I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting.
But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than its fees, because the counterfactual is that I don't have any of those things. I think it's a huge mistake to lump those together as "convenience", its a lot more than convenient!
The only important thing to me about having a non-substack website is that its good to have a place for more permanent information, lists, contact, etc. But even for many writers, that kind of stuff becomes stale so quickly that the personal sites don't tend to matter much, or even make them look worse! The floating social network spaces are much more valuable. Even losing my x.com would be much worse to my day-to-day life than losing my domain, though I may wish it were otherwise. And I cannot replicate that elsewhere. The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
> The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
I think this is mostly wrong, and that the social networks are big primarily because they spent money at the right time to create entrenched network effects that allow them to rent-seek ever after. The quality and innovation of the services themselves (especially simple sites like twitter/X) is not the moat. At a technical level, most are easily clone-able and dominate not because they offer the best service or have the best features but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.
I said "mostly" above because it seems like substack, e.g., as you said, has bundled payment, email, etc in a way that people really like. Even there, though, the network effect is probably the dominating factor.
It is wrong, but so are you. The truth is that social networks are big because they HAD genuine utility. The Facebook was amazing... at least until about 2010. I was at uni when it started and I vividly remember thinking "I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is" (we didn't have physical face books in the UK) and then a year later thefacebook turned up. Amazing for everyone's social lives.
But after 2010 it just gradually got shitter.
WhatsApp replaced it (in most ways; in some ways there is no replacement) and has so far been amazing but it feels like we're about at the "2010" of WhatsApp. Meta is starting to turn the screws. An AI button. Notifications about new features. Integration with Meta accounts. Eventually it will probably merge with Facebook Messaging or some bollocks and then we'll all have to move elsewhere.
Anyway my point is, these things genuinely became big because they were great. They stayed big despite becoming shitter due to network effects.
> If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.
And we would have kept a more inconvenient web, since without that incentive, Facebook etc. would never have had reason to pay for an army of software developers to implement and improve the site and servers to host it.
Yes, absolutely. Facebook became successful because at the time it was much more convenient than existing ways of accomplishing the same thing it did (interacting socially with other people, meeting new people), including even existing websites like myspace which were themselves more convenient than trying to create one's own website and grow a community, or traveling to meet people face-to-face.
> I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is
Did you miss Myspace and Friendster? Orkut had a market, I think. The reason that Facebook succeeded later is because it had a good API and invited people to write apps for it (mostly surveys and games, remember Zynga?), tracked its users across the internet, and sold them in targeted slices to advertisers. It was Friendster as a commercial platform (like Salesforce was CRM as a commercial platform.) It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.
I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput, being created by very talented people using Erlang. The reason people use it is because they always have and their friends do, and for a lot of countries with expensive SMS it provided messaging (and became so integrated into business that people weren't allowed to live without it.)
This is my argument about why these things were successful; I think that "they were great" isn't a credible one. They simply grabbed a large chunk of already proven markets quickly, but oriented themselves toward corporate needs to leverage that into total control.
> It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.
I might be misremembering a bunch but myspace never had a feed that showed you your friend’s updates.
It also wasn’t able to magically show you the people who were at that random house party you went to the night before that you hit it off with but were too drunk to get their number.
Facebook didn't have the feed initially either (and it was really disliked when it was introduced - people thought it was like stalking). But yes to your second point. Real people who you actually wanted to know and had actually met were on Facebook. That wasn't really true of any of the other sites.
Little did we know back then how many people were yearning to have stalkers. "This person wants to be notified every time I put something online" sounded incredibly creepy in the mid-aughts!
Yeah, Facebook was primarily a directory when it started, a cross between a college facebook (like a yearbook given at the start of the year instead of the end) and a phone book.
Also, it didn’t allow custom styles or html, which was unusual at the time but ultimately helped it take off to the point that, like Google, it didn’t have allow HTML or JS in ads either.
MySpace was a) awful, b) only used by a tiny tiny fraction of people (1% maybe), and c) rarely had people's real names & photos on it. Not remotely comparable to Facebook. Even fewer people used Friendster and Orkut, at least in the UK.
> I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput
Free. No ads. Reliable. E2E encryption. Group chats. Cross platform. There's so much that's great about it. It was successful because the alternative was SMS which was shit. I'm guessing you're American.
This is a feature, not a bug. There is nothing worse for a society's collective privacy than a surveillance machine where people willingly post every detail of their lives. Stalin would have dreamed of today's anti-social media as a surveillance tool.
> There's so much that's great about it.
