We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

1. How did you guys manage to attract writers? I know you have been signing fronting agreements. Superficially, Substack is a (fairly basic?) blogging platform + email + payment processing system. That doesn't feel particularly hard to put together, though maybe I totally underestimate that. So what's powering Substack's growth is that you were able to get guys like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander etc on board. How much of your growth do you think is product vs business/dealmaking?

2. You've been strong defenders of free speech, especially in the last two years where there's been a ton of censorship. Really, it's helped a lot, I've felt like Substack was one of the few places I could find rational and logical takes on things like lockdowns at a time when everyone else was losing their minds. Do you have some sort of strong philosophical take on this, or is it a sort of default because censorship takes specific effort and you're busy with growth?

3. Related to that, the pattern of tech firms being open access and supporters of free speech for some years and then later losing that as they hire more and more people (especially, new grads) seems to be a recurring one. Given you're based in San Francisco, do you have a plan to actually keep Substack the way it is, in the face of hiring employees who might demand you constantly cancel the witch-du-jour?

4. There's IMO a ton of potential for innovation with group discussions. To me, Slashdot was actually the peak of innovation in large scale anonymous forum discussions with many clever features, crowdsourced moderation, friends/foes, meta-mods etc. Do you plan to try new things with discussions, or stick to a conventional approach? Right now it's pretty basic.

I think what has driven our growth is a nice synthesis between the product, the business dev work (i.e. convincing writers to give it a shot), and the business model.

The model may be the underestimated part. It's compelling for many writers, partly because of its simplicity and transparency: you own the relationship with your audience, you publish stuff that gets sent to them, and then if you're doing good work some portion of that audience will choose to pay you to keep going. That's a good deal for writers, since:

a) It lets them do the work they believe is most important b) No one can mess with their audience c) There's a clear path to making money, which is the major thing absent from most other options for writing on the internet (or, increasingly, anywhere else).

These things make Substack a relatively easy "sell".

Of course, some writers are better poised to succeed with this model than others, so we have put in a sustained effort to identify those writers and let them know about their opportunity on Substack. In a small number of cases, that has meant we've offered a financial package to derisk the move for them (you can think of it as like startup funding to get them going; many don't have much financial buffer and may be reluctant to leave jobs even if they are unhappy in those jobs). But the vast majority of writers doing well on Substack have come to the platform of their own accord, without any kind of deal.

That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.

4. YES!

So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support?

From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that category. What about, say, open antisemitism? Will you host and help fund the American Nazi Party or the KKK? How about more borderline actors, like people who promote racist conspiracy theories and ethnic cleansing, but stop short of direct calls for violence?

I'm interested in hearing more, I recently had a Substack recruiter reach out to me and was curious about this because I work at a tech company w/ some internal "activists" (I don't consider them to be activists).

How would you talk about it with them while hiring? It seems like you might need to bring up uncomfortable (and potentially risky) things like politics (?) during an interview?

What to do if your employees start doing walkouts or what not? At the company I work for this happened. A lot of people don't feel comfortable standing up to the ones who are most vocal about cancel-culture (if you disagree with them you may be labeled and considered a "fascist" (ugh) or even worse a "nazi" and your career impacted), I find that most people just stay silent in the face of this and the organizers of these movements seem to rule the roost in the workplace.

Great job either way I'm a Substack supporter! :thumbsup:

So do you ever worry that you might end up like Parler? What happens if AWS, Cloudflare, payment processors etc. decide to kick you off the internet because of whom you publish? Right now it seems unlikely that they'd become that intolerant, but a lot of unlikely things have happened in tech in the last few years.

Are you worried about this eventuality, and are you preparing for it?

I'm not affiliated with Substack, but I'm having difficulty with your premise here. There's literally a Trump app on the App Store right now dedicated to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election. What opinions is "Big Tech" "censoring" and why should one think there's any validity to your slippery slope argument?

More than that is the general culture of suppression of the "wrong" view of reality. Most people who were merely to the right of center moderates in the 00's are now accused of being absolute evil if they voice any opinions. I've been told by well more than a dozen former co-workers that they're afraid to say anything or let anyone at work find out about their political opinions because they're afraid of getting fired & won't be able to feed their families. The suppression and censorship is very real.

One or two exceptional counterexamples do more to prove the rule than to disprove it.

In fairness, there are multiple explanations that don’t involve this being objectively true, while also being how these people perceive their situation.

Well, touting the fact that the App Store, in its benevolence, allows an app by an ex-POTUS, like it's some sort of triumph of free speech speaks volumes, doesn't it?

The ability of an ex-president to have such reach would go without saying in the past. Now it's up to the whims of Big Tech - and Twitter and others had already cancelled them.

He may be the leading candidate to be the republican nominee, but that's not the same as the leading candidate likely to win.

Your logic also doesn't work; you can be both the leading candidate and a fringe extremist.

By definition whoever wins the most votes is mainstream, not a fringe extremist.

