First of all, huge respect to the Ghost team. Their open source contributions are valuable, and their approach to theming enables some great-looking things. That said, some important corrections:
Substack is not "powered by Ghost". Rather, we built our own theming API that’s compatible with themes built for Ghost, including those built by third parties.
The Free Press is using a modified Tripoli theme, built by Ahmad Ajmi, under a paid license. This is how this is supposed to work. It's good for the theme developer if we support this – you should check them out here.
https://aspirethemes.com/themes/tripoli
This was relatively quick to build for Substack devs, because the structure of Ghost sites matches Substack fairly closely.
With respect to the search library, this is an open source library that we are using in a fully compliant way. John's own screen shot shows that we don't load it "from Ghost’s own CDN", it comes from jsDelivr
https://www.jsdelivr.com
This is a standard way to use an open source library. It's pulling from the version that the sodo-search maintainers published to NPM (thank you!).
It is a good point that we should lock a version, so that if they accidentally published a minor version revision with breaking changes it doesn't cause problems for us. We’ve fixed that.
We’re grateful to the developer of the Tripoli theme and to Ghost for its contributors to open source work. We’re exploring ways to give writers more customization on Substack. This is one approach we’re considering but it’s too early to know if we’ll scale it up.
And @JohnONolan, thanks for the note at the end about potential collaboration. In our minds, we’re on the same side of an important battle for a better internet. We’re definitely up to chat.
Having themes work across multiple major platforms is a boon for theme designers (and people creating blogs). It's a great idea to standardize it as much as possible.
> John's own screen shot shows that we don't load it "from Ghost’s own CDN", it comes from jsDelivr
That bit was the strangest part of the accusations, this is the Ghost CEO, he should know jsDelivr is not really "their" CDN but a generic asset host.
jsDelivr is meant exactly for this purpose though, isn't it? For JS files to be reused across different sites so it can be cached easier? Not locking versions is the only real issue here.
TIL, makes sense from a (very limited) security perspective.
CDN caching was never that useful anyway, non-cached jQuery etc downloads fast these days. Publishing libraries on a centralized public CDN, where the same URL is used across different sites is still the primary value prop for jsDelivr regardless.
Why even in brackets? It is NOT powered by Ghost. They use code so they can use Ghost themes and some search lib that was made by ghost or ghost uses as well or whatever but its NOT AT ALL Ghost.
Hi Chris! Love what you're doing with Substack. One quick thing though - this may seem weird, but Substack at the moment does not, in my opinion, offer a lot of customisation of the website. If you see a website, it's extremely easy to tell its a Substack.
Over the past year, I've only read high quality Substack posts - and my brain has sort of come to instinctively believe that if I see that specific layout, the post will be high quality. E.g. (not a very nice one) but in general, if I see the Medium layout, my brain almost immediately get turned off, believing the quality of the content to be sub-par.
I think individual theming, as in the case of The Free Press, takes away that immediate notion. I understand that the vast majority of people will not face this issue, but I think I will. I just wanted to know if you think this is an issue, and if it is, what you'll do to 'counter' it. I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this!
This is a great point, and one that we're honestly in the process of trying to make progress on.
Ideally, I would love to have both:
- Writers and creators on Substack are in complete control of the brand and feel of their publication
And:
- All publications look & work well
- Readers get the benefit of already understanding some of what this thing is, which makes it easier to subscribe with confidence
- We can continue to ship rapid improvements across all of Substack
In practice, there are tradeoffs involved here and we're trying to figure out how to push both sides as far as possible, while maintaining a simple and powerful product.
> E.g. (not a very nice one) but in general, if I see the Medium layout, my brain almost immediately get turned off, believing the quality of the content to be sub-par.
What you're saying about Substack is what people said about Medium in 2013. Just as Medium didn't go into the toilet overnight, Substack's universal theme isn't going to save it from irrelevance if the content isn't there.
Right now I would just be happy with code highlighting and formatting for my posts that wasnt utterly broken. Since last year, GitHub gist imports have had a warning message on them that is only supposed to trigger on non-printable characters, but triggers on literally every gist import for Substack.
