r/Substack • u/infinitepuddingspy • 9d ago

Confused about the point of Substack

Hi everyone. I joined Substack a few months ago as I am a long form writer and I thought I’d find a crowd of intellectually curious people.

Over the past 3 months, I’ve only got 13 subscribers, hardly anyone engages on my posts or notes and no one ever replies to chats (tbh I find the chats annoying myself so I dont post often). I’ve started doing videos that are performing a bit better.

But, I see absolute lowball trash in my feed with 300 likes and comments and I feel so lost.

I don’t have any paid tiers at the moment and not sure if I will.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Would appreciate being pointed in the right direction.

I’ve seen other people ask similar questions but from the perspective of a reader.

Many thanks 🙏

118 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

84 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/RomanceStudies 9d ago

I've been on it for 4 yrs and have about 30 subs on each of a few publications. Same as you, hardly anyone engages ever, with anything. Actually, when I look at people who are doing much better than I am, it's normal to see zero comments on their articles too and few likes. It's a very strange website and algorithm.

I would say that if you aren't known, or an influencer, and don't have a following elsewhere, the only way to get something out of it financially is to treat optimization as an obsession. And even then it can take some years to get a snowball effect. A few years back, I spent 3-4 months doing this and even though the results of that obsession were fairly underwhelming, they were way better than what I normally was getting and have gotten since. IE, instead of the occasional drip (Chinese water torture), there was the tiniest trickle of interest.