“The grievance is simple: substack is built for the mediocre (the utterly average). For outliers, those with some edge and unconventionality, there’s no seat at the table because the algorithm is programmed to smooth out anything interesting. My feed is a relentless parade of the mundane.”
“If you are into writing already, Substack could be the platform where you share your thoughts and give to people solid information or entertainment they cannot find elsewhere.”
“I currently own a small Substack where I speak about UFOs, astrology, mediumship, general ESP, and so on. I speak not only of mysteries, but I also try to compare and compile cases to create an outlook of how these anomalous phenomena behave as a whole and what they mean for humanity and your personal life.”
“She's got 500K followers on instagram and they followed her over to substack. She has 10k monthly subscribers and closes $60k annually on the platform.”
“Substack has its own discovery engine built-in via Notes. If you just write five notes a day, and you can schedule them, and reply to at least 20 notes a day, then you will see growth.”
“It is important to understand that followers do not always equal subscribers and there are some people who are on substack who use it like a twitter and only use notes without subscribing, and vice versa, so having a high follower count doesn't always equal high engagement rates or high subs.”
“Substack’s algorithm seems determined to show me things I’m not interested in constantly no matter how much I like interesting notes I find or how often I mark notes as “not interesting.” They keep showing me Christian theology and far right nationalist posts!”
“Substack is also not exactly known for its collective brilliance. As much as there are good people and talented writers, there are also people with all sorts of opinions. I guess it comes with the territory, haha.”
“It's a great place to grow an audience, but you would need to do it by posting actual high quality content (ie, a full recipe post). You can still put your link wherever you want, but it's not like Pinterest where it's sort of meant to be a stepping stone.”
“I have replaced several of my niche websites with Substack newsletters. At the end of the day, Substack creates a "website" page you can send people to and all the content you post...internal views happen over time, subsribers take a while, but it depends on the niche...”
“The calmer way to use it is to treat Substack less like a homepage and more like a library of subscriptions. Follow fewer publications, open from email notifications or direct publication pages, mute/unfollow aggressively, and avoid starting from the general home feed when you are in reading mode.”
“Please don’t mistake this platform for just the writers. This is more like a Insta for writing entrepreneurs. You do need good entrepreneurial, and influencers skills to be successful here.”
“I am not saying Substack is bad but there's just this feeling that the writers over there make it their identity about writing the most deep, profound things, but I'm sure in their actual life they're just a mess. On my home page, I just got a Mark Manson quotation and I was like I'm done.”
“Substack looks like an alternative to wordpress or an alternative to twitter, but it's most realistically an alternative to patreon. It's how influencers from other platforms build a paid subscriber base.”
“I don’t obsess over it anymore. It’s kinda exhausting especially when you’re chasing paid subs. currently taking it easy, substack is just whatever. The algorithm sucks”
“I understand every company has their own product roadmap and vision for what the platform can/should be, but this always felt like a missed opportunity for Substack.”
“Substack is a great platform. Like really great because the quality of people there and readers is very high. People are really serious and choose carefully what they want to read and support.”
“Best tactic that worked for me was finding similar Substackers or those looking for the content you write and commenting and liking their posts. May be more difficult with your topic (I use it for Fiction writing) but it should help you get more exposure.”
“The premise of Substack is that there's no algorithm. You are responsible for the growth of your page, by having other sites linking back to it, telling friends and family to subscribe, etc. The best you could hope for is a high Google ranking, but thanks to AI and Google being useless on purpose, I wouldn't bet on that either.”
“Honestly i feel like Substacks ROI is really, really bad, and its one reason i barely use mine. I always felt that Substack risked heading to this point as it never really knew what it wanted to be, and wanted to mostly cash in on the limitations of other social media platforms (free speech restrictions or twitter becoming shit post-Elon's take over).”
“The substack algorithm is not really good in suggesting new users to follow and the search engine is not giving good results when actively searching for content.”
“I myself use it solely as a publishing platform, not any sort of social media play. So I don’t expect to get subscribers from Substack, I just use it as a repository for my content and promote that content elsewhere.”
“on substack, you mainly monetise with paid subs. and to be able to get to $500/month with just 50 subs is actually already quite remarkable. conversion rate is typically 2-5%, so that's optimistically \~3 subs.”
“Substack is a good growth platform for someone who already has a personal brand outside Substack. But if you’re just starting your writing journey, it can be very hard for the average person to grow in it.”