It's an important feature that I can subscribe to the blogs I like without hearing anything at all about the ones I don't like. Get rid of the separation and you basically have Twitter or Reddit. People will complain about the stuff they don't like, and the next thing you know, Substack will need to hire an army of moderators.

Don't cross the streams. Not on Substack itself, anyway. The recommendations can happen via other websites like Hacker News and the occasional author link.

I agree that Substack needs a better content/writer discovery mechanism, like having categories or tags per article/post so that readers can find related articles by subject/genre/type to the one they enjoyed reading.

Unfortunately, Substack wants to do an internal reference or "recommendation" system that basically mimics a closed clique. Those that know other writers may get a friend to "recommend" their newsletter, but it will very likely not be anything that the readers of this friend are interested in since the recommendation may have nothing to do with the content, or the merits of the recommended writer, it's just who they know.

I think people are interested in the content, in a subject, or a genre/type of writing, like humor, advice, reviews, etc. They may want to spend more time with a subject rather than being given irrelevant recommendations based on who the writer reads.

I think the bigger issue is what is their competitive moat? I can't think of a single thing that isn't going to be replicated elsewhere. Unless they start cross advertising between their different newsletters or something to create some type of network effect.

It has already been replicated. Ghost is one example I know of that is very explicitly competing with them: https://ghost.org/vs/substack/

One newsletter I'm subscribed to recently switched from Substack to Ghost, and as a reader it was completely seamless and I might not have noticed if they hadn't mentioned it. They were able to transfer all their paid subscribers and article archive, so it doesn't seem like these services have any real moat.

The cross-marketing was clearly the plan but I wonder how many established-writer stans are like “This wasn’t so I could talk to my hero, I was also waiting to pay some unknown person for their food ideas.”

My guess is the conversion numbers on that are terrible.

That's true, I'm a subscriber at Medium, often times it suggests something that is of interests to me, I gifted its membership to a friend this year after find it definitely worth $50 a year.

Medium subscribers get free access to the entire library of pragmatic programmer's publications [1]. That alone makes it worth the money in my book.

1. https://medium.com/pragmatic-programmers/directory-of-pragma...

not known this, thanks!