It was that, and mail-in balloting and dropboxes, which the Democrats used to great advantage, blindsiding the Republicans in all the swing districts.

It seems to me the Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in 2020. However in 2022... mathematically, they're almost guaranteed to cede the House and maybe the Senate as well, depending on how events in Europe and general economic trends play out.

I'm not sure how not wanting to travel to a random gymnasium on a Tuesday became a political thing, but it's weird. Who actively wants their life to be worse?

That's both not true and trivially checkable.

In 2020, Biden won by 42,844 votes in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.

I got my numbers here[0] so feel free to fact check me. I may have been imprecise in referring to electoral votes specifically, but I think I am correct about the margins of victory.

[0]https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/did-biden-wi...

Maybe the word "censorship" is too loaded, but the claim that big tech platforms permit a narrower range of expression than they used to is so uncontroversial that it's barely worth defending. That's not always a bad thing; many of the people who've been banned in recent years are noxious pricks whom I don't miss, but what happens when the people who've been banned from Twitter and YouTube, kicked off AWS, terminated by Cloudflare and blocked by Visa and MasterCard decide to start a Substack because its commitment to free speech means it's the only place that will host them? I won't name names but I can think of, for example, a couple of semi-prominent figures who have been banned from other platforms due to their, ahem, "heterodox" views on vaccines, who now write on Substack and reportedly make a very healthy income from doing so. And worse actors might join the platform if they haven't already.

Is it really such a conspiratorial "slippery slope" to suggest that if the people who've been banned from everywhere else grow a huge, lucrative audience on Substack, then Substack is going to come under increasing amounts of pressure to kick them off - pressure far greater than what it's received so far in the face of lesser controversies? What form might this pressure take?

> HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

> There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.

> So while some small percent of Reddit’s average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit’s political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...

If this election had happened in Russia, we would have at least suspected something irregular. The fact that “their guy” win meant that anything that really did happen was ignored or dismissed.

And doesn’t Hillary Clinton still maintain that 2016 was stolen? (Her words, not mine.) Why wasn’t she deplatformed? Maxine Waters insisted 2004 was stolen. People still claim that 2000 was stolen. Lyndon Johnson was know for stealing elections. The idea that the 2020 election was completely legitimate isn’t supported by facts.

And Covid? Stuff that got you banned from Twitter in 2020 is now “true” today. It was misinformation in 2020, but today it’s not. Democrats we’re expressing vaccine skepticism when Trump was in office weren’t banned from Twitter. But vaccine skepticism in 2021 would get you banned.

We are seeing lies right now with oil prices. Jen Psaki said that there are 9000 unused oil leases and that’s the fault of the oil companies. What she didn’t say is that an oil lease doesn’t mean there is actually oil in the ground. Biden said to blame Putin for oil prices. Yet looking at any publicly available chart of prices show a rise in prices beginning in late January, 2021. No mention of Biden’s executive orders freezing new offshore and public lands leases. But sure “blame Putin.”

There is an organized effort at misdirecting the public before the midterm elections and the media that claims to be unbiased is carrying water for the administration because “their guy” is in office.

It’s disgusting.

Substack is great because at least there are some voices out there getting heard. Alex Berenson and Glen Greenwald among the best.

And using the “what about Nazis” argument is a straw man. And lest we forget, the ACLU defended Nazi speech as well they should. The marketplace of ideas will always have some bad products. But censoring those products isn’t the answer. Defeat bad ideas with good ideas — not censorship.

Email is actually pretty great for this, and email is especially powerful for giving writers direct connection to their readers. But there are limits to what you can do there, and stuff like community discussion, audio and video, and even 'not accidentally going to the promotions tab' can get a big upgrade.

Somewhat related: developing for email is still a pretty big pain. It's kinda like the bad old days when you had to support IE6 - lots of people still use old versions of outlook or whatever.

I can imagine Substack is more of an "aspires to read X" platform than a place for actually reading X. This argument is anecdotally supported by the sensationalism of popular pieces I see go viral, the payment system (it is always easier to quickly monetize aspiration than behavior), and its reliance on growth through virtue-signaling (eg twitter).

I hear you, it's a shit show! I'm gonna have to do that myself soon and I don't look forward to it.

> But there are limits to what you can do [in email]

But email will still be a very common entry point for readers (unless you expect to change the behavior of your users), so you still need to link to the app or website from the email.

As a user I don't mind an app from a technical perspective. It gives me more options! But what are the things the app can do that the web cannot?

As a subscriber to many Substack newsletters with different publishing schedules, I've found it to be a bit tedious and distracting to have my email inbox be inundated with new posts. I'd rather go to a reader app that has all the newsletters I've subscribed to in one place for when I have the time and the interest to spend a couple of hours reading. I'd like for the app to just send me a reminder once a week with who published what so that I can decide if I want to go to the reader app and peruse at my leisure.

