We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
Readers have been tweeting at us for years now to ask when we’d have an app. We’ve long wanted one too, and we suddenly got the manpower to be able to build a good one when we acquired Sachin’s company Cocoon (W19) last year.
Soon after starting Substack, we found it easiest to explain what we do as “We make it simple to start a paid newsletter.” Even then, a Substack was more than just an email newsletter: it was also a blog, and it could host embedded video and audio, and people could leave comments and participate in discussion threads. But the term “newsletter” was useful shorthand because everyone kind of got what that meant. All along, though, we’ve been quietly building the tools for what we call “personal media empires,” encompassing different media formats (natively) and community discussion (which we intend to make better and better).
By a similar token, right from the start we’ve been intending for the company to do more than just provide subscription publishing tools. We’re excited by the vision of Substack becoming a network, where writers and readers benefit from being part of a larger ecosystem. For writers, it means they can be discovered by readers who might not otherwise have found them. For readers, it means being able to connect directly with writers and other readers and to explore a universe of great work.
The app is a key part of the network vision. Nothing changes in terms of writers and readers being in control. The writers still own their mailing lists, content, and IP and can take it all with them anytime they want. Anyone who signs up to a Substack through the app still goes on to that mailing list. And readers still get to choose what appears in their “inbox,” with the power to subscribe and unsubscribe from whatever they want (you can also add any RSS feed into the app via reader.substack.com). But now we’ll have more and better ways to surface recommendations from writers and readers, to show people’s profiles, and to deliver notifications inside and outside of the app.
This is just a start for the Substack app. We want to keep improving it, so please give us feedback and ask us the hard questions. What do you think we’re doing wrong? What could be better? What could be great? What might we not have thought of?
We’re here for the next couple hours. Ask us anything.
450 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadhttps://apps.apple.com/de/app/substack-reader/id1581650857?l...
Cheers and thank you!
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.)
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 :)
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).
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?
https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-achieves-native-ios-per...
> At first, we felt that maybe doing it purely in JavaScript was futile. We spent some time trying to glue together UITableView with React Native, and while we made meaningful progress, it started feeling overly complicated. After stepping back and thinking about what else we could do — it hit us. We already solved this problem once before on the web! We already had an internal List component that virtualizes its children. There is no way we could just drop it into React Native right?
I'm also curious why it took them so many pain points to reach list virtualization as their solution. That would've been my first thought.
So no, while they initially implemented their core chat view natively, they are using full blown react native as of right now.
https://gist.github.com/vishnevskiy/f4ba74adf5cf1d269b860fab...
This is FastList Code. it's 100% javascript, and only imports are lodash, react, and react-native
Our next step within the Apple universe will most likely be to build an amazing iPad optimized experience. Right now the app works on iPad, but it's definitely not as great as it could be. A better iPad app would also be a good starting foundation for MacOS (and work on Silicon macs out the gate).
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.
However, it appears you have to create an account to interact with the app at all, which is not in the spirit of Show HN.
If a new startup posted a Show HN that required giving a live email address, they would be criticized for it (and most people probably wouldn’t go any further).
EDIT: it would be great if one of the founders could create a dummy account that we could log in with. That's something other founders have done in the past, and it would be more in the spirit of Show HNs:"Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.
However, it's true that the /show page is mostly side projects, new companies, and so on. I don't think we need to push the point, so I took Show HN out of the title now.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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?
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).
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.
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?
In the US, right now violent extremists are almost all from the far right. At points in our history, we have had violent far-left extremists, so it's not impossible. It's not even inconceivable; given spiking wealth inequality, in some ways I'm surprised I haven't seen any anti-billionaire violence. Ditto climate-change and eco-terrorism. But it's definitely the case that extremist threats here are mostly from the right.
But I do think it's telling that he saw me pointing out the KKK and the American Nazi Party as examples of current violent extremism and thought, "How dare you attack the right!"
It doesn't seem like communist extremism is the problem we are dealing with today. Unless you'd like to argue Putin's GRU lackeys are communists (which they're not, but either were and are nationalists). What you are doing here is essentially a whataboutism. What about the COMMUNIST extremists?! Yeah, well, what about them? They're irrelevant in the current playing field. The danger is coming from the right: alt-right. But either way, we can just call all of them extremists. Just don't pretend its 50/50 extreme left/right cause that's not the world we are living in. Not anymore, anyway.
