> Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read.
How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future? That's the path basically every other platform has gone down.
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The entire pitch of Substack is "You can export the email addresses of your current subscribers at any time"
So if they stop doing the "email my subscribers whenever I post" step, another service will fill the gap pretty quick.
Substack notes is non exportable; the newsletter now no longer have a link to read it on your site on substack and instead link to the substack app, and subscriptions started in the app pay Substack through Apple and Google and you can't export them.
Substack has become a roach motel but they pretend otherwise
Thanks for this.
I can hear Substack marketing saying that “We don’t have any intention to put you into a vendor-lock.”
I had a lot of discussions with companies about their marketing.
Why do you upload your events’ photos to FB instead of your site?
Why do you have news on LI feed and don’t make it a post on your site as well?
Do you think they can hear it? :)
Substack is going to become a similar service as FB, LI are… no possibility to export your data easily or not at all.
They've already started requiring you to be signed in to view content, so I'd argue that have already become, not going to become.
Not sure about LinkedIn, but Facebook does let you export all your data as a bit monolithic zip file.
because they have to due to EU Laws every business operating in the EU has to allow this.
Every single thing substack does reeks of growth hacking. I suspect that it will only get worse. For that reason alone I chose to avoid it for my newsletter.
Can't you link to whatever you want in your own blog post?
If Substack stops supporting that feature you would end up losing all of your subscribers when you move to the alternative unless you happen to have an up to date export.
Which is trivial. Even once a month is enough.
How many writers are even thinking about that though? If they shut it off tomorrow, how many would have a list within the last year?
I'm pretty sure all of them. Because they'll never shut it without advance warning, due to the backlash.
Of course they wouldn't give warning.
Backlash is almost always good publicity.
And a warning would make their content providers more able to leave.
Of course, if they were given warning they would export their subscribers. I am talking about if it was cut off without warning. I do not think the majority would have a list within the last year.
Two answers to that:
1) That's on them (those not exporting their lists as backup).
2) Almost zero chance happening without warning anyway.
Until they make it more difficult to export lol that’s the real canary in the coal mine if you ask me.
The coal mine is already inhospitable
> How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future?
You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?
Hackers always use this argument against everything because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.
Thus they argue that you should not trust your things to other people but do it yourself, because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
>because you can in fact know some things about what one person, yourself, will do in the future.
Nope. At best you merely know what your current self intends to do in the future. Whether you'll do them then, or whether you'll even still want to do them then, or be able to do them then, or have regretted ever wanting to do them, and many other such things, we don't know.
I'm not sure if you're arguing against self-determination and for serfdom. Or just making a narrow correction to one sentence in an argument that was perhaps slightly too definitive.
But obviously the key principle is about retaining control over your business, income stream, relationship with your readers, or whatever it is you value. Sure, I change my mind and make mistakes. But I don't think that's a good argument for handing over control to some other entity which is equally changeable and fallible, but not primarily incentivised by my well-being.
Nope. As per my second paragraph which you may not have gotten to:
>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Furthermore the phrase "some things" does not actually mean all things.
So again, trying to put it another way to clarify anything that may have been unclear:
You can be reasonably certain at the time that you need to make a decision that you will try to do what you believe is the best for you. I will now not go on to make an exhaustive list showing every way that you in the future may not do what is right for you because it is normally understood that there are numerous ways in which the reasonable expectations of people can be countered but nonetheless, the reasonable expectations will still tend to hold more than any of the countering scenarios. This is why they are the reasonable expectations, while the countering scenarios are the notable exceptions that often show up in sensational news reports and fiction.
And finally I should note this comes down to the principle, which I would have thought was clear from my previous post but evidently not, that if you can reasonably expect that future you will try to do what future you thinks is best for them, you can just as reasonably expect that the future corporation you are buying a service from will try to what the future corporation thinks is best for them, without giving much consideration for what is best for you.
I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
on edit: Note in my first post I referred to major illness, because major illness, including mental illness, is one of the most common ways in which people end up not attempting to do what is best for themselves.
>because, barring major illness, you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future.
Regardless of major illness or not, people do stupid things, self destructive things, ill-thought things, impulsive things all the time. At best they'll do "what they think is best" not "what is best" for themselves. And frequently not even that, as people still do all kinds of things they know are bad for them but can't stop themselves anyway.
But even if it was correct, "you can reasonably assume that you will try to do what is best for yourself in the future" is not really strong as an argument against the grandparent's:
"You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future? You can't. Why do hackers always use this argument against everything?"
The grantparent's argument is about not knowing what you'll be doing in concrete terms, not about merely knowing some abstract guiding principle like "you'll still want to do something you feel is best for you then".
>I do not know what you think is best, but I would normally trust future me over future corporation not owned by me but providing me a service, I guess I'm just funny that way.
Even so, that's worth acting only if the pain of future corporation pulling some shit later on is bigger than the convenience you still get before that, or easier than what you'll lack going without its services.
Also if the cost of just dumping their ass then when they DO turn, and moving to another player, is big.
Its the terminating argument for FOSS hackers. When there is no good argument left, they fall onto that.
"You're only going to get 20 years of use out of this proprietary service before you'll need to spend a few hours switching off! You must switch now!"
You get 3 years and then you cannot switch off, your thing is simply destroyed.
Substack has been around for a decade. The core value is also easily swappable.
> You can never know anything about what anybody will do in the future?
You absolutely can know something about what someone will do in the future. You gain those insights by looking at their past and present behavior and the behavior of others in similar circumstances. Hackers tend to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can often see where things are heading. Enshittification is a pretty smart bet.
So your ex girlfriend cheated on you and now you reject all contact with women because you know that "sooner or later" she's going to cheat on you? In my ears it sounds the same when hackers say you can never buy anything or use any service, because "sooner or later" it will go to crap.
It's probably easy being a cynic, because you can always wait for decades (as another commenter argued) until you are right. In the meanwhile you have missed out on life - for no personal benefit at all.
You can do whatever research you like, but when you attempt to apply it to predicting the future, you're still speculating. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
It is just risk assessment and mitigation. Some risks are acceptable for some people and they do not need the mitigation. But for others it is not acceptable and they would find solutions.
Allow me to translate: “It a near certainty that they will fuck you over eventually; the question is will it be next year, next decade, or will you win the lottery?”
When they will, you’ll be free to take action.
Yeah and having a site is a way to mitigate that risk...
There's enough demand for the feature that if they stop supporting it, they won't be able to compete against anyone offering the feature.
Do they do it right now? How far into the future can you plan for? In the long run we all die.
Your host can kick you and DNS can block you.
Gmail has categories. So they already are.
That’s when you leave.