As a writer on Substack I've found that readers like to reply directly to the emails they receive instead of leaving a comment on the web version so that others could see it and perhaps react/interact with it. If the app could help harness a community for the writers by making it more comfortable for readers to like and leave comments, then that would be beneficial in building a brand. Additionally, if the app has a mechanism to recommend Substack newsletters that are similar to the one a particular reader is reading then that would help expand the reach/discoverability of lesser known writers.

A simple but important one: being able to get a notification on your phone when a new post lands in your inbox. There are lots of subtle little things around readability, scroll performance, etc. too. There are also a decent number of Podcasts on Substack now, and listening in a web player (on mobile) is a pretty sub-par experience.

I turn off gmail notifications. I suppose some of their readers might want to know when the Substacks they subscribe to have new content but don't want to know when they're getting new spam.

Well... yeah. It's a fucking email newsletter. It'd be real fucking weird if people kept signing up for an email newsletter and not reading it in their email client.

Whatever the hell you think you're building: the people that make you money are selling it to customers as an email newsletter first and foremost.

Being able to open the app to read when I want to will be much nicer.

While I agree with the overall message of web over app (and have bugged some of my colleagues for going "App First", locking themselves into particular ecosystems before gaining audience), for consuming content, there are benefits to Apps, when done properly .

Most pertinently, offline content - I will always use Prime/Netflix/Disney in app form rather than Web form.

Offering an app as an option is a brilliant way to meet everybody's needs.

(nagging/pushing an app and deprecating web, however, is devil's work:)

One of the main products at my job is a new site that we've spent a lot of time making performant and readable but we're still building an app experience because we want to meet our users (particularly affluent users) where they are.

I have yet to hear a user data analytics team say that.

What will you do when this happens?

[1] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/09/18/telegram-messenger...

I'm a paid subscriber to a number of Substack writers, and I'd like to subscribe to more, but it can rapidly run into the hundreds of dollars per month - so I really have to pick and choose.

I can imagine bundles aren't really your model, and maybe aren't in your authors interest either. But I'd love to get like an Economics bundle and a New Zealand journalism bundle (shout-out to Bernard Hickey here, doing great work with his The Kaka Substack).

Or even a pay-per-article model - some of the free newsletters I'm on publish paywalled things I'm interested in, but I don't want to subscribe to the full deal. But I'd pre-load my account with $50 and pay a couple of dollars for a single article.

In a similar vein, LWN used to have a thing where people could pay to make the article free. There are sometimes paywalled articles I'd love to share around, but I don't want to deprive the author of revenue. If I could pay for a link that can be shared X number of times, or could chip-in to a "if enough people pay this article becomes free" fund, I would.

The bundle question is interesting.

The model right now is really an unbundling. The direct relationship between writers and readers is what makes Substack work: as a writer, your incentive is to earn and keep the trust of the audience who deeply values your work. That's not just a good way to get paid for work you're already doing. It's a model that allows and rewards a fundamentally different and better kind of work that the work you would have to do if you were e.g. trying to please something like the Spotify algorithm.

That said, bundle economics are real. And so while we wouldn't and couldn't do some top down bundle, if there were a way to do bundling that maintained the direct connection, and put writers and readers in charge (e.g. writer self federation, or readers buying several subscriptions at once) that could be very interesting in the future.

Better for international audiences, if you like Dax Shepard's podcast with him, you'll love his Webworm content.

I find myself very reluctant to sign up for new newsletters on Substack now because my identity is shared across all newsletters, so I feel I can no longer keep my interests separated. To be clear: after commenting on one newsletter, it becomes impossible to comment on any other newsletter without compromising my privacy. I am not certain because I do not publish myself, but I worry that writers might have an insight into other newsletters I have subscribed to as well. I would really like to have an anonymous reading (if not commenting) mode, without having to manually open an in-private tab and only be able to view the public posts of whoever's newsletter I am trying to read.

The issue I have with Substack in particular is that it was essentially founded around political newsletters. I'm not sure, but I think Bill Bishop might've been their very first newsletter... and he writes about Chinese politics. Of all topics, that is one where people might have good reason to want to be able to preserve their anonymity. Of course, you could get around this by signing up for different newsletters with different email addresses, but that makes it unnecessarily difficult to read paid subscriber-only posts. I feel like the company took a wrong turn in adding social network features instead of keeping the focus on individual writers and their individual audiences.

We tried to build reader profiles in a way that can handle this nicely - you can choose on a per-subscription basis which publications to display on your profile and which you'd like to keep hidden. This is almost like an anonymous subscription although it doesn't quite support a fully anonymous commenting use case, since theoretically someone could recognize you from different comment sections.

One thing I could see us trying in the future is giving writers more control over who can comment and how, on their particular publications. Already, writers can choose whether to allow comments from all subscribers, only paid subscribers, or to turn off comments entirely. Allowing writers to choose to support anonymous commenting doesn't seem out of the question.

