This post didn't age well – 3 weeks later Substack announced a $100m fundraise at $1.1b valuation. [1]
Ana's contention that Substack is "rickety" seems motivated by her conviction that they should adopt a more assertive, aggressive censorship regime, and that "we need a world where a social safety net protects risky writing".
There are certainly many interesting questions about the future of media and Substack's business – but the parade of people saying it can't succeed without more moderation keep being proven wrong.
This post linked to a different article (former Bloomberg reporter) that said it expected this round to be at $750 million ($50 million above the previous valuation).
And so yes, that's significantly less than it ended up being, $1.1 billion, but I'm not sure it impacts the argument being made. Except that the multiple would be even greater!
I don't think moderation has anything to do with it and it's not the core of the argument in the article. They've taken a huge valuation and investors will want a return on that. The problem is that there's just not that much loyalty in this space. I don't care where the content is hosted as long as it's not annoying, content makers don't care so long as they can make money. When substack starts needing to extract value they have to do it in a way that's annoying and chances are high we see the next platform appear. We've seen it before.
It would be lovely to see a platform get big taking a sustainable approach. But that investment money buys marketing and hype.
> This post didn't age well – 3 weeks later Substack announced a $100m fundraise at $1.1b valuation.
From the article: Newcomer says Substack is “pitching investors on a round between $50M and $100M that would value it above its roughly $700M last round price.”
Also: And if Substack does manage to raise that $100M they’re looking for now? Things will get worse.
The implication of her article is that they’d have a hard time raising that money and/or that they somehow aren’t doing well - I don’t see any evidence of this cited anywhere in her post.
No, the implication is that raising such a high level of VC would put huge pressure on Substack to grow and enshittify, thereby ruining the platform for writers who currently think it's good.
In other words, their current business model does not support their valuation, which necessitates a pivot.
She specifically talks about what happens next after raising that $100m. The higher valuation creating more urgency to be profitable, which could lead to a descent into Twitter-style outrage engagement stupidity, influencers, etc.
If she's wrong about anything, it's that you can assume enough people will leave a declining platform to keep it from staying alive.
This is an ironic response to a comment on HN that is being downvoted and soon will be censored by the crowd based flagging and voting system for being "disagreeable".
I’m not sure what you mean by “responsibility”. But if thing are published or notified based on content neutral criteria, then it’s fine in my opinion.
That's no longer a justification once you have algorithmic amplification which Substack introduced with its Twitter immitation.
At that point they ceased to just tolerate these ideas but to amplify them. At that point they carry more responsibility, and people rightly blame them for it.
Free speech is fine. A private company handing nazis a megaphone and not accepting criticism for it is not.
At no point in this post does she even write the word "censor"/"censorship". The post relentlessly criticizes Nazis but wanting silence to her dissent isn't pro-speech, it's just pro-nazi.
I'm really sick of this argument. You never see free speech extremists defending anti-fascism or even questioning the decisions of governments as long as they're right wing.
Hate makes people blind. Starship is failing by design - that's just how they're choosing to develop it. The chopsticks video that we saw earlier was very nearly science fiction. And as far as regular launches go, SpaceX has done more successful launches than any company or nation ever.
But more generally, this idea of abandoning an app (or product) the moment you encounter people who disagree with you is disheartening.
Abandoning a community the moment you encounter people who disagree with you is how one builds a bubble strong enough to say things like the bit you quoted.
Why would I spend my precious time wallowing in filth and squalor with some radicalized “influencers” who spout evil nonsense and entirely lack self awareness?
I’d rather go read a book and discuss it with some actually intelligent friends.
That was just a metaphor, a throwaway line in the article, no more important than Stephen Miller's marriage. It's peculiar that this is the subject you chose to expand on in the comments.
>But more generally, this idea of abandoning an app (or product) the moment you encounter people who disagree with you is disheartening.
It is a behavior Substack itself encourages by turing itself into a social media platform instead of simply a newsletter provider.
Yes, it is useful for building a moat of network effects, but it also forces views and opionions down people's throats that reflect badly on the platform.