You also need to think a bit about this - why wasn't this extremist fired from her position? Well, not surprisingly, it's because a lot of her fellow academics are fellow travellers, as was often made clear by many of their comments. They aren't literally members of the communist party, but they are certainly sympathetic to that way of thinking. I've talked to them directly, the things they come out with are astonishing.
Meanwhile, nobody even remotely right wing has had any influence at all, especially not in recent years. The libertarian wing of the Conservative party, such that it is, was reduced to constantly voting against the government, which always failed because they were supported by Labour. The "opposition" primarily "opposed" the government by demanding it do whatever it was doing, but faster and harder.
Consider how it'd look if she was a member of a Nazi Party. Nobody would accept that. There's no difference.
Convincing people requires that you work forward from the assumptions they hold toward your views. I'm not sure what asserting that other people actually do hold your assumptions when they keep telling you they don't accomplishes.
1. No they haven't. Lots of people found Michie's associations unacceptable and astonishing.
2. Anyone who does think that communism is not any longer an extreme position, is simply not well informed. Communism itself hasn't changed. Go look at the state of Xinjiang to see this. It's supposedly full of concentration camps.
Okay, and if you continue to communicate the way you are, those are the only people who will be interested in your ideas. You have to play the same game as your audience if you want to win.
You’ve already nailed the misrepresentation of the composition and purpose of an advisory body, so you can leave that part alone; the overwrought hyperbole there is already evident after a cursory check of what SAGE is.
please go ahead and defend your capitalistic gov that exterminated people in vietnam, hired nazis, bombed black neighborhoods, destabilized and created brutal dictatorships in latin america, bombs kids in yemen, enables apartheid..and once you're done digesting that think about the. slave. trade.
4chan has never been about free speech, it had rules since the beginning which are constantly enforced.
"1. You will not upload, post, discuss, request, or link to anything that violates local or United States law."
But that's only the first rule. There are 17 global rules, and each board has a few.
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:
My main thing in stating this is just to say that at this point in time I'm looking for a Coinbase/37Signals style work environment where I don't have to take part in others activism or "be an ally" by doing as told.
> Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions.
I think I'm going to start subscribing to two writers in particular and see how that goes. This is a great model.
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.
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.
It's a lot easier to create the appearance of a threat than to actually persecute lots of people, especially in the current social media landscape.
Aside from that, there are a lot of "cancellations" in the news, even if they're exceptional and only highlighted as a result of sensationalist reporting (or, more conspiratorially, behavioural control) the risk may still be actually too high. You only probably only have to be de-personed once for it to have a lifetime effect.
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...
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.
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...
I haven't checked the numbers but I think GP is arguing that the Biden-Trump result was "closer" in this sense than the Clinton-Trump result was; i.e. the margin in the electoral college and nationwide popular vote may have been wider, but 2020 was still a closer call in the small number of swing states that might have actually changed the overall result.
Trump won 306-232 in 2016. With faithless electors, this became 304-227. He lost the popular vote. As you note, 77,000 votes in the three closest states could have flipped the election.
Biden won 306-232 in 2020 (the same margin, or better if you allow for the faithless electors). If he lost 42,000 votes it'd have been 269-269, which would have led to the House of Representative contingency, which might have elected either Biden or Trump (or ended in a different outcome, frankly). It'd take another 33,000 votes to give Trump an unambiguous win by flipping Nevada.
This is an interesting curiosity -- but for Aunt Maria getting the flu, the election could have been different! But we're in increasingly silly hypotheticals. Knowing what we know now, it's clear Clinton would have done more to target the states she narrowly lost. But the problem is that state votes are correlated with one another and so the number of hypotheticals you need to sustain to "flip" exactly those votes without turning out any additional votes or affecting the campaign strategies is pretty weird.
Even if you take the prototypical version of this question "Did Ralph Nader 'cost' Gore the 2000 presidential election by 'taking' at least 500 of his votes in Florida?" it's sort of a rabbit hole of absurdities. The answer is surely yes to the question, because the answer to any hypothetical is yes when the margin is that close. But beyond that not super productive.
In general I think most people would, collectively, analyze Biden's victory over Trump as somewhat more decisive than Trump's over Clinton or Bush's over Gore, though less decisive than either of Obama's or Bush 2004.
Although, in the situation you propose, 2020 would actually be a 269-269 tie. Which means any unfaithful elector could refuse to vote for their candidate and throw it to the other party. And even if no one did, then Congress would break the tie in a pair votes that would presumably go for Trump and Pence if people voted on a party line.
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?
Trump knew that mail-in votes would favor the Democrats, so he spread a conspiracy theory that mail-in voting was rampant with Democratic ballot fraud (it wasn't,) going so far as to attempt to defund the Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting altogether[0].
