On: Ask HN: What is Substack doing with HN data?

[KomoD]

My guess is that is the opengraph[0] crawler for Substack Notes[1], the Twitter-ish alternative that Substack is making, so like someone posting a link to your blog, it visits, grabs meta tags to display a link preview.

[0]: https://ogp.me/

[1]: https://substack.com/notes

Edit: I was indeed correct, I went on Substack notes and wrote my own site, but the bad part is that it crawls as you type your post out, so instead of 1 request it'll be several!

> Sun Apr 30 2023 23:56:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)]: | Ip=34.200.242.86 | Req_page=/?substack_notes | Agent=SubstackContentFetch/1.0 (https://substack.com/)

[cactusplant7374 → KomoD]

I don't think anyone is linking to my blog. I didn't get any upvotes. Seems really unlikely.

[KomoD → cactusplant7374]

It's most likely one of those bots that use RSS to post all new HN posts.