What is Metastack?
I read a lot of
hacker news,
and I've noticed something: HN is a better judge of Substack quality than the Substack's subscriber count (even paid subscribers). To test this, I built MetaStack. It works as follows:
- Collect HN submissions that link to substack domains.
-
Calculate the
HN affinity
of each Substack, i.e. "how much does HN like this compared to Substack users?"
- Using this HN affinity, create an implied HN score for all posts in the Substack (even those never posted to HN).
- From here, I manually trim down to substacks with a high signal-to-noise ratio, and send them to you as a weekly roundup.
This gives you a slice of the best independent writers, weighted towards what hackers find interesting.