrong article.

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.