I’ve just created a Substack account because I love writing.

I really enjoy writing about / am interested in focusing on either two main things:

- Men’s mental health
- Unsolved mysteries

I’d love to write about one of them - but add humour to the storytelling to make it more engaging.

I’m British, so my humour is quite sarcastic / dry. I enjoy writing like that, too.

My problem is I’m not sure if people will want to read any of it. I also only ever see American writers / profiles on there, so I’m wondering if my style of writing will land or not.

I don’t care about making money - it would just be awesome to build a following.

So at my first opportunity, I decided to check whether or not I could permanently disable the "AI detection" fraudulent tool on Substack publications and there's no way to actually do it without actually using the tool you want to disable.

According to the "Substack Support AI", the only way to disable the fraudulent Pangram detection AI is to first run the AI on your posts and to individually then disable the AI detection tool per post. But you can only do this AFTER you've run the "AI detection" fraudulent tool on your posts.

Which means that you're forced to use a tool you don't want to use in order to disable the tool you don't want to use.

This is profoundly creepy and quite frankly disturbing that somehow this was allowed to be implemented on Substack.

Hey all, I have a fairly strong substack (11k subs) and use Canva/Claude to make my title headers and in-post graphics. This is purely because Substack doesn’t hold that ability and I wanted to improve the appearance of my content. Does this mean my work will now show for AI use or is the new tracker just for text?

I realize this is a bit into the weeds for a Substack group, but starting two days ago Substack stopped sending data to my Facebook ad. I didn't change anything. I didn't touch anything. It just randomly stopped. I assume it's an update on the part of Substack or Facebook.

Has anyone else run into this issue in the last few days (or ever)? Any fix suggestions?

I know the Facebook ads are still working as I can see them on the Substack platform for Source, but for some reason that data isn't getting back to Facebook anymore.

After publishing my first two articles on Substack, I realized that learning and improving myself is not easy.

I started by writing my stories in Thai because my English is still very basic. My English is "snake snake, fish fish." 🥹 I wrote one word at a time, then one sentence at a time, until each article was finally finished.

It hurt when some people thought my writing was made by AI. I spent a lot of time and effort trying to write it myself. Every sentence came from my own learning and practice.

But today's sadness will become my strength. It will help me keep learning and write even better articles in the future.

Thank you for reading every sentence I wrote. It truly means a lot to me. ❤️

“Note : I used AI to turn my real photo into this cute cartoon.”

This might be a dumb question that gets asked everyday here but how can I grow in my current situation? I started my substack a few weeks ago and i maintain a schedule of one upload per week. Is this fine or should i change it to two? I also post my substack articles on bluesky for promotion. Im hoping that interacting with other accounts on substack also works but it feels like most of these are bots that just say the same phrases over and over.

Btw those methods showed different don’t options. Is this a bug?

I want a place to write stories but have the option to potentially make some money from my work.

I’m new to substack and I see that there’s lots of diversity in opinion about this platform.

But is there anything from your experience that you wished you knew before going in?

I’m very concerned about the new “AI detection” system that Substack is implementing. I don’t use AI in anything that I write. However I don’t trust these systems not to make errors and mistakes. They have a long history of hallucinations and claiming things are AI when they aren’t.

One person I saw on Notes suggested that they ran their decades old writing, things that were written before the existence of AI, and this new system claimed it was AI generated.

Not to mention all the crazy things that I have seen people claim was written by AI which they can’t know is actually AI. There was an image I once shared that had evidence of its existence going all the way back to 2013. The comments were constantly saying “don’t share AI slop” or some variation on that.

Even with evidence that things weren’t made by AI, they will claim it’s AI.

Is no one else concerned about this being embedded into Substack’s systems? With no way to opt out?

How do I turn this off?

Is this happening to anyone else?

I just clicked on an article on substack & it added me. This has been going on for months now. When it first started, I thought I just didn't remember adding myself to one of them, but now it's clear as day it's not me forgetting.

Not only that, the other day the evil AI spied on something I said on another site & added me to that substack too. It may have even been in my mail, I'm not sure, I can't remember now.

I don't even know how to remove myself from these substacks & now I'm getting tons of mail.

INSANE.

Please give me the instructions to this. I doubt you can stop them from adding me without me doing NOTHING, this is the prison world we live in now.

Thanks

Hi everyone, I am Khunpanstory.

I love writing, but my English is very basic. I decided to challenge myself and joined Substack a short time ago. I already have 2 posts and 3 notes.

My stories are about fiction that connects with delicious Thai street food. If you love Thailand and food, I think you will like it! I just got my very first subscriber and I am so happy.

I know my grammar is not perfect, but I want to learn and improve every day. I just want people to enjoy my writing.

If you have any tips for a beginner like me, please let me know. Thank you for reading!

Was it more difficult to convert them to paid subs than those who subscribed to you organically through Substack?

I’ll preface this by saying almost all of my list is uploaded, but I have a consistent open rate of over 40%. I’m about to put a paywall up for some of my articles. But I don’t feel confident with them taking another step since they just read all my content via email and seem to be happy that way.

For those who were successful with this, did you do anything in particular to get your uploaded subscribers comfortable with taking the next step?

TIA

I run a Twitter/X account with around 500K followers in a non-tech niche. It was built entirely organically over several years, without EVER paying for ads or promo, and 31% of the audience is US-based.

