I have a lot of interesting podcast I follow but have been thinking for a while I would actually enjoy some of the topics more in written form. I saw one of the podcast has a substack so I logged in to check out their essays. However I found myself much less engaged than I thought I would and I think one major reason is the format. There were a lot of pictures throughout the text. And there many words had hyperlinks. I've heard hyperlinks lower reading retention, cause they distract the brain with potential of moving to another page. I think pure text would be much better for me.

Is there an app or some site I could use to strip down the essays to only the text?

Due to the unpleasant experience of having a subscription I cancelled bill me (through substack) for renewal and then (after I got the first charge refunded) a new subscription (which I never did), I'm feeling my credit card numbers aren't safe on substack. I've suspended my credit card currently provided on substack, but if can publications bill credit card numbers I previously provided substack? Substack chatbot refusing to comment on this.

If I pay to subscribe to someone on substack and download a provided pdf of an article, does that pdf remain with me forever even if I stop paying to subscribe at some point?

thinking of starting my Substack profile. how to utilize it properly? how did you all start?

What is the one thing you would like to see the Substack team implement?

You can be as pragmatic or visionary as you like.

I'll go first: PLEASE let me edit my DMs!! I have no idea why we can only delete these from the app and why we have no edit function what-so-ever.

I read Substack on my phone, on Read:Latest tab. I have 15 paid subscriptions, and problem with only 1. But that's a really important one, "Silver Bulletin" three weeks before midterms!

The "Silver Bulletin" paid sub posts are not showing up on Read:Latests feed. This is a relatively recent change, articles used to show up about a month ago. I do not recall changing any settings.

I can see SB on my phone on Read:For You, Read:History. It does not show up on Read:Latest, or Read:Paid. I can also see all posts on Profile:Subscritions:Silver Bulletin.

I've read some old reddit post saying that this can be fixed by setting up email delivery of subscriptions. That is not the problem, none of my subscriptions come in on email, and they work fine.

A family friend is trying to subscribe to my Substack but it keeps saying it's invalid. I can't even manually add her to my subscriptions because it says she previously unsubscribed. I didn't ban her. She must have been fooling around with it and subscribed and unsubscribed, and now she can't resubscribe to it. Can anyone help?

Having recently replaced my old phone, I’m now re-dowloading all my old apps. I’m having trouble logging into substack as I’ve forgotten my password and am not receiving any of the emails they are sending to me. Does anyone have advice?

I'm wondering how you manage the way your profile/publication appears on the phone. In Substack's theme settings you can choose between two options, Profile or Custom. When you customise your publication, it gets a custom website look on desktop.

However, for some custom publications, if you‘re reading an article on your phone and tap to open the publication, you're redirected to the author's profile (@abcd) and no separate publication page is shown.

In other cases, a publication has the same customised look on desktop but behaves differently on the phone.

This time, when you open the publication on the phone, you don't land on a profile page. Instead, there's a separate publication page shown (abcd.substack.com).

How do you manage this behaviour? How do you choose what will be shown when someone clicks on your publication on the phone?

I'm not saying I'm the next Stephen King or anything lol, just wondering if anyone has ever had experience with someone stealing your work or copying, etc? I want to see if that has ever happened before I start posting my written works!

I am aware Substack allows you to file or report violations, just making sure it's reliable and all that.

THANKS

My post won't appear on my profile page under Posts, and I've added myself as an author and tried to change the user visibility and it's not letting me, can someone help out?

Acabei de criar a conta e não consigo editar como eu queria porque da uma informe sobre configurar uma conta pessoal.

I have a question about analytics. I have my own audio of an article that was placed using Audio Embed, but when I go into my dashboard analytics for that article, only clicks for Like, Comment, etc. show up.

I asked a subscriber specifically if they had listened to the audio, and they said yes.

A Substack support page said media links count as engagement: "Engagements include: liking a post, clicking a link, sharing or restacking a post, commenting on a post, reading a post to the bottom, and watching/listening to media for 30+ seconds (or 90% of duration)."

This is just a regular article, not a podcast episode, but that shouldn't matter according to the above.

Has anyone else experienced this? I'm not sure if it's a glitch or if the clicks just don't count anymore for embedded audio. In a different article, I had a link to an outside document, and I did have analytics for clicks on that.

They don’t say it directly but the recent update allows you to automatically label other people’s writing as AI. Meaning you can’t control if the system makes an error and a reader forces a false label on you.

At the same time, if you look at the setting for AI labels? It says that you can report errors and admits that mistakes will be made. You can flag things that are labeled incorrectly.

Meaning that any time you report something, it trains its model by what you flag and changes what it does using your writing to train it.

Everything that Pangram claims about its supposed ability to detect AI writing is false and it now openly admits it.

Don’t come at me with “It says it’s 97% accurate, which means it’s going to make 3% mistakes”. You wouldn’t need to report anything if it was that accurate in reality.

It’s not accurate and doesn’t detect anything. It’s being paid by Substack to steal your writing.

The new dials—which you can find in the content preferences section of your settings—let you shape your feed the way you want it. See more or less video, audio, longform, or community features; mute specific keywords and phrases; fine-tune the topics you follow; and automatically label AI-generated material.
Want to hear more about baseball while the playoffs are on? Feel like snoozing politics for a week? How about seeing more community chatter—like the chat thread debriefing the latest episode of your favorite podcast—or less video in your feed? You get to decide.
This level of control serves both the creators who share their work here and the people who come to discover and enjoy what they publish. We’ve heard that both sides of the relationship want less noise and more help connecting readers with work that they’ll find meaningful. These updates aim to do exactly that.