There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry. And that's assuming messages are truly encrypted and not analyzed behind your back by Meta. E2EE is kind of meaningless when the endpoints cannot be trusted. SMS is insecure in transit but it isn't controlled by a single for-profit company with close ties to government agencies.
okay? good for you? you being worked up about privacy doesn’t magically invalidate the experience of others. you not liking something doesn’t mean that it’s objectively bad. you not seeing utility in something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have utility. you not seeing value in something doesn’t mean that a great many people saw value in it, which is exactly what you’re arguing against. It does not surprise me that someone with a worldview so simple and self-centred cannot comprehend of how a great many people saw the juice being worth the squeeze.
Facebook had immense utility in the 2000s and even some of the 2010s. Not everyone wants to hang out with you on 4chan dude.
> but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.
Sure. So what? You nonetheless cannot deny the utility. The friends that I have made from social networks are no less real. I am very grateful they (the means to discover these people now in my life) exist.
We are probably coming at this from different angles. I don't deny those things but they're also not a counter-argument to the point I'm intending to make.
As an overly dramatic example, a slave might fall in love with the wife he met on a plantation, and the family he has, and even be grateful for them. Nevertheless, you probably don't want to use those facts to be a booster for slave plantations.
My argument is that all the good things you like about social networks, from a technical pov, could be had quite easily without the ads, political propoganda, and other ill-effects of the current popular social networks. Indeed, there are many open source projects that already provide the features you'd want. It's just that none has achieved the network you want.
This situation is unlike that of a large, complex physical infrastructure project, where you really do need to "put up" with a governement (or something like it) in order to get the thing built and maintained.
I think you are missing the point of talking about utility in the first place. I have no interest in lamentations. If you told someone to stay away from social networks because of their flaws, you would be doing them a cultural and professional disservice.
As a more moderate metaphor it's like someone saying they like living in one city, for all its flaws, and someone else comes along and extolls the virtues of several imaginary cities. It's fun to imagine those places, but its silly to mention them when someone is speaking of utility. This rush to examples not beholden to reality seems more common among technical types than any other, and likely prevents you from benefitting from what exists today.
How easy/difficult was it getting off the ground on substack? Did you get interactions right from your first post? Is there visibility for new writers?
I started using it to run a conference 4 years ago with the intent that it was supposed to be a temporary solution until we built a "real" site.
The experience was so good that we haven't moved off. Even if we did build a more formal conference site, we'd still keep the substack blog. The mailing list has grown from nothing to right at 1000 subs which isn't bad for something I do in my spare time. By far the most effective communication. Social media (all channels) are a fraction of the engagement that I get compared to substack.
If you want a free ticket to come down this year, shoot me a note! We typically bring a bunch of folks from Concord. I came to speak at a meetup over at Flywheel Concord a couple of years ago to promote the conference.
What is genuinely interesting is how Hacker News moderators will edit user posts, such that it looks as if the user replied to another post originally, without ever making that clear. What other lies and manipulation do they come with? Directly editing the content of posts silently, no sign of being edited?
> even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.
This is a strange phrase - initially you had to either own land (therefore pay tax) or else if you lived in a city and didn't own land but paid sufficient tax[1], to vote in the early United States. Only taxpayers voting was our first principles! We only changed it later.
[1] I'm simplifying slightly because different states handled this differently
very minor nit but no CO2 is released during concrete curing. And over time (decades) the calcium hydroxide in concrete reacts with CO2 to pull it out of the air, producing calcium carbonate.
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O
(producing the concrete of course makes a ton of CO2, since its basically the reverse reaction, which is accomplished by generating a lot of heat)
That sounds a bit like one of Saturn's (1985-2010) original ideas from the 80s. The plastic paneling was easy to take off so that people could DIY change the colors or add their own panels (and Saturn engineers could quickly revise styles). I am not sure very many people ever did, however. Or even if the cars were all that customizable in the end.
I think you’ll find even people with 20 year old Toyotas are more attached to their trucks and more likely to put money in them for accessories and rims etc than your average Chevy Sonic owner.
Smart also used to advertised one of their early cars (maybe fortwo in the early 2000s?) emphasising how easy it was to swap the plastic panels. I just realised, I've not seen any adverts like that for many years, googled and found an article [1] describing how it was never as easy as they claimed.
> It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy.
I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more) years of pricing pain. Meanwhile expensive RAM has so far left stock for people that really need it. Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.
> Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut
The 3 RAM manufactures know this too, from painful experience. There won't be a glut this cycle because there are no capacity build-outs. Instead of increasing capacity, some OEMs left the consumer segment to focus on enterprise AI.
> Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.
It's not odd at all because the complementary industries are being damaged - possibly permanently: manufacturers of motherboard, cases, fans, and the entire consumer PC supply chain are being negatively impacted. Expect bankruptcies and consolidation if this lasts for 2 more years.
The big 3 are the only ones capable of bringing forth a glut, IMO. Of the Chinese challengers, CXMT is the frontrunner, there's also JHICC and others, but I don't think any of them will have sizable volumes in the next 2 years, despite extremely favorable market conditions. This is not a dig against them; they (and their domestic vendors) will need time and experience to get the yields up, and will undoubtedly eventually dominate the consumer market in about 5 years, according to my outsider crystal ball.
CXMT is a tiny supplier, it will take years before they significantly expand the market. They're pretty much in the same boat as Samsung and SK Hynix, they just have less of an incentive to actively curtail supply.
For some definitions of tiny. Their current monthly wafer production is about 1/2 that of Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron. They're rapidly expanding, but so are the others, so they're unlikely to catch up anytime soon, but that alone doesn't make them tiny. Maybe tiny in the HBM space or even DDR5, given their trailing process nodes.
> I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment.
Sentiment is the right word here. None of us really know, and go by feeling. If you perceive the AI boom as approaching tulip craze levels of irrationality, it feels pretty dire.
The RAM is a commodity and may be repurposed afterward. This kind of thing is a bit like a debt jubilee when the dust clears and survivors scavenge the dead. But a lot of other build-out may essentially be waste. To me, apologists for this boom seem to be harboring a variant of the broken windows fallacy. Not all economic activity is productive.
The other kind of damage is opportunity cost. How many players in other industries are being strategically harmed by this situation? We can't all just live on AI token output if these other industries retract too far.
I wonder what kind of bone yard is going to come out of all the mania spending. I am picturing a sea of GPU's being liquidated from startups no one's ever heard of.
> This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US.
No such thing as a free lunch. Whilst a lot of industries are doing extremely well right now (i.e. everything involved in datacenter construction), everyone else has to actually pay for it.
Therein also lies the damage; The economy wasn't doing so great to begin with, and now this massive multi-trillion-dollar expense has been added.
The direct expenses come out of the pockets of Big Tech, but all the indirect stuff like the DRAM crisis affect the wider economy directly.
The problem is that the medium term prospects are irrelevant to all the businesses that won't be around long enough to enjoy them.
Smaller businesses in particular - not so long past the COVID disruption and already facing significant challenges in areas like logistics and energy supply costs - will not necessarily have the reserves that older and larger businesses often do to withstand another multi-year price shock.
It's not odd at all to call this economic damage unless you're that disconnected from anything but AI/high-tech SV companies.
There's smaller businesses that I know _need_ data capacity (hard drives) that can't afford them and are facing serious CAPEX challenges.
I work for a start up that helps folks move off of existing on-prem virtualization solutions and every small to medium company across every sector you can think of aren't just able to not afford additional storage and memory, they can't find them either.
There isn't as much stock as you think. I can't wait for this AI bubble to pop. It's been absolutely terrible for 90% of the industry.
Yup. Once production ramps up (and then subsequently overshoots) in the next couple years we're going to have GPUs with 96GB VRAM for the price of a 4090 today.
I've had surface devices for a long time, originally for work to test HTML Canvas with the touchscreen. Unlike a lot of the other comments, I've had a nice time with them. The screens are a great quality, the keyboard especially in later versions is quite good. Drawing on them is nice. Battery life is middling, though.
Same experience. I still have one of the Snaprdagon X1 Elite surface laptops for the few times i need a windows machine, it's nice. It's about the closest you'll get to a MacBook in Windows land.
Also unlike the rest of HN, I don't have complete hatred of Windows. I wouldn't mind picking up one of these, but I'm almost certain the price is going to be somewhere between unaffordable and completely ridiculous.
But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than its fees, because the counterfactual is that I don't have any of those things. I think it's a huge mistake to lump those together as "convenience", its a lot more than convenient!
The only important thing to me about having a non-substack website is that its good to have a place for more permanent information, lists, contact, etc. But even for many writers, that kind of stuff becomes stale so quickly that the personal sites don't tend to matter much, or even make them look worse! The floating social network spaces are much more valuable. Even losing my x.com would be much worse to my day-to-day life than losing my domain, though I may wish it were otherwise. And I cannot replicate that elsewhere. The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.
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