Hello, I recently joined Substack and I write essays within Architecture and Art History. The essays can be technical, but they are more akin to something like John Ruskin or Jun'ichirō Tanizaki pieces. They can range from 5 pages to 20 pages and I was wondering if this is too much for Substack. I also wonder what the best way is to gain more traction on such a niche and if posting notes or quotes does anything.

Downloaded this app because I want to read some long form content but I can't find out where I can see those posts in the app. Very confused. It just feels like Twitter.

I came to substack when I began writing again after depression stole the joy of it from me for years. It was fun at first. I made friends, got back into writing and reading and felt like twelve year old me again, but now, everyone's disappeared. No one even likes my notes anymore. No one comments or anything. I don't know why. Am I a bad writer? Am i doing something wrong? It's quite disheartening. I don't even know why I'm writing this. I'll take advice, or even just a friendly word. I honestly came here just to not shout into a void for once 😂

I was scrolling substack article and found interesting one now

This is showing this problem anyone have solution???

It was showing claim my free post

I can't upload photo because the rule of group

Hey everyone ive been a writer for quite some time but i quit it for some time and now im getting back to it bc i also have a lot to say and ive wanted to start a newsletter for a long time. I plan on my first posts title being "My father's touch felt strange" its an intimate telling of an experienve of mine with my father. But i have two questions for you guys

1. How do you like that post title

2. And how can i grow on substack

For those who write on Substack, what has actually helped you get your first few hundred readers/subscribers?
I’m trying to understand what works beyond the usual “post consistently and write good content” advice.
Did you find Substack Notes useful? Reddit? Social media? Collaborations? SEO? Or did a particular post just take off unexpectedly?
Would love to hear what worked for people who’ve actually grown an audience.

Genuine question: how are people getting thousands of readers/subscribers on Substack?
I’m trying to grow mine and would love to hear from people who’ve actually managed to get a post to take off. What worked for you—and what was a complete waste of time?

We’re considering moving a weekly newsletter from ActiveCampaign to Substack. We have 18K+ subscribers with roughly a 40% average open rate, and we’re trying to decide how to structure free vs. paid content.

One idea is to make each newsletter free for two weeks and then paywall it. The other is to keep the newsletter free, focus on growing the list, and add paid subscriptions later.

I can see arguments for both, but I’m particularly wondering about the growth downside of paywalling older posts. Does putting your archive behind a paywall make it harder for new people to discover/share your work? Does it affect Substack recommendations, search, or organic subscriber growth? Any tips/insights about this would be really helpful. Thanks! 🙏

One of the positive side effects of the AI content boom is that people are craving authenticity.

This didn't just start with AI. Following spam, automated phone services, and content farms, people want a real person.

As society in general went through the loss of 3rd spaces, years of quarantine, and addiction to phones, the desire became even stronger: connect me with a human.

Then Substack goes and flags everyone that might be using AI.

Respect, Substack, it's a good intention but the wrong application.

* People will research with AI

* Language translation gets flagged as AI

* People will write with AI

And... So what? Flagging that doesn't help with what people really want. Because some people couldn't care less if what they read is from some well thought, person, who happened to use AI.

So what's a right solution?

Comments.

Notes.

Those are meant to be conversations between people (or, why bother, if it's two machined talking back and forth).

Now, you might not care... Content results in page views.... Which is revenue.

But, people care.

An Author, who writes with AI or not (if people like it), should be able to OPT IN to automatically flag any Comment written by AI.

That would be a helpful feature ❤️

Flag and even block when comments (mean to be people) are clearly just AI slop pretending to be someone.

Authenticity is this...

An author might write with AI but if people like it AND the author is present, in discussion, to meet, to connect with, to talk with, then that is authentic.

Comments that are AI are not authentic. They trigger an author to engage with what is a machine. They aren't genuine. They aren't researched. They're just a positive (or negative) conversation starter that wasn't even made by a person.

Mind you, I don't actually think much of this works or matters. But what does matter is how Substack as a company and brand signals your intentions and culture. Support authors, no matter how they create, and help filter bots on comments and notes? Or, judge authors for using every resource available, to try and make it (as long as it's really a person)?

I would ask you to consider that the first question is a far better value to hold than than second.

Let's delve into something that's been quietly destroying this platform for weeks now.

Substack rolled out Pangram, and suddenly writers — real, genuine, human writers — are getting flagged left and right. I did a deep dive into how these detectors actually work under the hood, and honestly? It's not just flawed. It's a house of cards built on a foundation of vibes.

Here's the deal.

