>Guess I need to migrate my entire blog to Substack so that I can have a concept of "subscribers" and the necessary analytics to give me a dopamine rush any time the number gets bigger.

I get what your sarcasm is about but a friendly FYI if you didn't know... the purpose of Substack is writing for subscribers. Building subscribers (and hopefully paying subscribers) is why the founder of Substack created it. (My previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083741)

Stratechery's writer Ben Thompson quit his 6-figure job at Microsoft and was able to make millions per year by writing for an audience of email newsletter subscribers. That's the type of financial success that many writers using the Substack platform are trying to replicate. (https://www.google.com/search?q=Stratechery+writer+subscribe...)

You're not "doing it wrong" because you're not the intended user of Substack. An analogy would be me saying "I guess I'm playing music wrong because I just sat around the campfire with my guitar and sang "99 Bottles Of Beers On The Wall". I guess I need to put my songs on Spotify to get a rush from watching the # listener streams go up."

My mockery of the musicians on Spotify by me playing dumb about not also not putting my music on it -- is irrelevant to those artists on that platform trying to make money.

The author of this thread's article is also trying to monetize his writing. He admitted he's not there yet so wanted to "blow off some steam" -- via some satire -- about the endless advice to "work harder" to grow his audience. His satirical piece doesn't change the fact that he still wants to grow his Substack audience to some success like Ben Thompson.

If people don't know what the Substack platform is actually about, then I can see where it looks like the writers are just there for unhealthy vanity gazing.

Journaling is great. It helps organize your thinking.

Why do you publish, if not to reach readers? If you want to reach readers, why not put some effort into that part too?

I write to organize my thoughts and sometimes that writing is useful to others and then I publish it. But that's more like 1:50 or so these days, most of the stuff I do I'm pretty sure nobody would be interested in. Last week's project: to recreate an old Romanian kitchen implement. I highly doubt anybody would be interested in something like that.

I’d be interested, should you ever decide to post that content!

Hah, serves me right :) It's a wooden mallet/knife combo that is used to mash eggplant, nothing special really but you can't just go out and buy them here. So I chopped one out of a piece of acacia wood and then endless sanding to get it to as close as the original as I could.

This the real thing:

https://www.dedeman.ro/ro/tocator-pentru-vinete-lemn-euro-sa...

And here is my clone:

https://imgur.com/a/ikAXbyB

If you want an SVG for the outline let me know (mail in profile).

That's four hours of work, most of it spent on sanding, Acacia is pretty hard.

I bet there are 7 subreddits focused on topics that embrace old Romanian kitchen implements.

I did put effort into that - I built an RSS feed for my site. In fact, if you use a well-behaved reader with partial fetching, I'll even include the full text of each article.

Why? My most enjoyable project doesn't have any tracking at all, I don't know if it has just 1 (me) user, 1,000 or a million. Every other week or so I get some confirmation that people actually use it and it always is a pleasant surprise, so much more worthwhile than just to see a number go up.

Maybe there is a businessmodel to be made with a platform that shows engagement metrics but they're not the real thing, just a bunch of counters that are incremented regardless of actual use. That way you get to feel good...

I read it was takin' the piss / sarcasm.

The person writes for a living, so having analytics is necessary. Subscribers are the most direct possible audience for a book, which is usually part of how writers support themselves.