Substack writers, you need a website
Jun 10, 2026 “But I already have a website on Substack,” you argue. No, no, Substack is just a distribution tool to amplify your website. In the last few years, I’ve noticed a pattern of writers leaving their websites to make Substack their digital home.
- ▪Jun 10, 2026 “But I already have a website on Substack,” you argue.
- ▪No, no, Substack is just a distribution tool to amplify your website.
- ▪In the last few years, I’ve noticed a pattern of writers leaving their websites to make Substack their digital home.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 709 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Elizabeth Tai |
| Canonical URL | https://elizabethtai.com/2026/06/10/substack-writers-you-need-a-website/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:58:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-28T17:35:03.435Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-28T17:35:03.435Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | dcIl3qGwGwri · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Substack writers, you need a website! Jun 10, 2026 “But I already have a website on Substack,” you argue. No, no, Substack is just a distribution tool to amplify your website. It should not be your digital home. In the last few years, I’ve noticed a pattern of writers leaving their websites to make Substack their digital home. Now, it’s kinda okay if they have bought a domain and linked it to Substack. (Meaning, it’s better than nothing.) Rachel from Conscious Living is a good example. This way, Substack more or less functions like a content management system (CMS) for you. However, compared to other CMS it’s very limited, such as the ability to manage your SEO and customize your pages to add more features, but I digress.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Elizabeth Tai.
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