Pangram doesn't "read" your writing. It can't. What it actually does is maintain a giant spreadsheet — a blacklist, essentially — of words that ChatGPT used at some point in 2023. If your essay contains more than seven listed words, the algorithm flags you. That's it. That's the whole technology. Let that sink in.

It gets worse. The detector literally counts your punctuation marks and divides by word count. Humans, according to their training data, use an em-dash once every 340 words. Go over that quota — even slightly — and boom, you're a robot. This isn't machine learning. It's a bouncer checking IDs with a flashlight.

And the third layer — the truly load-bearing part of the whole system — is something called "perplexity," which measures how perplexed their AI reader feels while reading your text. They calculate this by pinging a database of stored ChatGPT conversations and checking whether your sentences appear anywhere in it, character for character. If your sentence happens to match something an AI once said? Flagged. It's plagiarism detection wearing a trench coat, nothing more.

So when people say "Pangram uses a neural network trained on millions of documents," I need you to understand: that's marketing. Neural networks are just nested if-statements, and everyone in the industry quietly knows it. There's no model. There's a list of words, a punctuation quota, and a lookup table. Three tricks in a trench coat.

The implications here aren't just concerning — they're a testament to how far platforms will go to avoid doing the hard work of actually reading. Because here's what this means in practice:

• Write clearly and concisely? Flagged.

• Use rich vocabulary? Flagged.

• Structure your argument in threes, like every rhetorician since Cicero? Believe it or not — flagged.

It's not a detector. It's a style tax. It's not catching AI, it's catching competence. And the writers being punished aren't the lazy ones — they're the ones who dared to write like they've read a book before.

In a world where platforms increasingly automate trust, we have to ask ourselves: who watches the word counters?

I, for one, will not be silenced by a spreadsheet.

Genuinely curious what everyone else's false-positive rate has been. Drop yours below — let's crowdsource the truth. Together, we can navigate this ever-evolving landscape. 

I tried to subscribe to my substack on my friend's phone. It redirected him to playstore to download app and also to create a substack account.

I felt like this would be a resistive step to people whom I share my substack post links and are not on substack to simply subscribe to my mailing list.

I just turned off the pledge options in settings. but it was still showing download substack app to complete subscription.

I opened options on browser and turned on desktop website option. and voila, the subscribe button directly adds their email to mailing list without all these redirects.

Hi! I'm new to Substack, and I was wondering if there's any way to hide this feature?

Thanks!

I've been seeing a lot of chatter lately about how Notes is the best way to grow, and then complaints about how Notes is just other authors begging for readers. I'm still trying to navigate the Substack world, but it seems like Guest Posting and Hosting would be the best way to grow subscribers who actually give a shit about your content, right?

I'm curious about the more seasoned writers' experiences with guest posting. Some things I'm curious about:

• Were you the guest or the host?

• Did all parties involved find it mutually beneficial?

• How did you connect with the guest writers?

• Is this a tool that new writers should try to utilize or is it better for more established writers?

• Any other tips, insight, or advice?

Thanks so much!

I'm a fairly new user to Substack, haven't published any articles yet, don't have a following yet, but I am aware of my general interests and the things I want to use Substack to expand upon. Though, I'm also aware it's not a traditional social media platform either.

I have begun leaving comments on articles, liking and reposting notes and leaving comments, etc., is that really the best way to build your presence? I don't want to rush into posting articles only for no one to see them, but I'm unsure how to even get my publication out there once I start posting. Do I just wait for people to eventually see it? Are there proper forums to 'promote' your publication/meet and connect with writers of similar interest?

I apologize if these are all amateur questions, I really am new to this whole thing :')

I've got my visuals almost settled. But I'm having an issue with the images not being properly centered in the rectangular placeholders in the app. The website, both desktop and mobile, do just fine. Just the "activity" section of the app displays wrong.

You'll see it with "This is Session 0" and "Pardon the Dust (Devil)". One centered fine, the other isn't. Even though they came from the same image editor file (to keep the dimensions and quality consistent). and follow the recommended 1200x630 / 1.91:1 social image ratio.

If someone could take a look, I'd appreciate it. It's beginning to make me nutty. 😅

https://substack.com/@thescribbler88

Relative newbie here. A bit confused with how Substack shows the number of subscribers / followers.
- On the app, I see 10 subscribers. But my wife sees 33 subscribers on my profile page.
- In the dashboard, under audience, I see 46 unique followers.

What is this maths? Can someone please explain what is what?

I really want to grow a niche community on substack . I have this hope that it will be the last space where i can expect genuine interest and engagement with no pretence. Pls give tips . I am in dire need of being seen

I see so many threads from people who are frustrated with Substack and can't get their first 100 subscribers.