Of course, this meant Republicans avoided mail-in voting en masse, so when the (primarily Democratic) mail-in ballots came in after the initial numbers appeared to favor Trump, and the tide turned against him, the cries of fraud only became louder.
That's what Trump does, he poisons any well he can to harm his opponents, even if he has to drink from it afterwards. It's political because he made it political, the way he made masks and vaccination political because he thought COVID would distract from his narrative of a "roaring economy" and because he thought wearing a mask would make him look weak in front of the press, who he considered his enemy.
[0]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/24/why-trumps-...
Not a fan of Trump either, but would things have been so much better with Hillary as President? Her actions are equally if not more heinous than Trump. She’s just not as obvious about it.
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.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/02/18/...
You keep using this word, "fringe". I don't think it means what you think it means...
I'm not sure why you're talking about COVID, Russia, oil prices etc because none of that was mentioned; I actually agree with most of what you wrote in your latter paragraphs. But this isn't the place to have this kind of flamewar.
"What, you disagree that we should kick off people who claim that we're wrong to say that there's practically no foo? Let me round you to the X's, who claim there's lots of foo, which is crazy."
(Of course, this caricature is immediately picked up by the people who actually do believe there's lots of foo, and who very much appreciate either them passing as moderates, or the moderates being counted as them.)
And, of course, the reverse. In an outrage-based social media landscape, it is impossible to be a moderate: you will be rounded off to the extremists regardless of what you actually say.
It is both the case that voting machines can be compromised and that we know the most well-advertised claims of election fraud in the 2020 election are themselves fraudulent.
https://blog.erratasec.com/2021/11/example-forensicating-mes...
And the other side claimed absolute proof of no fraud?
I've mixed feelings about Greenwald, but he is smart and occasionally makes good observations. What good things can be said about Alex Berenson, who The Atlantic memorably called The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man [1]? He seems to depend on basic scientific illiteracy in his readers. Where Greenwald would respond to a substantive critique like the Atlantic's, Berenson seems to hope his readers remain unaware of the critique.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-pandemics-wrongest-m...
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/cdc-director-walensky-re...
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pandemics+wrongest+man%22...
If you think he didn't respond to that then surely you don't actually read his blog.
Neither of the two links you provide to his blog take any of the claims from the Atlantic piece and refute it. He mocks the title of the Atlantic piece but does not respond to its content. As far as I can see, it's bluster, pure rhetoric
Do you have any instances of Berenson actually attempting to refute specific claims made in the Atlantic piece?
The Atlantic on why Berenson was wrong: "[he is] arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can)."
The last three words are links to junk studies or articles of the sort that suddenly became fashionable after April 2020, after many years of studies saying there was no such evidence. But Berenson was and is correct. Mask mandates don't stop transmission or protect against COVID and this has been proven over and over again. Here's Berenson responding to this point by refuting it with another study, but this one is actually high powered and has a reasonable methodology (it isn't a dumb modelling study or lab experiment):
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/school-mask-mandates-use...
"On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed"
They were claimed to be 95% effective at stopping infection after two doses. Nobody has believed this for a long time, not even governments, which is why Israel is now up to 4 doses and it still isn't working. This claim was a correct reading of Israel's data.
Now, Berenson shoots from the hip. He likes to treat Substack as if it's Twitter and sometimes publishes stuff that turns out to be wrong. But he doesn't have to be right 100% of the time or even 50% of the time to beat the media outlets criticizing him. The Atlantic should especially pipe down because it's probably the Pandemic's Wrongest Publication:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-oh-my/comme...
They've served up some great headlines in recent times. October: "Four measures that are helping Germany beat COVID" (Germany is currently one of the most restrictive countries in Europe). December: "We know enough about Omicron to know we're in trouble" followed by in February: "Open everything: the time to end the pandemic is now".
Anyone reading Berenson has been consistently about 6-12 months ahead of the "mainstream" journalism curve. Anyone reading the Atlantic would have been exposed to a whiplashing of overwrought nonsense that bears no reality to what actually happened.
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.
Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term.
And I also think that the very model of Substack (subscribe to a specific writer, instead of a newspaper that typically bundles many different voices) also attracts readers that are ideological/obsessive.
That's a feedback loop that could end not well.
Probably very well, for the same reason that Joe Rogan's podcast is the most listened to podcast in the US: those views are widely accepted by about 50% of the population.