My favorite part of Substack was how it built on top of email, an (actual) distributed protocol. I'm able to access my Substack writers alongside other writers/publication, since everybody integrates into email.

I like the reader experience of the new app and the recommendations, but I'm worried it will become another walled garden like Medium. How do you plan on protecting against that?

FWIW, Matter (https://hq.getmatter.app/) has a workaround (albiet complicated) for getting all emails forwarded to app, is that on the roadmap?

Our goal with the app is to give a seamless upgrade to the email experience -- which is why the home page works just like an inbox -- while having writers retain ownership of their list (which therefore gives them exit rights.)

We don't want to be a walled garden. We want to make a great reading experience, with porous boundaries. If you publish on Substack, it goes everywhere - email, the web, other networks, but as the writer you can pull your most valuable audience to the place that you own and can get paid from. If you read on Substack, you can read things on Substack, and then maybe things from other places, like RSS etc. I like the idea of having emails that you can get stuff delivered to.

This is exciting to hear. When I saw the announcement, but my first thought was "They're making an RSS reader that only reads from Substack". If you're actually building a _better reader_ that's bigger than Substack (and doesn't push Substack content too hard) then you've got my support!

However, I can't promise that we won't push Substack content. We will :)

> We don't want to be a walled garden.

Is it just me, or do those not align completely?

A paid newsletter, as in you get access if you pay, is by definition a walled garden.

I understand that because Substack and its writers both benefit from publicly available material, since it draws organic traffic. But it seems that that's not at odds with also wanting a walled garden. The difference may be the size and shape of the garden fence door. Medium is annoying by tricking you into clicking stuff that you can't read unless you sign up. Building an app seems like it could lead there. Not because you want to, but because of thinking centralised rather than decentralised.

My favourite newsletter, Haskell Weekly, distributes an article list with a summary by email, but the links go to anywhere on the web, usually personal blogs. Maybe some people like to have an app as it then functions as a browser dedicated to particular reading purpose(s). I'd personally prefer browser links. That's where I read everything and sync tabs/bookmarks between phone and computer. I hope you don't get those annoying pop-ups that keep encouraging people to install the app even though they clicked no thanks. Like Reddit. Just because the fence is mostly see-through, it still counts like a wall. :-D

The content is paywalled, but the medium of exchange is open. That's the big distinction here.

By then, I had entered a different email address (I wasn't sure if I was incorrectly remembering which address I used), and it created a new account for me with that address. The authentication email for the second address arrived very quickly.

When the email for the first account finally showed up, I tried clicking it so I could log into my previously-existing account. It didn't work because I was already logged in with the new empty account. And when I logged out of the account and tried again, it didn't work because (I think) the link can only be used once.

I've tried entering the correct email address again and am now waiting for the email to arrive. Just some feedback on how this process has worked for me! The email address that had problems is a yahoo address, and the one that didn't have problems is gmail, in case that matters.

To all the HN regulars here - own your medium instead. Own your content. There's no need to stick to yet another VC funded "writing experience". Many potential readers will eventually hit a subscription fatigue. There are several proven strategies to monetise your content (and Substack isn't one of them).

Data export, mailing lists, billing information all belong to a third party who charges you commission to "facilitate". I am sure that commission will increase down the line, and the net effect will be less and less.

Think before you leap into this.

The good thing about substack compared to most centralized apps is that writers maintain control over their audience address list. This aligns incentives since leaving is possible. It makes them more of an actual software platform for their writers which is a good thing imo. As long as this remains true, the risk is low.

It’s probably the best outcome you can realistically get on the non-urbit web outside of niche providers like ghost which have their own trade-offs.

I suspect the hardest thing for substack will be the moderation position they find themselves in. If they do anything to try to help increase readership (even if they don't) they will eventually find themselves in the same difficult situations as every other platform, this is just an unavoidable fact of being a centralized service with this power and capability (and choosing who you will not allow as customers is a form of substack's speech). Having this responsibility is not easy and with continued success and scale becomes messy.

This (imo) just isn't something that can be solved by a centralized system effectively, even though it sounds like they'll do the best the can: https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati...

I've got an email newsletter that 874 people pay me $5/m to read (The Sizzle - https://thesizzle.com.au). I set it up outside of Substack a few years ago, then migrated when Substack launched with the hope their platform would bring in new readers and make my life easier.

This turned out to be a massive waste of over a year, as not only did the newsletter stop growing, it lost subscribers. There was no platform effect by being on Substack, so I left it, setup my homebrew solution (where all the bits, like billing, email sending, customer info are interchangeable) and growth has resumed and I'm doing better than ever - all without giving Substack a 10% cut and further locking myself into their ecosystem.

Here's a blog post explaining in more detail why I chose to remove myself from Substack if anyone is interested: https://blog.decryption.net.au/t/why-i-use-a-mishmash-of-ser...