I agree that hate makes people blind, which is why you need to get off X. That line doesn’t imply anything other than that SpaceX launches are unstable! The explosions are a highly notable feature of said launches.
Here's how little I understand business: $45 million in revenue, earned by taking a totally fair 10% of subscriptions that other people do all the work to get, seems like it ought to be enough. If leadership is trying to scale up to be thousands of employees, or to go public, they are lunatics and deserve to fail. Why not just run a successful newsletter platform?
It’s interesting you say the 10% is fair. I think some disagree.
In short they are selling web hosting and card payments, which are most likely worth far less than 10%. However, they’re clearly going for being a Brand that people want to publish under. Substack is worth 10% because it’s Substack, not for the tangibles they provide.
Now that leads to the question: what do they need to do to be a brand people want to be a part of? Is censorship part of that? Maybe, maybe not.
The other interest related piece that is topical at the moment is whether Substack might be worth 10% for card payments alone if certain publications would be unable to use payment providers otherwise. Porn and gambling sites often pay that sort of rate because it’s hard to get a payment provider. Maybe laundering nazi sympathy in with a bunch of tech blogs is worth 10% to them.
The network effects of substack seem pretty weak. Authors can use their own domain name and export a list of their subscribers any time. Their value is in providing software that is sticky for writers and solves a lot of the problems of creating and retaining an audience, which they seem to be doing pretty effectively. For better or worse, I don't think substack has much influence on the broader ecosystem either way; it's all down to consumer demand.
I feel ambivalent about Substack's Notes (its version of X/Bluesky). On the one hand, the signal/noise ratio is higher than either X or Bluesky. On the other hand, I can see signs of the social media engagement farming nonsense that I've come to dread.
But, I can just click on the "Following" link to avoid it. In fact, I can even set that as my homepage. So, so far, it's not that bad. And I continue to enjoy the diversity of writers; and am much more worried by virtuous scolds than by neonazis.
Why is it that Substack can’t just be run as a 10-20 person small-medium sized business forever? If publishers want to go there for a basic product, and Substack can collect rent from them, what’s the problem?
They took VC funding. That requires them to attempt to grow to the size of Facebook or Amazon, or implode. Merely being profitable forever is not an acceptable outcome.
There must be an opportunity here for someone who can stand up a medium-sized website and integrate it with a payment provider to take Substack's lunch money?
* Patreon kind of sucks for writing / newsletters or else they could have captured part of this market. Medium was supposed to fix this but they had an epic collapse.
* Single point where subscribers can manage their subscriptions and preserve a common identity across subscriptions in the comments etc. Again, Medium/collapse.
* A rapid adoption of substack by well known online writers with loyal followings. These writers either had their own blogs or were exiting traditional media or getting dumped out by the collapse of online media (gawker network, buzzfeed news, etc). Again, could have been Medium if not for their collapse.
* I suspect Substack spent a lot of that VC money guaranteeing 2 years of X revenue for a non-trivial number of high profile writers so they would onboard.
Reading this story I didn't realize just how much they had taken over the years (I use to operate in this media space, but haven't in a long time). I'm not sure what the headcount is but that amount of money is staggering and I can only imagine it was all used to acquire DAUs and very little novel technology has been created with it.
I think Substacks first 10m/100m (their keep of rev/total rev from subscriptions) was extremely impressive and fast. But also it was a kind of low hanging fruit. There was a market already there for this and Medium/Patreon couldn't capture it. Now if they are really at 45m/450m that is much less impressive. It will be extremely hard to get to 100m/1000m and IMO impossible to get much higher than that with their current approach.
Did Medium have a way to pay authors? Maybe it would have been easy to add but saying "A could have been B if only" I think misses the picture. Yahoo could have been Google if only they'd chosen a different algo. Flickr could have been Instagram if only they'd made a mobile app with filters. Etc...
I think it's precisely because substack launched with a way to let readers sponser the authors directly they liked that it took off. Medium had a partner program but that's not the same.
