My article was No.1 on Hacker News – Elizabeth Tai

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My article was No.1 on Hacker News

Aug 16, 2026

A couple of weeks ago, Fabrizio of Passo.uno dropped me a message on LinkedIn and told me that my article, "Substack writers, you need a website!", was No.2 on Hacker News. I thought he was pulling my leg.

I checked Hacker News and indeed it was true: My essay was on the front page. By the time I checked, it had dropped to No.6, but I visited hnrankings.info to check the historical movement of the essay and saw that I was actually No.1 for a brief period.

I was absolutely stunned.

For one, although I do write about technical issues as a technical content writer and as a personal hobby, I am not technical-technical, if you know what I mean. Hacker News, the digital rag of SWEs around the world, highlights essays that I sometimes can barely comprehend. So, to be No.1 on that website is something I don’t even dream about.

It’s also a bit ironic, because the content of the blog post itself kind of proved my point. Before Hacker News picked up my post, it was actually selected by WordPress.com to be placed on the front page of its Freshly Pressed page. That was already a big deal for me.

When WordPress.com decided to highlight my post, I didn’t realize it. One day I just randomly noticed that the post was getting way more comments than I was used to. Usually I get about five or six comments at most, but on that day I discovered I had 50 comments. I thought maybe it was a fluke, or that somehow the topic had just resonated with people. Then I saw an email from WordPress.com telling me that I was selected to be featured on their Freshly Pressed page. I got a lot of eyeballs due to that, which was great and made me pretty happy.

I firmly believe it is because of what WordPress did that I got noticed by the person who shared my article on Hacker News.

This would not have happened if I had published the post on Substack. For one, Substack tends to promote its superstars (i.e. those with a lot of subscribers, paid, preferably, and often not from my part of the world. Ahem.) Also, I doubt it’ll promote a post urging writers not to use Substack as their digital homes!

Still, it proves my point that promotional channels are equally important. If not for WordPress’s Discover page and Hacker News, I probably would not have been noticed at all.

Curiously, my Substack post highlighting the essay, Writers, don’t make Substack your digital home! is getting an uptick of comments lately. 32 comments so far! Highly unusual as I usually get less than a dozen comments, and usually from my usual readers. (FYI, I usually offer a bite-sized, behind-the-scenes version of the essay on my Substack, and invite readers to read the full essay.)

I think my essay coincided with a zeitgeist moment. I happened to write about Substack days before they rolled out their new Pangram AI detection feature.

People were already fed up about the state of platforms in general – what Cory Doctorow famously calls enshittification. Pangram was an "I’ve had it" moment for many Substackers already weary of being tossed around by lack of moderation, algorithms, rules and now a feature that may subject them to witch hunts. Pangram was the last straw.

Why writers need a website they own

My article, "Substack writers, you need a website!" was something I wrote out of frustration from what I’ve been seeing.

A lot of Substack writers are far too dependent on the platform to house their content. As the platform introduces more and more features they don’t like, many are complaining on the feed.

My frustration is borne out of the fact that many don’t seem to be aware that they can escape this "loop of doom," so to speak. They don’t have to be trapped in this situation nor do they need to treat the platform as an be-all and end-all.

I also noticed that a lot of writers seem to think they can only choose between having their own website or being on Substack. The truth is, writers need to have a digital home that they own, and digital home means owning a domain name. It doesn’t matter what you build your site on—whether it’s WordPress, Ghost, or even Substack, really—as long as you have the domain name, you own the content. It’s like an address you keep forever.

However, if you don’t have a domain and your content lives on something like xx.substack.com or xx.wordpress.com, then the domain authority or "SEO juice" doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to those platforms. That’s why I’ve always championed the fact that you need to have your own website.

But a lot of writers I speak to are reluctant to do that, mostly because they are not technically inclined and feel overwhelmed by the thought of creating their own site. Perhaps it was incredibly hard to create a website in the 1990s, but it’s really much easier right now. There are so many services out there that can help you build your website without a speck of coding on your...