SlateStarSubstack

For all my complaints about Substack, I was overjoyed to see Scott’s new post today.

Among many other things, he writes:

As I was trying to figure out how this was going to work financially, Substack convinced me that I could make decent money here.

I don’t know exactly what Scott’s calculus was, but it sounds like Substack’s monetization was part of it. If so, we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

Having said that, it sucks that Substack enforces stylistic homogeneity. It sucks to see Slate Star Codex get sucked into the uniform aesthetic blob.

While the crypto people get to work on true decentralization, end-users already have tremendous control over at least one aspect of their online experience: CSS.

So I installed a Chrome Extension that makes editing CSS easy, copied over some styles from an archive.org page, and tada:

You don’t need to know anything about CSS to use these styles. Just follow a few steps:

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article div p {
 color: #333;
 font: 12px/20px Verdana,  sans-serif;
}
 
h1.post-title.short.unpublished {
 font-size: 16px;
 line-height: 1.3em;
 margin-bottom: 10px;
 text-transform: uppercase;
 letter-spacing: 1px;
 font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif;
}
 
td.post-meta-item.post-date {
 color: #888;
 font-size: 10px;
 font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;
 letter-spacing: 1px;
 background: #f9f9f9;
 border: 1px solid #eee;
 padding: 5px 7px;
 display: inline;
 text-transform: uppercase;
 text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #fff;
}
 
td.post-meta-item.post-date:before {
 content: "Posted "
}
 
td.post-meta-item.post-date:after {
 content: " by Scott Alexander"
}
 
.single-post {
 border: 1px solid #D5D5D5;
 border-radius: 10px;
 background: #fff;
 padding: 20px 28px;
 margin-bottom: 10px;
}
 
.single-post-container {
 background: rgb(240, 240, 240);
 padding: 10px 0px;
}
 
.single-post a {
 color: #0066cc;
 text-decoration: underline;
}
 
.post {
 padding: 0;
}
 
.subtitle {
 font-size: 12px;
 padding-bottom: 8px;
}
 
.main-menu .topbar .container .headline {
 text-decoration: none;
}
 
.main-menu .topbar .container .headline .name {
 font-size: 43px;
 max-height: 100px;
 color: white;
 font-family: 'Raleway', Open Sans, Arial, sans-serif;
 text-align: center;
 letter-spacing: 2px;
 text-decoration: none;
}
 
.topbar {
 background: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(139,171,232,1) 0%, rgba(79,115,193,1) 100%);
 text-decoration: none;
}
 
button.button.primary.subscribe-cta.subscribe-btn {
 display: none;
}
 
.container {
 justify-content: center;
}
 
div.buttons.notification-container {
 filter: brightness(3);
 transform: scale(.7)
}
 
img.logo {
 margin-right: 30px;
}
 
button.comments-page-sort-menu-button {
 background: transparent;
}
 
table.comment-content tr td {
 border: 1px solid #ddd;
 padding: 10px;
 border-radius: 10px;
 flex-grow: 1;
 background: #fafafa;
}
 
table.comment-content tr td.comment-head {
 border: none;
 flex-grow: 0;
 background: white;
}
 
table tr {
 display: flex;
}
 
td.post-meta-item.icon {
 margin-left: 10px;
}
 
.comments-page {
 background: white;
 padding-top: 10px;
}
 
.comment-meta span:first-child a {
 font-weight: bold;
 color: black;
 text-decoration: none;
}
 
.comment-meta span:first-child  a:after {
 content: " says";
}
 
.comment-meta span:nth-child(2) a {
 color: #888;
 text-decoration: none;
 display: block;
 padding-top: 8px;
 padding-bottom: 6px;
}
 
.comment-actions span a {
 color: #888;
}
 
.profile-img-wrap img {
 border-radius: 0px;
 height: 40px;
 width: 40px;
 position: relative;
 right: 8px;
}

They also work on the main page:

As well as the comments section:

Of course, these won’t work in your email client, you have to actually be on the domain. And if Scott moves over to a custom domain, you’ll have to follow the steps again there.

Thanks to this comment on Hacker News for inspiring the idea.

–––

Edit 01/22: An earlier version of this post recommended more Chrome extensions I enjoy. I’ve since been told that one of them recently became malware. Sorry about that.