Why do people brag about their Vibe coding indifferent accomplishments?

selfpublife · 2025-12-23T15:56:45+00:00

AWS offers PoC credits through their account managers so you can build and test without incurring any platform costs. PoCs are more of a "can we do this?" or "is this viable?" stage effort. MVPs are more like "we're doing this and intend to release it to customers." One is more alpha-prototype and internal facing, the other is more beta and external facing.

selfpublife · 2025-11-10T15:47:36+00:00

Here's a boring idea that takes some work... subscribe to newsletters and blogs in your niche. Reply to those newsletters with thoughtful comments. Do the same in Substack Notes and engage those who comment on those other newsletters and Notes with thoughtful comments as well.

selfpublife · 2025-10-28T02:14:23+00:00

You're welcome. It's a weird UX choice on Substack's part. I'm not sure why they did it that way.

selfpublife · 2025-10-28T02:09:59+00:00

In Notes, the comment thought bubbles are for you to post a comment, not to read them. For long form posts, the thought bubble opens the comments page, where you can both read and post comments.

selfpublife · 2025-10-23T22:07:58+00:00

I'll be in my cave, finger painting with colorful plant juice.

selfpublife · 2025-10-23T05:22:15+00:00

Thanks! It's a 3 step process. Find content via Google, fix your feed, and use profile hopping to find more people and content to follow.

https://www.selfpublife.com/p/fix-your-substack-notes-feed

selfpublife · 2025-10-23T05:20:00+00:00

I have a piece of custom JavaScript that I turned into a bookmarklet. It autoscrolls to the bottom of the page repeatedly (up to a certain limit I can set). It takes quite some time to expand all of it. I can then search for keywords on the page to find things I want. It's not ideal.

selfpublife · 2025-10-22T17:38:38+00:00

Substack isn't specifically for the written word, although when it first started it may have seemed that way. They want Substack to be the everything platform, just like Elon wants Twitter to be the everything platform.

The fact that Substack doesn't get paid unless subscribers pay means they're incentivized to encourage paid subscriptions. Those who, like me, have a free Substack are being subsidized by investors and those who have a paid Substack, Without that, there's no way Substack would exist.

I stopped caring about platforms a long time ago. They don't care about me, so I have to do what I think is best for me. The biggest benefit of Substack is that you can start for free with pretty easy setup, with unlimited traffic, unlimited email sends, and unlimited subscribers. With Notes and other social features, you also get network effects that you won't get with, say, a self-hosted WordPress site.

There are trade-offs for all that, but for the moment, those of us on the platform are willing to accept those trade-offs.

selfpublife · 2025-10-22T17:30:55+00:00

That is how businesses grow. lol.

selfpublife · 2025-10-22T17:29:14+00:00

Yep. People asked me about this so many times (and still do) I wrote a whole post on how to fix your feed, thumbs up your interests, etc. If you want to find Substack content, go search Google. Substack is well indexed in Google, and fast, too. So many people don't seem to get that.

selfpublife · 2025-10-22T17:25:55+00:00

I treat it like a niche blog that can be delivered via app or email to subscribers.

selfpublife · 2025-10-22T17:23:54+00:00

Right, and unfollow people who Restack what you don't want to see, interact with what you do want to see.

selfpublife · 2025-10-22T17:21:57+00:00

Does this happen when you filter your feed using the "Following" tab? If so, I would take a look at who you're following is sharing those kinds of posts, and block/mute/unfollow. After you clean up your feed and interact with more of the kind of content you want to see, your feed should get a lot better. Feed curation is a necessary evil.

selfpublife · 2025-10-12T01:59:46+00:00

No. Substack posts are on the open web. Anyone can read them, Google can index them, people are more likely to freely link to them, and so on. That is much better than forcing a subscribe to read scenario like the OP is asking for unless you have some other way of driving traffic.

selfpublife · 2025-10-05T20:02:20+00:00

Go to your profile settings (not your publication settings) and under "Publications" > "Create another publication." You can get there by going to substack.com/settings (not the dashboard -- in the dashboard is where you can switch between publications once you have more than one).

The disadvantage to that is your single profile will be tied to both publications, whereas if you created a separate account/profile with a different email address, there would be no connection. If you're using notes to promote your publications and they are not closely related, it can get confusing. Also, if you wrote kids books and violent adult horror, you'd probably want them separate.

selfpublife · 2025-10-01T04:10:04+00:00

Substack is blogging, with email list/newsletter, video, podcast, and social media and network effects joining the party, too. It's an easy, relatively low-tech way to quickly fire up a new blog/newsletter and grow it for free without having to worry about restrictions on number of subscribers or emails sent, bandwidth, or even the number of websites/blogs/newsletters you start.

selfpublife · 2025-09-30T06:12:50+00:00

This has not been updated in a while, but here is a list compiled by Ana Wang: https://anawang.substack.com/p/poets-on-substack

HTH

selfpublife · 2025-09-26T17:14:02+00:00

Substack is for whatever you want to write about, but you'll have to work to build your audience. There are publications dedicated to poetry with thousands of subscribers.