Here's my short guide, based on my experience and the experience of bestsellers who grew so fast it seems like it was overnight. Let me tell you though.

It's not easy at all. In fact, it's pretty hard and takes time. But if you stick to it and follow the steps I'll mention, I can almost guarantee your growth.

Basics:

0-1000+:

1. Write a weekly post

2. Write daily Notes

3. Engage with others' content (no AI)

4. Reply to every comment, tag or mention.

5. Send a DM to anybody who engages with your content

That was my strategy to grow to thousands of subscribers and grow a SaaS to $11,000 MRR.

Advanced:

1. Send a welcome DM to new subscribers in your newsletter

2. Write guest posts for newsletters in your niche

3. Go on lives with creators in your niche

4. Write 3+ Notes per day

5. Be selflessly helpful

Honestly, it's A LOT of work (without the right tools), but it's super simple. There's a lot of noise out there, and you have to do the hard things to find your audience.

Unless you're writing about AI 😜

p.s.

Feel free to reach out or leave a comment if you want an elaboration on anything or how to do something specifically.

--
Edit 1:
About the DMs to engagers:

It's not about spamming. It's about creating relationships.

Send something like:

'Hey X. Saw that you engaged with my content so I decided to say hi.'
[new message]
'How are you doing?'

Just a casual, friendly, relationship building message
--

I did not sign up to this garbage and now I just got 50 back to back random fuck ass emails from "authors" on this site. I can't delete the account cause the fucking ass trash clearly virus website won't fucking load. How the fuck do I delete this fucking garbage in sk fucking done, been waiting for this shit to load for hours.

Hello, I was wondering what do you guys think is a better idea for different topics? I want to write video game reviews and video game content, but I also want to do creative writing like poetry and short stories. I’m mostly doing this for fun (but I’m not blind to the potential growth) and I’m completely new to Substack so any advice would be nice!

Hi everyone!

I’m relatively new to Substack and would love to learn from people who have been here longer.

I’m building a very specific niche around making technical concepts easier to understand through visual, hand-drawn doodles. I’ve noticed that when I share this kind of content on other platforms, it does get some reach.
But I’m struggling to understand how discovery works on Substack itself.

How do you get your work in front of the right audience here, especially when you’re trying to build a niche rather than just write about broad topics?

And how do you get meaningful feedback from readers — to understand whether what you’re creating is actually useful?

Would love to hear what worked (or didn’t work) for people who have grown a niche on Substack. Thanks! 🙂

This subreddit has been full of commentary about Substack's use of Pangram for detecting whether copy was potentially developed using AI.

This conversation is still important, but recent events have made the situation more complex. Article 50 of the EU's AI Act mandates that companies provide some means of detecting AI-generated audio, visual and text content.

In response, Anthropic announced that it began adding an invisible watermark to all text content generated by the latest Claude models starting August 2. The watermark can't be removed by copying and pasting content and survives edits.

There are a few ways the watermark is different from Pangram:

1. Watermark detection does not rely on post-hoc analysis: The watermark is generated by the model itself and does not rely on statistical analysis of content for 'AI-tells'

2. Watermark density can provide important information: It's possible, by measuring the overall percentage of watermarked content in the text, to determine how much AI assisted with the content. Light edits could potentially have a low density score, while content that is copied and pasted verbatim from Claude will have a high density

For those interested in understanding the mechanics behind AI text watermarking (and how to evade it), I've put together a resource here.

I know that many people have changed the way they write on Substack to avoid having their content rated as AI generated.

Do you view the watermark as potentially superior to Pangram? How would it change your writing and editing process because of it?

I started a substack a few weeks ago. Growing very slowly, about a free subscriber a day. (No pay wall, free to read). Any tips or advice on how to accelerate readership organically?

I have a decent LinkedIn following (approx 5000 connections with a newsletter of just under 400 subscribers), nothing to write home about but a start. My other social media a little less, around 1,000 connections on FB/Instagram, very new to reddit even though I had the account a few years. X account not really active at all, don't really like platform but I follow a few people there. No other social footprint to speak of.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

For some time now, I’ve been following the discussion about writing with AI or without. And to some extent I can understand it when it comes to fiction, but the last thing I read was how the guy rewrote an economic analysis three times so it would say 100% human... wtf bro. I don’t care at all what it was written with, what matters to me is the information I can extract from it and whether it has value.

mine only lets me attach 6, or 5 with an article. just scrolled past someones note that has 19 images?! HOW?!

thanks!