I'm certainly not arguing against your point. I didn't work at Medium but I had insight into their operations at the time and they didn't really seem to have a coherent vision to make money 12 or so years ago. My comparison of the two is more around their similar goals and audience, which was giving great (or interesting) writers a home for their projects and audiences and somehow make money. Medium was saying the financial part would happen down the line and it was a can they kicked for a long time. Medium seemed more interested in talking about their technology and aesthetics than they did on figuring out the crucial parts. Substack got it right doing what Patreon (and even Twitch) had already proved, people will pay up front for the writers/creators they love.
That said Medium did pay higher profile writers and publications to move to their platform (in some cases quite a bit of money) in a similar way that Substack has, which was to dip into the VC funded bank account.
To me, it seems like they're simply a monetised version of Tumblr, without the newfound censorship that all the other social media companies somehow have to have.
I really don't get the whole email thing, though. Newsletters are kinda super annoying to signup for, and then to receive. I've tried the Substack version, and I still don't get it. Even though I do love the mailing lists, but that's not the same as the newsletters.
> The problem isn’t just that Substack makes money off Nazis, it’s that they don’t seem to care who they make it from.
Ana Marie Cox can move to Medium, they have that "diverse and inclusive" editorial policy she is seeking, we all know how "great" Medium has been doing...
This post didn't age well – 3 weeks later Substack announced a $100m fundraise at $1.1b valuation. [1]
Ana's contention that Substack is "rickety" seems motivated by her conviction that they should adopt a more assertive, aggressive censorship regime, and that "we need a world where a social safety net protects risky writing".
There are certainly many interesting questions about the future of media and Substack's business – but the parade of people saying it can't succeed without more moderation keep being proven wrong.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/business/substack-fundrai...
This post linked to a different article (former Bloomberg reporter) that said it expected this round to be at $750 million ($50 million above the previous valuation).
And so yes, that's significantly less than it ended up being, $1.1 billion, but I'm not sure it impacts the argument being made. Except that the multiple would be even greater!
I don't think moderation has anything to do with it and it's not the core of the argument in the article. They've taken a huge valuation and investors will want a return on that. The problem is that there's just not that much loyalty in this space. I don't care where the content is hosted as long as it's not annoying, content makers don't care so long as they can make money. When substack starts needing to extract value they have to do it in a way that's annoying and chances are high we see the next platform appear. We've seen it before.
It would be lovely to see a platform get big taking a sustainable approach. But that investment money buys marketing and hype.
> This post didn't age well – 3 weeks later Substack announced a $100m fundraise at $1.1b valuation.
From the article: Newcomer says Substack is “pitching investors on a round between $50M and $100M that would value it above its roughly $700M last round price.”
Also: And if Substack does manage to raise that $100M they’re looking for now? Things will get worse.
The implication of her article is that they’d have a hard time raising that money and/or that they somehow aren’t doing well - I don’t see any evidence of this cited anywhere in her post.
No, the implication is that raising such a high level of VC would put huge pressure on Substack to grow and enshittify, thereby ruining the platform for writers who currently think it's good.
In other words, their current business model does not support their valuation, which necessitates a pivot.
Counterpoint:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/timeline-softbanks-bets-wewor...
She specifically talks about what happens next after raising that $100m. The higher valuation creating more urgency to be profitable, which could lead to a descent into Twitter-style outrage engagement stupidity, influencers, etc.
If she's wrong about anything, it's that you can assume enough people will leave a declining platform to keep it from staying alive.
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Yes, censorship. Which is a bad thing. Ideas, even disagreeable ones, should be permitted. Otherwise you don’t have a real democracy.
This is an ironic response to a comment on HN that is being downvoted and soon will be censored by the crowd based flagging and voting system for being "disagreeable".
Should it be the responsibility of a periodical to publish every random Nazi op-ed? (And then send out push notifications for it?)
Assholes can self-publish, as always, IMO.
I’m not sure what you mean by “responsibility”. But if thing are published or notified based on content neutral criteria, then it’s fine in my opinion.
That's no longer a justification once you have algorithmic amplification which Substack introduced with its Twitter immitation.
At that point they ceased to just tolerate these ideas but to amplify them. At that point they carry more responsibility, and people rightly blame them for it.
