A look back on my experience
If you all remember, I honestly didn’t but because I’ve been spending the last week looking through all of my “non-fiction” emails I was given the benefit of hindsight, I wrote my first “Dear Substack [2023 Edition]” which, at the time, I promised I would do annually. As that one was done on March 15, 2023 it seems almost poetic that I would come across it when I did. So, just a week late, here are my thoughts on the platform one year later.
Dear Substack,
It’s been one year since my last, sort of, look back on your year and how I’ve experienced it as a creator. And though there may be some repeated stuff mentioned here, I want to start on a positive note by saying, I’m not going anywhere.
Thinking about you as a platform and not as a community (which is how I’ve come to look at you as) it reminds me why I came to Substack in the first place. I was running away from Mailchimp and their clear hunger for money despite their users. It felt like they were going after us (the user) for their financial needs instead of helping us bring consumers to our creative endeavors and getting their share afterwards. If that makes sense?
Of course, I know, you need to make money somehow. But what sets you apart is that you understand that we bring you that profit. You could easily go the Mailchimp route and charge your users regardless of whether or not we have paid subscriptions turned on or not. And quite frankly, all these years later, I’m both shocked and pleased that you never have (and it feels like you never will…).
I want to thank you for always putting “us” the user first, even though for many of us (fiction community) it may not always feel that way. And while I’d love nothing more than to gush at you about what you’re doing right I would like to briefly mention where I see a chance for improvement.
I’d like to start with the discontinuing of Office Hours. Now, I only used it once, maybe twice. I think the reason why I stopped and never looked back was for the same reasons others like me did as well; the conversations just moved too quickly and was really hard to keep up with, let alone join.
But and however, instead of getting rid of it in favor of a “let them suss out the communities” approach, I would’ve rather see Substack double-down with a better solution to the problem. Now, don’t get me wrong, having hundreds of people clamoring with questions and conversation is NOT a problem in my book. That seems to me like a cry for more input from you, not less. It seems to me this was an opportunity for Substack to take more steps towards open forums on a daily or even just more than once weekly basis rather than shut it down completely. I understand if it’s a bandwidth issue. In the industry I work in that is a word I am all too familiar with. But perhaps leaning on the community that cares to possibly facilitate conversation on a more regular and niche basis might be a conversation worth having. An example I can think of is breaking down the Office Hours by topics of a more granular level and then seeing if there are any “Substack Features” folks who might be willing to be Substack Ambassadors to host an Office Hour on a rotating basis. You get help with bandwidth, they get exposure (in a good way) and to feel like they are helping a community that has given them so much. Anyway…it’s an idea. And seeing as you have a larger audience than any of us, having you be the wheels that keeps us on track is important to keeping our communities afloat.
Something else I’d like to bring up because it’s still an issue; the updates. Yes, there are the infrequent major announcement of large changes like when DMs finally came round, but, and I don’t think I’m alone in this, I want to know the little changes. Do I think a small change of adding or removing a button or option is worth an email to all of us? No. But I do think having a place where we can go to see these little tweaks might be helpful for those of us who frequent our Substack Dashboards and get jarred when it isn’t quite right. It will at least save us time from having to try and suss out the changes ourselves.
Lastly, I want to talk about the single best thing you’ve done which is bring DMs to Substack. Though, I must confess, I have only seen the need to use it twice since its introduction. That can mean one of two things:
First, I’m far too busy at the moment with my own writing to be bothered bothering anyone else.
Second, I didn’t need the feature quite as badly as I thought at the time.
Either way, I can see the net benefits to it and I’m sure we are all delighted to have it.
If I could offer a brief list of some major (and minor) changes that I think would benefit all of us, not just the fiction community on Substack:
Bulk changes in the Posts area. I’d love to be able to select multiple posts that are published (or in draft) to delete them, move their section from one to another, etc. That would indeed be a game-changer.
More freedom with Subscribers. I feel I’ve mentioned this before but I’d love to be able to change the sections that people are subscribed to for them, especially if they are unable to figure it out on their own. Right now we rely on our own ability to explain how to opt-in or out of certain sections/emails that we send and I wonder how many simply unsubscribe rather than take the time to change their subscription options.
More formatting options when creating a post. Things like columns, center text, text along side images, etc.
Mobile App – I’d love to be able to do TWO things in the mobile app: 1. Write a post. Divide the app into two views (writer and reader). 2. Opt IN or OUT of Substack sections within the app. The ability to manage a subscription within the app would be really nice and probably make our job easier to explain to subscribers who may not be familiar with Substack what the point of sections actually is.
I will return in March 2025 where I hope to report some of my suggestions have happened or at least things are still on a positive trajectory.
Substack makes it possible for me to worry less about the platform I’m using and more about the content I want to put out into the world. And for that I am grateful it exists.
See you next year!
I like all of your suggestions.
I suspect the one about more formatting options probably won’t happen because posts display better in the app when they are set up as a long, single column. I haven’t tried the app myself, though. If it adjusts gracefully to viewing in landscape mode, then the format is less of any issue. I know from checking my website on the phone that portrait view it much more difficult to view effectively.
The Mailchimp reference reminded me of just how bad it was. Charging for unsubscribed users on the (unproven and probably mistaken) assumption, that, though they didn’t want emails from us, they’d love to hear from us on social media. That’s partly a result of MC trying to become more than just a mailing list provider, but the net result was ridiculous for people who just wanted a mailing list provider.
One improvement I’d like to see would be an easier process for tagging large groups of people. Tagging one person is straightforward enough–just type an ampersand and keep going until Substack suggests the person you want to tag. But I’ve noticed that in some of the genre groups, it seems to be correct etiquette to tag all the group members.
I thought that would be easy. I found tag lists for the relevant groups, copied them and pasted them into a Word doc for future use.
Well, note as easy as I thought. The material pastes correctly from one Word doc to another, but when I paste it into a Substack note, it pastes the underlying link, but not the tag itself.
Next, I tried pasting the tag texts to see if Substack autoconverted them. Nope! Clicking on each one caused Substack to attempt to convert that one to a tag, but soon enough, I was confronted with one that could refer to several people. Closing the window with the possible choices causes the note to close. I could probably avoid that, but the process looks fiddly at best.
Today I found a couple notes with tag lists, opened them, right clicked and clicked on “inspect page.” My plan was to copy the code I found and insert it into a note using what appears to be an insert code block on the little formatting menu that pops up when text is selected.
No dice there, either. The tag lists displays as text, just as if there were no underlying code. But on the page itself, each tag is a clickable link.
For the moment, it appears the only way is to input each tag individually, one at a time. I’ve heard other people claim tagging was cumbersome. They weren’t kidding.