I'm surprised that substack shows up so often on HN. It doesn't support syntax highlighting, tables, Latex, and has no widgets for data or interactive visualizations. Perfect for lots of audiences who want long-form writing, but HN?
It’s a YC company. I don’t see much special for it, let’s see how long it lasts. At least Medium did some very unique things with their text editor (I challenge anyone to find a more enjoyable _writing_ experience than Medium in the world of online editors, barring Google Docs)
What? Medium is horrible to write. We basically migrated from it because it’s like word. Who likes to write using word besides non-techies?
And even then, I’d chose wordpress over medium any day because of how restrictive and gated medium is. Their rss feeds are also so hidden it’s annoying.
> I challenge anyone to find a more enjoyable _writing_ experience than Medium in the world of online editors, barring Google Docs
I was responding to to the bit about online editors, and Quip has a very nice collaborative editor that has a lot of useful functionality (which eventually makes its way into Google Docs)
I think the cause will be a combination of being a YC company along with community that has a general skepticism of legacy media outlets and an enthusiasm for alternatives. Plus the nature of the platform as a “no curation” direct channel from writer to reader lends itself to a particular kind of writer that’s attractive to that same community.
Personally I’m not really on board and a “substack.com” domain is now a negative quality signal for me in the same way as “medium.com” has become, but I can totally see why it’s a hot topic for some.
I don't think any of that has substantial effect, most users aren't writers, this is true in traditional social media, and is even more true in substack.
As a reader, I like substack. It promotes a healthy diversity in opinions unlike the increasingly ban-happy established social media and puts some power back into the writer's hands, at the cost of shattering the "For Free!" illusions of free beer social media.
What I just wish they do is realize how goddamn fucking aweful their rock-slow website is, how astonishingly user-hostile and actively infuriating it is to use.
I'm surprised no one has built a better publishing platform for books/multi-page content. Almanac's editor (based on Prosemirror) is top notch (https://almanac.io/), but it's a different target market. I'm trying to build a similar editor for the publishing space along these lines at pagespace.app.
During the height of the culture wars (probably 2020) it was one of the few outlets with dissenting opinions presented in a credible and well written way.
It is for classic liberals who want free thought, so it seems logical that the site shows up here.
There were lots and lots of blogs with similar opinions.
It’s really the case that they played up their hosting of some controversial writers in order to build publicity - hence one of their founders appears on Joe Rogan etc.
You can admire their stance and business model or not but let’s not pretend they were out of the ordinary.
You can annotate, edit with markdown, save articles permanently and also share the annotated articles with other people.
We also have inbuilt arXiv support so that you can read arXiv papers without wrangling PDFs. Latex equations are rendered quite well!