Your model sounds better for professional writers, or already established writers. But the benefit of Substack for emerging writers is that it gives them a platform to establish a brand presence with the hope that it will develop into a large enough audience to get enthusiastic readers who will convert into paid subscribers. There is also no easy way for new writers to try to start a writing career while also trying to figure out different technologies to send out a newsletter. Substack makes it completely easy, and it's fair that they charge some percentage once a writer starts earning money while using their platform.

It seems like this would be a cost-benefit analysis for each writer. For technical writers who can spin up their own blog and add Stripe subscription billing, it might not make sense. But for writers who are technically not savvy, or who write things that could benefit from journalistic legal protections, it might make more sense. I don't get the sense that the amount they charge is so high that it wouldn't be a reasonable option for anyone.

hosting platform, promotion, backend, frontend, spam control, whitelisted mail server with high inbox rate

not a bad deal for having to pay 10%

Surely Substack is no less proven than any other content monetization strategy for individual authors. Most people simply can't make a living from writing, regardless of their monetization strategy. And at a minimum, Substack at least has proof points [1] that their platform has been working for someone.

[1] https://reader.substack.com/discover

if you want to "own your content" self host, do not use any of these platforms.

What is the question you're asking here?

I downvoted you for being rude.

What part was the flaming? Can you quote the flaming part? Because to me it just seemed like advice.

>What is the question you're asking here?

I don't think there is a question here. Did you interpret what they said as a question? Doesn't that mean it isn't flaming?

What caused you to interpret it as a question?

For someone like me that feels wary every time I see a Substack URL, are there some quality independent journalists covering current events that don’t participate in conspiracy theories and partisan echo chambers that I can discover?

Peruse the leaderboards at substack.com and in the new app (in the Discover tab).

Check out the profiles of the writers and readers you most respect (just click on their faces). You'll find lists of Substacks they're subscribed to, which may lead you to some interesting places and new writers to respect.

Dr. Robert Malone is not a journalist but a scientist. The analysis of recent medical studies shunned by the mainstream media is worth the time investment.

I’m trying to get away from folks that make broad, sweeping judgements without much data / firsthand knowledge or dangle open ended conspiracy theory questions about subjects they have little to no expertise in.

But for now I can tell a war story that might be fun. I'm one of the founders, and am in a very much non-technical role now as CEO, I did write a bunch of the very early code (some of which people curse my name for to this day.)

When we were starting, I was limited by how many new languages/frameworks I could learn at once. I started writing the backend in python, because I knew it a bit. But our first writer often needed to use Chinese characters, and in python 2.X I could never get unicode strings to work properly. I couldn't upgrade to python 3, because on google cloud I would have had to learn Docker and I was already learning too many things at once.

Eventually I got so frustrated I threw out several days work and started the whole backend over, with node + Postgres hosted in Heroku. This ended up defining much of the stack we use to this day, which might be good or bad depending who you ask. At least unicode works though :)

Cross platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, etc are super interesting but in our experience can hold an app back long term. As you're able to dedicate more resources to the product, it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs. It's a tough decision to make for early stage start-ups but we also went with native at Cocoon (our last startup which was acquired by Substack). I think some important factors that should go into the decision are 1) how important you think both Android and iOS support are out of the gate 2) how soon you'd expect to be able to hire native engineers for both platforms 3) your long term vision for the product and its desired complexity. We love Android (I've got some Kotlin experience myself) and will have it out ASAP, but with the existing email/web product there is less pressure for cross platform in our case.

We all use Android while our users are mostly in single platform approach won't work for us. We're also a hardware company, so need BLE and WebBle support isn't good enough for us.

Thanks for your answer

> it's more likely that you'll want custom UI (animations, transitions, etc) and functionality that require full access to native APIs.

Besides the custom UI stuff, as I think React Native has some decent animation support nowadays, what specific native APIs were needed in Substack's case that made React Native an ineligible choice?

As text being the main content for Substack, Its hard for me to imagine why React Native wouldn't be sufficient for a relatively simple app.

Discord, undoubtedly, has more complex UI needs compared to Substack, however it's humming along just fine with React Native.

What makes React Native capable for Discord, but incapable for your needs?

We are sprinting as fast as we can to get an Android app out the door. We're also planning on investing more in the reader experience on web. Some time ago, we launched a web reader (reader.substack.com) in beta and have some exciting ideas in the works to evolve that surface.

Beyond Android, when it smaller platforms like iPad / Desktop apps, it's mostly a matter of looking at the data and listening to users. With a small team, we have to be judicious with prioritization, and as we increase the surface area for readers it's important that the experience for writers remains clear (right now their readers can already read on email, web, and mobile).

Also, you wouldn't believe how much time goes into customer support password issues.

1. When folks opt in, you can reach them whenever you want, unmediated by an algorithm 2. They can pay to subscribe, and you keep 90% of the economics and 3. You own your email list. You can leave Substack and take them with you.

