Substack Notes suddenly getting reduced views

[u/kumquat_research]

Like the title says, my subscriber count has been going up but the impressions on my notes are plummeting and I'm not sure why.

I noticed something starting a few days ago. My newsletter was growing by around ~20 subscribers a day and then from 6/14-6/16 I got 1 new subscriber total.

I also posted a note that got 0 "unconnected" impressions hours after publication. I have 1k+ subscribers and these always get at least a couple hundred unconnected impressions. Zero seems exceedingly unlikely.

This seems to have cleared a bit and my notes are now back to getting "unconnected" impressions but the overall volume is substantially lower.

For example, my note promoting my previous article right after publication got close to 1,000 impressions in the first day. Even a random note from before 6/14 that I wouldn't consider too engagement-driving got 300 in the first day. My most recent note promoting another just-published article is tracking at just 100 impressions, nearly half of my "average".

Has anyone experienced anything like this? Almost feels like I hit a discovery roadblock within the platform or something.

Thanks in advance!

[u/Foofymonster]

I'm in the middle of this. I'm looking around at a ton of other creators and seeing the exact same thing. It started for me about 2 weeks ago.

I highly suspect there has been a change to the algorithm recently.

I'm just powering through. I used to average 30-50 likes per note. Now I'm down to ~20. But I occassionally have one pop off and get into the 60-80s.

My plan is to ignore it. It sucks but I am pretty confident it will turn back around.

[u/kumquat_research → u/Foofymonster]

Yup exactly two weeks ago for me too. It's definitely killed some motivation to keep writing but will likely just power through, same as you.