Free speech is fine. A private company handing nazis a megaphone and not accepting criticism for it is not.
At no point in this post does she even write the word "censor"/"censorship". The post relentlessly criticizes Nazis but wanting silence to her dissent isn't pro-speech, it's just pro-nazi.
I'm really sick of this argument. You never see free speech extremists defending anti-fascism or even questioning the decisions of governments as long as they're right wing.
> It’s as unstable as a SpaceX launch
Hate makes people blind. Starship is failing by design - that's just how they're choosing to develop it. The chopsticks video that we saw earlier was very nearly science fiction. And as far as regular launches go, SpaceX has done more successful launches than any company or nation ever.
But more generally, this idea of abandoning an app (or product) the moment you encounter people who disagree with you is disheartening.
Abandoning a community the moment you encounter people who disagree with you is how one builds a bubble strong enough to say things like the bit you quoted.
Why would I spend my precious time wallowing in filth and squalor with some radicalized “influencers” who spout evil nonsense and entirely lack self awareness?
I’d rather go read a book and discuss it with some actually intelligent friends.
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That was just a metaphor, a throwaway line in the article, no more important than Stephen Miller's marriage. It's peculiar that this is the subject you chose to expand on in the comments.
>But more generally, this idea of abandoning an app (or product) the moment you encounter people who disagree with you is disheartening.
It is a behavior Substack itself encourages by turing itself into a social media platform instead of simply a newsletter provider.
Yes, it is useful for building a moat of network effects, but it also forces views and opionions down people's throats that reflect badly on the platform.
I agree that hate makes people blind, which is why you need to get off X. That line doesn’t imply anything other than that SpaceX launches are unstable! The explosions are a highly notable feature of said launches.
Here's how little I understand business: $45 million in revenue, earned by taking a totally fair 10% of subscriptions that other people do all the work to get, seems like it ought to be enough. If leadership is trying to scale up to be thousands of employees, or to go public, they are lunatics and deserve to fail. Why not just run a successful newsletter platform?
It’s interesting you say the 10% is fair. I think some disagree.
In short they are selling web hosting and card payments, which are most likely worth far less than 10%. However, they’re clearly going for being a Brand that people want to publish under. Substack is worth 10% because it’s Substack, not for the tangibles they provide.
Now that leads to the question: what do they need to do to be a brand people want to be a part of? Is censorship part of that? Maybe, maybe not.
The other interest related piece that is topical at the moment is whether Substack might be worth 10% for card payments alone if certain publications would be unable to use payment providers otherwise. Porn and gambling sites often pay that sort of rate because it’s hard to get a payment provider. Maybe laundering nazi sympathy in with a bunch of tech blogs is worth 10% to them.
Greed doesn't have to be the same thing as the ambition it takes to start a company like this, but in practice it pretty much always is.
Running a successful platform is not enough for VC grifters who funded them, the only thing that matters to VC is growth.
"Grifters" a bit harsh, considering they used VC money to become successful in the first place (see other comments).
Presumably they knew the deal.
In the long run, all VC investments lead to enshittification.
The network effects of substack seem pretty weak. Authors can use their own domain name and export a list of their subscribers any time. Their value is in providing software that is sticky for writers and solves a lot of the problems of creating and retaining an audience, which they seem to be doing pretty effectively. For better or worse, I don't think substack has much influence on the broader ecosystem either way; it's all down to consumer demand.
I feel ambivalent about Substack's Notes (its version of X/Bluesky). On the one hand, the signal/noise ratio is higher than either X or Bluesky. On the other hand, I can see signs of the social media engagement farming nonsense that I've come to dread.
But, I can just click on the "Following" link to avoid it. In fact, I can even set that as my homepage. So, so far, it's not that bad. And I continue to enjoy the diversity of writers; and am much more worried by virtuous scolds than by neonazis.
Why is it that Substack can’t just be run as a 10-20 person small-medium sized business forever? If publishers want to go there for a basic product, and Substack can collect rent from them, what’s the problem?
They took VC funding. That requires them to attempt to grow to the size of Facebook or Amazon, or implode. Merely being profitable forever is not an acceptable outcome.
