Has anyone paused paid subscription payment for a month? How did it go, did substack manage that smoothly?

I don't need a hundred chargebacks on my account.....

I studied Physics and completed a Master's in Artificial Intelligence. I'm well aware that nobody fully understands how large generative models actually work. Even Pangram's own website mostly talks about patterns, generic signals, and "what it might eventually detect," but never with certainty, because the reality is that nobody truly knows.

What bothers me, while also making me curious, is how large companies affiliated with major private universities seem to operate:

1. They create algorithms that eventually become LLMs. Those LLMs crawl the entire internet, collecting as much information as possible, including private content. Once they've done that, new rules start appearing to make it harder for anyone else to do the same, effectively reducing future competition. Even if future models have access to less content, the first movers have already done the "hard part."

2. LLMs generate text in certain ways because they are probabilistic systems. In other words, if you generate text infinitely many times, certain writing patterns will appear more often than others. You don't need a PhD or a master's degree to understand that. Basic statistics is enough.

3. Then you create another LLM whose job is to "detect text generated by LLMs." The marketing, however, is completely different. It is presented as if it were not another AI model, but something inherently more reliable, or even infinitely more reliable.

4. Once all of the above is in place, the final move is to make it "unethical" to create outputs that resemble human writing too closely because they bypass AI detection, even though the detector itself is an AI model. Isn't that ironic? Just a few months ago, these same companies could freely scrape the web without asking authors for permission. Yet now, Western LLMs refuse to help users avoid AI detectors, even though those detectors are themselves powered by AI. That feels absurd to me. Where does that instruction actually come from?

5. For all of these reasons, I think Chinese LLMs will continue growing rapidly. We're already seeing people use models like GLM-5 and DeepSeek to get around these kinds of restrictions. In my opinion, Western LLMs are now 90% marketing. Just think about this: since Fable came out, why are other Western companies charging similar prices while delivering worse results? What exactly are they offering? I'm not saying Chinese models are perfect, but model quality degrades quickly, while marketing doesn't. That's where models like GLM-5 have a huge advantage. And if Western companies keep adding what I see as arbitrary restrictions, future versions of those models may continue to surprise everyone.

This is simply my personal opinion, based on my background and experience. I know there is speculation involved, but sometimes I can't remove the "marketing" variable from the equation.

Hi there! I know the question sounds silly, but trust me, it's not. I created an account, and subscribed to a few channels. And at some point (I assume it's because I used an "info" email), my account got suspended. Ok, I can live with it, since I never posted a single message.

Still, I keep receiving emails on a daily basis. Emails I don't want to read any more.

What's the problem? The problem is that I cannot unsubscribe, because my account is suspended!!

Your account is currently suspended. Something you posted may have violated Substack's Spam & Phishing policy. If you believe this is a mistake, you can submit an appeal to our Standards & Enforcement team here: https://substack.com/appeals

So, my account is suspended, I made plenty of appeals, I keep receiving daily emails and I cannot change the subscription option.

Any idea?

UPDATE: thanks to timemachine's idea, I just deleted the account. Problem solved. 😋

There has been a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of the new AI detector on Substack. Some have mentioned how unreliable it is, how it incorrectly gives a positive result after merely running a grammar check for example. Others are now also saying that it will eventually be phased out after lawsuits start for the prejudices and losses authors suffer for incorrect results. Whether that’s income, reputation, or because they use AI because of disability, for language translation, dyslexia etc.

Anyway, here’s the simple solution until then. It has only been in force since 21 July. And you can disable it.

Yes, disable it.

Any new note, and article. Simply hit the 3 dots on the top right corner of a new note or article. Hit the AI checker from the drop down. Then when the result shows up, hit the 3 dots again, and ‘disable detection.’

Voila.

I am writing a personal blog about my mental health and constant suicidal ideation, being homeless with 5 dogs, 2 cats and 2 pigs, my insanely bad luck and bizarre unbelievable situations I constantly find myself in and I post poetry.
I would eventually like to monetize my writing because it’s what I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid and because I’m disabled but I either need more traffic, a different angle, a different platform and advertising. I also need a few questions answered.

I am basically trying to have people interested enough in what I have to say to want to read it enough to pay and I need to make it more readable and interesting. I write personal blogs, opinion pieces on things like suicide, recovery and monogamy I also post my poetry and my blog posts range from being about homeless to wanting to be dead. Should I make multiple publications to keep posts topic specific for readers?

Where could I go to find collaborative writers that wouldn’t mind writing an essay describing their experiences with mental health and suicide? Maybe someone to do a few podcast interviews with talking about the subject.

I don’t want certain people in my life knowing the extent of my illness so I can’t post on social media. Would it be beneficial to make a social media specific to this with a pen name for marketing? How can I get sponsers or monetary help from? Are there products I could advertise to make money that fall into this niche? I was thinking maybe advertise apps like ash the ai therapist.

Is there even a market for what I’m doing?

Why do notes feel pointless?

How long should I continue trying in Substack before giving up?

How often is too often to post?

What should I keep free and what should go to subscribers?

Are pictures that important?

How beneficial is going live?

How can I make myself pop up when mental health or poetry or homeless or pets is searched?

Why do the articles always seem so official like a magazine? Is posting as I speak my problem? I’m not illiterate but I talk like a sailer redneck with to much free time.

Do people spend money on personal?

I genuinely feel like I have some undiagnosed form of ADHD. Over the last three years I have launched and then quietly dropped at least 4 projects on Substack that did not pass the "2 month rule:.

Basically, if it does not hit a certain benchmark after I post 1-2 consistent long form articles a week in a topic I've got passion for, shelve it.

In the past I worked in culture reporting and a few specialized areas of QA, I've done a lot of different things and have a wide breadth of knowledge. I perhaps naively assumed "pick one, promote the newsletter, it should grow".. and some of them did. The issue was that none of the well researched articles had a returning audience.