Despite your pejorative labelling you aren't actually finding extreme minority viewpoints on substack, you're finding modern-day mainstream conservative perspectives.
The readership potential is huge.
Much of the "anti lockdown/mask/covid vaccine mandates" was and is slowly vindicated day by day no matter how much money or power you throw into the mix to convince people otherwise.
The Pfizer publications https://youtu.be/7YOD9drZasM are definitely being ignored by most media but are just one more nugget that those you called anti vaxxers that wanted the right to make their own risk analysis were right and those who sold you a lie did it knowingly.
Abhorrent is your intolerance and the happiness with which much of the population pushed segregation and deshumanization.
> the right to make their own risk analysis
I really wonder where this comes from though. Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?
I mean everyone talks about their "bubbles" but very few acknowledge how cognitively hard it is to be open. For that it is best to talk person to person without outright throwing facts around.
I once talked to someone who really believed Hillary Clinton is at some center of some devilsh things eating babies and shit. Well, it turned out it to be a more desperate emotional expression (a personal thing), of course she didn't directly admit it, but it was nonetheless very interesting and insightful. I wouldn't have found that out if I didn't go through the first uncomfortable and awkwards moments of actually leaving my bubble. Someone could dismiss that as only emotionally unstable, I didn't.
So, when a POV seems extreme to you and is held by seemingly 50% of the population: there is really something rotten in the state of Denmark: Leave your bubble form time to time, dude.
If someone I know and love believes that Hillary Clinton is eating babies, I will engage and try to find out more.
But if it's some random woman on the Internet, I'm really not interested.
To push that analogy a little farther, consider how people would have reacted if, in 1905, months after the Wright Brother's successful flight tests, the United States had made air travel mandatory and suppressed discussion of its attendant risks.
I think the mRNA vaccines are a tremendous marvel and our best tool for defending ourselves from COVID. But they are not a panacea, and we cannot build trust in them by demanding it.
Trust is earned. The airline industry has earned a lot of trust by having, amongst other things, extremely thorough accident investigations and extremely high safety standards. They also introduce new technology slowly and conservatively. People don't have to take the word of random 'experts' for this, because they can see with their own eyes that plane crashes are extremely rare. In the even rarer case where it's discovered to be due to genuine negligence or malign behaviour (see: Boeing 737 MAX fiasco), that is very widely discussed and executives are held to account via legal liability frameworks.
The COVID vaccine industry has not earned this trust:
1. Vaccine makers insist on blanket exemptions from legal liability of any kind in order to sell vaccines to a country, even if it is shown in a court that they were negligent. Check the leaked Pfizer contracts if you don't believe me. Governments have changed their laws in some cases to enable this (liability exemption pre-dates COVID).
2. People can see, with their own eyes, that vaccines have side effects they weren't told were possible. Now the law courts are forcing documents out of the FDA we can see that Pfizer knew about these side effects but didn't tell people about them (probably others too).
3. When something goes wrong and someone is injured by a vaccine, there is no crash-style investigation process. Instead it's swept under the rug, e.g. doctors will happily deny there's any connection between a vaccine and a severe reaction that happens just hours later.
And so on, and so on.
The problem with people who hate "anti-vaxxers" (they usually aren't actually anti-vaxx in general), is that they don't seem able to handle nuance or complexity. Even the derogatory label anti-vaxxer is like this, it strips all the complexity from people's positions. Comparisons between airlines (massively trusted, earned) and Pfizer (recipient of the biggest corporate fine in history, not massively trusted, earned) are in no way useful because not all institutions are the same.
Nobody doesn't have the right to make their own risk analysis. That's assuming they're capable of it and we both know that's not the case.
It really serves no purpose to link to these kind of videos, the ones with an official sounding title and authored by "a retired nurse teacher" who nonetheless calls himself "doctor".
If people don't waste 20+ min of their day sitting through the entire video and then picking it apart to have an endless back and forth of "ok but what about this other 90 page garbage pdf report I found" then it's like you've won the argument that nobody wants to have in the first place. This kind of stuff is rotting the internet from within like there's no tomorrow.
You start out by saying that people have the right to make their own risk analysis, suddenly add on a condition (if they're capable of it), determine (by yourself?) that they're not capable of it, invalidate your initial conclusion and end up saying (without saying) that people actually don't have the right to make their own risk analysis.
Now that's abhorrent.
Y'all really think that moderate conservative writing - it didn't stray in terms of emotion into what I would consider rhetoric - is abhorrent? Wow. That's some thick-walled bubble you're in.