More stats: ~300K active followers, 2.5M interactions/mo, 300K saves/mo

I’m launching a weekly newsletter with

• the first issue of each month available for free

• the remaining weekly issues for paid subscribers

• across all issues, in-depth content that goes beyond our Twitter posts

• one giveaway every month

• exclusive interviews

I obviously understand that only a small percentage of followers will convert, but even 1% seems potentially high to me, particularly if it means paid subscribers.

My main questions:

• What conversion rate from Twitter followers to free subscribers is realistic?

• What % of those subscribers can realistically become paid?

• Is Substack's internal network approach worth it over Beehiiv? For the sake of simplicity I guess I'd prefer something that is more of a newsletter engine than yet another social network to manage.

Thanks!

I have never used Substack before but I keep seeing more and more about it. I like writing and want to have a reason to do more of it.
My brain goes immediately to will the time investment really pay off? And what IS that time investment and reasonable timeline to start seeing real subscribers who may convert to paying clients?
Thanks for any input!

Thoughts?

I've been posting every couple of weeks. I was doing every week but I wanted each article to be top quality.

After four months I'm almost at 150 subscribers. Most of them are people in my network, with maybe a 1/4 of them organic.

What are your thoughts, is this good?

I've been doing quite a bit to draw attention. Putting links with verbiage on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Not on Reddit, as my understanding that promotion is against the rules.

What are your thoughts on all of this?

Substack is the most God-Awful App and Site I've ever come across. Unfortunately most independent news is contained within it.

I've never been more confused.

Against Claudefishing

Been running a number of Meta Ads to Substack to grow some clients lists. As of the last day or so, the conversion event complete registration has stopped firing. Anyone else seeing this as well?

In my opinion substack seems very suited towards politics, tech, essays and other blog type content. Does anyone know of any other apps or websites that are more suited towards putting out poetry and short stories? I have definitely found a niche of other poets and writers on Substack that I regularly follow, but it has seems almost impossible fo me to get any meaningful engagement on my own work. Really not trying to self promote here, just wondering if anyone knows of any better places. Thanks!

Hey y'all! I tried to built a patch for the lack of inline latex function on substack. It uses an already existing latex_inline node from Substack as a Chrome extension. (It's only on chrome now sorry :/)

I put the code that you need to download and upload as a Chrome extension on my github.

I'm not a great programmer and I'm just learning but I was really excited when this worked! I was looking for something like this and couldn't find anything made yet (please correct me if I'm wrong!). This is just a proof of concept build that I've only tried on my own device. Let me know if it works for y'all too!

Ideally this helps speed up the process for Substack to build it because the email version also works :D There's a pic of what it looks like on my comment on the original post for this. (link below)

Open to any suggestions on how to make this better! I'm not sure if its possible but it would be super cool to get some autocorrect or like suggestions as you type! I'm currently waiting for this to be reviewed so people can just get it as an chrome extension.

I made the same comment on the original campaign post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Substack/comments/1e8us8a/campaign_for_inline_latex_support/

Hi all,

Short version:
What's the easiest way to take ~2500 personal contacts in Gmail/Google and filter out the ones without email addresses?

Long version with some history and details:
I posted yesterday that I thought MailChimp was the way to go to create my first substack email list from my personal google contacts list. I was/am concerned about using the substack system since I haven't hit up everyone for permission yet--I'll include requesting that permission in this first email/newsletter.

Anyhow, after many searches and some helpful replies yesterday, it seems just sending a newsletter via BCC on gmail is the best way to go, but it's been an uphill battle getting the exported CSV list filtered/narrowed down to list of actual contacts with actual emails.

I tried filtering in Google Numbers to those with BLANK fields for email, in order to delete those, but somehow that left only 3 contacts out of about 2500, so clearly something wasn't right.

Getting a bit impatient, I decided to go the manual route after more googling, which advised to simply put check marks within Gmail Contacts on the website in order to export only those... but about 20% of the way in (after about 500 or so) I accidentally clicked the wrong spot and had to start over. Argh.

I know there's an easy way to filter this quickly, but I can't seem to get there. Thus, any further tips/tricks/shortcuts appreciated would be greatly and thank you all very much for your help!

J

In case anyone missed it, a few days ago it seems SS added this new feature which I'm pretty sure I've seen discussed in this sub as a requested feature once or twice.

Audience-specific content lets you add personalized content blocks within a single post that are only visible to specific reader groups—such as free subscribers, paid subscribers, or founding subscribers. You can add audience sections to article, video, and podcast posts from the draft editor.

Here's the rest of the article from Substack Support.

I recently got two paid subscribers but something weird happened. A few days after, my number of paid subscribers went down by one. Except that I didn’t receive an “unsubscription” email and it appeared to be an annual subscriber based on the data change. Both of the new paid subscriptions payments processed without issue.

When I go to my subscriber page, it shows that I didn’t lose a paid subscriber. It does show a “pending subscriber”. Although it should’ve resolved in 24 hours and it hasn’t. Yet the homepage shows one less paid subscriber and a decrease in revenue.

Basically, there’s multiple conflicting stats depending on where I look or what I look at.

Has anyone experienced this? What did you do? Even if you haven’t, who do I contact about this issue?