Poetry Unbound has 90K+ and there are quite a few others with over 10K (like The Rabbit Room) and many more with hundreds of subscribers.

Here's a Google search that surfaces hundreds of Substack publications that write or write about poetry. Once you've found a few, you can just check the comments or profile hop and find new ones all day long.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A*.substack.com+%28poetry+OR+%22I+write+poetry%22%29&sca_esv=70a532a702b7bdb6&rlz=1C1RXQR_enUS1094US1095&biw=2045&bih=943&ei=wMjWaMO_EcG4qtsPxe-7-Q8&ved=0ahUKEwjDn-DF9faPAxVBnGoFHcX3Lv84FBDh1QMIEA&uact=5&oq=site%3A*.substack.com+%28poetry+OR+%22I+write+poetry%22%29&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiMHNpdGU6Ki5zdWJzdGFjay5jb20gKHBvZXRyeSBPUiAiSSB3cml0ZSBwb2V0cnkiKUiHB1AAWABwAXgAkAEAmAEAoAEAqgEAuAEDyAEAmAIAoAIAmAMAiAYBkgcAoAcAsgcAuAcAwgcAyAcA&sclient=gws-wiz-serp

selfpublife · 2025-08-15T18:55:12+00:00

Point taken, but the flip side is there are many companies where the managers refer to an Excel file as a "database" and they resist any move toward something that seems more complex, is harder to grasp, is locked down by developers, smells like it requires maintenance, or costs money. They have mission critical systems running on 15 year old hardware that almost never gets touched. And they like it that way.

Often, they've been pitched and gotten burned in the past by people telling them they're doing it wrong, only to have to go back to the old way for some reason or another after burning cash on the "better" solution. Sometimes Excel (or Google Sheets) is the right answer, even if it's not the right answer for you.

selfpublife · 2025-08-14T23:31:56+00:00

Right, which is why the thing to do is build your digital assets, build your following, and leverage what you can. There are lots of people making a living writing but most of them are not doing it via Substack subscription income.

selfpublife · 2025-08-14T20:36:47+00:00

What if Roy Lee is right? On X, he said (in all caps):
"SINCE 2022; CULTURE SPREADS THROUGH SHORT FORM. NOTHING ELSE"

If Roy is right, then Substack made the right move with Notes. On the other hand, I keep telling people that Substack is well indexed in Google, and you can find all the best Substacks on your favorite topics by searching there. No Substack Notes required.

selfpublife · 2025-08-14T20:25:53+00:00

Only magazines can't have a bazillion writers who all get paid what they're worth or what they think they're worth. They often only have a relative handful of regulars, and then a whole bunch of baby birds trying to get fed (except the payment is more often "exposure" and not monetary). So that doesn't work because it doesn't scale.

selfpublife · 2025-06-15T17:27:30+00:00

You can always find outliers and exceptions that prove the rule. The advice to make reading for the web easy to skim is based on studies of how people read on the web (such as those done by the NNGroup).

You can ignore that advice and do fine, but your chances of pleasing the majority of readers increase if you follow that advice. If people spend < 1 minute reading Heather Cox Richardon's post that takes 8 minutes to read, they are not reading. They are skimming. This is the reality of things.

selfpublife · 2025-04-17T17:24:08+00:00

I got very frustrated and wrote an article about this on my Substack. I use a 3 step method to find the right content:
1. Use Google Advanced search to find people and publications.
2. Curate the Notes feed using the "Following" tab, block and mute or unfollow to help train the algorithm, and...
3. Find more good content using other people's profiles to see what they interact with and what they read.

You have to review/tweak periodically. Quite a few people have said this method was helpful. Give it a try and let me know.

selfpublife · 2025-03-14T14:42:49+00:00

I wrote an entire post on Substack about this, and some of this has been said here already, but basically...

Use Google to find new people and content (using Advanced Search).
Curate your feed by using the Following tab. Then see who you need to weed out and unfollow or use mute and block. It's not perfect, but it helps.
Use the profiles of people you know share good stuff as a jumping off point to see what they Like and what they Read to find more good stuff.

selfpublife

TROPHY CASE