SubstHack
Separating legitimate "hacker" newsletters from the spam.
Many Substack newsletters include the word “hack” — or “hacker,” “hacking,” etc. — in their name1:
Many others use “hack” words in their description or elsewhere in their newsletter.
But there’s also a lot of video game “hack” spam on Substack.
You can find some of the spam by searching Google for: site:substack.com/subscribe hack2
You may find more spam by searching for words that happen to be in titles of games.
I’m glad Substack flags spam newsletters as “potential violations” and removes their so-called content. But I think Substack should go further and get these pages removed from Google and other search engines.
Removing spam newsletters from search engines could be especially good for the discoverability of legitimate “hacker” newsletters on Substack. But it would also be good for all Substack newsletters. Being on Substack should be a sign of some quality, not of spam.
To liven up this post, I found a Minecraft dramatization of a good hacker versus an evil one. If anyone can explain it to me, please feel free:
In any case, if I’ve left out any newsletters with “hack” in their name, please let me know in the comments or by email.
Some “hacker” newsletters — like some newsletters in general — have an introductory post and nothing else. For example, see “Freshest News on the Hacker Scene” (from July 2019). Shouldn’t Substack have a time limit (six months? a year?) after which it notifies a user that an unused subdomain will revert to availability, unless the user affirms that they plan to start the newsletter? If someone actually starts a newsletter, even if it’s just one post, I feel that’s enough to be able to keep the subdomain.
Likewise, you can find music and movie spam by replacing “hack” in the search with “download” or “torrent.”