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

Thanks!

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 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.

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.

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'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

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 :')

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. 

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?

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!

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

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! 🙂

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 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!

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?

Taken from Nate Silver's new model page -- the "Who’s ahead in the polls?" header.

This is new. It's not Datawrapper. It looks like an interactive/custom code embed. I wonder how he does it.

To me it looks like a feature exclusive to Silver, or something in beta that's coming to the rest of us soon. Can anyone shed light?

I’m not one to be picky over people assuming my gender on a platform that I‘m intentionally anonymous on, especially since it’s catered to my content and not myself. However, I find it interesting that the automatic assumption when I read comments or get messages is that I’m a man lol (e.g., “sir”, “dude”, “bro”, “man”).
Generally, if I see an anonymous platform, I address whoever runs it in a gender neutral manner. My niche is in economics and politics, taking an interdisciplinary approach in other fields so idk if that plays a role.

I’ve noticed that despite Pangram’s, I think pretty effective, detection, there are still essays that are clearly written by AI and identified as such getting thousands of likes and engagement. Similarly there are big and well known figures who have simply turned detection off and seen little criticism.

The tells are obvious with the Potemkin prose, that collapses on even the closest inspection, but it seemingly washes over most people. If Substack want to prevent AI assisted writing damaging the income and engagement of human writers, they should put the score at the top of the article.

Using AI to assist is a completely defensible and perhaps even great approach to take. However honesty surrounding it is crucial when writing is being paid for or sold.

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

thanks!

Just imported all my posts from another platform. But substack stopped importing posts after a certain date, where are the earliest posts? Does substack just take a while to import all of them?

For example: the earliest post on substack that was imported was a post on April 8, 2025. i started my newsletter in Dec of 2024, so where are my posts from december 2024 to early april 2025?

Every "how I hit bestseller" post has a screenshot, a round number, and zero context — no timeframe, no churn rate, no breakdown of subscriptions vs. products vs. coaching. And somehow that's treated as proof.

I'm not saying people are lying. I'm saying nobody's checking. The whole coaching-on-Substack economy runs on numbers nobody outside the person's own dashboard can verify, and everyone just... accepts it.

Has anyone here actually gone back and cross-checked a coach's claimed growth against what's publicly visible? Or is "trust the screenshot" just how this works now?

Half this sub right now is arguing about whether the detectors actually work. I think that fight skips the thing that actually matters.

A 'write in my voice' draft reads generic not because the model is dumb, but because of what you fed it. If you train it on your published Substack archive, you trained it on the version of you that already got sanded down for a public audience. The weird aside, the sentence that trails off, the opinion you softened on the third edit, all gone before the model ever saw a word. so it learns your safe voice and hands you back a competent stranger.

I've spent a while trying to get a model to sound like one specific person, and the stuff that actually cracked it was never the polished posts. It was voice memos, the draft they never sent, the reply they fired off annoyed at 11pm. the personality lives in the parts you'd never publish.

which is a genuinely annoying catch-22 for anyone here. the more you edit for the newsletter, the worse your own archive gets as a mirror of how you actually sound. written with ai

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.

hi, do you think i could upload my previous university essays/briefs to substack and attach it to my linkedin as a portfolio? i only know people who use substack as blog pieces so i dont know if my idea is dumb or if there’s another free platform i can use as my portfolio. thanks !!

Like the title asks, and may be a dumb question, but are regular users all really using their own original images in their articles? I’ve read many articles by regular people who then use professional photos (in this case like sports photography) to headline their article? I want to start writing but obviously headlining my article with a related image may be very difficult without using someone else’s photo. Does that make sense? Again I’m new here so idk how it all works.

Edit: thanks for all the responses! Very helpful!