These things create the incentive structure that allows great work to get done on Substack. But doing the secret email thing breaks #3. Part of the bargain as a reader on Substack is that you're giving your email.

Definitely hear you on the confirmation link thing.

https://imgur.com/a/PTwWor3

Adding that to the phone app would only be exposing it on the phone app - not hiding it from functionality for anyone who wanted to do it.

Congratulations on all of your successes!

One of the good things Substack can do is put competitive pressure on traditional outlets. If people want to go independent, having a good way to do so helps them. But also that possibility creates pressure on existing institutions to give writers more freedom, pay them better, etc. etc. I don't think it's a coincidence that you see more legacy publishers starting "newsletter" divisions that give writers more leeway. All of this is good for writers in our minds and we're happy for it.

Do you think that in a few years, people will look at the the early days, in which you were thought of as a newsletter-based company, as analogous to Netflix's early days, where they were thought of as a DVD-by-mail company? I notice that like Netflix, you didn't pick a name that is tied to your first incarnation.

1. Can you please support signing in to multiple accounts? Ideally, you would merge the subscriptions together into one view, but even if not, easy account switching is good enough.

2. Can you gray out the read posts? The "inbox" doesn't distinguish between read and unread, archiving is the only option. But sometimes I might want to refer back, and don't want to archive it yet. (EDIT: I just found the orange dot, but it's not very visible)

3. When you know that I have read the post via email (from the tracking pixels), can you show them as read in the app?

2. Good feedback re: the orange dot! I'll pass that along to our Designer.

3. This is also a good idea, but unfortunately a little less straightforward to get right 100% of the time as email clients increasingly start to get in the way of tracking pixels visibility.

Have you ever considered offering subscription packages? I find it hard to justify making multiple paid subscriptions (they add up fast), but would love to be able to build a package of newsletters that I could subscribe to at a bundled rate of some sort. Something like a cable tv plan for Substack newsletters?

Bundles of some kind are an often-requested feature by both writers and readers. Something we're really mindful of: the direct connection between reader and writer is the magic that makes the whole Substack model work. So we would be very wary of a bundle product that abstracted that connection. However, I do think there are ways to do a bundle that keep that direct connection front and center, keeping the reader in control, and maintaining the writer's ownership of their audience. It's an interesting problem to think about!

It seems like creators could use the support of something like Substack without being tied to the publishing platform itself. That seems like a real opportunity.

I really don’t like the idea of newsletter platforms expanding beyond email, because the reasons why we’re using email in the first place is because it’s platform-agnostic. So your company launching an app really gives me pause. But creators I’ve talked to over the past day or so are in more of a wait-and-see mode.

I realize I’m not the target audience for your service as-is. I prefer self-hosting things like my website, I want to code my template myself, and don’t want to charge my readers a subscription fee. But I think some of the services you offer do not need the publishing platform you’ve created for it.

It could be a way to help the newsletter ecosystem without making it dependent on the URL and how we choose to publish.

Also I can't comment on a post about substack without mentioning my favorite substack post of all time![2]

[0] https://ghost.org/

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-john-onolan-grew-...

[2] https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-brok...

Ghost is a good platform. I don’t use it these days, but I’m a bit of a maverick—case in point, I used Ghost to build my newsletter before it had any newsletter functionality! (I currently use Craft CMS, which has a dedicated view that can spit out a completed newsletter template, with custom ads, in a matter of seconds.)

As someone who does want to self host, which Substack services would be valuable to you? What do you feel like we could offer you?

You could have done the same thing and built a generalized newsletter app.

But instead you built a reader just for Substack, which is clearly built to lock in an open ecosystem, just as medium tried with blogging and Spotify is trying with podcasts.

I think promotional options within the ecosystem would be nice for newsletter creators outside of Substack, but at the same time, I think the work that you’ve put into building significant resources is a unique offering in the sector that nobody else is doing to the same degree.

A good model to compare this to, in my mind, would be the Freelancers Union (https://www.freelancersunion.org), which offers a lot of services to people who freelance. That I think could be of interest even to people who don’t publish with you.

I’ve been around the block for a bit, and I think a big part of the reason the blogging ecosystem died is because there weren’t any nets. You have done a good job of creating a net for your audience. There’s no reason that net has to be for Substack users alone.

We submitted v1.0.1 the moment that v1.0 was released and shipped it on launch day as soon as it was approved by Apple.

Cheers and thank you!

I'm a huge fan of your platform, and love that its empowered some of my favorite journalists and other others to write freely while continuing to be able to provide for themselves.

One question I have is as a small time blogger, I currently use Medium as my platform. The reason I do so is because it has an audience baked in, so I'm easily(-ish) able to attract new readers to my blog and grow the list of people who follow what I write.

What does Substack have or is planning to have product feature-wise that might allow for smaller writers to get the word out and have a social network-like following to help grow their own readership?

I would love to switch to support your product, this is the one thing holding me back.