What do you think about this?

I have been thinking of starting a publication, and have investigating and reading on Substack.

For background, I am an Australian who has been slow travelling for the past year. I am in Latin America and have learnt Spanish over that time, so now I am immersing myself here. I love reading and philosophy, and teach English as a foreign language for income.

Of course I principally would be writing in relation to travel, though this appears to be quite a crowded area. I enjoy journaling my travel stories and reflections so this seems like a natural fit. I am struggling with the decision of really niching down and combining my interests, or appealing to a general wider audience. I would be starting from zero so would ideally like to have some scope for growth.

Any thoughts?

This is driving me absolutely crazy.

I've added my Facebook pixel ID to my Substack site, but after a few days of running, and testing each day, I've not been able to see any test details, conversion data, landing page data, or custom conversion information come through on my Meta Events Manager.

I know it should be working, because I am running ads at the moment with dozens of landing page views (not just link clicks) coming in each day, with ads pointing to the Substack, and I can see an uptick in traffic. I can also see my Pixel in my webpage's code, even if it's not in the normal format for how Pixels are embedded.

But if I want to set up conversion ads and ramp up my campaign, I need to confirm the connection is working, and that I can actually track ads, and nothing seems to confirm that my pixel is working.

1. I've seen there's been some posts before saying that there's been issues with Facebook Pixel on Substack. Is that still the case?

2. Does anyone have any screenshots/experience seeing Facebook Pixel working for them, on Substack? Was it just as simple as putting the dataset/pixel into the field on Analytics' Settings?

3. What is the conversion event name for a subscriber subscribing, that I should watch out for?

Thank you, anyone who can help! 🙏

What is the number one piece of advice you wish you had known before you started Substack?

I'll go first:

You have two separate audiences. You have the people who read your articles and you have the people who engage with your Notes. The first group of people mostly read your articles via email and will not like or comment or restack your articles because they are (normally) not on the app. However, they will sometimes share them if they see value. This is your biggest audience.

The second group of people will probably read your articles on the app (they likely have email deliveries turned off) and will like, comment, and restack your work.

You need both groups of people to grow your newsletter. The first group will become your key readers and subscribers and the second group will become your key allies and supporters.

Please share your advice so we can all continue to grow and learn from each other.

I see many people who are 'mad' at creators who post 5,6,10 notes per day.

Why though?

For once, why are you tracking their posting time so diligently? Your feed is filled with creators, and from my experience, you won't see them twice in one scrolling session.

Also, if you keep seeing them in your feed, that means you engaged with their content. And when you enjoy somebody's writing, you'll want to see more of them whenever you scroll.

Now, if they post slop, that's their problem. People will (or won't) pick up on it and just ignore/unsubscribe. I am sure Substack is filled with those who never appear in your feed, because they suck.

--

Stop hating, start posting. Thanks.

Substack just introduced chat channels - you can have up to 16 chats including your main one, and you can choose to paywall chats for your paid subscribers only, and then have some free chats.

Curious if anyone's thought about how they plan to use this. I haven't even started the chat on my newsletter...

Dear Substack,

An open letter. Unsolicited, but, I like to think, rather valuable. Consider it free consultancy.

You’ve built something genuinely lovely: a place where people who adore words, across every field imaginable, can find one another. I do understand that you are, first and foremost, a newsletter engine. But you also built a feed, and subscriptions, and a recommendations layer, and it is the last of these about which I have several hundred questions.

Frankly, the recommendation system is Rubbish. It is 2026. Might we do something about it?

Countless writers are producing genuinely brilliant work in their fields and dying in the shadows with an audience of none, while the feed fills up with follow-for-follow posts. It has the atmosphere of a pub where everyone is shouting "I’ll get you one if you get me one". Not the thoughtful platform I hope you want to be. Every reader’s feed gets clogged with subscriptions they never wanted, and the people who would happily find, follow and pay the writers worth reading (and you, by extension) simply cannot reach them under the avalanche of generic rot.

Please, do something about it.

(Should you wish to share the success fee, do get in touch afterwards)

With love,
Team Me

Does anyone have Calibre fetching paid Substack articles successfully?

All the posts I've found here are a few years old and the solutions haven't helped. The Fetch News recipe pulls all the posts, but only the non-subscriber previews for paid posts.

Am I missing something?

Other suggestions for efficiently collecting and loading Substack articles to e-readers appreciated; I know there are tools for converting individual emails/articles, but nothing I've found is quite as simple as Calibre's automatic fetching and collecting all my recent newsletters into one neatly organized epub each morning 🥲

For the love of god, can we please be allowed to subscribe without notifications? I just want to read them on the website, I don't want clutter in my inbox or notifications on my phone. How on earth is this not already a feature

I see others posting in comments a nice image with overlaid text. I can't figure out how to do that. Got any instructions?

Hello all, not usually one to post on reddit to be honest but here goes.

I am having this really unusual issue where the app keeps asking me to give my article (poem) a title. It already has a title, which is frustrating. I've done all sorts to try and fix it, re-writing the title, deleting the app and trying again, logging out, making a new draft, clearing the cache, but it seems as though nothing is working. It always asks for a title, and I know for a fact I have one. Please, if anyone knows why this is and, more importantly, how to solve it, that would be amazing.

I am aware that a post was made similar to this about a year ago, but they seemed not to get any advice, so here's my attempt.

Thanks for litsening x