Somehow I find that less annoying with substack, because their positioning is clearly "look, this is a newsletter, not a blog." The dark UI patterns around dismissing the pop up are annoying though.
Yeah that's the problem. I don't want a newsletter, I want a blog.
And like the OP I only care about people reading my stuff. I don't care about monetisation and I definitely don't want to put them through all the crap that medium does.. substack is not a great alternative because it's also monetisation focused for authors.
For me one problem with the newsletter is that everybody and his brother and his sister and his other brother wants to send me email spams several times a day. The only way I can keep it manageable is to remove myself from every list as soon as I can.
I've been building my own smart RSS reader so I'd much rather add a feed to by reader which puts me, the reader, in control.
I thought of it but Hacker News posts are pure text, you can't add a single picture. The reading format is also not suitable for long form, and it makes the post text kinda grey which makes it even harder to read.
So, no. The community is great but it's not a blogging platform. I could self host my blog and post links here for discovery but self-promotion is generally frowned upon. I don't want to abuse the community.
If people can upload images people will upload atrocity pictures (with the caption POST A STUPID IMAGE MEME... U DIE!), lewd pictures, CSAM pictures, and other things that will waste your time to manage if they don't get you in trouble outright. (It was super easy to get a basically G rated site demonetized with a 10⁻⁴ fraction of problem images ten years ago, it must be much worse now.)
