The problem with Substack

I now have two publications on Substack, but I have to admit, I do have a few frustrations.

While I like the desktop version, I hate the app. There’s so much going on - it’s like another social media platform that I just don’t need in my life. And with the recent introduction of a reels-type feature, it is almost like it’s trying to be all the different social media platforms rolled into one.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of purists who are unhappy. They are saying that the addition of short-form video, lives, notes and chat features has meant that Substack is now so far removed from what it set out to be - a place for writers and journalists to share their work and get paid for it.

I only started using Substack this year, so I can’t comment on the “good old days” but I can see why people are frustrated.

I actually quite like the notes feature and the chat feature. I have notes on my menu in NBT, and I love sharing little weekly updates about what I’m drinking. I was really looking forward to using notes for my new publication.

Unfortunately, I discovered a problem.

Notes are linked to your writer profile, not the individual publications. That means any notes I share are all mingled together.

So if I share a note about Write With Lisa, it shows in the notes for NBT.

That means people who want beer-related content might get a little confused when they start seeing writing tips (and vice versa).

I didn’t realise this before I set up my new publication, so it was a little frustrating to find you can’t have separate notes for the different publications.

I could set up an account with a different email address and add myself as an author, then just post notes to one publication from that account and to the other from my main account. But having to log in and out of different accounts to post does seem like an unnecessary faff.

While the notes thing is annoying, it’s not the thing I dislike most about Susbstack. The thing I dislike most about Substack is the focus on getting people to subscribe.

When you set up a site on Beehiiv or Ghost, you can just direct people to your site. There’s no barrier to them viewing the content unless you decide to gate it.

But Substack is different. When you send people to your Substack home page, they don’t see the home page straight away. Instead, they get a pop-up to subscribe like this:

People who are familiar with Substack will know you can bypass this by clicking the link below. This is set to “No Thanks” by default, but I’ve changed mine to “Let me read it first” as I think that makes it clearer what that link does.

But it’s easy to miss the link altogether. And for people who aren’t familiar with Substack, this pop-up could put them off, especially with the mention of T&Cs and privacy policies.

You can avoid people getting this pop-up by sharing links to any page other than your home page or by linking directly to a post, but even then, Substack tries to push people to the app

I get it. Substack is a business. And they work completely on a commission basis - they only make money from paid subscriptions, so it’s in their interest to get as many people as possible regularly using the platform.

That’s why they push people to subscribe, and why they promote their app so aggressively. It’s why the pledge feature defaults to ‘on’ when you start a publication. And it’s why they encourage you to immediately recommend other Substacks to your subscribers.

I understand - they want to make money. But it is a bit pushy and I don’t like it.

And this is where Beehiiv and Ghost have an advantage. You can build your site and share your content knowing you and your subscribers will be left alone. They work on a fixed fee, not commission, so it makes no difference to them how many subscribers you get.

It might sound like I’ve made a mistake choosing Substack for my first paid subscription, but it does have some benefits.

That’s not to say I’ll hang around on there forever. I’ll give it six months and then decide whether to move to Beehiiv or Ghost. For now, it does what I need, and it’s giving me a chance to test various features.

This is, after all, an experiment. And I want to learn everything I can - the good and the bad - about all three platforms so that I can give honest, well-rounded, thorough feedback and advice.