You're the one calling this service - which has attracted a sizeable number of perfectly mainstream conservative writers - 'the perfect honeypot.'
We definitely do have different ordinaries.
> But it is clear enough by now that the Narrative is not true. Covid-19 is a nasty illness which should be taken seriously, especially by those who are especially vulnerable to it. But it is nowhere near dangerous enough - if anything could be - to justify the creation of a global police state. [1]
If you don't see the conspiracy theory in this, then I can't help you.
(Me, all I need is the capital N at "Narrative".)
[1] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-vaccine-moment-par...
You seem to be particularly triggered by the word narrative - ignore that word if you like, or mentally replace it with "what governments tell us" and which part of what was said above is false?
(And how is porn not speech? If you ban porn then you're not defending free speech in any meaningful manner.)
1. Practical. Porn is banned because Stripe doesn't allow payment for porn. In turn Stripe doesn't allow that because the chargeback rate on such payments is very high, supposedly due to the number of people who buy porn because they want it and then get caught by their spouses and claim their card must have been stolen. At any rate, a blogging/newsletter platform is not exactly optimized for porn anyway. The people who want to buy and sell that are better served by other platforms.
2. Theoretical. Porn is not "speech" because speech encodes ideas or viewpoints. The reason freedom of speech is important is because ideas and viewpoints are important, as it's only through the competition of ideas that progress occurs. Defending free speech takes a lot of work, but can be justified by the benefits. Defending porn would take even more work, but wouldn't yield the same social benefits.
It's fascinating that the top-level comment telling us how they "love" Substack is from someone who apparently thinks the fight against Covid is equivalent to modern-day Stalinism (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30637571 further in this thread).
Whoops.
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
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
Also useless, because it is very likely you cannot read the article at the moment you receive the notification, because you are busy.
I don't know what Substack is, but it seems similar to Medium, and as such an app is unnecessary. You don't need apps to display and read text, I already have a web browser. Distraction-free reading? Just make sure your pages are compatible with Reader View, or better yet, make a distraction free design in the first place.
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.
This is one of my favourite thins about email, it is a way to deliver something to me, but imposes no limitations on my workflow. I can customize however I want.
This is one reason I would never use a substack app. I don't want a different app for substack, medium, WordPress, blogger and have to check them all and learn their imposed workflows. I just want everything sent to my email then I can use the workflow that I want for all of the content.
Being able to open the app to read when I want to will be much nicer.
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).
If you have any further reading on this please share.
n=1 with exception for scientific papers I do essentially all my reading on my phone and I do not experience any attention difference. I also have my phone on perpetual DnD so notifications and other distractions are not a thing.
This assumes this is goal for Substack founders and leadership. The null hypothesis absence of other evidence, is that the goal is active reader/subscriber growth
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:)
I have yet to hear a user data analytics team say that.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
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.
Regarding a cross-platform launch, I think launching at the same time considerable increases odds of reaching a critical mass of people joining the hype generated by a launch. In my experience users rarely come back to a place when app was released to a platform they don't have - disappointment factor plays a role - unless they really need it.
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.
For now I use feedbin, which lets you subscribe to newsletters with a custom feedbin email. Other readers also do this.
The downside is that your substack login address has to be a feedbin address.
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'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.
Also The Pragmatic Engineer: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/
Better for international audiences, if you like Dax Shepard's podcast with him, you'll love his Webworm content.
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.
Also an emergence of a "curator" class, people who could assemble "newspapers" out of the newsletters could be interesting, too.
This will offer some genuine benefits to readers (one monthly payment, maybe a discount) and to writers (lower transaction fees, since Stripe has a fixed cost that eats into small payments), but it will also sever the thing that currently makes it possible for authors to leave Substack and take 100% of their paid subscribers with them: every single reader has a unique subscription object in each individual publisher's Stripe account, which can then be ported to any other platform using Stripe. So when writers leave Substack they won't be able to take with them any subscribers who arrived through a bundle.
I think writers won't realise the danger here, and that Substack will therefore be able to lock in writers, against their original promise.
I would be delighted if this didn't happen, and happy to retract this if Chris could just promise that Substack will never do this kind of bundling, even if it's opt-in for publishers.
This is an excellent idea! Tracking individual articles for payment, rather than the whole publication/newsletter, would allow for bundling in a way that respects Substack's intentions of preserving/respecting the author and reader relationship.
People say they want this, but in reality almost no article seems to be worthy of eg. $5, even though you would be absolutely ok subscribing for $5 to a newsletter with 2 posts per month, one of which you won't read ...