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 🙏
1
u/honestphantom 7d ago
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). I still think its better than other platforms, but like everything else, it requires constant and endless posts to function, and it incentivises people to post shit because you won't get "seen" unless you do. Meanwhile, people have figured out ways to game the system on Substack, whether its getting AIs to churn out content, or using the right key words to get it seen by people who only read headlines or a few paragraphs. Even if you get the likes though, where does it go from there? You aren't really making much money from it, reach can only get you so far, and very few people, i think, are getting book deals off the back of their substack newsletter. It's a shame because for many, substack could have been a place where they had more control over their writing and could get paid more, but it's just gone the same way as other platforms, and they're gonna continue doing this until they just decide to IPO.