The nice thing about "network-first" products like Medium and Twitter is that there's a large audience baked in (as you mention) that you can tap into is a small time writer. But the trade-off is that you don't own your audience - you can build up followers, but you don't have a direct connection to them outside of that product. You typically don't get their email addresses, and you can't take your audience with you if you choose to leave.

You also don't necessarily own your work! I was a huge fan of Medium when it launched, and an early active writer. One day, my best performing post got added to someone else's collection, and now it "lives" in some random space that I have nothing to do with (https://medium.com/p/3eadcdc56ff2). This was a pretty frustrating experience.

We think there's a way to have your cake and eat it too: own your own audience, and be in full control. But also get access to a network of readers that grows over time. We're trying to take a deliberate and thoughtful approach to growing the destination for readers, and the app is a major step.

We have some other exciting ideas in the works for helping readers discover more writers through the lens of the writers they already trust, that the app will provide a nice canvas for.

Does it? Do people browse medium looking for things to read? Where does the 'baked in' audience come from?

My personal opinion of medium is very different - I usually see it as blogspam.

Do you consider letting users customize other readability-related features, such as column width, line spacing, etc.? Like text size, this is good for both usability and accessibility.

Glad to see Dynamic Type supported in your v1.0!

For now it's probably most compelling for folks who already do a lot of reading powered by Substack, but we're interested in adding more support for reading non-Substack things (and we already have some basic support for reading Substack stuff in other RSS readers.)

I love substack, and have been writing a weekly blog on it for over a year now!

Do you have any plans to give more granular data on traffic/emails? Stuff like being able to see specific posts views over time, etc... What's currently available is ok, but I'd really like to be able to get as much data as possible and then export it into a BI tool.

Also, for a "quick win", have you considered adding the ability for authors to generate unique URLs for sharing posts? Ideally with separated analytics.

A forward/backward button at the bottom of a post that would lead to the next/previous post would also be great

That's a cool idea! Is your intended use case being able to easily spin up different URLs so that you could share them in different places and see which ones drive the most traffic / subscriptions?

I've been a subscriber and spend about $2K/yr on Substack subscriptions thanks to a generous Enterprise educational budget/policy (and then cheat/steal all my other media/news content).

This is great news.

In the beginning, I posted blogs on Medium, and I sent out newsletters on Substack.

Then Medium started to provide email subscriptions.

Now Substack has a mobile app.

I need to rethink my content strategy going forward...

I’m curious - what are some of your goals with the app in terms of reach, retention, engagement and activation of users?

I’m also wondering - does this new channel set up yourselves (and writers) to be at the whim of Apple?

For example, if the app begins to drive any of the metrics above, and Apple someday comes to see it as untenable, would you be comfortable sacrificing it?

In the iOS app, we don't support in-app-purchases (subscribers can upgrade to paid via email/web) so there's no 30% take from Apple.

Societal pressure on this has been intense, and your team's tweets in support of individual expression have been absolutely landmark tweets, and I am a paying customer because of it

Sincerely, thank you

Can you elaborate? I know some people were paid big $ up front to make the move, but it didn't seem very secret -- the ones I'm thinking of were pretty open about the deals they'd taken, so presumably Substack wasn't pressuring them to keep quiet. And as far as I know they were paid up front for the first year, before moving to an ordinary revenue split and being free to leave.

What you're describing sounds like a cash advance/guarantee which Hamish mentioned about 'de-risking' offers.

If you have good data that a writer could make X money, but they're afraid to leave their day job - it's easy to just say to them "we'll pay you your day job salary to de-risk this jump for you" if you know they'll make way more than that. You can even offer more.

That's not a 'secret benefit' to prevent them from leaving - it's a smart economic move to help people anxious about perceived risk.

A few comments;

- The font looks quite small (on iPad). Have you considered adding the ability to change font and size?

- Now that all my subs are in here, I don't really need to bombard my inbox. Is there a way so that I can mute sending to my email inbox?

- I love to read when flying. Will my inbox be downloaded for offline reading?

- The iPad experience is admittedly not as amazing as it could be, and something I'm excited to improve big time down the road. For now, the app should respect your dynamic type settings (in case you have your font set larger at the iOS level)

- Yep, there's a toggle you can access from your Profile Tab > Notifications

- Right now the offline experience is so-so but not perfectly optimized. If you refresh your Inbox right before a flight your recent posts should be cached nicely and readable while offline.

edit: I think this is a very reasonable question to ask. I'm sorry it's making some uncomfortable but that discomfort really doesn't change the economic realities of competitive space in the industry.

I see that you have an Android app, coming soon, so this makes me think that you are using some form of hybrid tech (as opposed to native).

What would be your advice to new platforms that want to take a free speech approach, while attracting users across the entire political spectrum? (to avoid the fate of Parlor and Rumble)

One area I'm especially excited about: discovery through the lens of the writers you trust. What are those writers reading themselves? What else are their readers (whose taste you ostensibly share) reading? We have a light version of this already with reader profiles in the app (and on web) - when you subscribe to a publication, you can choose whether to display it on your profile. Lots more we could do though.

