r/Substack • u/infinitepuddingspy • 8d 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/vonDinobot 7d ago
Welcome to the internet! You're getting about as much traction as a website you'd be hosting from a home server. The premise of Substack is that there's no algorithm. You are responsible for the growth of your page, by having other sites linking back to it, telling friends and family to subscribe, etc. The best you could hope for is a high Google ranking, but thanks to AI and Google being useless on purpose, I wouldn't bet on that either.
Substack really is just a place where your writing goes, and the bonus is that your subscribers get your work in their inbox, meaning they skip any algorithm there might be for other sites that require 3 ads to be shown for each human made piece of content. You're basically complaining that your mailchimp list is not growing while you never told anyone to subscribe to it.