I wonder how many profitable, sustainable, rewarding medium-sized businesses that have never taken VC money are utterly invisible to HN.
“You know, you could just not take VC money.”
“… We don’t do that here.”
There must be an opportunity here for someone who can stand up a medium-sized website and integrate it with a payment provider to take Substack's lunch money?
I've always struggled to understand this part: what is it that Substack came up with that we did not have earlier?
Aren't there a hundred examples out there of medium-sized websites providing a similar infrastructure mix?
Substack had a few things that worked for it
* Patreon kind of sucks for writing / newsletters or else they could have captured part of this market. Medium was supposed to fix this but they had an epic collapse.
* Single point where subscribers can manage their subscriptions and preserve a common identity across subscriptions in the comments etc. Again, Medium/collapse.
* A rapid adoption of substack by well known online writers with loyal followings. These writers either had their own blogs or were exiting traditional media or getting dumped out by the collapse of online media (gawker network, buzzfeed news, etc). Again, could have been Medium if not for their collapse.
* I suspect Substack spent a lot of that VC money guaranteeing 2 years of X revenue for a non-trivial number of high profile writers so they would onboard.
Reading this story I didn't realize just how much they had taken over the years (I use to operate in this media space, but haven't in a long time). I'm not sure what the headcount is but that amount of money is staggering and I can only imagine it was all used to acquire DAUs and very little novel technology has been created with it.
I think Substacks first 10m/100m (their keep of rev/total rev from subscriptions) was extremely impressive and fast. But also it was a kind of low hanging fruit. There was a market already there for this and Medium/Patreon couldn't capture it. Now if they are really at 45m/450m that is much less impressive. It will be extremely hard to get to 100m/1000m and IMO impossible to get much higher than that with their current approach.
> could have been Medium
Did Medium have a way to pay authors? Maybe it would have been easy to add but saying "A could have been B if only" I think misses the picture. Yahoo could have been Google if only they'd chosen a different algo. Flickr could have been Instagram if only they'd made a mobile app with filters. Etc...
I think it's precisely because substack launched with a way to let readers sponser the authors directly they liked that it took off. Medium had a partner program but that's not the same.
I'm certainly not arguing against your point. I didn't work at Medium but I had insight into their operations at the time and they didn't really seem to have a coherent vision to make money 12 or so years ago. My comparison of the two is more around their similar goals and audience, which was giving great (or interesting) writers a home for their projects and audiences and somehow make money. Medium was saying the financial part would happen down the line and it was a can they kicked for a long time. Medium seemed more interested in talking about their technology and aesthetics than they did on figuring out the crucial parts. Substack got it right doing what Patreon (and even Twitch) had already proved, people will pay up front for the writers/creators they love.
That said Medium did pay higher profile writers and publications to move to their platform (in some cases quite a bit of money) in a similar way that Substack has, which was to dip into the VC funded bank account.
Marketing, including paying well-known individuals to switch to their platform. That's funded by all the VC money the smaller fish don't have.
To me, it seems like they're simply a monetised version of Tumblr, without the newfound censorship that all the other social media companies somehow have to have.
I really don't get the whole email thing, though. Newsletters are kinda super annoying to signup for, and then to receive. I've tried the Substack version, and I still don't get it. Even though I do love the mailing lists, but that's not the same as the newsletters.
What about https://ghost.org/about/
They seem to be doing well, 8.5 million in revenue
Buttondown already offers this - https://docs.buttondown.com/paid-subscriptions
Ghost exists
> Why is it that Substack can’t just be run as a 10-20 person small-medium sized business forever?
They have taken VC money.
You cannot give millions of USD to potential authors if you are tiny webserver-running small business. That’s what the article was all about.
VC money and you can't boast to your peers with your monopoly valuation that doesn't have any real merit.
There are already small newsletter businesses that offer basic products.
> The problem isn’t just that Substack makes money off Nazis, it’s that they don’t seem to care who they make it from.
Ana Marie Cox can move to Medium, they have that "diverse and inclusive" editorial policy she is seeking, we all know how "great" Medium has been doing...
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