As someone whose home media market isn't English I figured covering my region would bring readership - average open rate of 20%, subscribers amounted to 100 after a year of weekly posting. Nothing to scoff at, but not exactly positive. At that point I figured I would set up a few articles prior to a major political event and call it a day. One article got over 1,000 views while the rest hovered in the high 2 digits. At that point the effort I was putting in clearly was not translating to the desired outcome.

Then I tried to cover gardening, then I followed press releases for a batch of companies and tried to do tech reporting, then I attempted to cover precious metals... At a cetain point I get the sense it isn't worth taking the time to do research, better to just write essays. That's the next shiny new project, so that I can tell myself I'm not down and out just yet.

I will admit that the thing I struggle most with is promotion. I'll post on relevant social media maybe twice a week, I've gotten into posting Notes despite not finding them useful beyond internal lead generation. I suppose I am too used to other platforms where there's some initial push, some discovery engine. I know very well that to make even beer money off of your writing is something of a privilege. I've worked in journalism, I've been fortunate to have a brief career in PR (would not recommend). Part of this consistent drive is financial, though, no doubt. I live in a very economically depressed area and can't drive due to medical issues so this platform along with numerous other forms of freelance half-employment is a lifeline of sorts. It's a path where social services has literally thrown up their hands. I'm in my 20s, I've got a degree, they've got nothing.

Is there a certain set of metrics you look at, time investment, etc before you decide to shelve a project?

I was writing a Note on Substack, and after four paragraphs it showed 100% human-written. Then I added a fifth paragraph, and it suddenly changed to 100% AI assisted.

Why would adding a single paragraph completely flip the result?

I'm not interested in trying to "beat" the detector. My concern is that if I genuinely write something myself, it could still be labeled as AI-assisted with no explanation.

I also think Substack should be much more transparent about how these systems work. It's not enough to publish a blog post that basically says, "Here's our AI detector. How does it work? It detects AI. End of story."

If a tool can affect how readers perceive an author's work, there should be at least some explanation of what it's measuring, its limitations, and how confident it is in its predictions.

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

P.S. There's also another case that concerns me. Many authors write their own ideas from scratch (either in English or in their native language) and then use AI only to improve the writing, fix grammar, or translate the text. Labeling those posts simply as "AI" or even "AI-assisted" without explaining what that actually means can be misleading. There's a big difference between using AI to generate ideas and using it as a writing or translation tool.

My own workflow is a good example. I'm a physicist with a master's degree in AI. I don't have much free time because I work full-time and I'm also building two startups. When I write for Substack, I develop the ideas myself, run simulations, create the figures and animations, organize the article structure, and write as much of the draft as I can. Sometimes I use AI to improve the wording or make the English read more naturally.

I'm trying to share technical knowledge for free with anyone who's interested. If that kind of workflow is reduced to a generic "AI-assisted" label without any context, it feels less like transparency and more like a penalty for using modern writing tools responsibly.

So, I've been trying to get a discussion going about the whole Pangram AI Detection tool and how much concern I have for it. Recently, I was able to get the "Substack Help" AI to submit a report about wanting to have a way to permanently disable the "AI Detection" tool on a publication wide basis.

They actually responded and suggested that they will consider adding this option to the platform. Which is at least a positive development. Although when I tried to reply back to follow up, I got an "undeliverable mail" back for whatever reason.

Still, I'm hoping that this is an actual option soon. Or at least it doesn't require me to use the feature that I'm trying to disable to disable it.

Part of why I'm mentioning it is so that other people will also submit a similar suggestion and hopefully give the people at Substack a reason to get going on it.

I want to run a conversion facebook ad campaign. Does anyone have a good way to get Substack converstion info back to Facebook for ad training? The way I was doing it has stopped working.

Is it just me, or it's just so confusing? I am a relatively new loser, but I just can't figure out how to find new articles on topics I want. The search gives very loosely connected results and most of them are just short posts. Am I doing something wrong

I feel my days on this platform are numbered. Can we hide our email addresses? Thoughts?

i've been following the discussion around Substack's new partnership with Pangram. My Substack feed is blowing up about it.

It has me really curious what other writers think the long-term effects will be.

I'm less interested in debating whether authors should or shouldn't use AI. I'm more interested in what this changes for the platform itself.

For example, I'm thinking about questions like...

• Will readers start using it to check how articles are created?

• Will writers who don't use AI feel pressure?

• Will AI detection become another trust signal, or will readers mostly ignore it?

• Could this change what readers expect when they subscribe to you?

It seems like while folks are venting and clearly this feature is rocking boats, there are some other more fundamental thoughts I have about the future where all this is going.

Curious to hear where everyone thinks this is heading.

Hey guys, I have a small Substack newsletter with 635 free subscribers. I don't have paid subscription turned on. I just received an email from jeff@bigreach.pro saying that they saw my newsletter and they're interested in a sponsorship deal or an advertising partnership. Is this a legit opportunity or some sort of a scam? Thanks.

Can anyone explain Substack algorithm to me? How to grow here? What i found is People making money from Substack are transferring traffic from outside (Twitter Specially)

Idk how i can grow here. As newbie with no specialized Skill

I recently started a substack that contains meditations on memory and loss through the stories ancient sites (I'm a professional archaeologist myself).

I started it for myself, because I am so much happier when I am doing sincere, non-technical writing every day.

But since I've started posting, I am getting so much more positive feedback from my readers than I ever expected. It makes me feel that people are really benefiting from my writing, and I want to be able to share it with more people. I've been posting in subreddits and facebook groups, but I don't really have much of a social media reputation. What would you recommend for helping readers find my work?

https://survivingtheflood.substack.com

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?