Context: I'm a happy user of NewsBlur and find being able to go back and forth between Android, iOS, and desktop to be quite useful.

Or even have an unlimited package.

For adding non-Substack publications into the Substack app via RSS, go to reader.substack.com (make sure you're logged in) and click on "Add RSS feed" in the left sidebar.

Does that work even for paid subscriptions? I was thinking it would require some sort of separate URL.

For Substack authors that I subscribe to, will you be making a full-content feed available? I'm quite happy with my current feed reader, and would just like to get my substack subscriptions in there like my other full-content subscriptions.

Separately there's been some interesting challenges on the client side around caching posts, serving post content offline, and purging spam/copyright infringing content.

One feature request: would love to be able to collapse comments/replies like you can do on the web.

Thanks for the great app!

I think the Substack model gives us a bunch of advantages here: readers are choosing to subscribe to writers they trust, and who they then have a direct relationship with. I don't think that Apple is likely to try to police that too heavily, and if they do there is always web and email that exists as a fallback.

As someone who uses and loves substack precisely because of its censorship resistance, this sounds like wishful thinking at best. Even if substack is primarily web based, introducing a dependency on the ever-changing Apple content policing system is a potential conflict of interest.

A cynical take is that smaller platforms compete early by allowing more speech, only to close it down when they become bigger and tied up in corporate relationships.

How do you remain independent as you grow?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In a society where the government isn't allowed to censor, the greatest fear is that speech platforms will become few enough, or homogeneous enough, that particular kinds of legal speech have nowhere to go. Substack provides a home for some speakers who had nowhere else to go, and is therefore decreasing the total amount of censorship that happens in the US.

Some of your "racists and abusers" may be people that others want to read. If you don't like what they're saying, don't read them. If you're going to try to stop me from reading people I want to read, I'll financially support companies that don't let you do that.

Likewise, one could trivially dismiss your position by saying that there are plenty of ways to get anti-vaccine messages (or whatever other "forbidden" political knowledge) - they are published all over the web! In the op ed section of every major newspaper, for example. Far more widely with regard to readership than sexual content is published.

Have they said in plaintext that this is politically motivated or motivated by their "values"?

A lot of platforms that censor sexual content don't do so out of their own wants or desires. I mean, what user generated content platform wants less users? Instead, they're pressured by VC's who have "morals" of their own or financial institutions who have heavy handed policies that could severely impact a fledgling company.

There's also a big difference between "sex workers" and "pornography". Would Substack censor an escort for talking about detailed aspects of escorting? That's very different from censoring someone for posting pornographic images or videos which could potentially fall into the following very harmful, hard to moderate, and litigious categories like age and consent.

I'd say that porn producers have lots of places to go that will cater to them, and that will connect them to porn consumers. As I recall, reddit's r/gonewild is huge, and lots of producers are using it to pull people to their OnlyFans accounts. Someone who is "canceled" for porn at Substack could just go there, and they'd probably be better off because they'd be in a community of people who want to consume porn.

On the other hand, an anti-vax writer (or someone who was publishing accurate concerns about the covid vaccines and was labeled "anti-vax") couldn't just go get a job at Fox to continue their activities after Facebook banned them and their web host stopped hosting them, etc.

Bottom line, I think it's reasonable for a "free speech" platform to specialize in certain kinds of unpopular speech so that they don't have to fight every censor-happy asshole at once. One might say "we specialize in hosting porn and fighting Christian censors" and another might say "we specialize in hosting Trumpers and anti-vaxxers and fighting woke censors" and that's perfectly fine. Ideally, there would be enough such platforms in existence that a writer could choose the proper one for the kind of content they plan to create.

>Censorship happens when a writer is de-platformed, and has nowhere to turn to re-platform themselves. People on HN then give snarky, insincere advice about creating your own web hosting company or whatever.

Substack would be a place for profiling what's happening in the sex worker community, providing news and insight and addressing issues important to individuals within the community. r/GoneWild and OnlyFans don't cater to that; they only want you to post your nude content.

So in your follow up example, there is no other platform that would offer the same kind of service and target audience for sex workers that Substack does.

We don’t allow content that promotes harmful or illegal activities, including material that advocates, threatens, or shows you causing harm to yourself, other people, or animals.

Nudity, porn, erotica

We don’t allow porn or sexually exploitative content on Substack. We do allow depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature. However, we may hide this content from Substack’s discovery features, including search and on Substack.com.

Plenty of censorship in those paragraphs to any free speech absolutist who strives for ideological consistency. They're "cancelling" enormous amounts of what many consider free expression.

I.e. I think Substack's content is less likely to violate any rules (though I can only speak with so much confidence, having not read every article on Substack).