Unfortunately, there is no other method for syntax highlighting on Substack.
Support responded after a few weeks that its on their roadmap, but considering how long its been, I'm not hopeful.
I love substack. You guys have been doing a lot for the info landscape to return to the blogsphere. But I would love you even more if there was dark mode, I want to read in bed! -sincerely a huge fan of your platform
I'm one of the Substack founders. My (obviously biased) view is that we are trying to do something that is genuinely important, and that we're willing to sweat the details in service of the people who use Substack. I'll try to give that quick barbell of lofty vision and practical details.
Big picture: we believe that what you read matters, and that therefore great writing (and great intellectual culture in general) is valuable. In our view the great promise of the internet is that it can unlock a flourishing of culture, but the first phase was dominated by a land-grab for attention which gave us the current landscape of ad-driven platforms which optimize for the wrong things and don't serve great writing. Substack is an attempt to create an alternate universe on the internet, with different laws of physics, that fulfills the original promise. Where writers can make real money by earning and keeping the trust of an audience who deeply values their work. Where readers can take back their mind, and decide for themselves who to trust and how to spend their attention.
Practical terms: we try to focus really hard on serving the people that use Substack. The writers, obviously, by giving them something that genuinely works. I think of this as "we do everything for you except the hard part". Which means if you can write something great, the job of the product is to handle the rest. This means not just the right features, but smart defaults everywhere that help you succeed. For readers, we try to make the experience very clean and frictionless, and communicate right from the get-go that this is a place that respects you and your attention, to the point that it might be worth paying for. The things others have noted - smart defaults, fast loading, clean design, etc. etc. are expressions of this. We're focused serving people, and we're not shy about using 'boring' technology (like email, for example) to make it happen.
Putting this together, the magic of the Substack model is not that it gives writers a way to get paid for doing the thing they might have done elsewhere. It creates a system where the kind of thing you do to succeed is qualitatively different and better than what succeeds elsewhere. For writers, that can mean getting paid -- sometimes very handsomely -- to do the work you actually believe in. It can unlock this for people who weren't professional writers before. And for readers, it means a lot of the best writing to be found anywhere is on Substack.
A common criticism in this thread -- and elsewhere -- is the accumulation of subscription fees to authors. I can justify $10/month for my favorite writer's weekly work, but not another $90/month for my next 9 favorite writers' biweekly or monthly work.
What are your thoughts on handling this aspect of the economic piece of the content puzzle?
The solution may simply be that consumers should get used to consuming less. We all bemoan what has become of the modern internet (tracking/privacy violations, clickbait, the 'attention' economy, a never ending stream of low-effort, low-value content), but one of the single biggest contributors to this state is that it has built up around users getting addicted to consuming content for no monetary cost.
This probably extends outside the digital realm and applies to modern consumerism in general. If paying for the actual cost of consumption goods is unbearable, perhaps it's a sign we should be cutting back on how much of it we are consuming?
I strongly disagree. Their focus should continue to be 100% on making it possible for their authors to make a living. Anything else is a distraction. Bundling, while a possible option to help this, is probably a distraction at this point, and could also muddy the waters, in terms of the Substack/Author relationship.
Thank you this is an interesting perspective. Substack today is definitely targeted at people who want a full stack thing and don't want to worry about coding one's own template etc.
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?
Google Reader, which y'all claim to love, supported reading any blog, not just Google's owned Blogger.
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 your company has done a lot of work around building resources for up-and-coming writers—legal services, health insurance—as well as educational offerings. Most of those have requirements tied to Substack usage or revenue. If you offered a package that made these accessible to non-Substackers, that would be a useful contribution to the space in general.
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.
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.
I just want to get this prediction down in writing in as many venues as possible: Substack will eventually offer (opt-in) bundling for authors, where the customer pays $x per month and Substack distributes that to the authors in the bundle.
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.
Chris can we get a promise in writing from you that you will never implement bundles in such a way that writers couldn't leave your platform and take 100% of their paying subscribers with them?
