Most of the time I think Hackernews obsession with self-hosting is misplaced.

But in this case, you're 100% right.

Like Medium, Substack's entire growth strategy is their own users ignorance of how important SEO is and how it works.

When you publish content on Substack, you're sharecropping. Plain and simple.

Just because you can charge for the Corn you grow on their land, doesn't mean you own the land. Your newsletter is building a steady audience of backlinks and users coming to substack.com, so ultimately, you're growing their business. Every time you publish content or advertise your newsletter, you're building authority for substack.com

And their business is the better one to be in. You do all the work, you generate backlinks and send users to their platform. They sit back and build a real sustainable business, while you're stuck tied to the weekly newsletter grind.

While its more work up front, I highly recommend you write your content on your own domain hooked up to a mailchimp or similar service. The importance of SEO and building authority on your own domain should not be overlooked.

Yes and no. I would say those platforms are more like communes. That is, I'll share mine (audience) is you share yours (audience).

It's like any product: starting from scratch to find fit and from that traction is not easy. It's resource intensive. Failure rate is high.

Yes, these platforms get a piece of your action. But they also provide something in exchange; something you'd likely struggle to create on your own otherwise. Then once you find fit, and traction, you can leverage that and transition elsewhere.

I agree, you can use these platforms to get off the ground fast and transition later.

BUT, here's the problem, the more you develop workflows, habits, and a big back catalogue on their platform, the harder it is for you to transition off of it.

Your content catalogue could have been building SEO juice for you on your own domain. Instead, by transitioning, any link anybody has ever posted to your content or newsletter becomes obsolete and a dead end into substack.

The truth is, if you aren't able to set up your own platform now, you aren't suddenly going to acquire the time and skills needed to do that while tied to a weekly publishing schedule later--especially given the vendor lock-in I mentioned above.

The platforms know this. I've never heard of a commune that venture capital investors were willing to put $15M in hoping for 10X returns.

It's sharecropping.

If a self-host blog post falls in the woods and no one is there to read it...is transitioning from Commune Y or Z a sound worth whining about? :)

It's only sharecropping if you allow it to be.Furthermore, SEO take more. There's a reason it's its own industry. So early on, are you better off learning SEO and working at it? Or becoming a better communicator, publishing content, finding fit, and getting traction?

SEO is marketing. It is a tool. Not every business and business model is the right fit for that tool. Full stop.

p.s. VC invest in a lot of things. Most fail. A few deliver marginal returns. A sliver deliver. I'm not so sure it's a lens that applies here.

That said, if Medium, etc. are so bad, why doesn't the market reflect that? If content is king, and you're the content producer, then that makes you the land owner.

Yes, SEO is valuable. But to base your entire decision on it and only it, and apply it in a OSFA way is foolish.

If there's a platform to avoid it's FB. That content is walled in and locked down.

You need a mailing address in the footer of emails in the US and any country with a CAN-SPAM-like law. Substack lets you use their PO box. It's even auto-filled. That adds cost for a self-hosted option unless you want your home address dangling out there or already have a business address.

Small USPS PO boxes are ~$10/mo. Is the convenience of Substack's PO box worth $10/mo?

You can ask that question up and down the yak shaving continuum and get an infinite number of answers. Is it worth it to me? No. How many people would answer yes? That's the 50 billion dollar question.

The reality for people who own homes is that it's more or less trivial to track down an address in general unless someone has a common name and there aren't obvious clues to their general location online.

This is true, but I don't think most people go through a complicated opsec calculus. Blasting a home address out to hundreds or thousands of strangers will feel weird for most people. I found lots of threads from people asking about this when I went out looking to see if this was a normal worry. I know ~three pieces of information is enough to find almost anything on someone and I still don't want to make it any easier for them.

Most people don’t want to run there own infrastructure. Also many newsletters are written by people that aren’t technical so self hosting is for a really limited audience.

> so self hosting is for a really limited audience

I agree with your general point (in fact I'm building something for that reason) but millions of WP installs don't count as a limited audience IMO.

That’s a really good counter argument.

+1

But it's just so much easier to just get started and try to develop the writing habit. That's the primary objective of someone starting out, I think.